Art, Politics and Rancière: Broken Perceptions 9781472510563, 9781350044173, 9781472511676

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Art, Politics and Rancière

Also available from Bloomsbury Dissensus, Jacques Rancière Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp

Art, Politics and Rancière Broken Perceptions

Tina Chanter

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Tina Chanter, 2018 Tina Chanter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1056-3 PB: 978-1-3501-1903-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1167-6 ePub: 978-1-4725-1094-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface List of Abbreviations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction: The Schizophrenia of Impossible Identification, and the Impossible Identification of Schizophrenia Redistributing the Sensible: The Art of Borders, Maps, Territories and Bodies Politics as the Interruption of Inequality, and the Police as the Miscount Art as Dissensus: Moving Beyond the Ethical and Representative Regimes with the Help of Kant and Hegel Framing and Reframing Rancière’s Critical Intervention: Foucault and Kant Form and Matter Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order

vi xvi

1 35 57 83 101 121 145

Concluding Reflections

161

Bibliography Index

169 175

Preface Perceptions acquire a rigidity that comes to light only when they break into pieces, only when they shatter. We just do not realize, most of the time, how hemmed in we are by them, these ways in which the world presents itself to us. And then, one day, as Chinua Achebe, following William Butler Yeats, puts it, things fall apart.1 With such dislocations, the knowledge that, as it turns out, this fluff, this cotton wool, this unspecifiable environment, this atmosphere, held together, comes tumbling down. Who would have known that it was so important? This all too vague, ineffable, gauze, this finely woven, all but transparent, fabric of the world. It glues together the things we think we know, but is not itself knowledge. It is implicit, assumed, tacitly agreed upon. It facilitates knowledge; it feeds into the background that allows knowledge to have settled where it has. Malleable, but all too susceptible to fixity, having settled into undisturbed grooves along which our thoughts travel, into habits that structure perceptual patterns, into psychic and discursive tics that replay themselves over and over, repeating and refining themselves perhaps, but adhering more or less to the same scenario. There is something important about this fabric of the world not quite being knowledge, yet having something to do with knowledge. In being misaligned with what it is we think we know, it can turn into a site of resistance to knowledge. What is the difference between failing to notice a pile of stones in an idyllic landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as a roadblock, preventing the access of Palestinians to goods vital to their survival? It is the difference between allowing one’s gaze to pass over a pile of stones as an unobtrusive part of the landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as preventing people who live on their native land from going to their place of work, from seeing their families, as a roadblock that interferes with their freedom of movement, with their way of life.2 What is the difference between seeing something and not seeing it? Nothing more, perhaps than connecting a miniscule event, a small observation, with a series of other minute perceptions, and allowing the pattern they form to emerge as significant. What is the difference between trusting someone absolutely, and seeing them as a threat to one’s very existence? Or the difference between reading a situation in terms of racism, and not reading it as such? What is the

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difference between the pathological, and the so-called normal? Almost nothing. And yet there is all the difference in the world. A nuance, an inflection, the way a voice rises or a pair of eyes dip down, looking away from you, how a smug smile appears on a face in the morning, and how these gestures appear to fit into a pattern, or fail to do so. Every now and then, a break occurs. A fissure, a rupture, a fault appears. Things shift. New objects become visible, things arrange themselves in different patterns, in new ways. We see things in a completely different light. How this happens is uncertain, and it cannot be foretold, prescribed or predicted. A historically sedimented environment, riven with affects, is just there. Until, all of a sudden, it isn’t. It undergoes a shift, and precisely as it does so, we can sometimes catch sight of it, just a glimpse at first, but slowly we can begin to record, classify, unpick, analyse, adumbrate its features. We can begin to put them together in a different way, discard some of them, refigure others, let them fall into new patterns, reimagine them. This might be done more or less consciously, more or less deliberately. With each slight shift, new possibilities can occur, new perspectives can open up as old ones close down. This play back and forth, between objects in the world and our conceptual, imaginative and affective grasping of them is what Immanuel Kant considers in terms of the faculties of understanding, judgement and reason, and the knowledge of nature, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and the principles of morality that the faculties provide. We might say this play is what Kant refers to in The Critique of Judgment as ‘cognition in general’.3 To break the habits of perception is to break with patterns of knowledge, to rework the discursive frameworks that make sense of sensory knowledge, and to reframe the enunciative possibilities that define and legitimate knowledge as objective. Artists make such interventions; so do political actors. Art and politics are two different ways of redistributing the sensible, as Jacques Rancière puts it.4 What distinguishes them is that while politics focuses upon the emergence of a new collective subject, the emergence of a new ‘we’, art effects new forms of visibility, making available new possibilities for perceiving the world, and in the process rearranging the conditions of enunciative possibility.5 For quite a long while now, I have been thinking about how things become visible, while other things remain invisible, about what it takes for something to be seen, and why it eludes visibility, about the way in which politics is shaped by forces that are irreducible to concepts or intellect, about how there is something aesthetic, in the broadest sense, in this shaping, about how things arrange

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themselves, present themselves, are noticed or ignored, are read or remain insignificant, how they obtrude, or fade into the background to the point of becoming not just negligible, but invisible, unavailable, unseen, non-existent: how they do not count. A flick of a switch is all it takes. After which, nothing will ever be quite the same again. And yet, even if it is not the same as before, it too will become habitual, it will come to constitute part of the commonsensical way of seeing things. None of us is immune. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been part of it. I’ve been assimilated into the police order. So have you. The police order is how we think, how we make sense of the world, what constitutes itself as common sense. Take feminism, for example. First there was sexism. Then there was feminism. Feminism became part of the police order, insofar as it started policing who could, and who could not, count as a woman. Then there was the transgender movement, and as feminists, we found ourselves having to rethink why certain body parts had somehow become essential to what it had come to mean to be a woman, and who had the right to determine which body parts qualified, and how some feminism’s policing of bodies reflected in highly problematic ways the very order of thought it was trying to escape. How we see things limits, or opens up, the possibilities for thought, and the meanings we attach to what we see. Shifts in perception are bound up with shifts in thinking, shifts in what seems possible or impossible. While changes in the perceptible are not related to changes in the possibility of that which can be thought by causal necessity, there is nonetheless an intricate relationship between on the one hand, what we see and what we do not see, between visibility and invisibility, between what we hear and what we do not hear or cannot hear, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, and on the other hand, the significance that assumes salience and legitimacy, circulates as knowledge and becomes sanctioned. There is, in other words, a relationship between what we see, hear or perceive – more specifically what it is possible to see – and the meanings that become prevalent, accepted or dominant, and which, as such, constitute, determine and govern the limits of both perception and understanding. The possibilities of comprehension are circumscribed by implicit political assumptions (and, I would add, psychological habits) that define the borders of communities, and as such, determine the contours and limits of comprehension. Things arrange themselves according to narratives that take on a certain selfevidence, and then they come to appear to us as the way things are, yet this very appearance, the very possibility of appearance, is already circumscribed by

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particular narratives, presenting themselves as if they were the truth, as if they had universal purchase, as if there were no point of access from which to question them. Meanings become institutionalized, and appear unavoidable. The way that the world appears to us conforms to institutionalized ways of appearance. The very possibilities of seeing and knowing, of doing and being are circumscribed in advance, but this circumscription remains unavailable for thematization, insofar as it coincides with what presents itself as the only possible way of seeing. This is what Rancière calls the ‘police order’, which presents itself as the natural order. It passes itself off as the truth, presenting itself as simply given.6 The efficacy of political or aesthetic dissensus is unpredictable and contingent. It erupts without warning. When it does so, things begin to line up differently in a new order of the perceptible, they settle into new places, occupy new functions, and the way things line up distributes people in new roles. There is a ‘redistribution of the sensible’. Sometimes art effects a shift in perception. There is no telling when, or whether, it will do this. There is no causal necessity, there is nothing inherent about the impact a work will have on a viewer, or the effect a film will have on the spectator. There is no direct line of transmission from artist to audience, no guarantee that what the author intends is that which the reader will understand. And this is as it should be. Otherwise, the work would be didactic; it would fall into the trap of telling us what to think, and we would become passive recipients of ideas that are communicated to us. The artist would reveal a hidden truth, the artwork would be revelatory, and the spectator would remain an empty vessel, ready to be filled with whatever the one who knows the truth intends to communicate. The artist would be the one who knows, and the spectator would be the one who is ignorant, in whom knowledge is deposited, as if a passive repository. Enlightenment would be granted.7 Yet this is not how art, or knowledge for that matter, works. Learning is not passive, it is active, and seeing, hearing or perceiving are activities too. To assume that there are those who know and those who do not (and cannot), is to buy into an assumption that there is a fundamental divide between two categories of people, a divide that entitles those who know to set the standards for what counts as knowledge, and to thereby disqualify those who do not know from constituting legitimate knowers. They can only be recipients of the knowledge that belongs to those who control what counts as knowledge. When Aristotle distinguishes between voice and speech, or when Plato distinguishes between social classes, what is at stake is not just differentiating between those who have,

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and those who lack logos (speech/reason), but also distinguishing between those who are entitled to set the terms of what counts as knowledge, and those who are not, between those who define what constitutes legitimate knowing, and those who are excluded from setting such standards, those whose voices are heard as speech, as contributing to the whole, and those whose voices have no place, those who have no part.8 There is a fundamental miscount that Rancière sees as characteristic of a politics that construes democracy as consensus.9 This miscount goes hand in hand with a negation of politics, a negation of the struggle of those who have no part that is considered as meaningful. Their voices do not count; they cannot be heard as speech. This is key. It is not that their voices are not heard at all; it is that they are dismissed as meaningless, as mere noise, as pure plaint. They do not signify. They do not signify as meaning anything meaningful. They only signify as noise, or as suffering, as complaint, or as revolt – as unintelligible. They signify as just so much nonsense, to be quelled by the powers that be, by those in charge of meaning, by the police order. They signify as animal noises, as grunts, and groans, as cries and moans, as pain. They signify as unintelligible noises that cannot be integrated into prevailing discourse, because to integrate them would be to change prevalent meanings, to restructure the account of what counts as meaningful. When such a restructuring happens, and it happens rarely according to Rancière, there is politics. When previously discounted voices are made to count through a reorganization of what counts as meaningful, there is dissensus. For Rancière, politics is not defined by consensus, but by dissensus. When dissensus takes place, when it is staged, a wrong is demonstrated. There is a divergence of meaning from itself, there is a reframing of common sense. Someone makes an intervention, and that intervention becomes political in the sense that it reorders the domain of what passes itself off as reality, and in the sense that the intervention speaks for and as a class that is not counted. In speaking for those who have no part, a subject contests the miscount, by making those who remained uncounted count as part of the political. What is said or staged starts to make sense. It starts to be heard. It is translated into a language that renders it meaningful, instead of being dismissed as nonsense. What this means is that at the same time, it constitutes a challenge to the boundaries of what hitherto qualified as meaningful. Art and politics are intertwined with one another in various distributions of the sensible, in the ways the world appears to us, and in the ways it is parcelled

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out, authorized and legitimated.10 Such is their entanglement that subjects pronounce upon the meaning of objects, their significance, and their place within discursive systems in ways that tend to demarcate a particular place for art and artists that is rigorously delineated from other objects and from everyone else. Rancière disputes the permanence of any such distinction. For him, ‘Art and politics do not constitute permanent, separate realities’.11 For Rancière, there is no permanent boundary separating works of art from other objects. Indeed, a hallmark of what he calls the aesthetic regime is precisely the refutation of any permanent distinction between the objects of art and those of ordinary life. By this he means that: (i) what constituted art for what he identifies with the (chronologically earlier) representative regime or the (still earlier) ethical regime does not necessarily constitute art in the aesthetic regime, and that (ii) anything can become art, that there are no intrinsic objects of art.12 The fact that Rancière declines to ascribe any permanent, ontological reality to art or politics means that what counts as an artwork can differ over time. ‘One and the same statue of a goddess may or may not be art, or may be art differently, depending on the regime in which it is apprehended’, says Rancière (AD 28, ME 43). What the work of art does not do, according to Rancière’s conception of what makes art political, is to tell us what to think, or ensure a particular reaction, or establish a causal relation between whatever affect the artist might have intended to inspire, and an action that intervenes in the world. Political art, in the sense that Rancière understands it, does not depict a state of affairs that it decries in order to counteract that state of affairs. It does not content itself with depicting victims of genocide in order to solicit action, for example. If it did so, the artist would be appealing to a straightforward, causal relation between whatever the intention behind an artistic representation of a particular state of affairs might be, the promotion of certain, negative affects in the spectator or viewer for example, and the translation of those affects into a motivation to act in the world in order to transform the situation represented. In what follows, I pay particular attention to the way in which visibility itself is underwritten by certain legitimating narratives that prevent us from seeing, blinding us, and eclipsing from view that which might later come to be seen as quite obviously unjust, exclusionary, unequal or racist. Such narratives have often been unselfconsciously woven into the fabric of national collectivities. The distribution and figuration of affects play into the ways in which such collectivities understand themselves.13 To question the ways of seeing that such narratives legitimate is to interrogate that which passes as sanctioned, publicly

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accepted mythologies that have established themselves as truths, or as just the way things are. It is not just that there is a kind of aesthetic orientation that organizes our perception, and that cannot be reduced to concepts. While, on the one hand, politics is arranged aesthetically, on the other hand, aesthetics, what we see or hear, is infused with signification; there is no strict dividing line between the objects of politics and the objects of art. There is no rigid, ontological divide, as there is for Emmanuel Levinas, for example. Objects of art can become, or can also be, objects of life. Art can also be a commodity. There is, here, none of the purism found in Theodor Adorno’s ‘modernist rigor’ (DPA 201). An image is part of a complex network of signs, which never stands alone.14 This is not to say that art and politics are the same, any more than the artist and the viewer are the same. They are not the same.15 Yet, neither are they absolutely other, absolutely foreign to one another. One of the challenges that Rancière’s work presents is its investment in a constant, deliberate and strategic blurring of boundaries, such that discourses which other philosophers have distinguished have to be rethought. Rather than occupying distinct realms, Rancière understands politics and art as ‘intermix[ed]’ with one another.16 Yet, at the same time as construing politics and art as always implicating one another, Rancière is also committed to maintaining a tension between the two, refusing to resolve one into another, resisting any hierarchical resolution.17 He insists upon ‘the aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151), with the result that the political impact of works of art remains undecidable (see PA 64), its effects outside the control of artists themselves (see PA 62). The figure of dissensus – conflict, disagreement, resistance, polemic – is central to the operation of Rancière’s thought, informing his understanding of politics and his understanding of the potential art has to be political in the aesthetic regime. Political dissensus and art as dissensual are not the same as one another, yet they are always in relation to one another, informing one another. The distinction between art and politics is not categorical. They do not occupy permanently ontologically distinct realms. Another way of putting this is that the judgements, according to which philosophers have distinguished ontological realms, are themselves bound up with the aesthetic, and that categorical distinctions turn out to be contingent, historical and infused with politics.18 The relationship between art and politics is negotiated. To acknowledge the impermanence of art, its porosity as a category, is to acknowledge it is a historically and politically inflected concept.

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Notes 1 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Penguin, 2001). Achebe’s title quotes a line from William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’. 2 See Jacques Rancière’s discussion of Sophie Ristelhueber’s photograph from her West Bank series, WB 2005, an illustration and discussion of which appears in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 103–4; Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), pp. 113–14. Hereafter cited in the text with the abbreviation ES, SE followed by page numbers. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 102 and p. 104. 4 See Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’ in Dissensus, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 141. Hereafter this essay will be cited in the text as DPA. 5 As José Medina points out in The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), the language of sight might be taken as discriminatory against those who identify as not sighted or partially sighted. That the language of vision operates pervasively in Anglo-American and other Western contexts as a metaphor for a much broader sense of comprehension and intellection testifies to the predominance of visual culture as a model for understanding. While I retain the metaphor of vision in keeping with Rancière, I also want to acknowledge, along with Medina, the problematic baggage this term carries with it. I endorse Medina’s eloquent consideration of the issue in his foreword, ‘Insensitivity and Blindness’. 6 The police order is that which passes itself off as just the way things are, as fact. As Rancière puts it, ‘What characterizes the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions, and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that “real” and multiplying it in a polemical way. The practice of fiction undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs and spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given “commonsense”. It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done’ (DPA 148–9). 7 Rancière distances himself from the desire to believe in what he refers to as the ‘straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action’ (ES 103, SE 113), by associating this belief with what he calls the ‘logic of the stultifying pedagogue’ (ES 14, SE 20).

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8 Rancière emphasizes that ‘Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech’, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 22–3. La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1995), p. 44. Hereafter cited as DT, M in the text. That is, those who endow themselves with the capacity for logos, also render judgements about what counts as legitimate speech, and what does not, relegating the latter to ‘noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt’ (DT 23, M 45). 9 Those who have no part, the people whom Plato confines with a lie about the nature of their souls (see DT 16, M 36), are discounted. They are the ‘constitutive wrong … of politics as such’ (DT 14, M 34). Hence, Rancière concerns himself with the ‘founding wrong of politics’, a wrong before which, he says, ‘Quite simply, parties do not exist’ (DT 39, M 64). They do not exist due to the fundamental ‘miscount of that demos that is both part and whole’ (DT 58, M 89). Politics is the deployment of this wrong, this dispute, while the rich indulge in a negation of politics, by denying that those who have no part should have a part (see DT 14, M 34). 10 Even before an artist intends anything, there is, according to Rancière, a ‘politics of aesthetics … predates artistic intentions and strategies: the theatre, the museum and the book are “aesthetic realities” in and of themselves. In other words, they are specific distributions of space and time, of the visible and the invisible, that create specific forms of “commonsense”’ (DPA 141). 11 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 25; Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 39. Hereafter cited in the text as AD, ME. 12 As we will see further, while Rancière associates the ethical regime with Plato and the representative regime with Aristotle, he does not understand these regimes as merely historical; contemporary art can embody elements of both regimes. 13 The work of Falguni Sheth and Sara Ahmed contributes to an understanding of the metaphorical work that emotions do in shoring up certain configurations of the public as if they were immovable and unchangeable, and in understanding how certain associative meanings operate to delegitimate particular subjects as unruly, or threatening. See Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York, 2009), and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 14 For Rancière, an image is ‘a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid’ (ES 93, SE 103) and ‘it never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit’ (ES 99, SE 108). So, when an artist changes the frame, speed or scale of what we perceive they ‘make

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the invisible visible’ or ‘question the self-evidence of the visible’ or ‘rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely … invent novel relations between things and meanings that were previously unrelated’ (DPA 141). As Rancière says, the ‘film remains a film’ and the ‘spectator remains a spectator’ (DPA 151). Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 62. Hereafter cited as PA. See also DPA 133. See, for example, Rancière ‘The Monument and its Confidences’, Dissensus, p. 183. Hereafter cited in the text as DMC. See PA 50 and 65.

