Tuesday, August 15, 2006
(10:16 PM) | Brad:
My Latest Flirtation
Adam thinks I'm developing a crush on Jacques Rancière, and you know, maybe I am. But, alas, while I've not yet gotten into his pants, I am getting into his philosophy. I find something fundamentally intriguing about the "anachronism" of his appeal to aesthetics in the thinking about politics and equality. Now, I'm still wrapping my head around it & coming to terms with what I think about it, esp. as it (if it?) relates to theology, but it's been a fun journey so far.Thankfully, the journey was made that much more interesting by this recent interview, which more than adequately spells out the ten-cent version of what Rancière is on about -- hopefully, though, the end of the interview is not indicative of what I'll discover about the whole of his work, because it really kind of trails off pretty badly once he starts talking about the internet. There are several good bits, though. I'll save a little commentary for another post on another day, but an excerpt may be in order if the link itself isn't appealing enough.
TL: There are a lot of actors defining the public sphere all the time. For example, when the Bush Administration talks about "weapons of mass destruction" and "terrorists", they are setting an order that should perhaps be opposed. Isn't that a way of constituting the world, which is to say aesthetic activity?
JR: Yes, we can say it is a kind of aesthetic activity, a framing of what is given and what we can see. If you take the example of "weapons of mass destruction": I was in the US at the time of this huge emphasis on weapons of mass destruction. What struck me was that this was not only a mischievous design of some far Right politicians and members of the media. I remember all the rather well-off Democratic politicians that were also on TV arguing about weapons of mass destruction. What is fascinating is that it is very easy to impose the existence of something which does not exist at all. This is very easy with some words; it doesn't demand a massive effort of documentation, argumentation, and persuasion. You are framing what is given, what is visible. Of course, this case is paradoxical, because weapons of mass destruction were precisely invisible, yet it was so easy to accept. The core of this is this kind of gestion of the population through terror. You are threatened, and if you can persuade people that they are frightened, then you can designate what threatens them.
TL: But, on the other hand, can you see the terrorists as a part of this that doesn't participate, or that is trying to participate?
JR: No, I don't think so at all. What is done by the so-called terrorists is a form of military and psychological action. From my point of view, it has nothing to do with politics. Politics is when you create a stage where you include your enemy, even if your enemy doesn't want to be included or you are fighting against that enemy. I think it is very different in the case of terrorism. Terrorism is only a military question: "We want to destroy or impair the capacity of the enemy." That is all. The problem is that they don't help anybody to act against the form of power they are suffering under.
[. . .]
JR: Aesthetic has to be rethought precisely in its political meaning. What "aesthetics" meant when it was created at the end of the eighteenth century was something very different from beauty or a philosophy of art. It was a new status of experience. Aesthetics meant that for the first time, artworks were not defined according to the rules of their production or their destinations in a hierarchical system, but taken for a kind of specific sensation. So artworks were no longer addressing a specific audience or social hierarchy. This was conceptualized at the time by philosophers like Kant and poets like Schiller, who thought there was something specific, a new kind of equality, involved in the aesthetic experience. At this time, the idea was born that in aesthetic experience and in aesthetic community there is a possibility for another kind of revolution.
TL: So, you use "aesthetics" as a means for understanding how meaning is constituted?
JR: What I meant is that aesthetics is not a discipline dealing with art and artworks, but a kind of, what I call, distribution of the sensible. I mean a way of mapping the visible, a cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible. Aesthetics was a kind of redistribution of experience, the idea that there was a sphere of experience that didn't feed the traditional distribution, because the traditional distribution adds that people have different senses according to their position in society. Those who were destined to rule and those who were destined to be ruled didn't have the same sensory equipment, not the same eyes and ears, not the same intelligence. Aesthetics means precisely the break with that traditional way of embodying inequality in the very constitution of the sensible world.
[. . .]
TL: How can those who don't take part get involved? Should they be educated, should they use violence? How can they be empowered? Should they just be heard? Herbert Marcuse talks about the repressive tolerance, that being heard is not enough to gain the power to change things.
JR: It's difficult to know what is enough. There's that old French joke that democracy means cause toujours, that democracy means that you can speak, but it doesn't matter, it has no outcome. What I consider to be the real emergence of free speech occurs precisely in places that were not supposed to be places for free speech. It always happens in the form of transgression. Politics means precisely this, that you speak at a time and in a place you're not expected to speak.