List of Abbreviations Rancière, Jacques AD

Aesthetics and Its Discontents

C

Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

DAR

‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes’

DI

Le destin des images

DMC

‘The Monument and Its Confidences’

DPA

‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’

DT

Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

ES

The Emancipated Spectator

FI

The Future of the Image

HD

The Hatred of Democracy

HDE

La haine de la démocratie

M

La mésentente: politique et philosophie

ME

Malaise dans l’esthétique

Pols

Aristotle, Politics

PA

The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible

SE

Le spectateur émancipé

WE

‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed’

Other CPE

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

H

Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Holzwege

LS

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

PLT

Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought

1

Introduction: The Schizophrenia of Impossible Identification, and the Impossible Identification of Schizophrenia

Politics, for Rancière, is the ‘introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking beings’ (DT 19, M 40). Rancière plays this out with reference to the struggle between the rich and the poor. ‘Politics (that is the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity’ (DT 11, M 31). While Rancière is very clear that the role he intends the poor to play is symbolic of a more general wrong, suggesting that the ‘poor themselves are not really the poor’ but rather ‘the constitutive wrong or torsion of politics as such’ (DT 13-14, M 33-34), the question arises as to whether his formulation of this wrong (and what this formulation ‘stops short of ’) ties him to a notion of politics that remains too wedded to the Aristotelian version of the police order of politics he seeks to challenge.1 Does Rancière only acknowledge dissensus to operate in a way that is liable to replicate the limitations of ancient democracy to Greek males, transposed into the European metropolis?2 In the opening gesture of Disagreement, Rancière appeals to the distinction Aristotle makes in the Politics between speech (logos) and voice (phonê), a distinction he aligns with humans and animals. While all animals can voice their pain, only humans are endowed with speech, and it is speech that allows humans not merely to vocalize pleasure and pain, but also to differentiate the useful from the harmful, good from evil, the just from the unjust. It is ‘sharing a common view’ of what is good and just that constitutes the political. Herein lies Aristotle’s ‘idea of the political nature of man’ (DT 1, M 19).3 Rancière goes on to stipulate, however, that a slave participates in logos, according to Aristotle, ‘by way of comprehension but not understanding’, so that ‘the slave is the one who participates in reason so far as to recognize (aesthêsis) it but not so as to

2

Art, Politics and Rancière

possess (hexis) it’ (DT 17, M 38); thus for Aristotle, says Rancière, the slave represents a ‘transition from animality to humanity’ (DT 17, M 38).4 For his part, Rancière contests the difference that Aristotle maintains between perceiving or recognizing logos as the distinction between slaves and those who are free, surmising that if you understand an order and you ‘understand that you must obey it … you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (DT 16, M 37). Since it is precisely ‘a dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it’ that is the proper subject of disagreement (DT xii, M 14–15), the question of how a slave participates in logos would appear to be decisive for Rancière’s project, in which he maintains the ‘equality of anyone at all with anyone else’ (DT 15, M 35). Although slaves serve as the occasion for Rancière to part ways with Aristotle’s argument on the crucially significant issue of whether people differ in their capacity for logos, it is not slaves but the poor on whom Rancière focuses both in Disagreement and throughout his work. Thus, Rancière states that ‘the whole basis of politics is the struggle between the poor and the rich. … It is the actual institution of politics itself. There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor’ (DT 11, M 31).5 While Rancière comments in some detail on Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, a text in which Aristotle attends to the theme of slavery, the role that slavery plays in Rancière’s argument is largely confined to establishing the peculiar character of the freedom that the poor are granted when they eschew the fate of slavery (see DT 7, M 26). Slavery is admitted into the discussion inasmuch as it affords Rancière the opportunity to elaborate on the ‘empty’ (DT 8, M 27) freedom bestowed upon the poor. What would be the proper way to engage critically and productively with Rancière’s articulation of the relation between politics and art? What would be improper ways of doing so? How might disidentification figure into how one positions oneself in relation to the part that has no part? What would it mean to articulate that which Rancière identifies as the ‘improper property of freedom that establishes the demos simultaneously as both part and whole of community’ (DT 13, M 33) differently, improperly, with impropriety? What would it mean to complicate and multiply the ways in which the part that has no part lacks any part? Is there only one way in which the part that has no part has no part, or are there many? If there is more than one way, what is the relation between these parts that have no part? Is it similar or different to the relation that Rancière conceives between the police order and dissensus? Is there a hierarchy between

Introduction

3

several parts that have no part? Despite Rancière’s efforts to move away from it, does class remain the spectrum or filter through which voices must pass in order to be acknowledged as really speaking, as opposed to merely mimicking ‘the articulate voice’? (DT 22, M 44). If this is the case, are gender, race, sexuality and a host of other crucial configurations of power and oppression neutralized or rendered invisible by this filter? If logos or the intelligibility of speech is the measure by which one must establish one’s political viability, rather than a re-evaluation of the worth of physical labour or reproduction, must there always be invisible others who perform this work behind the scenes, unaccounted for? If politics is not just speech but also ‘indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just’ (DT 22-3, M 44), what are we to say about the politics of Rancière’s own account, which renders Aristotle’s work as if he had nothing at all to say about women or ‘barbarians’? If ‘politics is the setting-up of a dispute between classes that are not really classes’ (DT 18, M 39), what about those whose existence is so negligible as to not even rise to the level of Rancière’s commentary, so as to fail to qualify as ‘not really classes’? What about Athenian women, whose bodies serve as vessels in order to qualify the male children they bear as potential citizens, those who must count as free in order to bequeath freedom on their male offspring, but whose freedom does not extend far enough for them to count as political citizens themselves? What about ‘barbarian’ women, those whose existence Aristotle barely acknowledges, let alone theorizes, those who, it would seem, serve no political function – except the manual labour of slaves and reproduction of ‘barbarians’? When Aristotle does mention female slaves, it is to suggest that among barbarians, it is impossible to discern any hierarchy of natural rulers. Aristotle claims that, ‘among barbarians, female and slave have the same rank. The reason for this is that they do not have a natural ruling principle but their union is one of female slave with a male slave’.6 As Holt Parker says, for Aristotle, ‘There is no distinction between slave and female because all barbarians … are by nature slaves’.7 Were it the case that male slaves had authority over female slaves, this would interfere with the hierarchies Aristotle establishes within the household, in which he maintains that while neither free women nor slaves are, in Elizabeth Spelman’s words, ‘fit to rule’, the ‘function, virtue and nature of women differ from those of slaves’.8 It is hard to know where to break in, how to interrupt or intervene in what presents itself as the imperturbable flow of a narrative that sweeps us along. It is

4

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as if Rancière establishes his own version of circularity, a variation of a ‘logic of equivalence’, as Davide Panagia points out, which he denounces in others, but which he might be said to reiterate in narrating the logic of a dissensual politics that claims to speak for anyone and everyone, but passes over some in silence.9 Even as it breaks through the barricades that philosophers have sought to erect between their political theories and dissensual politics, Rancière’s circular narrative presents itself as hermetic as it counterposes a logic of identity with a logic of the ‘heteron’.10 It is not the ‘claim for identity’ that matters, it is the power of the ‘anyone’ at all.11 It is not ‘the self of the community’ that matters, it is ‘subjectivization’. It is not ‘identification’ that matters, it is ‘disidentification’ (1992, 59–61). If the logic of emancipation is going to differentiate itself from the logic of policy or of the police, so Rancière’s story has it, it must rely on something other than identification. If it is in the name of a specific category that dissensus intervenes, it is neither the specific value, nor the ‘lived situation’ (2009, 17), nor the ‘attributes or properties of the community in question’ (1992, 60) that matters. Nor, we are told, must we appeal to a notion of universality that resides in the concepts of ‘citizen or human being’ that have operated in such a way as to exclude ‘the worker’ from being ‘a citizen’ or ‘the black’ from ‘being a human being’ (1992, 60). Rather, universality only exists in the enactment of equality: ‘The only universal in politics is equality. … Equality exists, and makes universal values exist, to the extent that it is enacted’ (1992, 60). Universality lies in ‘what follows’ from playing out the consequences of the ‘disjunctive junction of two logics’ (2009, 10), that of the police, and that of equality. Equality is not an end, it is an axiom.12 Let’s look a little more closely at this story to discern whether there are ways in which, like the operation of exclusion for consensus thinking that Rancière puts into question, his own thinking succumbs in certain ways to the very impulse he condemns, that which, in Panagia’s words, ‘erases the difference between inside and outside, between community and non-community, so that there is nothing to dispute’ (2014, 289). Perhaps the ‘nothing to dispute’ is legislated through a silent interdiction on particular ways of acknowledging the political, or by the oversight that allows Rancière to ask ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed’, without detaining himself to wonder if it might have had something to do with what has been explored under the heading of the ‘“feminisation” of mass culture’, as Rita Felski adumbrates.13 Or rather, by legislating that such a consideration be outlawed by the series of equations or equivalences that orchestrate the story

Introduction

5

Rancière tells about history of philosophy, such that the gendered status of the character of Emma Bovary cannot figure as politically relevant. Let me develop this example. Emma, says Rancière, is ‘sentenced to death’ by Gustave Flaubert ‘as a bad artist, who handles in the wrong way the equivalence of art and nonart’ (WE 240). Flaubert sublimates in her, his own ‘temptation of putting art in “real” life’ (WE 240) by making his character embody the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (WE 239) he cannot tolerate in himself, cannot reconcile with his idea of himself as an artist. What better way to purge himself than by embodying his own desires in the character of a woman, and then to kill her off ? If, as Rancière suggests, ‘Madame Bovary is the first anti-kitsch manifesto’ (WE 240), Emma is the means by which Flaubert differentiates himself as a writer, as an artist, from the character whom he makes succumb to the crime of which he can only rid himself through the compensatory mechanism of literature itself. Emma must be put to death in order to save Flaubert from the crime of betraying mysticism, the crime of bad art.14 In putting Emma to death, Flaubert is also putting to death symbolically that part of himself he cannot integrate into his image of himself as the ideal artist. Emma must die so that he can live as an artist, unsullied by the evil she is made to represent and for which she must be punished. In differentiating himself from his female character who conflates art with ‘a nice blotting pad and an artistic writing case … nice curtains … a pair of blue vases on the mantlepiece’ (WE 239), Flaubert enacts precisely the symbolic divide that preserves art for what Felski identifies as the ‘educated elites’ (1990, 1). Felski points out that the divide between high and low culture, high art and kitsch associated the ‘working class’ and ‘the non-intellectual middle classes’ with the ‘banality and triteness of mass-produced art’ (1990, 1). It also characterized ‘the sphere of consumption rather than production’ and that of ‘sensationalism and emotionalism rather than critical thought’ with feminization (1990, 1). That which Rancière identifies as Emma’s disease of ‘sentimentalism’ (WE 235) becomes the perfect foil for the critical distance her inventor can assume, and her death the vehicle that enables Flaubert to distance himself from her culpability.15 Although Rancière points out that ‘Flaubert needs for his own sake to construct Emma’s wrong or disease as the confusion between literature and furniture’ (WE 240), or between the enjoyment of spiritual art and material life, Rancière fails to notice – or rather the machinery of equations he has put in place to enable him to differentiate between an Aristotelian distribution of the sensible, and the capacity of Flaubert’s democratic and artistic style disqualifies

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its registration in advance – that in the cure he administers, Flaubert reinscribes gender stereotypes in the most hackneyed way. He sacrifices a woman, albeit within the confines of the literary – by containing the sacrifice in ‘a book’ (WE 238) – for the greater good of the male artist. In the final analysis, what ails Emma is her confusion of the ‘words and images’ (WE 246) that had become readily available to ‘anybody’ (WE 235) with ‘objects of desire, goods to consume, ends to achieve, persons to conquer’ (WE 246). Hers is the ‘wrong interpretation of sensation[s] … their solidification as objects of desire and love – as causes of pain’ (WE 246). In a word, it is ‘hysteria’ (WE 246). It is ultimately only ‘at the cost of having some of them [hysterics] die’ (WE 247) that Flaubert can destroy ‘the illusion of life, of individuality’ (WE 245). Rancière exempts himself from having to deal directly with the associations of Emma’s hysterical ‘solidification’ (WE 246) with femininity by strategically introducing hysteria into his text only after the fact, in two senses. First, he acknowledges its importance once it had already begun to detach itself from its habitual associations with the feminine. ‘Hysteria … underwent a radical shift during the second half of the nineteenth century, as what was considered an organic feminine disease became a psychic disease common to both sexes’ (WE 246), says Rancière. Hysteria had become an equal opportunity employer, freed from any naturalizing attachment to the female body, and affecting both men and women by the time it arrives on the scene in Rancière’s narrative, ‘between the time of Flaubert and the time of Proust’ (WE 246). Secondly, Rancière turns his attention to the term only after his consideration of Flaubert’s Emma. Through the simple but effective narrative device of retrospection, Rancière equalizes hysteria by distributing it among everyone. He thereby implicitly absolves Flaubert of any sexism, affording himself the opportunity of avoiding the gendered implications of Flaubert’s hystericization of his character Emma. The term ‘hysteria’, says Rancière, came to ‘designat[e] the way in which bodies suffer from a pain that has no organic cause but is provoked by an “excess” of thought. As such, the word hysteria became an approximate synonym for the “excitement” caused by the excessive availability of words, thoughts, and images that was supposed to be inherent to modern life’ (WE 246). In other words, since excitement was considered synonymous with democracy (WE 235), hysteria was understood – by those who decried the disappearance of the old, hierarchical order, where people knew their place – as the disease of democracy, the disease where it is possible for people to equate art with furniture, to solidify sensations. It was the democratic disease of hysteria, according to this analysis, that allowed

Introduction

7

Emma and her like to solidify ‘swirls of dust, bubbles of water, and patches of color’, to treat them as ‘objects of desire and love – as causes of pain’ (WE 246). The ‘literary cure’ (WE 247) on the other hand, was to ‘splinte[r] those solid qualities and retur[n] them to the identity of particles whipped by the impersonal flood’ (WE 246–7). The literary health of the writer is bought at the expense of the disease and punishment of his hysterical character. The writer thus adopts the position of the healthy schizophrenic, by releasing ‘the swirls and bubbles of impersonal, preindividual life, but he does not let himself be split up by them’ and he thereby separates himself from ‘true schizophrenia’ (WE  247). Emma must die for the sake of Flaubert. Such a bargain Virginia Woolf cannot make with the character of Rhoda, as we will see. Woolf knows what it means to be ‘truly split up’ (WE 248). She knows ‘that the impression … only hurts and wounds us. And it condemns to death as well’ (WE 248). It is clear that the ‘literary health’ (WE 246) Flaubert achieves is reserved for artists like himself, artists who (unlike Emma) understand that art is not personal, but impersonal. It is not a matter of will, not a matter of making ‘art visible’, as Emma makes it, by putting ‘art in her life – ornaments in her house, a piano in her parlor’; it is a matter of doing what Flaubert the writer does, in making art ‘invisible’, a matter of expressing ‘in its magnificence, the nonsense of life in general’ in a prose that is ‘still muter’ than the ‘prose of everyday life’.16 As Rancière sees it, Flaubert’s art is neither individuated, nor does it concern subjects who act in plots (art is not what Aristotle thought it was), nor is it about consumerism, nor about ends and desire (art is the neither/nor of Kant’s aesthetic idea). Art is about the pure, impersonal flow of atoms, microevents, sensations, haecceities (art is Deleuzian).17 It concerns ‘the impersonality of the flow of sensations’.18 Flaubert’s artistic project, which Panagia identifies as playing an ‘archetypal role’ for Rancière’s ‘political theorizing’ (2014, 285), construes literature as that which ‘blurs the distinction between the realm of poetry and the realm of prosaic life’ and thereby ‘makes any subject matter equal to any other’ (WE 237).19 Rancière thus casts Flaubert as anti-Aristotelian in this respect, since, for this new regime of literature, there are no longer ‘noble subjects or ignoble subjects’, nor any border separating the ‘poetic’ from the ‘prosaic’ (WE 237). The social and political hierarchy in which Aristotle’s poetics was embedded would appear to be dispelled, as poetry liberates itself to become the poetry of the novel, in which it is no longer a question of representing the actions of distinguished personages pursuing ‘great designs or ends’ (WE 237). Literature

8

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is no longer set over against history, which deals with life and its reproduction, and which concerns, specifies Rancière, ‘mostly women’ (WE 237). Rancière understands Flaubert to have overturned the essentially Aristotelian hierarchy ‘between two kinds of humanity’ (WE 237). By specifically associating women with ‘those who were satisfied with living, reproducing life’ and who thus were taken to embody one side of the division of humanity, Rancière’s implication is that it was men ‘who dedicated themselves to the pursuit of great designs or ends’ (WE 237). Thus, the further implication is that in overturning the Aristotelian view of poetics, in blurring the line between the poetic and the prosaic, Flaubert was also, at least in principle, disassociating women from the prosaic. This allows for the assumption that it just happened to be the case that the character who mistakes art for life is the female character of Emma, but it could have been otherwise – after all, as Rancière stipulates (after the fact), hysteria came to be recognized as a disease affecting both sexes. Yet, far from this being the case, I suggest that it is precisely a gendered dynamic that structures the symbolic divide Flaubert exploits between kitsch embodied by Emma, and art embodied by the artist (Flaubert). The ‘pure art’ of Flaubert is ironically an art in which there is no pure art, one in which anything or anyone can become the subject of art. As Rancière says, ‘Among the new possibilities available to anybody, there is the possibility of “fusing art and life”. Flaubert can make art out of the life of a farmer’s daughter to the extent that the farmer’s daughter can make art of her life and life out of his art’ (WE 238). It is precisely because of this equivalence that, as Rancière sees it, Flaubert must find a way to differentiate himself from Emma, and one of the means by which he does so (and this is what Rancière does not see) is through the leverage of gender. Let me pause to note that by referring to Emma as the daughter of a farmer, or as a ‘young gir[l]’ (WE 245), and not as a woman in her own right, Rancière downplays the gendered dynamic that Flaubert is exploiting. It is not gender that matters, it is class.20 It is not being a woman that counts in this instance, it is being the daughter of a farmer, or the inexperience of youth. This erasure of gender happens in the name of the part that has no part, the anonym, the logic of the heteron. Rancière overlooks the specificity of gender by making it the equivalent of class. The same logic of equivalence operates elsewhere, as when Rancière introduces the distinction between ‘active men and passive women’ as a gendered gloss on ‘the old order’, only to immediately submerge the specificity of gender in the generality of class by linking the ‘upsetting of the old opposition’ with ‘the child

Introduction

9

of the plebeian’.21 By the ‘old order’ Rancière means the Aristotelian distribution of the sensible (or its more recent equivalent, the order of belles-lettres). Rancière departs from his more established way of indicating Aristotle’s hierarchy as the distinction between two kinds of humanity when he genders the opposition, but then goes on to subsume Emma Bovary under the generic description ‘child of the plebeian’, counting her as one among the ‘daughters of peasants’ (2014, 207). She is aligned with ‘sons of artisans’, like Woolf ’s ‘“half-educated, self-educated”’ Septimus, or with the ‘sons of country parsons like [Conrad’s] Lord Jim’ (2014, 207). Again, it is not gender that matters, it is class. According to Rancière, Flaubert wants to ‘untie the knot that ties artistic equality’ to the availability of ‘ideal pleasures’ to ‘anybody’ (WE 238). In other words, he wants to assert his distinction as an artist from the character of Emma. He wants to claim his expertise as an artist. There must exist two opposite ways of handling the equivalence of art and nonart. There must be an artistic and a nonartistic way to deal with it, and the character [Emma] is constructed as the embodiment of the wrong way. The right way, the artistic way of dealing with the equivalence consists in putting it in the book only, in the book as a book. The wrong way, the way of the character, consists in putting that equivalence in real life. (WE 238)

In order to preserve his distinction from his ‘antiartist’ character, Flaubert sees his ‘virtue’ not only as ‘making any nonartistic subject artistic’ but also in making his character a ‘nonartist’ (WE 238). In this sense, says Rancière, Flaubert ‘needs the hysteric for his own schizophrenic health, which means the health of literature. … He needs him or her, he needs the fiction of his or her cure, in order to separate healthy literary schizophrenia from true schizophrenia’ (WE 247). With the words ‘him or her’ Rancière elides the equivalence between literary health and the true male artist, and the corollary equation between the schizophrenia/hysteria of his character Emma, who embodies practically minded sentimentalism (see WE 235), and the gendered consumerism of mass production. Rancière disavows the feminization of mass culture that Flaubert embodies in not only putting Emma to death, but ‘scoff[ing]’ at her as he does so (WE 240). If Flaubert is disdainful towards Emma, Rancière attributes the disdain to Flaubert going ‘overboard’ in his attempt to demonstrate himself as the ‘exact opposite’ (WE 240) of Emma. If Flaubert ‘treats the whole story of Emma’s life and misfortunes as Emma treats … Mass; as a set of sensations and images’ (WE

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239), he must find a way of distinguishing himself from his character. This he does through his absolute, impersonal style, by showing that the ‘right way to achieve … the equivalence of art and life’ is through ‘seeing things when you are no longer a personal subject, pursuing individual aims’ (WE 241). This ‘absolute’ writing style is one in which Flaubert sees things ‘released from all the ties that make them useful and desirable objects’, where one enjoys ‘sensations as pure sensations’ (WE 241). It is a style in which the ‘real events’ of the novel are ‘the perfume of lemon and vanilla’ or sunshine darting through ‘little blue bubbles’ of water (WE 242). As art, the real events of the novel are not to be tied into what happens ‘within the plot of a subject of desire’ (WE 244). Rather, it is an ‘impersonal flood of haecceities’ that pure literature ‘releases … from the chains of individualization and objectification’ (WE 243). Rancière quotes Deleuze who understands by ‘haecceities’ the ‘relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’ (WE 243).22 The artist weaves out of these ‘microevents … an impersonal sensory life’ (WE 243-4). While Flaubert ‘extracts the impersonal haecceities from the personal appetites and frustrations’, Emma ‘reinscribes the haecceities as qualities of things and persons; hence she reinscribes them in the turmoil of appetites and frustrations’ (WE 243). To invoke the way in which Emma is implicated in appetites, rather than the impersonality of ‘pure’ literature, is not a million miles away from the logic of Aristotle’s argument for differentiating women’s relation to logos/reason from that of men, an argument that Rancière passes over in silence, as we will see in chapter 3.23 Not only does Emma have to be killed in order to save Flaubert from true schizophrenia, so too does she have to be bored with the provincialism of her life in order to save him from confronting the implications of his own Orientalism. In her article entitled ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary’, Aubrey Porterfield points to the affinity between the language of ingestion that Flaubert uses to describe the scenes confronting him on his Egyptian travels, and his characterization of Emma. In her solidification or reinscription of haecceities in a life of desire, Emma reinserts them into the plot from which the writer had extracted them. Quoting Flaubert, Porterfield says, ‘Of his arrival at Alexandria, [Flaubert] writes, “I gulped down a whole bellyful of colors like a donkey filling himself with hay,” as if the hues of the city exceeded the visual register and required the operations of taste, touch, and digestion’.24 Flaubert’s responses to Egypt ranged from registering its sublimity to feeling boredom. Flaubert’s transposition of his

Introduction

11

boredom onto Emma Bovary is a displacement of his Orientalism onto her. By juxtaposing Flaubert’s account of his travels in Egypt with the novel Madame Bovary, Porterfield argues that Flaubert ‘project[s]’ his ‘malady’ of boredom ‘onto [the] domestic, feminine figure’ of Emma Bovary.25 Porterfield concludes that ‘Flaubert … had need of such a character in order to treat the malady of boredom afflicting the colonial traveller with aesthetic and critical distance’.26 Not only, then, does Flaubert make Emma represent the feminization of mass culture, he also displaces onto her his own Orientalism, thereby achieving his critical distance as a writer by inscribing the hapless Emma with his own displaced colonial attitudes. If, in one way, Flaubert succeeds in distancing himself from the Aristotelian plot by appealing to impersonal haecceities, this distance is achieved only by relying on the plot of the hysteric, onto whom he projects his Orientalism, from whose solidification of haecceities he can then distinguish himself. What exactly is at stake in an ostensibly impersonal style achieved through the condemnation of a fictional subject who must be put to death for the inauthenticity of her relationship to art, a subject who echoes Flaubert’s own Orientalism? Has Flaubert rendered the voice of the narrator, as Panagia suggests, ‘so utterly impersonal that it was entirely impossible to determine the nature of the subjectivity of he, or she, or it who spoke’ (2014, 292)? Or is Flaubert rather putting into question the coherence or desirability of female subjectivity before any political legitimacy has granted stability for the subject position in question, in part by making Emma stand-in for his own Orientalism? If the latter, how far does Rancière acquiesce to the conflation of gendered and racialized tropes in Flaubert’s characterization of Emma? Does Rancière’s elaboration of the truth of the absolute, impersonal style of Flaubert prematurely forfeit subject positions that cannot be recognized as properly political or appropriately civilized subjects? In this sense, is not Emma the fictional stand-in for anonyms, who have not yet managed to distinguish themselves from the part that has no part? Is Rancière complicit with Flaubert in putting Emma to death, symbolically killing off women – and their associated Oriental counterparts – before their voices can be heard as political speech? If so, does Rancière’s complicity escape the taint of Flaubert’s Orientalism? Emma’s literary death occurs eighty-eight years before French women would be granted the vote in France; the argument that Rancière insists on framing in terms of the question ‘Does a French woman belong to the category of Frenchmen?’ (1992, 60) had yet to be successful. Just as the suffragettes were dismissed as hysterical, barbaric and uneducated, suggesting

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that they were insufficiently civilized (white) or educated (middle class) to warrant the vote, so Flaubert establishes Emma’s inadequate, uncritical manner of handling art on the basis of his own Orientalism.27 Inasmuch as Rancière fails to distinguish himself from the gendered and racialized mechanisms by which Flaubert achieves his own distanciation from his character, Rancière would appear to endorse them, or at least to blindly acquiesce to them. For Rancière, if in one way, Flaubert moves away from the hierarchical Aristotelian vision that splits humanity into two different kinds – those whom poetry concerns and those it does not – he also ‘remains cognizant of the old Aristotelian poetics which turns ignorance into knowledge through peripeteia and recognition’ (WE 247). Flaubert ‘needs the fiction of his or her cure, in order to separate healthy literary schizophrenia from true schizophrenia’ (WE 247). Emma must be hysterical in Flaubert’s place; Flaubert absolves himself of hysteria by demarcating himself from her through his allegedly impersonal (but in fact gendered, Orientalist) literary style as an artist. Woolf, by contrast, ‘can no longer play the part of the healthy schizophrenic writer’ (WE 248). She no longer observes the rules of Aristotelian poetics, whereby the ‘plot of the hysteric allows’ the writer ‘to make the difference between healthy schizophrenia and real schizophrenia’ (WE 247). In The Waves Rhoda, in Rancière’s words, might be ‘cured of the disease that prevented Emma from choosing the true enjoyment’ (WE 248), but she is not cured of schizophrenia. She cannot ‘link a moment with the following one’ (WE 247). She ‘cannot write’ (WE 248). She is not an artist. She cannot transcribe her feeling of the ‘haecceities of impersonal life’ (WE 248) into writing, and so she cannot save herself. She does not know ‘the laws of literary metaphorization’, she is not, like Flaubert ‘a good doctor’ (WE 247) of words. She is not like the character who must write in Rhoda’s stead, she is not like Bernard, who is ‘too healthy’ (WE 248). Woolf does not make Rhoda’s life – or death – into a ‘lesson’ (WE 248). She does not relapse into using the plot to differentiate herself from the insanity of her character. She does not buy her own literary health at the cost of her character. Rhoda dies, but her death serves no writerly purpose. It is pure loss – at least from the point of view of the literary health of her inventor. Rhoda dies in ‘one sentence, a very short sentence’ (WE 248) – in Bernard’s sentence, in the sentence of another character, who writes for her. So Rhoda’s death, suggests Rancière, can only serve the writer-narrator who is also a character; it cannot ‘save’ Woolf, the writer (WE 248), as if, somehow, it was meant to.

Introduction

13

Doesn’t a certain logic of equivalence also assert itself when Rancière runs together the literary deaths of Flaubert’s Emma, Marcel Proust’s Albertine, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude with William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas and Woolf ’s Septimus – as if there were absolutely no difference between them, as if Woolf ’s gender and Joe Christmas’s biracial characteristics were negligible? (see 2014, 206) Do we not have to mark the difference between Flaubert’s killing of Emma, and Woolf ’s killing of Septimus? Do we not have to register the seamlessness with which a gendered regime allows Flaubert, Proust and Hardy to kill off their female protagonists, and a racialized regime permits Faulkner to kill off Joe Christmas with relative impunity? Is it not incumbent upon us to notice that when Septimus dies at the hands of Woolf, something different is happening? When Woolf decided to let Septimus die, it was still relatively rare for the author who had the power to confer life or death on her characters to be a woman, and rarer still for a male character to be deprived of his life at the hands of a female author (even if it was under the respectable fictionalized cloak of suicide in a traumatized response to war). In this rarity, do we not find Woolf protesting, retaliating against the long litany of female deaths at the hands of their (usually male) literary executioners? Should we not be troubled by the fact that none of this appears relevant, significant, or perhaps even visible to Rancière? Not only does it fade into irrelevance: there appears to be a mandate, an interdiction, operating in his work to banish it from relevance. Is it really enough for Rancière to resist overtly ‘political’ readings of Flaubert’s fiction by invoking on Flaubert’s behalf the ‘purity of literature’ (WE 233-34) as a way of warding off all the work that feminist and race theory has accomplished? Rancière stipulates that the ‘right question’ is what is the relation between ‘Emma’s death and the purity of literature’ (WE 234), suggesting that it consists in her insistence on individualizing the sensations that the impersonal writer has been at pains to extract from individualization. Yet, what if the impersonal turns out not to be so impersonal insofar as it participates in Orientalism and sexism’s refusal to see certain persons as worthy of individualization? Surely literary fiction is deeply implicated in either sustaining and legitimating, or interrogating and disrupting the gendered and Orientalist social fictions that pass themselves off as reality, as if they were just the fact of the matter, as if they were impervious to dispute, as if they were not merely reflective of the police order? In denying that the aesthetic regime has any ‘specific connection with political equality’, and in his attempt to keep at bay a ‘pervasive sociologizing vision … committed to the reduction of cultural inequalities’ doesn’t Rancière allow himself to overlook some crucial questions regarding the part that has no

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part?28 The problem is that Rancière fails to perform the ‘disappropriation of identity’ (DT 139, M 187) for which he calls. Rancière offers as an ‘anti-Platonic myth’ the ‘countermyth of the joiner’ in an effort to break ‘the circle’ that Plato establishes with his myth of metals (2009,  17), whereby he orchestrates social space so that certain bodies are restricted to certain functions, according to their alleged capacities. With this countermyth Rancière wants to break the ‘circle of the arkhè, the logic according to which the exercise of power is anticipated in the capacity to exercise it and this capacity in turn is verified by its exercise’ (2009, 9). The joiner who stops his work in order to appreciate the beauty of the view he beholds steps out of the distribution of the sensible that is characteristic of the ethical regime, breaking up the ‘Platonic circle, the ethical circle’ (2009, 8). When he ‘stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it’ (2009, 7), he thereby dismantles ‘a certain body of experience that was deemed appropriate to a specific ethos, the ethos of the artisan’ (2009, 8). He takes the time he should not take, when he sees and appreciates the beauty it is not his place to see and appreciate. He enjoys it in a way he should not be able to enjoy, according to his occupation. In doing so, the joiner aligns himself with Kant and against Plato on the question of aesthetics. He ‘agrees with Kant on a decisive point: the singularity of the aesthetic experience is the singularity of an as if ’ (2009, 8). He thereby breaks out of another ‘as if ’, the one that legislates Plato’s hierarchical world, which ‘must be viewed as if God had put gold in the souls of the men who were destined to rule and iron in the souls of those who were destined to work and be ruled’ (2009, 8). The point of this myth is not its literal credibility. ‘It was enough’, says Rancière, that the workers ‘sensed it, that is they used their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if this were true’ (2009, 8).29 Rancière reads the words of the joiner as a ‘personalized paraphrase’ (2009, 7) on the disinterestedness that is key to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The singularity of aesthetic judgement suspends the hierarchies that situates an object either as an object of knowledge or as an object of desire, and appreciates it ‘without considering its social use and signification’ (2009, 7). It is this Kantian move, the suspension of the rules that align the understanding with a ‘class of intelligence’, and sensibility with a ‘class of sensation’ (2009, 3) that Rancière takes up and extends to politics. He thereby appeals to aesthetic judgement as disrupting the hierarchy that would otherwise obtain between Kant’s faculties, the same hierarchy that organizes Plato’s division of the parts of the soul, a division which also dictates the hierarchies of the community, keeping those who are to be ruled

Introduction

15

over in their place. In extending the ‘as if ’ of aesthetic judgement to politics, Rancière suggests that politics ‘also obeys this principle of judgment’.30 The scene of dissensus is one that puts two worlds – two heterogeneous logics – on the same stage, in the same world. It is a commensurability of incommensurables. This also means that the political subject acts in the mode of the as if; it acts as if it were the demos, that is, as the whole made by those who are not countable as qualified parts of the community. (2009, 11)

The enactment of the as if in the political arena amounts to saying, in Panagia’s words, ‘It may not be my place to be, to speak, to act, to read, or to write in this way, but I will do it anyway’ (2014, 288). Still, there seems to be something missing in the world of dissensual politics that Rancière has created, a world in which I find not just myself and my concerns minimized, but those of whole communities of feminist readers, writers, thinkers and philosophers, whole communities of race theorists, communities that are themselves still being torn apart over the question of whether gender or race comes first. By what mechanism are such concerns dismissed, elided or rendered equivalent to a part that has no part, a part that does not see, must not see, race and gender? What lies in the background of Rancière’s application of Kant’s aesthetic judgement to politics, in his equation of Kantian faculties with the Platonic parts of the soul, in ‘the dismantling of a certain body of experience’ (2009, 7–8), and in the ‘supplement that both reveals and neutralizes the division at the heart of the sensible’? (2009, 3) When Rancière turns to Aristotle’s Politics, in the opening line of the first chapter of Disagreement, entitled ‘The Beginning of Politics’, he says, ‘Let’s begin at the beginning’ (DT 1, M 19), as if the beginning of Aristotle’s Politics were his distinction between speech and voice, his identification of the capacity for politics as specifically human. Yet, Rancière does not begin at the beginning. Rancière’s beginning is not where Aristotle begins. Aristotle begins Book I of the Politics by distinguishing the household from the polis. Informing, preceding and framing Aristotle’s this distinction between those who merely register pain as all animals do and those capable of sensing/ perceiving what is just and unjust is another discourse about parts and wholes, a discourse about how the household is constituted, about the roles of women and slaves, and the ways in which they should be ruled. Aristotle will develop this discourse when he identifies certain virtues as appropriate to women, and others

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to be appropriate to slaves (as if they were two mutually exclusive categories).31 This discourse about the respective roles of women and slaves subtends the discourse that Rancière elaborates about wealth, virtue and freedom, about the three values that get reduced to a struggle between the rich and the poor. Yet this discourse about women, which is interwoven with his considerations about slavery, is rendered invisible in Rancière’s account, as if it did not exist. It is a discourse to which I suggest we need to attend, in order to retard the slide I think Rancière makes too easily, too quickly between, on the one hand, the enactment of equality ‘in the name of a category’ (1992, 59), between ‘workers, women, people of color’ (1992, 59), and ‘the name of the anonym’ (1992, 60), the name of anyone at all, on the other hand. What Rancière slides over, when he fails to mention the complex ways in which slaves and women are played off one another in analogical patterns, does not just go away.32 It returns again and again, in different historical configurations, under different guises, with different names, and in different struggles, just as it returns in Flaubert’s feminized Orientalism. Charlotte Witt has shown that ‘form and matter are gendered notions’ and that their gendering is characteristic of Aristotle’s biology and his politics.33 Although he does not follow through the fractures it introduces into his own narrative, we have seen that Rancière himself on more recent occasions acknowledges the gendered aspects of Aristotle’s distribution of the sensible, only to reinscribe it within the discourse of class. More often, Rancière articulates this division between two different classes of humans as an opposition between men of intelligence and action who are associated with form, and men of sensation and passivity who are associated with matter. I suggest that where, why and how Rancière’s texts stop short – and I will say this even though it is not my place to say it – will take us through some conceptual and political thickets of thinking that complicate his narrative. In the spirit of complication, I offer a counternarrative to the story of the part that has no part that Rancière tells us, one that puts pressure on, creates friction between, some of his equivalences. It is a narrative that is well known by feminist and race theorists – the story of Sojourner Truth. Here is the speech Sojourner Truth made in Akron in 1851. That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much

Introduction

17

and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?34

As Avtar Brah and Anne Phoenix observe, when they turn to this speech by Sojourner Truth in order to illustrate the intersections between race and gender, the identity that Sojourner Truth maps out with her rhetorical refrain ‘And ain’t I a woman?’ is a relational identity.35 One might say that she illustrates Rancière’s notion of the ‘in-between’ (1992, 61) – except that her addressees are white women, feminists who are still fighting for the right to vote. The recognition she seeks is not that from men but from women. Don’t I count as a woman, she is asking, what can your feminist struggle offer me as a slave woman, who works in the field as hard as any man? Is your struggle merely the struggle of white, free women, or is it a struggle that can accommodate black women who are slaves? The rhetoric of Sojourner Truth’s speech suggests that in the case of Sojourner Truth – and innumerable examples could be offered – it was not ‘the name of the anonym, the name of anyone’ (Rancière, 1992, 60) that was invoked, but the specificity of black womanhood against the background of an invisibly white figuration of women. Here, then, is an instance of political speech that does not follow the model that Rancière suggests is applicable ‘generally speaking’ when he outlines the logic of dissensus. ‘The logical schema of social protest, generally speaking may be summed up as follows: Do we or do we not belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this?’ (1992, 60). What is eclipsed by the phrase generally speaking are the ways in which the politics of racialization are played out in the very articulation of feminist and race struggles, that the logic of politics does not just consist of asking whether or not workers are citizens, or blacks are human beings, but also in the question of whether slaves are women or women are slaves. Even if such questions remain relegated to the background, do they not continue to haunt Rancière’s analysis? I think they do.36 To press this point, let’s return to the opening pages of Disagreement, where Rancière expounds upon the empty freedom of the miscount. In Rancière’s view the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, indeed political philosophy in general, amounts to ‘policing’ (DT xiii, M 16). By this he means that political philosophy attempts to ‘rid itself ’ (DT xii, M 15) of the ‘logic of disagreement proper to political rationality’ (DT xiii, M 16). In expelling that which should be the stuff of politics, political philosophy concentrates instead

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on order and control, an exercise it maintains with reference to the various parts of the community it designates. For Aristotle, justice, which goes beyond the mere balancing of individual interests in that it concerns that which citizens have in common, is a matter of creating an order and instituting a standard for what citizens have in common (see DT 5, M 23). It is the dividing up of what is in common. What entitles parties to their share of the common lot is the value they bring to the community, as determined by the common good, measured by justice. The entitlement of each party, their right or dues, is in strict proportion to the value it contributes to the common good. The problem on which Rancière focuses is that this involves ‘an odd way of counting “parties” within the community’, which he refers to as a miscount (see DT 6, M 24). Aristotle identifies three values that contribute to the community – wealth, virtue and freedom. These correspond to three parties – although Rancière points out that, in practice, those who have wealth and virtue are usually ‘coextensive’ (DT 11, M 30), so that in effect the three parties are reduced to two – the rich and the poor. The question arises as to what value the freedom of the people brings to the community. In answering this question, Rancière says that ‘the fundamental miscount rears its head’ (DT 7, M 26). The value he associates with the poor, those who lack wealth and virtue, is freedom, yet this freedom is ‘empty’ Rancière suggests.37 By this he means first that it is not a ‘positive property’, and secondly that ‘it is not proper to the demos at all’ (DT 8, M 27). With regard to the first point, Rancière explains that it is by dint of the abolition of slavery that the people are counted as part of the community: The freedom of the demos is not a determinable property but a pure invention. … Simply by being born in a certain city, and more especially in the city of Athens once enslavement for debt was abolished there, any one of these speaking bodies doomed to the anonymity of work and of reproduction, these speaking bodies that are of no more value than slaves – even less, says Aristotle, since the slave gets his virtue from the virtue of his master – any old artisan or shopkeeper whatsoever is counted in this party to the city that calls itself the people, as taking part in community affairs as such. (DT 7, M 26).

Only through the accident of birth, through the contingency of having been born in Athens, does one avoid the fate of slavery. With regard to the second point, freedom is empty in the sense that it is not in fact proper to the demos because it is common to all, yet ‘the people appropriate the common quality as their own’ (DT 9, M 28). Rancière says, ‘The people are

Introduction

19

nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification – no wealth, no virtue – but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do. The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest’ (DT 8, M 27).38 Thus, for Rancière, what the people ‘bring to the community strictly speaking is contention’ (DT 9, M 28). Not only is it the case that far from being an exclusive property of the people, freedom is what the people share with all the other citizens, those who possess the positive qualities of wealth and virtue; the people identify with the community through a wrong. The ‘mass of men without qualities identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities have the natural effect of propelling them into the nonexistence of those who have “no part in anything”’ (DT 9, M 28). Who exactly is counted as belonging to the community, despite the fact that they have no value to bring to it apart from the freedom they appropriate as their own, which is in fact not theirs to bring, since it is common to all the parties who make up the community? It is artisans or shopkeepers who are counted. More precisely it is male artisans and shopkeepers; Rancière makes no mention of women. Had he done so, he might have had to qualify his remark about the people as an undifferentiated mass with no virtue, since in contradistinction to Plato, for whom virtue is one, Aristotle attributes specific virtues to women and to slaves, virtues he argues are appropriate to their subservient functions. Yet women remain invisible in Rancière’s commentary on Aristotle, although the very thing that qualifies the class of contention, the class that has no part, is the ‘birth’ of those who make up this class within a certain geographic area. Women, then, and more specifically the implicit reference in Aristotle’s account is to women whose bodies are contained within the geopolitical space of the city of Athens, women who give birth to those who become free simply by being born there, constitute the indispensable condition for the inclusion of male artisans within the community to become free citizens. Yet, women themselves are not worthy of mention. They themselves are neither counted as citizens nor deemed capable of contributing anything – except manual labour and reproduction, which Aristotle consigns to the pre-political realm of necessity. Two questions arise. The first is, why does slavery drop out of Rancière’s account, after it has served to help get his analysis off the ground? The second is, why is there no mention at all of another theme in Aristotle’s Politics, namely women? To turn the question around, what accounts for Rancière’s focus upon the poor? There are biographical and political answers that come to mind.

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Rancière is a recovering Althusserian, and as such he wants to theorize the poor/ proletariat in a different register than the concept of ideology permits.39 He spent a good deal of time reading, reflecting upon and writing about what workers themselves said and thought. So when he reads Aristotle and Plato, he is primed to attend to the problem of the poor. Rancière’s intellectual itinerary predisposes him to this particular focus. One might say, borrowing Rancière’s own vocabulary, that the distribution of the sensible that helped to form his political and philosophical vision, which bodies were permitted to occupy which spaces, whose logos established itself as the authoritative milieu, how a certain aesthetic allowed particular intellectual and political questions to attain pertinence and legitimacy while precluding others, what was seeable, sayable and doable, and what was not – all this surely played a role in shaping Rancière’s enquiries. In question is whether as a consequence, a particular wrong becomes salient in his account, a certain miscount comes to predominate, while other wrongs and miscounts go unacknowledged, remaining invisible or nonsensical. If so, what would it do to Rancière’s thinking to mobilize these sites of invisibility? To adapt what Rancière has said in a different context, what might it mean to think with and against Rancière, by staging an ‘intrusive encounter … by interrupting the organization of a class of objects or a series of performances’?40 What would it mean to rethink the part that has no part, and the way that it orchestrates Rancière’s writing? How might one displace this object of thought, moving it ‘away from the site of its original appearance or attending discourse’ by shifting its ‘discursive register, its universe of reference’? (ibid.). What would it mean to restage a politics of reading that might be explicable biographically by inflecting it through a ‘theoretical framework’ (2000, 121) that respects the democratic impulse of Rancière’s thinking, while extending it in ways that he himself has not? If the accidents of Rancière’s own birth (intellectual, as much as geopolitical) might have rendered some questions obscure in his work, a dissensual model of thinking might ask how a field that is saturated with the discourse of class might be put in question through the structure of the supplements that race theory and feminist theory can bring to it.41 In posing these questions, my concern is to clarify the theoretical significance that Rancière’s structural focus has on the poor throughout his work. What accounts for the privileged place that the poor occupies in the logic of his analysis? What drives this singular focus, and what effects does it have? How does it shape the democracy in which he is invested? Does it ultimately limit the purchase of his analysis? Is Rancière’s political logic of dissensus a white,

Introduction

21

masculinist logic? Are questions about women and slavery relegated to the realm of the pre-political in Rancière’s analysis in such a way as to reproduce the normative framework that allows Aristotle to observe that ‘among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank’ because (unlike Greeks) ‘barbarians have no class of natural rulers’?42 Even as Rancière’s analysis tracks the incursion of equality as the irruption of the pre-political into the police order, insofar as he upholds the struggle of the poor against the rich as the model of political dissensus, does he leave intact an imaginary that feminizes non-Greeks (read non-Europeans), and racializes women? If so, how might we approach this cultural imaginary in order to challenge it? If Rancière’s conception of politics as policing is formulated on ‘the basis of Aristotle’s text (and what this text stops short of)’ (DT xiii, M 15), how far does Rancière’s understanding of politics as dissensus succeed in going beyond Aristotle, and how far does it remain caught up in Aristotelian terms of analysis? If imperialism shapes the colonial imaginary of ostensible democracy as much as it shapes the colony, how far does Rancière’s understanding of politics remain colonial, how far does it participate in discourses that replicate the invisibility of whiteness? If the poor is the constitutive wrong of politics itself, does Rancière’s analysis remain a class analysis despite itself, does it require dissensus to fit the cast of the struggle between rich and poor? Despite its effort to put in question an understanding of the police along the lines of the state apparatus, does Rancière’s logic replicate the law in that only one wrong can be articulated at a time, and in doing so, does it fall prey to the problematic Kimberlé Crenshaw points out when she shows that even apparently progressive laws concerning equality only recognize one axis of difference at a time?43 In short, does the privilege Rancière accords to the poor in his analysis operate in such a way as to permit any other class of people to appear only as a substitute for the poor? Does Rancière’s analysis of dissensual politics mimic the police order in this sense? Or does his analysis displace this logic of substitution? Two caveats are in order. First, the problem of the invisibility of women and slavery in Rancière’s analysis of Greek texts as foundational for Western democracy is far from unique to him; it is a systemic problem. We need only point to two discussions whose strategic importance bear upon Rancière’s own considerations of Aristotle’s appeal to the distinction of logos from voice as defining the political. Both Arendt’s discussion of the bios politicos as opposed to the activity of labour, and Agamben’s focus on the distinction between life as bios and life as zoē also fail to elaborate on the question of women or slavery.44

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The second caveat is that, while he does not attend to the role that women play for Aristotle, it is not that Rancière entirely neglects feminism. On the contrary, unlike most of his contemporaries he includes examples of feminist and race struggles in his explication of political dissensus.45 At issue is how he frames women and feminism, how and where women and racial minorities enter into his texts and whether they might enter them differently. Does Rancière’s silence about Aristotle’s discussion of women, and his curious elision of slavery once it has kick-started his discussion, render invisible the problematic backdrop of interwoven Aristotelian assumptions about barbarians and women? If this background is whitewashed, rendered negligible, discounted, does it return to haunt these analyses, and those of Rancière’s commentators, most of whom perpetuate this whitewashing? If these questions qualify as textual, they have arisen out of interpretation shaped by my own intellectual, political and philosophical itinerary, and are conditioned in part by the prevailing debates of the communities in which I have circulated in the United States and the United Kingdom. The questions I formulate are indebted to the symbolic economies that predominate in communities of reading, thinking, teaching and writing of feminist theory, postcolonial theory and race theory. The absences, gaps, ellipses, erasures and silences that inhabit Rancière’s texts leap out at me, because of my own history and practices of reading, habits of thinking, and exercises in disidentification, which have steeped me in the difficulty of how to do intersectional work well. I write out of a sense that something is awry. There is something missing. Reading Rancière is like performing the balancing act of the schizophrenic who does not want to save the writer in her at the expense of sacrificing the woman. I do not want to make writerly sense of Rancière at the cost of complicity, abandoning the casualties he casts aside, not just for my sake, but also for the sake of others whose existence his logic of equivalence equivocates. The more I read, the more doggedly I pursue the lines of fracture that Rancière so expertly papers over, the more I follow the cracks to see where they might lead, the less imperturbable the edifice he has created appears to be. ‘The real difference’, says Deleuze, ‘is not between the inside and the outside, for the crack is neither internal nor external, but is rather at the frontier. It is imperceptible, incorporeal, and ideational’.46 The more I worry at, exacerbate, these nearly invisible fissures holding together the various iterations of the narratives Rancière presents in his ‘indisciplinary’ fashion (not quite philosophy, not quite history, not merely

Introduction

23

politics, perhaps more akin to the style of literature than anything else), the more the crevices deepen into chasms.47 Until, one day, I tumble into a hole, not unlike the rabbit hole into which Alice fell, and I find myself in a topsy-turvy world, one I enter only after having been spun round and round, turned upside down, where I find everything is stood on its head. The world in which I believed myself, like Rancière’s joiner, to be ‘at home’ (2009, 7) is not my world. It is a world in which I have become very, very tiny. I am barely visible. I have almost ceased to exist. I cannot climb back up, without also reconstructing the world I fell away from. The ‘entire play of the crack has become incarnated in the depth of the body at the same time that the labor of the inside and the outside has widened the edges’, says Deleuze (LS 155). Like Alice, I find myself having to move between the surface and depths, to discern whether the cracks that appear on the surface of Rancière’s ‘porcelain’ (LS 155) prose, which follow the path of least resistance, deepen into wounds that tend to cut into certain types of bodies, typically feminized and racialized bodies.48 It is not that I do not believe that literature is about the beautiful nonsense of life in general, it is that in Alan Lopez’s words, ‘nonsense, even if “emitted [only] at the surface” is still “carved into the depth of bodies” [LS 84]’; it is that the right to the affirmation of nonsense is still granted more easily to some than to others, and its granting and carving is gendered and racialized.49 Perhaps, to write and to be political (in Rancière’s sense, in the sense of challenging the inegalitarian distribution of the sensible) as a woman, is to strive for invisibility as a writer and for visibility as a woman (just image google ‘Professor’ to see why the latter is still necessary). To be a feminist writer, for me, is in itself to flirt with a schizophrenic enterprise. It is not just that if I slip into the invisibility of nonsense, I might never be able find a way out, I might just slip through the cracks and into an abyss.50 It is also that I do not want to hold at bay my own schizophrenia at the cost of others.51 ‘It’s not you that’s cracked – it’s the Grand Canyon’, says Deleuze, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald (LS 155). So, if I infuse the impersonal with the personal, if I reinsert the signifier ‘I’ into the flow of prose, from which the true, pure, art of absolute literature has excised it, I do not invoke this signifier on the ‘mistaken assumption of an absolute signified’ (Lopez, 2004, 116). I reinsert it to mark the places where such signifiers fail, how the poetic movement, the rhythms of Rancière’s writing, the way it rests and how it moves on, the temporality and spatiality of his style, papers over symptomatic cracks in his prose, apertures that become abyssal, deep, underground holes into which I keep falling. Such insertions might also serve to alert others to beware of

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the holes through which they might experience a falling sensation, black holes, perhaps. Does Rancière’s politics preclude or facilitate a serious investigation of the cultural imaginary that continues to play itself out as an informal network of biases in his own work? How might Rancière inform feminist and race theory and how might feminist and race theory inform and inflect Rancière’s work? What happens when we allow these sites to shape and speak to one another? What might a productive conversation between feminist theory, and race theory and the questions Rancière poses look like? Should it make good on the lacunae in Rancière’s textual readings of Aristotle and Plato, the places where he could have incorporated women and slaves into his analyses but doesn’t? Should it identify ways in which the cultural imaginary that allows women and slaves to fade into the background of Rancière’s political analyses reasserts itself elsewhere in his texts, haunting his analyses, inhibiting them? Should it learn from Rancière’s approach by exploring dissensus in contexts that he himself does not? Should it apply Rancière’s dissensual politics to the difficult work of intersectional politics? Perhaps it should not decide between these approaches, but slip between them, moving in and out of them, perhaps it should perform a series of identifications and disidentifications. In what follows, I draw on the work of feminist and race theorists who have demonstrated the ways in which political theory and aesthetics remain entrenched in damaging racialized and gendered assumptions, and suggest that there are moments in which Rancière does not escape this legacy. I sometimes identify with Rancière’s understanding of dissensus by extending its purchase, as when I explore how a racialized and gendered cultural imaginary organizes the redistribution of the sensible in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Chapter 2). I sometimes identify with what I take to be the overall sense of Rancière’s prose, as in explicating his understanding of political dissensus (Chapter 3), his relationship to Kant (Chapter 4), or the relation of artistic to political dissensus in his work (Chapter 5). I also identify with Rancière’s understanding of art as political in order to disidentify with Heidegger’s understanding of art (Chapter 6). I disidentify with the sense of Rancière’s work in considering works by the Guerrilla Girls and other artists (Chapter 7). In concluding, I turn to the work of Gillian Wearing and Claudia Rankine, artists whose work I think communicates with, supplements and augments Rancière’s understanding of dissenusal art. In Chapter 2 I begin to play out how dissensus can be understood to function in relation to art by considering the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. In 1931 Molly

Introduction

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(Everlyn Sampi), along with her younger siblings, escaped from the Moore River Settlement, to which they had been forcibly removed, and set out on foot to find their way back home by following the fence from which the film derives its title, Rabbit-Proof Fence. The fence had been erected in a vain attempt to keep the rabbits that had been introduced to Australia by the English from ruining agricultural crops. When the three girls, fourteen-year-old Molly, ten-year-old Gracie and eight-year-old Daisy escape from the Moore River Settlement, they find their way home by following the fence, which provides them with a road map. Seeing the fence through their eyes is a way of redistributing the sensible. Against all the odds, the girls walk over 1,000 miles home, defying police attempts to find them. The film puts in question the effort of government to impose racial homogeneity by intervening in kinship practices. I read the film as one in which the legitimating narratives that serve to frame that which is publicly sanctioned as visible are aesthetically displaced. Sanctioned narratives, precisely because they confirm and corroborate ruling powers, circulate more or less invisibly in their work of legitimation, as they encourage, verify and reward behaviours that conform to the version of events that governments espouse. When displacements and disruptions occur, the mythical frameworks that organize and orient national collectivities, but which are not always made readily available for interrogation, can present themselves for reworking.52 Sanctioned ways of seeing are those that are most readily publicly available, which are facilitated by unarticulated myths that limit and constrain in advance the possibilities of vision, predisposing us to see that which we habitually see, that which we are allowed to see, that which available narratives suggest, corroborate, encourage and confirm. We are presented with something that appears as permanent, as though this is the only appearance possible. In Rancière’s terms, we are presented with the police distribution of the sensible.53 When art disrupts such narratives, it can redistribute the sensible, providing us with new ways of seeing. Rabbit-Proof Fence, I suggest, can be read as dissensual art, art that intervenes in a given distribution of the sensible, and redistributes it, framing the world in such a way as to make available new ways of seeing, thus paving the way for new meanings to establish themselves, correcting the miscount and writing those who previously had no part into full subjectivity. When Molly reads the rabbit-proof fence as a guide to show her how to find her way home, she employs the skill of someone who has been taught to be observant of her surroundings, someone who is accustomed to thinking about the impact that her footprints leave on the paths she travels through the

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landscape, someone who is not simply a passive observer, but rather is a girl who intelligently reads the landscape, and in doing so changes the fence that carves up agricultural land to protect it from rabbits into a mechanism of survival. As a young girl who is astute and skilful, she contests what passes for knowledge, and who passes for legitimate knowers, outwitting an entire administrative bureaucracy backed up by a police force, and challenging the standards of the knowledge they presume to have and to control. After exploring Rancière’s reflections on aesthetics in relation to Rabbit-Proof Fence, I turn my attention to some other works of art including works by Ingrid Mwangi, who has fused her artistic persona with that of her husband, and goes by the name of Mwangi-Hutter. In Chapter 3 I turn to Rancière’s characterization of archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics, which he identifies as the three major configurations of political philosophy. Rancière takes each of these figurations, which he associates with Plato, Aristotle and Marx respectively, to conflate politics with the police order. By contrast, Rancière conceives of politics as the interruption of the inequality that passes for politics as usual. In this chapter, I reference critiques of political philosophy by race and gender theorists, and raise the question of what these critiques mean for Rancière’s own interventions into political philosophy. In the ensuing chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), I pay particular attention to the importance of Kant and Hegel for Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime. I attend to Rancière’s understanding of the ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes in Chapter 4. With particular reference to the notions of dissensus and the ‘identity of opposites’, I show how both Kant and Hegel inform Rancière’s approach to aesthetics. In this chapter, I also explore Rancière’s critique of JeanFrançois Lyotard. Just as he resists positing an absolute difference between politics and art, so Rancière resists the absolutization of the Other that he sees as characteristic of the ethical turn in contemporary aesthetics. He resists the tendency to turn alterity into the unrepresentable, the inassimilable, the unthinkable, and he refuses to hypostasize the Other as a given identity. He sees Lyotard’s appropriation of the sublime as representative of such a tendency. He thinks for all its talk of art witnessing that which is unrepresentable – and the Holocaust is the unrepresentable per se, for Lyotard, the trauma beyond all trauma – by departing from representational art, the ethical turn only manages to rejoin a discourse of purism. It reserves certain art (Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist Onement, for example) as an appropriate expression of the Holocaust, and rules out any other artistic approach as inappropriate. Lyotard

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thereby ends up doing precisely what he doesn’t want to do. He celebrates Newman’s orange gash as representative of the only type of art capable of representing the unrepresentable. He thereby preserves a representationalist view of art, despite himself. For Rancière, the lines separating art and politics, blur; their indistinction is not to be lamented. In Chapter 5 I elaborate Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime and political dissensus, and at the same time continue to elaborate his debt to Kant, developing the suggestion introduced in Chapter 2 that in order to understand how key notions such as the police order, dissensus, and the redistribution of the sensible operate, attention needs to be paid to how Rancière reformulates a Kantian approach to temporality and spatiality. Chapter 6 draws together and thematizes a thread that runs through the previous chapters, namely how the distinction between form and matter, and its attendant distinctions, operates in aesthetics. After reviewing how the form/ matter distinction figures in Rancière’s work, I consider Heidegger’s attempt to displace this guiding distinction in his reflections on the work of art, drawing on Rancière to suggest that Heidegger is not completely successful in his effort to overcome the legacy of the form/matter distinction. Rancière’s analysis itself is susceptible to a similar critique. Attending to works by the Guerrilla Girls, and a series of related works by other artists, I argue in Chapter 7, raises some important questions regarding Rancière’s analysis. A work that might seem old hat to feminist audiences presents challenges to more mainstream audiences, and in doing so it suggests that we take seriously the question of context and audience in thinking through the relationship between Rancière’s conception of politics, the police order, and the redistribution of the sensible. I suggest that the blanket sense in which Rancière conceives of the museum as having facilitated a more egalitarian relationship to art across the board is in need of rethinking. I conclude by discussing Gillian Wearing and Claudia Rankine, and by suggesting that it is not only a question of politics staging dissensus in relation to the police order, but that multiple worlds come into play. In this book, I am trying to pick myself up, and dust myself off, to stand myself up, having stumbled and tripped my way through Rancière’s prose, sometimes losing my way in it, becoming completely mired in it, unable to move anywhere at all, sometimes borne along by it, skipping happily over its surfaces, sometimes abruptly falling out of it, into another world. As my Dad (who died while I was writing this book) used to say, ‘I’ve come unstuck, I’m stymied’, as if unstuck

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and stymied meant the same thing – and of course they do in a way. If you come unstuck you lose your bearings, you become unmoored. When you are lost, you are stymied. You are confused. You have fallen through the cracks. You have lost sight of any way forward. You have reached an impasse, come to a standstill. You have to begin again, to think things through a different way. You have to plot out another path, to navigate a new, uncharted channel through the waters, which have become, all of a sudden, unnavigable, impossible. It is out of the impossibility of identification that I write:54 the impossibility of identifying with the father, the impossibility of not identifying with the father; the impossibility of identifying with the working class, the impossibility of not identifying with the working class; the impossibility of identifying with being a woman, the impossibility of not identifying with being a woman; the impossibility of identifying with others, the impossibility of not identifying with others. the impossible identification of the part that has no part, the impossibility of identifying with yourself. You are no longer the one you thought you were, no longer where you thought you were. You are no longer there at all. The impersonal world has taken you over. All that you can do is desperately hold on to things, to sensations: the round smoothness of stones in a circle of friendship; the liquorice of the lake’s horizon at 4 o’clock on an impossibly warm winter’s afternoon; the sharp, harsh spikes of windblown sand that whip your skin and cut into the surface of your face. There is nothing else left of you. You don’t have to try to experiment with writing, you don’t have to try to reach for the style of the impersonal. You’ve already survived the impersonal, but barely. You are not trying to arrive at a place where there is no longer a subject or plot. You are trying to get with the plot, while tweaking it here and there. One of the ways you do that is by writing impossible identifications into the history of the plot that has already written itself, as if it were impersonal, the plot of philosophy/politics/literature.

Notes 1 Rancière tries ‘to answer the question, what can be thought of specifically as politics’ on ‘the basis of Aristotle’s text [the Politics] (and what this text stops short of)’ (DT xiii, M 15). 2 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 3 See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 21 (London: Harvard University Press, 2005), I, 1253a 9–17.

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4 See Aristotle, Politics, I, 1254b 24–25. 5 While it is clearly the police version of politics that Rancière is describing here, rather than the dissensual model he himself develops, in question is how far this dissensual model replicates the police model. 6 Aristotle, Politics, I, 1252b 5–7. 7 Holt N. Parker, ‘Aristotle’s Unanswered Questions: Women and Slaves in Politics’ EuGeStA, no. 2 (2012): 71–122, see esp. p. 76. 8 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 40. 9 Davide Panagia, ‘Rancière’s Style’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 284–300, see esp. p. 287. Panagia discusses the logic of equivalence in relation to Marx. 10 Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 1–19, see esp. p. 10. 11 Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October, vol. 61, The Identity in Question (Summer 1992): 58–64, see esp. p. 59. 12 See Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 113–26, see esp. p. 121. 13 Rancière, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 233–48. Hereafter cited as WE. Rita Felski, ‘Kitsch, Romance Fiction and Male Paranoia: Stephen King meets the Frankfurt School’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 4, no. 1 (1990): 1–11, see esp. p. 1. 14 Rancière quotes from one of Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet in which Flaubert ‘confesses … his own dream’ in which he also confuses ‘literature and furniture’ (WE 240). 15 As Rancière says, Flaubert’s Emma is both sentimental and at the same time sentimental without contradiction, in that she wants to solidify or render concrete the ideal pleasure of art and literature: ‘Flaubert characterizes her attitude by two apparently opposed adjectives; she is said to be both sentimental and practically minded. But there is no contradiction. Sentimentalism and practical-mindedness mean the same thing. The sentimental character wants the pleasures of art and literature to be real, concrete pleasures. He or she wants them to be more than a matter of intellectual contemplation: a source of practical excitement’ (WE 235). 16 Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, Substance, no. 103, vol. 33, no. 1 (2004): 21–2. 17 Although Rancière will distinguish his own view of art in other respects from that of Deleuze elsewhere, he endorses the notion that art concerns the impersonal flow of haecceities. 18 Rancière, ‘Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 172–90, see esp. p. 189.

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19 As I develop below, Flaubert departs from Rancière’s egalitarianism in that Flaubert wants to distinguish between himself as a ‘pure artist’ and the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ that he makes Emma represent (WE 239). As Alison Ross points out, Rancière ‘complains that Flaubert still wishes to defend the semantic integrity of the concept of art against the democratic intrusions of the merely prosaic … the entry of prosaic really does mean (despite Flaubert’s condemnation of Emma Bovary) that anything can have aesthetic significance for anyone’, ‘Equality in the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian Background to Jacques Rancière’s “Aesthetic Revolution”’, in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, edited by JeanPhilippe Deranty and Alison Ross (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 87–98, esp. p. 94. 20 Rey Chow and Julian Rohrhuber make a similar point, but develop it in a different direction than my argument here. See ‘On Captivation: A Remainder from the “Indistinction of Art and Nonart”’, in Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 44–72, see esp. pp. 58 and 60. 21 Rancière, ‘The Thread of the Novel’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 196–208, see esp. p. 207. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 261. 23 Aristotle aligns men with intellect and women with appetites, arguing that women’s logos lack deliberative authority. 24 Aubrey Porterfield, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary’, Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 3 (2016): 259–78, see esp. p. 264; Porterfield is quoting Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. A Narrative drawn from Gustave Flaubert’s Travel Notes & Letters, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1996), p. 29. 25 Porterfield, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored’, p. 268. 26 Ibid., p. 276. 27 Newspaper reports of the suffragettes’ destruction of orchids at Kew Gardens in 1913 accused them of barbarism, and suggested that their uncivilized, hysterical actions proved that they were unfit for the vote by appealing to their animality and inadequate literacy, thereby implicitly locating them by race and class. See newspaper reports included in the Royal Botanic Gardens Metropolitan Police Correspondence, 1845–1920, held at the Royal Botanic Gardens Archives, Kew. 28 Rancière in ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, p. 296. Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, see esp. p. 122. 29 See Panagia, ‘Rancière’s Style’ on the importance of sensing rather than the analytic of arguing and its association with the faculty of understanding in Rancière’s work.

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30 Rancière, ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited’. See also Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’, p. 11. 31 See Spelman, Inessential Woman, ch. 2. 32 See Parker, ‘Aristotle’s Unanswered Questions’, p. 72. 33 Charlotte Witt, ‘Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective’, in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, edited by Cynthia A. Freeland (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1998), pp. 118–37, see esp. pp. 122–3. 34 Quoted in Avtar Brah and Anne Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2004): 75–86, see esp. p. 77. 35 Brah and Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, p. 76. 36 Although women play no role in his analysis in Disagreement, in a later interview Rancière acknowledges that citizenship was confined to free males when he says, ‘The presupposition of equality is a basis for the existence of politics in general. This means that it is already valid for ancient democracy. Now it is well known that the presupposition in that context concerned the free male citizen, and the fact is that that the practice of arts in classical Greece was mostly founded on an ethical principle,’ ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, p. 296. There is no exploration of how the ostensibly ethical principle upon which the practice of the arts was founded was also permeated with presuppositions that confined women to very specific roles, excluding them from acting in tragedies for example. Nicole Loraux has argued that while Athenian politics excludes women, the feminine ‘haunts the Athenian civic imagination’, and she thus she makes it her project to ‘record the difficulties that civic discourse encounters as it tries to imagine fully the utter exclusion of women’, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 11, 21. 37 Whether the poor lack virtue on Aristotle’s account is unclear. 38 To say that the people are an undifferentiated mass who lack virtue is to overlook the fact that Aristotle differentiates between men and women, and argues for virtues that are specific and appropriate to women. 39 Rancière treats ‘the poor of ancient Greece’ as equivalent to the ‘modern proletariat’, and both as exemplary of ‘whoever has no part’ (DT 9, M 28). 40 Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 120. 41 I am playing on what Rancière says of the police order here: ‘The essence of the police is the principle of saturation; it is a mode of the partition of the sensible that recognizes neither lack nor supplement. … The political is what disturbs this order by introducing either a supplement or a lack. The essence of the political is dissensus … the political persists as long as there is a dissensus about the givens of a

32

42 43

44

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Art, Politics and Rancière particular situation of what is seen and what might be said, on the question of who is qualified to see or say what is given’ (2000, 124). Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b. Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140 (1989): 139–67. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). In the background of Arendt’s discussion are Martin Heidegger’s reflections on man as animale rationale or zoon logon echon in ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 193–242, while both Arendt’s considerations and those of Foucault provide a context for Agamben’s discussion. An example of a female activist invoking a right in a way that challenged the basis upon which the public sphere functioned is Rosa Parks. On the basis of their skin colour, African Americans were denied the right to occupy the same seats on public transport as white Americans. In full knowledge of this, as an act of civil protest, Parks exercised the right that she was denied when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in the state of Alabama in 1955. Her protest was followed by a boycott of the transportation company by African Americans, and as we know, it eventually became one of a series of events that led to the success of the civil rights movement in the United States in overcoming segregation, at least in its legal configuration. Of course racial segregation remains in many forms: residential, cultural, educational, environmental, for instance. The boycott, says Rancière, ‘staged the double relation of exclusion and inclusion’ at stake in ‘the duality of being a human being and a citizen’, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2009), p. 61, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), p. 69. Hereafter cited as HD, HDE. In the case of Parks, an individual acted in a way that amounted to embodying, exercising, and thus claiming a right that had been denied. She thereby enacted, or brought into existence, that which was withheld (the right to occupy a seat on a bus), and in doing so, exposed the inequality of the political order as failing to grant the equality demanded. This failure was based upon a double standard, which treated people of colour as if they were secondclass citizens, not worthy of equal treatment, and as such, not deserving of full recognition. They were not considered fully human in the sense that they were allowed to exist while not being construed as capable of bearing full political or civil rights as citizens. Their worth was restricted to the performance of menial labour, conceived of as occupying the private realm, as instrumental in supporting and maintaining the lives of those who assumed the full array of political and

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47

48

49

50

33

civil rights in the public realm, a privilege that African Americans were denied. In protesting this marginalization, the action of Parks thus contested the prevailing order, the authority it assumed, and the appearance of necessity with which the particular shape of the public sphere infused itself. Far from being self-evident, the configuration of the boundary between public and private comes to be seen as based on an exclusionary order that is capable of being challenged and refigured. Rancière also refers to Olympe de Gouges, and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Jeanne Deroin, for example. For a discussion of Olympe de Gouges see my ‘The public, the private, and the aesthetic unconscious: reworking Rancière’, Public Sphere from Outside the West, edited by Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V. (Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 297–313. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 155. Hereafter cited as LS. See Rancière’s discussion of militancy, history, philosophy and literature in Abraham Geil, ‘Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 301–10, see esp. 302– 04. See also an interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello, ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity’, trans Gregory Elliot, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 1–10, see esp. p. 2. See also Deleuze, who says, ‘How could the silent trace of the incorporeal crack at the surface fail to “deepen” in the thickness of a noisy body? How could the surface gash fail to become a deep Spaltung, and the surface nonsense a nonsense of the depths? … If the order of the surface is itself cracked, how could it not itself break up … How could we not reach the point at which we can only spell letter by letter and cry out in a sort of schizophrenic depth, but no longer speak at all? … should we … be … a little of a guerilla – just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? … If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs’ (LS 156–60). I am grateful to Helen Palmer for discussion of the significance of Deleuze’s appeal to the image of the crack. As Hannah Stark says, ‘On her strange adventures in Wonderland, Alice must navigate surface and depth, negotiate size as her own body and the things around her shift’ Feminist Theory after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 35. Alan Lopez, ‘Deleuze with Carroll: Schizophrenia and Simulacra and the Philosophy of Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3 (2004): 101–20, see esp. p. 110. Deleuze and Guattari say that girls ‘slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes’ (1988, 277).

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51 Since it is not always a question of what I want or do not want, it is rather a question of a cultural unconscious, perhaps I should say I want to try to be accountable for the ways my efforts to hold onto sanity might have schizophrenic effects for others. In this regard, Claudia Rankine’s discussion of anger and insanity in relation to Serena Williams comes to mind. See Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015), pp. 24–36. Hereafter cited as C. 52 While it is impossible to tell exactly how much, if at all, the impact of Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) fed into the change of heart witnessed on the part of Australian government, which under John Howard had refused to grant the official apology that Kevin Rudd did in fact grant in 2008, I think it is likely that the impact of the film (which was widely seen) on public opinion played a role in this shift. See http:// www.theguardian.com/film/2002/oct/27/features.review1 (last accessed 26 August 2016). 53 There are one or two subtle signs in the film that a shift of authority, a shift in vision, might be possible at some future point, as when the tracker sent to bring the girls back to the Moore River Settlement, after repeatedly being frustrated in his efforts to do so, acknowledges that Molly is ‘clever’, conceding an attribute that Neville manifestly denies her, and then after a moment’s pause, simply adds these words, which need no further commentary: ‘She wants to go home’. 54 See Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, pp. 61–2.

2

Redistributing the Sensible: The Art of Borders, Maps, Territories and Bodies

A young girl looks up towards the sky. Her face is reflective, her eyes meditative. Her eyes are following a bird, as it wheels freely in the sky above her. As she watches, her head tilted to one side, she listens to the words of her mother (Ningali Lawford), who, with her arm around the girl’s shoulder, tells her that the spirit bird will watch over her. When the spirit bird, which has appeared to Molly in a dream, reappears near the end of the film (in a record of the events visualized in Australian director Phillip Noyce’s 2002 film, Rabbit-Proof Fence), soaring in the sky, Molly follows it home. Curious about the world, fourteenyear-old Mardu girl Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi) attentively listens to, and learns from, the stories her mother and grandmother (Myarn Lawford) tell her. She asks questions of others. She listens thoughtfully to a white man, who answers her question about the rabbit-proof fence. How far does it go? All the way to the sea in the south of Australia, and all the way to the sea in the north, she is told. Later, remembering these words, Molly transforms the rabbit-proof fence into a path that will lead her back to her home in Jigalong. Having been forcibly removed from her family by representatives of the Australian government, who see their job as saving the ‘natives’ from themselves, and having been transported to a school for ‘half-castes’, along with Daisy and Gracie, her two ‘sister-cousins’ – as Doris Pilkington Garimara calls them – Molly leads them in their escape from the Moore River Native Settlement the day after they are abruptly deposited there.1 By following the fence, Molly is able to lead Daisy safely home, though Gracie is recaptured and returned to the Moore River school through the government’s subterfuge. Drawing on the skills she has learnt from her community, Molly uses her wit, courage and determination to navigate her way back home. Against all the odds, she evades police search parties, surviving sometimes on account of the kindness of strangers, and

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sometimes despite the complicity of those she encounters, who would capture her. Molly reads the landscape in order to avoid the fate of being assimilated into the white culture, the effort to breed out all traces of her native blood. She resists those who would map out her destiny, and that of her kin, as a domestic worker, as if all that she is good for is cleaning up white people’s mess. Molly’s journey home, along the rabbit-proof fence, was accomplished over a period of nine weeks in 1931, and is recounted by her daughter Doris GarrimaraPilkington. I suggest that the film Rabbit-Proof Fence shows the landscape of the Australian outback by effecting a new distribution of the sensible. It is not just that what is seen and what is heard is wrapped up in the social distribution of roles, but that in resisting the effort to dislocate certain bodies from the land to which they are attached, the film points towards a renewed understanding of place and time. It is a question of contesting the very notions of place, space and temporality that authorize the attempt to remove indigenous peoples from the lands they inhabit. The settlement of Australia by the British was accompanied by legitimating narratives, ostensibly corroborating their right to appropriate land on the basis of concepts of land use and property consistent with social contract theory. Bound up with the notions of labour and ownership that were supposed to underwrite the claims of British settlers to indigenous lands, were not only appeals to what allegedly constituted the defining features of humanity, but also an appeal to terra nullius, nobody’s land, or empty land – an appeal that rested on the invisibility of those who already inhabited the lands for those who appropriated it, on the unrecognizability or illegitimacy of their humanity. This amounted to the discounting of a way of life because it was not premised on the individualism of capitalist landowning rights, which was, at the same time an aesthetic and political judgement about the signification of the colour of skin of those who already inhabited the land, but who were deemed to have no right to it on the basis of their alleged primitivism. Just as the ‘natives’ were considered dispensable, and their claim to the land they inhabited negligible, their manner of inhabiting the land was not respected, not recognized as legitimate – that is, not acknowledged as fitting smoothly into white narratives about an efficient working of the land for profit. The clear implication was that the failure to entertain a relationship to the land based on property ownership amounted to a defect, a failure that the settlers set themselves the task of making good, in effect, demonstrating what they considered to be a more developed, productive and civilized relationship to the land. In question, especially in this age of global warming, is what values were enlisted in the service of this ‘civilizing’ impulse.

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A more respectful, and less exploitative relationship to the land and the animals inhabiting it, such as that enshrined in the Mardu way of life, appears these days not only to be increasingly wise, but also imperative to survival. Rabbit-Proof Fence can be understood, not only to contest the political narratives about which ways of inhabiting the land constituted the properly human, rather than allegedly defective modes of inhabitation; it also challenges the philosophical concepts of spatiality and temporality that underlie and inform the ideals and values propelling capitalist, landowning myths of appropriation, driven by efficiency in the service of the accumulation of profit. The film thus addresses the mythical underpinning of narratives that fail to acknowledge the humanity of peoples on the basis of a fundamental but for the most part invisible disagreement about what it means to live meaningful lives. Not only did British settlers of aboriginal lands assume the land they conquered to be empty, but also implicitly operated on the assumption that no productive relationship to time and space had been established in this ostensibly empty land. Neither time nor space was being utilized for the production of monetary value, for profit. The land had not been cordoned off and was not being harnessed efficiently for the competitive accumulation of capital. One might say that, in effect, the British saw not only an empty land; but also an empty time and space, which they sought to fill up with capitalist notions of time and space, based upon the speed of productivity, and upon converting places into property capable of yielding capital. The metaphysical basis underlying Kant’s understanding of how space and time function as a priori conditions for experience opens itself up to interrogation. What Kant proposed as the sine qua non of experience re-establishes itself as historical and contingent, rather than universal and unchanging. This might be thought along with Foucault’s historical a priori, or in terms of Quentin Meillassoux’s insistence upon contingency. It can also be thought in terms of Rancière’s conception of the transition from the representative regime to the aesthetic regime, which, in some respects, builds on a Foucauldian understanding of the historical a priori and coincides with Meillassoux’s emphasis of contingency.2 The forms of intuition, it turns out, are neither as pure nor as necessary as Kant made them out to be. Rancière is concerned with ‘the way in which the practices and forms of visibility of art … intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration, in which they distribute spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular’ (AD 25, ME 39). In maintaining the differential operation of spatiality and temporality,

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Rancière effectively radicalizes phenomenological claims about the horizonal operation of temporal and spatial modalities. Rather than assuming that we are oriented to the world in a way that is reducible to a calculative mode of existence, and that space and time are empty forms, constituted by measurable, identical units, philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized that we are situated within the world.3 If we understand worldhood in terms of cultural contexts, we can also see that culturally constructed worlds can clash, conflict and exist in tension with one another, when brought into some sort of relationship. Building on claims that understanding and orientation occurs within constructed contexts, within cultural horizons, queer theorists and race theorists are among those to have developed the idea that individuals and groups can be oriented by, and can orient themselves according to, specific temporal and spatial modes.4 The levelling out of divergent temporal and spatial models according to an allegedly uniform and universal form of time is as much a function of political privilege as it is of the predominance of a scientific rationality that imposes a linear, quantitative, regulative concept of time. Heidegger displaces what he characterizes as a scientific notion of time, which assumes that time is progressive, calculative, and can be adequately encapsulated in formulae that posit an accumulation of identical units of time that can be mapped as now-points that cancel one another out to coalesce into an infinite time line. Privileging finitude, Heidegger radicalizes the transcendental approach of Kant’s Copernican revolution, thinking time on the basis of a subject who experiences time as one whose finitude is inescapable. Making the anticipation of death decisive for understanding our experience of time, Heidegger brings into question the legitimacy of construing time irrespective of mortality. Yet, his understanding of finite temporality does little to negotiate the complexities of a world in which vulnerability to death in the sense of propinquity is enhanced or inhibited in line with geopolitical and socio-economic considerations. Nor does he account for what Orlando Patterson has adumbrated as social death.5 Such considerations, for Heidegger, would be relegated to the level of the ontic, rather than the ontological; yet, the line distinguishing the ontic from the ontological is itself a regulative divide that decides in advance in favour of certain normatively constitutive features of temporal experience.6 The likelihood of early death for certain sectors of the population is left unaddressed by Heidegger’s blanket emphasis of mortality, as is the notion of social death.

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Models of time that are socially and culturally inflected reflect the divergent experience of differently situated subjects. They also contest the universality of the forms of space and time that Kant maintained, suggesting that his metaphysical claims for perceptual experience are based upon an invisibly privileged masculinist and European stance, which makes a series of assumptions about an implicit ‘we’, the default subject of European philosophy, which excludes from its purchase vast swathes of humanity.7 Thinking together, the idea that such modalities of temporal and spatial experience are modulated across diverse cultures and subcultures with the suggestion that art can play a role in distributing modes of time and space in new ways, we can see how art, by confronting one culture with the temporality and spatiality of another culture, might redistribute that which Kant took to be pure forms of intuition. It is in such a project that Rancière’s work engages, in an implicit reworking of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology through insights culled from his aesthetics.8 Art can produce a contestation of cultures through proposing alternative ways of envisaging temporality and spatiality within a given culture, and between cultures. Through cultural and artistic contestations, new ways of thinking, doing and seeing, new intercultural and intra-cultural ways of perceiving in general, between and across cultures might emerge. Indeed, they are already emerging through art, if Rancière is correct, and it is up to philosophy to track and conceptualize their emergence. In the case of Rabbit-Proof Fence – not a film that Rancière himself has discussed, but one that I think illuminates his thinking on art and is illuminating for it – the reduction of the land to a resource for extracting profit contests a way of inhabiting the land that is less exploitative, and more respectful. A thoughtful curiosity about and knowledge of the land enables Molly to read intelligently the signs inscribed on its surfaces as if they were tracks or clues, following the cues of the animals and birds that reside there. This mode of inhabitation does not reduce the land to the instrumentalist end of extraction. This is a world in which humans learn from birds and animals, following, in this case literally, their lines of flight. Molly and her siblings circle around the land until they alight on the rabbit-proof fence that points them homeward, and when the fence peters out, the spirit bird guides them back to their family and community. Rabbit-Proof Fence participates in a redistribution of the sensible, effecting a clash of worlds, a conflict. One finds oneself drawn into a world, a vision, a way of seeing, a way of understanding, a way of construing the land that brings into view the story of the ‘stolen generation’, where the perspective operates both in

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literal terms of the way that the land is seen – through particular camera angles – and in terms of cultural, metaphorical, aesthetic and political points of view. The landscape comes to be seen in certain moments, from the points of view of Molly and the community of which she is a part, while in other moments we see the fence and the land through the eyes of those who would capture the girls. In these latter moments, the land is surveyed from the point of view represented by A. O. Neville, the ‘chief protector of aborigines’ (Kenneth Brannagh), the tracker, Moodoo (David Gulpilil), who attempts, and fails, to do Neville’s bidding in finding Molly and her siblings, and the police officer, who accompanies Moodoo. The fence comes to function as a map, as Molly follows its path, having listened to a white man’s account of how it is the ‘longest fence in the world’ – words that take on a new meaning as the girls, hungry and exhausted, trek on foot 1,200 miles of the 1,500 miles to which one of the three rabbit-proof fences erected across Australia extends. Molly has been brought up on her mother’s stories, and the fact that she knows how to listen, her attentiveness, pays dividends. By following the fence, she is able to return home. She transforms the lessons she has learnt, her observations of the location of the sun in the sky, her ability to track animals, her understanding of how to provide shelter for herself and her siblings, and her ability to cover their tracks, into a means of survival. The ‘poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning’ (ES 10, SE 16), says Rancière. Molly translates the words of a white man, and recomposes them into a lifeline, as she follows the fence back to her family and community. The fence shows her the route back to the world from which she has been stolen, a sign that points her homewards, even as it embodies the effort of white, British settlers in Australia to separate the wild from the tame, a separation that comes to stand metaphorically for aboriginal ways of life and the life of white Australians, who see themselves as saving primitives. The fence symbolizes the effort of the Australian government to tame the wildness of aborigines, ‘for their own good’, by taking their children from the land and life they know, and assimilating them into white culture. The cinematography of the landscape is evocative of songlines, of dreamlines, as the fence that has been erected to protect agricultural land (cultivation/ civilization) from the ravages of the rabbits (untamed wildness) is read in a different way and for different purposes by Molly. We might say that Molly transforms the fence into a songline, singing into existence another world, a world she rejoins because she knows how to cover her tracks, escaping with Daisy and Gracie from the school just before rain wipes out their footprints,

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and crossing the Moore River so that Moodo, who is dispatched with his tracker dog to find them, loses the scent. Moodo is compelled to acknowledge Molly’s intelligence: she is, he is forced to concede with a grudging admiration, ‘clever’ – she is not the ignorant, uneducated black child that the white Australian government imagines her to be, in its quest to eliminate the traces of black blood in ‘half-castes’ and to offer them what is imagined as salvation. Two worlds clash, and their difference is epitomized in how the materiality of the fence manifests itself – its function to prevent damage to crops by rabbits (a mandate that, in fact, it failed) – and the role it takes on in the marking out of a path that returns the girls to their home. The fence comes to constitute the difference between starvation and exposure for the girls on the one hand, and their returning home, on the other hand. Whether they follow it or not, becomes a matter of life and death for Molly and her siblings, while for those who erected it, at issue is economic survival premised upon keeping the rabbits from the crops. When Molly and Daisy finally reach their home in Jigalong and rejoin their family, their faces are blackened in an effort to prevent their reappropriation; the government’s efforts focused on children whose lighter skins were taken to signify that they could more easily and quickly be assimilated into white communities and ways of life. The lighter their skin, the more effectively the traces of black blood could be bred out of their family lines, so the thinking went. Rabbit-Proof Fence opens with a long, unbroken aerial shot, which moves above, over and along what turns out to be a landscape, but which presents itself at first as indeterminable. The referentiality of the shot is uncertain. ‘We’ are not sure of what we are seeing immediately. ‘We’ do not know what we are looking at. Slowly, the pattern of shadows, hollows or dots – are they bushes, or the tops of trees? – that merge into one another takes on the discernible topography of desert land. After moving across the land, the long take reveals the sky above the land, and then dips down again to the land. This opening aerial shot evokes aboriginal dot painting, a technique in which Western perspectival assumptions are inoperative; that a Eurocentric perspective does not operate, is suggested in more than one way in the film, as the desert is presented to us from a bird’seye view, evoking the spirit bird that guides Molly home.9 What we see when we see the rabbit-proof fence, what we see when we see the land it cuts across, whether we see a barren inhospitable land, or whether we see a homeland, is precisely what is affectively, politically and philosophically at stake. And this very indeterminacy is at the heart of the film.

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In an account that resonates strongly with scenes from Rabbit-Proof Fence, Fiona, one of the contributors to a 1997 report Bringing them Home, a report published by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, recalls: ‘We had been playing altogether, just a happy community and the air was filled with screams because the police came and mothers tried to hide their children and blacken their children’s faces and tried to hide them in caves.’10 Quoting this passage and commenting on how she is moved by Fiona’s testimony, Sara Ahmed resists articulating the way she is moved in terms of empathy, and distances herself from the ideal of reconciliation, the limits of which she points to. She invokes a politics based rather ‘on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one’ (CPE 39). Ahmed insists that she does not know, has not lived that which moves her in Fiona’s testimony. She ‘cannot know’, and yet she is moved by what ‘does not belong’ to her (CPE 31), and being so moved, still she must act. As she says, ‘non-indigenous readers’ need to take ‘personally’ the testimony in Bringing them Home, ‘but in such a way that the testimony is not taken away from others, as if it were about our feelings, or our ability to feel the feelings of others’ (CPE 35). Ahmed points out that the violence inflicted in forcibly removing Fiona from her home ‘was not simply inflicted upon the body of the individual who was taken away, but also on the body of the indigenous community, which was “torn apart”’ (CPE 34). As Ahmed puts it, the ‘skin’ of the community that mourns the children that were removed from its midst helps to shape both that community itself, wounding that community, and the children of the ‘stolen generation’. In order to move away from the hurt thereby caused, she suggests, agreeing with Wendy Brown, that it is necessary to avoid fetishizing wounds, insisting that it is equally necessary for the hurt to be made political, for it to be brought into the public realm, for it to be witnessed, for it to be heard. And not just for it to be heard, but for it to be heard justly – for it to be heard in a way that calls for action, in a way that renders it capable of entering into the realm of the political. To enter the public realm is also to challenge the contours of what counts as public. In this case, such a challenge involves interrogating the self-evidence of standards and assumptions that seem to flow unproblematically from white authority, until such time as this authority is rendered critically conscious of itself, made to account for itself and the vision that sustains it, called to justice. Until such time as an apology is elicited.11 Until such time as to be white does not accord the right to determine how and where those who are not white should live, how they should be educated, and what should be their way of life.

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Since legitimating narratives circumscribe in advance the appearance – and thus, in so many of the ways that count, the very existence, the very public character – of anything at all, the conflicts of values that underlie legitimating narratives need to be given. To adapt a phrase from Hannah Arendt – a ‘space for appearance’, is necessary in order for new legitimating narratives to appear. The struggle to allow such conflicts to appear is a political struggle. Allowing the emergence of discord between Molly’s vision of the world and Neville’s, between how the fence figures for her, and how it figures for others, is a way of opening such a space of appearance. As such, we might see Rabbit-Proof Fence as composing, in Rancière’s words, a ‘proposition on what it is that is given to see to us’ and as an interrogation of the ‘power of representation’ (DPA 149). Legitimating narratives circumscribe in advance the possibilities of not just recognizing individuals as equal, but also transforming the standards according to which equality is judged. They limit available interpretations of the very narrative works of art that can shape affect in such a way as to be transformative, and the frames of visibility that dictate interpretive schema. Legitimating narratives themselves are subject to transformation. In another context, discussing Chantal Akerman’s 2002 film De l’autre côté (From the Other Side), a film concerning the US-Mexican border about which I will say more towards the end of this chapter, where I will also comment briefly upon a few other works, Rancière says that Akerman’s film is about the ‘raw materiality’ of the border, and that it transposes a ‘geo-political’ issue into an aesthetic one (DPA 150). One could say the same about Rabbit-Proof Fence, where how one views the fence and the land it cuts across is embedded in conflicting ways of life. The proximity between these two films resides in the fact that they both compose a proposition on what ‘is given to us to see’, they both constitute artistic propositions that, as Rancière says, ‘focus on matters of space, territories, borders, wastelands and other transient places, matters that are crucial to today’s issues of power and community’ (DPA 149). When art redistributes the sensible in ways that remain interesting politically, while at the same time remaining art in the sense that Rancière understands it under the aesthetic regime, it avoids merely telling its audience what to think. It remains art, and does not become politics. Political art, as Rancière understands it in terms of the aesthetic regime, remains content to open up a space in which a conflict of worlds might produce a shift in narratives, a shift in vision. Yet equally, the conflict exposed in and through such art might yield no political change. And this is precisely as it should be. For, once art can predict its effect on

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an audience, it stops being art and coalesces with politics. The wider question at stake here is the relationship between art, philosophy and politics, the integrity and autonomy of each realm, and how to think these realms without assuming that one is answerable to the other. It seems to me that Rancière is able to juxtapose these realms to one another, in a way that resists subordinating one to the other, at the same time as it resists imagining that these realms work entirely independently of one another. The line between them remains indeterminate, subject to constant reworking, just as the line between the private and the public domain is constantly redrawn, and with this redrawing the borders of individual subjects also shift. That the line distinguishing the private from the public, or art from politics, is subject to incessant revision does not mean that there is no difference between these realms. Rather, the difference is politically negotiated, and the work of affect, especially its capacity or incapacity to be signified, is part of this political negotiation. Affective investments have a propensity to shape the very lines that divide individuals from society, consciousness from the unconscious, subjects from objects, what we see and what we fail to see, what we understand and do not understand, and thus what we take to exist and that of which we remain ignorant. How far Rabbit-Proof Fence devolves into a political manifesto I leave others to judge, but I would say that in its most interesting moments it resists doing so. Rabbit-Proof Fence takes up the collective trauma suffered by aboriginal families under the heading of what has come to be called the ‘stolen generation’, the forcible removal of children from their natural kin. At issue is the compounding of a racial identity marked as inferior by a white culture. The reason that ‘half-castes’ were removed from their homes was because they were already construed as half-white, and therefore were considered appropriate vehicles for the further dilution of aboriginal identity and culture. The term suggests that indigenous children who were born from mixed-race sexual unions fell short of proper (white) formation, that they were cast in the image of whiteness only halfway. The forcible removal of ‘half-caste’ indigenous children from their communities was undertaken with the express intention of assimilating these offspring into a white community, in order to breed out the blackness of their skin. As the architect of this racial reconfiguration of indigenous communities, the Australian government imagined for itself the role of benefactor. It also imagined itself to be responsible for the reshaping of humans, whose material bodies and racial configuration it imagined could be moulded in keeping with the white ideals it espoused. Passive black bodies, it imagined, could have their

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blackness effectively erased, according to a white form, in terms of which they were imagined to fall short. Although the film Rabbit-Proof Fence might be said to serve to document a story, and thus functions in one sense as revelatory – it reveals the hidden truth of the ‘stolen generation’, and incites ‘our’ indignation – visually, it also functions in a way that disrupts the very narrative it tells, providing another way of looking at the landscape than the dominant, instrumentalist view of those who steal away children from their families and communities and from the land that supports them and their way of life. It counters that narrative with another narrative, a narrative in which a young girl sees the land in a way that constitutes a form of knowledge and intelligence discounted by that dominant view. Rabbit-Proof Fence demonstrates how deeply kinship regulations are infused with racial connotations, that they are implicated in ethnic injunctions. In this sense, it brings to the forefront the question of who is allowed to count as kin, which is heavily implicated in what Patterson calls ‘social death’.12 There is an official injunction to marry outside a group defined by its racial parameters and distinguished by its allegedly primitive mode of life. Kinship practices are engineered by cordoning off a whole group of people, and their way of life, on the basis of the colour of their skin, designating them as inappropriate marriage partners, while sanctioning others. Taken from their families and from the land they know, the ‘stolen generation’ of aboriginal children were deposited in schools to learn, in the words of Doris Pilkington Garimara, ‘how to live like the white man’.13 The intention was to raise them in an environment that would enable them to marry into white communities, in order to breed out the traces of their black blood, so that their offspring would no longer share the colour of their own skin. The traces of blackness would be bred into non-existence, eradicated. Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates how a white colonizing nation conceptualizes itself according to racialized assumptions that are woven into the fabric of society, in a way that might be thought of in terms of an aesthetic unconscious. In looking to Rabbit-Proof Fence, I am looking to art as bringing into question the borders defining subjects as distinct from objects, individuals as distinct from communities. By reading this film alongside Ahmed’s understanding of affects as not belonging to discrete subjects, but circulating between subjects in such a way that this transmission helps to constitute who counts as a subject and who does not, we can understand that affects help to delineate subjects as belonging, or not belonging, to specific communities. In Rabbit-Proof Fence at

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issue is a cultural mode of seeing that is specific to a communal way of life valued by indigenous communities, but not valued – and to all intents and purposes not even visible to – those who set themselves up as their ‘protectors’. Making visible that which is rendered invisible through cultural hegemony, where the latter is understood as a systematic inability to see, or what also might be elaborated as a failure of affective investment, is at issue here. In proposing that the Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates what Rancière calls the redistribution of the sensible, I suggest that it provides an example of how visibility itself is orchestrated in advance by the sanctioned narratives that circulate and come to be recognized as synonymous with the realm of appearances itself, and how seeing things through the eyes of others differently affectively positioned from ourselves can open up the possibility of challenging those narratives.14 This does not mean, as Ahmed emphasizes, that we feel what others feel, it means rather, that art can move us through identification, a process that respects the separation of subjects. Neither does it mean that being moved will necessarily cause any personal or political transformation; it means that change is possible. It means that different ways of seeing are possible, different ways of hearing and understanding are possible, that shifts in sight and vision, in hearing and listening, in sensing and perceiving are possible. Sometimes, but not always, such shifts can transform themselves into political transformation. Legitimating different narratives is a way of transfiguring the public domain of that which passes for common sense, or is taken as self-evidently true within a given community. Artistic redistributions of the sensible are one of the ways in which the transposition of such narratives might begin. Rabbit-Proof Fence offers a way of thinking through how something like an aesthetic unconscious can inhabit the best of intentions, and how such intentions can be structured through radical blind spots, structured, in this case, through the assumption of white privilege which takes on genocidal overtones. The aesthetic unconscious allows us to approach fundamental failures of vision that structure what passes for knowledge, failures of vision that allow those affected to dismiss a way of life as invalid because it does not conform to oligarchic, Western lifestyles and styles of government. Neville believes that the genocidal acts in which he engages in relation to aboriginal peoples is ‘for their own good’. The removal of Molly and her sisters from one community to another illustrates how porous are the concepts dividing an individual from a community, for what happens in the assimilation of the ‘stolen generation’ is precisely a refiguration of individuals, and at the same time a redrawing of the boundaries

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of communities. Ahmed indicates how loss, a loss that is registered affectively as pain, was suffered by the indigenous communities from which children such as Molly were removed. A collective memory of that loss, bereavement, trauma and suffering recomposes those communities. The claim that Rancière makes in focusing on the redistribution of the sensible is that art can change the way we see, or more generally, perceive the world. It can cause perceptions, or more specifically, the perceptual field, the perceptual horizon (which will be culturally and politically inflected for us all in different ways) to shift. So things previously invisible can become visible, or things that were visible in particular configurations can become visible differently. This means that if we are moved, perhaps on an unconscious level, the world can change the way it looks to us. New ways of understanding the world become possible. It is crucial that new ways of grasping or understanding the world do not necessarily follow from new ways of seeing or perceiving the world. The unpredictability of this causal relationship is the key for Rancière.15 Whether a new conceptual grasp of the world ensues will depend upon, among other factors, a great deal of work being done by the one who perceives the world in a new way. Habitual, well-worn, culturally validated assumptions will need to be dislodged, and this might take concerted effort, communal help, and a good long while, a lifetime or more – perhaps a lifetime will not be enough. Perhaps we will run out of time. There is no strict causal correlation between the work that art can do in opening up new worlds, horizons or perceptual fields and the way in which familiar objects and things can settle into new configurations or relationships. Positivist attitudes might be discontent with this lack of any strictly causal correlation; but this lack of determination might also reflect the way things are, the way the world is, the way change happens – or doesn’t. That art can open up the possibility of political change remains crucial. Equally, it remains crucial that it does not mandate or necessitate political change, since if it did, art would coalesce with, or collapse into, politics, and that, as we know, would spell trouble. In an early sequence of Rabbit-Proof Fence, a maternal arm is cast around Molly, as she listens to the words of her ancestors, who pass down to her a way of life and learning, a writing not taught in classrooms, but by which traces are inscribed on the land and in the air. I opened this chapter by referring to the scene in which Molly looks up to the sky to emphasize the ancestral heritage that binds her to her community. In understanding affects not as belonging to discrete subjects, but as circulating between subjects in such a way that this

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transmission helps to constitute who counts as a subject and who does not, we can acknowledge the instability and porosity of the borders separating subjects from their communities. Affects can bring into question the borders defining subjects as distinct from objects, individuals as distinct from communities. Affects help to delineate subjects as belonging, or not belonging, to specific communities. A community previously relegated to anonymity by a white way of seeing finds a voice, finds, at least, a vision, locating itself in a landscape, in Rabbit-Proof Fence. At issue is a cultural mode of seeing that is specific to a communal way of life valued by indigenous communities, but not valued – and to all intents and purposes not even visible to – those who set themselves up as their ‘protectors’. Seeing the fence through Molly’s eyes makes visible that which is rendered invisible through cultural assumption, manifested both as a systematic inability to see, and as a failure of affective investment. In the preceding discussion, I have highlighted how art can contest the view that the forms of space and time are empty, abstract and uniform, and that the units of a linearly conceived time are identical. As such, I have elaborated what Rancière means when he says that art is political ‘because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space’ (AD 23, ME 37). By challenging the ways in which we see and hear things, the ways in which we perceive the world, the ways in which the world is framed, art can expose the frameworks, which we might have taken as neutral and universal, as in fact embedded in very specific assumptions about what kind of spaces are allowed to exist, and what relationships to time are granted legitimacy. In Rabbit-Proof Fence, highly specific narratives about capitalist productivity and efficiency infuse the racialized impulse to move bodies from one place to another, in order to school them according to the cultural and economic assumptions of the dominant culture. Rancière favours art that opens up new ways of seeing, new ways of distributing the sensible, while acknowledging its outcome, its effect, to be incalculable. He is interested in the conflict of narratives that Akerman’s film De l’autre côté presents about the US-Mexican border, because the film ‘turns an economic and geopolitical issue into an aesthetic matter’, and because it produces ‘a confrontation between two sides, and a series of conflicting narratives around the raw materiality of the fence’ (DPA 150). Akerman ‘has the camera move along the fence, making us feel its inhuman strangeness’, and in doing so, she resists focusing merely on the ‘drama involved in crossing the border’ or on the ‘contradictions that exist between the realities of the US economy

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and the injustices and prejudices of US nationalism’ (ibid.).16 She presents the experiences of Mexicans, families who have lost their sons, loved ones who have risked, and lost, their lives in trying to cross to the other side, in their attempt to make their lives more liveable, in the effort to earn a living wage. Akerman presents the omnipresence of the wall, the intrusiveness of searchlights, the pain and the suffering of those who are left behind. She shows how precarious, how risky, it is to cross the border, and in doing so she demonstrates how little those who are willing to risk their lives have to lose. And then she presents the fear and righteousness of Americans on the other side, who see Mexican border crossers as invaders of their land, who assume they have the right to shoot those who trespass on their land. She brings these two divergent worlds together, demonstrating their incompatibility, their divergent logics. The film focuses on the conflicting narratives that the border produces. It does not tell us what to think. It simply presents the widely divergent narratives, of those who have lost their loved ones to the attempt to cross over to the other side in search of a better life, and those who assume that they have the right to kill them for trespassing on their land in their aspiration for a better way of life. And it leaves us to draw our own conclusions. These conclusions might involve reflecting on the irony that some feel themselves entitled to seek to better themselves, but would deprive others of such entitlement, because they come from the wrong side of a geopolitical border that puts them at a systematic disadvantage in the economic order of the world. Towards the end of the film, we hear a voice-over of Akerman on the soundtrack, while we see an American highway, at night, from the perspective of a driver. The voice tells the story of an illegal Mexican immigrant, who worked as a housemaid, and then disappeared. The story is told from the perspective of the woman who employed her. We never see either woman. We do not discover if the woman who disappeared attempted to cross the border, if she was returned safely to Mexico, or whether she was killed in trying to do so. We are left, suspended, between these possibilities, in a state of uncertainty, like many relatives of would-be Mexican immigrants to the United States. We do not see illegal immigrants being killed or subjected to violence – the film concerns those who are left behind – but this film is haunted by the death and loss of those who do not come home. In a similar way, Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the West Bank resist showing the wall itself, and instead shows ‘a pile of stones … harmoniously integrated into an idyllic landscape of hills covered with olive trees’ (ES 103, SE

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113-14). In this way, she shows us ‘an Israeli roadblock on a Palestinian road’ (ES 104, SE 114), but does so in a way that refuses to anticipate the effect on the viewer. Rancière says, ‘She has photographed not the emblem of the war, but the wounds and scars it imprints on a territory’, and thus elicits not the ‘exhausted affect of indignation’ but ‘an affect of indeterminate effect – curiosity, the desire to see closer up’ (ES 104, SE 114). The effects are thus uncertain, ‘where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it’ (ES 105, SE 114). Again, the conclusion is in suspension. One either sees, or does not see, the pile of stones; one sees them either as a harmonious and insignificant part of the landscape, or as a roadblock that interferes with the daily life of Palestinians. If, according to Rancière, ‘some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territories and borders’, in what ways is the art of certain contemporary artists effecting a transformation in the distribution of the sensible such that racialized, female bodies become terrains through which, upon which, and with which, artists compose propositions?17 In addressing this question, I turn to Shades of Skin, a photographic installation by the Kenyanborn artist, now a resident of Germany, who goes by the name Ingrid Mwangi/ Robert Hutter, having fused her artistic identity with that of her white husband. In Shades of Skin the artist/subject chooses not to return the gaze of the camera, but her choice does not figure as a withdrawal from confrontation.18 On the contrary. She does not sensationalize or eroticize her body, but she stands (or hangs) firm, even if her body is cut into segments, even if her back has been mutilated by a whip, even as it recalls the way in which women’s bodies, raced bodies, are constantly subjected to measurements, compared (and found wanting) to ideal measurements, made to approximate to norms. She partially covers her face with her hands. She reveals her body in parts, but the parts resist the fetishization of the white male gaze. What happens in Mwangi-Hutter’s photographic installation, in four, largerthan-life images, Shades of Skin, which cuts her body into segments, mimicking, yet distancing herself from, the commodification and fetishization of female body parts that are eroticized in masculinist imaginaries? What happens as these photographs both expose the black, female body of the artist as vulnerable, and refuse to capitulate to the narratives of lynching and middle passage to which they nevertheless attest? How do we read the photograph of two dark-skinned feet, dangling, suspended, above the darker earth, in conjunction with the lighter skinned back, scarred with marks that could have been left by a whip, or

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in conjunction with a face that closes itself off from viewers, eyes closed, hands protecting it, obscuring our view of the face? What histories do we see in these images, and what remains invisible to us? Who is the we, the us, I invoke here? Who will read this, and what will you make of it, and how much does what you make of it depend upon your sex, your, class, the colour of your skin, your history, the thinking you have done about feminism, oppression, colonialism, racism or slavery, on how you have been affected by discrimination, or whether you have been subject to it? With each photograph, the shades of skin darken, until, with the last one, where Mwangi-Hutter’s feet, dangling just above the black earth, are almost as dark as the earth itself. The images evoke lynchings, recalling Billie Holliday’s haunting rendition of ‘Strange Fruit’, just as Mwangi’s scarred back evokes beatings, and the middle passage. Against a background of colonial history in which women’s bodies have become eroticized metaphors for the conquered lands of colonial conquest in which the lighter a dark body is, the more it is found to approximate to white, hegemonic standards of beauty and civilization, the stark confrontation of this body in parts resists any easy reading.19 The body of Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter – her fused artistic identity no doubt part of her ongoing interrogation of hyphenated identity, having been born in Nairobi, Kenya and having migrated to Germany at the age of fifteen – becomes a terrain on which the histories of oppression and exploitation are mapped out. At the same time the power, strength and resilience of black bodies comes to the fore. In the duality of this strength and vulnerability, and perhaps in their inseparability, the images of Mwangi-Hutter’s body, dissected into segments, cut up into sections, nonetheless conveys imperturbability. Artists can create new forms of perception of the given and new plots of temporality. Thus, Mwangi-Hutter’s Shades of Skin calls up a history of slavery, at the same time as resisting it. She appeals to a textural, mythical background such as Fanon describes, only to defiantly rework it, just as her photographs both refer to and reconfigure the fetishization of the female body. In multiplying the temporal and spatial perspectives in terms of which we construe a body or a landscape, art works can contest the narrative of an active form shaping passive matter. In calling up affects of curiosity rather than indignation, art is political in a way that cannot be determined in advance, but precisely insists on remaining indeterminate. In the context of the history of appealing to the sexualized metaphors of women’s bodies to describe the landscape, in her work Static Drift (2001)

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Mwangi-Hutter inverts that operation, inscribing rather the maps of Germany and Africa onto a black woman’s body, indicating how that body is marked by territorial boundaries, inscribed by geopolitical histories, read and seen through colonizing impulses.20 Mwangi-Hutter uses her body, the only thing she owns, to contest the narratives inscribed on it, and to produce new narratives with it. In doing so she messes up, and redeploys the form/matter dichotomies that have operated in colonial contexts, and transforms the ways in which they have been played out on the dark bodies of women. The skin of her body becomes a site of transformation, a surface on which the sun tattoos maps of Germany and Africa, which contest the settled orthodoxies of the world, creatively rewriting them in ways that call for new visions, new worlds. Let me bring this chapter to a close by turning finally to a work discussed by Rancière, Alfredo Jaar’s image, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita.21 In his discussion of Jarr’s piece, Rancière remarks on the eyes of a woman who has seen her family murdered in the Rwandan massacre. Focusing on what he calls a ‘politics of metonymy’, where the effect is given for the cause (the eyes that have seen the murders are shown, not the massacre itself), and the part is given for the whole: ‘two eyes for a million massacred bodies’ (ES 97, SE 108), Rancière comments on the choice of whether to hide or show feelings, the choice of whether to speak or remain silent (see ES 98, SE 108), a choice which Gutete Emerita retains, but of which those who are murdered have been deprived. We do not see the spectacle of horror, but the ‘woman’s eyes’, eyes that have seen this horror, a metonymy that ‘disrupts the counting of the individual and the multiple’ (ES 98, SE 108). Spectators are asked to read a placard that tells the history that these eyes have seen, ‘the history of this woman and her family’ before we see Gutete Emerita’s eyes. Since politics is, as Rancière puts it, ‘in the first instance … the changing of places and the counting of bodies’ (ES 97, SE 108), the photograph functions to disrupt any easy count, just as it refuses to engender debates about the ethics of whether the horror of massacres should be depicted, or made into a spectacle. It indicates the horror not by showing it as spectacle, but as it is reflected in a woman’s gaze. Rancière understands politics in terms of challenging the miscount, where bodies move into different places, and where the total number of bodies is counted differently, where bodies that were previously invisible according to dominant regimes of thought, can be seen and can begin to count. He understands art as effecting new ways of seeing, new manners of partitioning the sensible, new ways of dividing up what there is to see, hear and perceive,

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such that different ways of counting become possible. That which was relegated to private, invisible spaces, now becomes public, and as such can turn into a matter of political debate. When bodies begin to count in different ways, and when the sounds they make begin to count as legitimate and meaningful speech, so too the discourses in which they intervene can change, so that the very terms of what counts as legitimate speech are transformed.

Notes 1 Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly Craig, describes the relationship between the girls as sister-cousins in her account, as retold in Jennifer Bassett’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (Oxford University Press, 2008). The story forms the basis of Phillip Noyce’s film of the same title. This edition is intended for young readers. I have been unable so far to procure another version. The term ‘half-caste’, as if aboriginal children who have mixed parentage are inadequately cast, as if they fall short of an ideal of whiteness, as if they are inadequate copies of an idealized whiteness that is imagined to be pure, invokes images central to the history of aesthetics, pervaded with assumptions about the shaping of matter by form in accordance with a presumed ideal of truth. 2 Rancière suggests that ‘aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. … My approach … retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility. At the same time these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression. I differ from Foucault insofar as his archeology seems to me to follow a schema of historical necessity according to which, beyond a certain chasm, something is no longer thinkable, can no longer be formulated. … I thus try at one and the same [sic] to historicize the transcendental and to de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility’ (PA 13-50). See also Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). 4 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also, Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London: Duke University Press, 2006).

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5 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 6 For a more detailed discussion of this point see my essay ‘The Problematic Normative Assumptions of Heidegger’s Ontology’ in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), pp. 73–108. 7 I adapt here a phrase I borrow from Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007). 8 Levinas understands art as harbouring the capacity to freeze time, to effect a stoppage of time, such that art is understood as a frozen moment, interrupting the inevitable passage of time. There is, then, a precedent for the suggestion that art can effect a changed relationship to time. For Rancière, art is capable of orchestrating multiple new relationships to time, that is, artworks can displace us from the temporal assumptions in which we are embedded and cause our experience of time to operate differently. 9 I am grateful to Mary Moodon for her discussion of this point. 10 Quoted by Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 36. Hereafter cited in the text as CPE. Bringing them Home is a report published by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997. 11 In 2008, an official apology was issued to aboriginal peoples by the Australian government. While it is unclear exactly what the causal link might or might not be between the appearance and consumption of Rabbit-Proof Fence, and the issuing of this apology, it is certainly possible that its circulation contributed to a mood in which the issuing of this apology became possible. To be clear, there is an important difference between rendering political the hurt caused for the ‘stolen generation’, and the sentiments generated by Rabbit-Proof Fence. Yet, the redistribution of time and space, the redistribution of the sensible that a film such as Rabbit-Proof Fence effects, helps to facilitate shifts such as that a world in which an official apology becomes possible. Precisely the lack of any clear causal link between the distribution of a film such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and the issuing of an official apology is consonant with Rancière’s view that for art to be political, for it to effect dissensus, is not for it to dictate a particular intervention, but rather for it to make us think differently, perhaps to perceive the world differently. Action consistent with such transformations might or might not follow, and this is how it should be, since once art instructs us on how to act politically, it ceases to be art and becomes simply politics. 12 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 13 Bassett, Rabbit-Proof Fence, p. 5.

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14 There are ties that bind Molly to the land from which she comes and to which she belongs, and which she knows and loves, ties that are insignificant to those who seek to wrest her from that land. These ties of belonging are at the same time communal ties, ties to a shared way of life, which includes a vision of the land that is inaccessible to the police, whose search fails to find her. 15 While not maintaining the complete autonomy of art and politics from one another, Rancière distinguishes the orbit of art from that of politics; he resists the idea that political art should lead directly to political, collective action, conceiving of the art of the aesthetic regime, rather, in terms of its capacity to intervene in the field of possible visibility, that is, its potentiality to disrupt that which presents itself as self-evident, in accordance with what he regards as the police distribution of the sensible. Rancière discusses this in terms of the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151). 16 See Rancière’s discussion of how the uncanny, which ‘resists signification’, relates to the ‘readability of political signification’ (PA 63). 17 Rancière, ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics’, in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, Willian Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth MCcormick (London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 49. 18 https://nmwa.org/works/shades-skin 19 H. Rider Haggard in his novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885) has Alan Quatermain provide the following description of the African landscape: ‘I attempt to describe that extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language fails me. I am impotent even at its memory. Before us rose two enormous mountains. … These mountains … are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and on top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast’, quoted in Lola Young, ‘Imperial Culture’, Theories of Race and Racism, edited by Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 273. 20 http://exhibitions.globalfundforwomen.org/exhibitions/women-power-andpolitics/biology/body-as-art 21 https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/66608

3

Politics as the Interruption of Inequality, and the Police as the Miscount

In the introduction, I raised a series of questions about Rancière’s understanding of the part that has no part. If the objects of dissensual politics are nothing other than the objects of the police order, and if the ‘class struggle’ is ‘politics itself, politics such as it is encountered, always in place already, by whoever tries to found community on its arkhê’ (DT 18, M 39), then how far do the terms on which speech counts as articulate in Rancière’s dissensual politics replicate the racializing and gender biases of Aristotle’s politics?1 Aristotle’s discourse about the specific ways in which slaves and women should be ruled in the household supports and informs his discussion of the struggle between the rich and the poor, which Rancière identifies as the defining characteristic of politics. Aristotle’s arguments about women tend to proceed by assuming that women are free, while his arguments about slaves tend to proceed by assuming that slaves are men, assumptions which build the invisibility of female slaves into his account. Female slaves relinquish their invisible status only in order for Aristotle to maintain that the proper rulers of slaves who are women are their free masters, and not their slave husbands, while the proper rulers of free women are their husbands.2 Rancière’s discussion of Aristotle proceeds, however, as if it involved no such entangled relationship between women and slaves, indeed, as if women were entirely absent from the discussion. In this chapter, I follow Rancière’s argument in the earlier chapters of Disagreement. Towards the end of the chapter, I turn to some feminist readings of Aristotle’s Politics in order to play out how his consideration of women in relation to slaves complicates Rancière’s presentation of it. I also turn to Charles Mills’s considerations in The Racial Contract, to see how racism structures social contract theory.

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Rancière conceives of politics as an interruption of the police order. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that Rancière redefines politics in such a way that what generally passes for politics, namely ‘the practices and legitimations of the consensus system’ (DT xiii, M 16), now come to be construed as ‘the police’ (DT 28, M 51). More specifically, ‘Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (DT 28, M 51). In proposing to call such systems of distribution and legitimization the police, Rancière is concerned to bring to the fore a presupposition that politics as usual puts aside, excludes or eliminates. To bring this presupposition to the fore is to render explicit the constitutive ‘assumption’ (DT 33, M 57) or precondition on which politics rests, and in doing so, to expose the wrong that politics as usual is founded upon. Politics is what puts back into play the presupposition that the police order has put out of play. It is for this reason that Rancière construes politics as that which interrupts, or is ‘antagonistic’ (DT 29, M 52) to the police order. Politics ‘comes about solely through interruption’ (DT 13, M 33).3 The precise nature of the interruption that politics effects when it interrupts the flow of the established order, when it ‘stops the current’ (see DT 13, M 33), is the incursion of equality.4 Plato and Aristotle agree that a just city is one in which the harmful (blaberon) has been eliminated, and all that is left is that which is useful (sumpheron) (see DT 4, M 22). Rancière points out that, along with the elimination of the harmful comes the bracketing of the fundamental equality of people. When those who make up the part of society that has been designated unequal in some capacity that ostensibly disqualifies them from rule, precluding them from the equality that in fact must be operative in order for them to be ruled, that part of society must find a way of asserting its equality, of making itself heard. Rancière identifies equality as the ‘sole principle’ of politics (DT 31, M 55), offering as a definition of equality, ‘the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test equality’ (DT 30, M 53). In what way is the basic, fundamental equality, the equality of all speaking beings, a presupposition that the fiction of the police order casts aside and keeps at bay? Rancière explains it in this way: ‘There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (DT 16, M 37). Aristotle – whose Politics ‘and what this text

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stops short of ’ (DT xiii, M 15) serves as the basis for Rancière’s understanding of politics – acknowledges this ‘equality quite precisely while avoiding naming it’, when he identifies the slave as ‘one who participates in reason so far as to recognize it (aesthêsis) but not so as to possess it (hexis)’ (DT 17, M 38).5 In doing so, Aristotle allocates to the slave ‘the capacity to understand a logos without having the capacity of the logos’ (DT 17, M 38). This is also a way of perpetrating a miscount. The very existence of politics is attributed to what Rancière calls a ‘basic miscount’ (DT 10, M 30). ‘There is politics … because there is a wrong count of the parts of the whole’ (DT 10, M 29). In this sense, the concept of wrong ‘belongs to the original structure of all politics’ (DT 39, M 63). To make oneself heard when one is speaking for a part that has no part, for a class that is said not to exist, is not just a matter of finding a voice. It is a question of redistributing roles and positions in relation to the spaces occupied. It is a matter of becoming ‘an operator that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience – that is, in the nexus of distributions of the police order and whatever equality is already inscribed there, however fragile and fleeting such inscriptions may be’ (DT 40, M 65). The stakes of this project are high, due to the fact that the wrong that political subjectification seeks to deploy is constitutive of the political order itself – the rule of the rich over the poor.6 ‘The people are not one class among others. They are the class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a “community” of the just and the unjust’ (DT 9, M 28). As such, their dispute is a ‘fundamental dispute’ – it interrupts the current, ‘short-circuits’ (DT 13, M 33) the order that has been imposed, and shored up by authority. Politics occurs as an interruption of the fiction that the police order has established for itself, a fiction that it legitimates and thereby makes passes for reality. For Plato, this includes the idea that some are fit to govern, and some only to be governed, views that he justifies by arguing that the latter lack the capacity to rule themselves properly. One might say that the judgement that some are naturally unfit to rule proceeds from the effort of a social order to eliminate the ‘sheer contingency’ (DT 17, M 37) or ‘ultimate anarchy’ (DT 16, M 36) on which its hierarchy is based. By not counting those considered to have no part in politics, because they are not considered to exist in any meaningful sense, the political community consigns those it refuses to see as properly human to the realm of animality. In place of speech and discourse, it hears only ‘noise signalling pleasure or pain, consent or

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revolt’ (DT 23, M 45). It thereby dooms ‘the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence’ (DT 22, M 44). Those who see themselves as having the capacity of logos (reason or speech) – and Rancière makes the point that ‘the logos is never simply speech because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech’, relegating some speech to mere animal noise (DT 22-23, M 44) – perpetrate a miscount. They do so by taking it upon themselves to divide up what citizens have in common (see DT 5, M 24), thereby not only adjudicating what counts as logos, but on that basis also creating parts of a community, and assigning to these parts differential roles, tasks and duties. Consequently, for Rancière the ‘duality of the logos as speech and account of speech’ (DT 43, M 71) is intrinsic to the logic of politics. Politics, in the sense that Rancière construes it, happens when the presupposition of equality comes to the fore, when the ‘mechanisms’ of the police order ‘are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order’ (DT 17, M 37). In putting back into play this presupposition of equality, politics is necessarily ‘contentious’ (DT 14, M 35), for it introduces the ‘constitutive wrong or torsion of politics itself ’ (DT 14, M 34). It thereby institutes a ‘shift in the playing field’ (DT 39, M 64). In ancient Greece, the constitutive wrong is nothing but the ‘poor’, the class that is not a class, or the part that has no part, the part that is not counted as part of the whole. For Rancière, ‘the war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics’ (DT 14, M 34). Rancière surmises that the ‘party of the rich has only ever said one thing … the negation of politics: there is no part of those who have no part’ (DT 14, M 34).7 In contesting this, those who are designated as having no part introduce ‘an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies’ (DT 19, M 40). In the context of ancient Athens, Rancière equates the poor with the very existence of politics, because the poor introduce a limitation into what would otherwise be the absolute rule of oligarchy. They do so through the exercise of an ‘empty freedom’ (DT 19, M 40). ‘The law of oligarchy is effectively that “arithmetical” equality should command without hindrance, that wealth should be immediately identical with domination’ (DT 8, M 27). Yet, the equality in question for politics is not arithmetical. It concerns the value apportioned to the parts into which the common is divided, and the entitlement that value secures for each part. ‘The political begins precisely when one stops balancing

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profits and losses and worries about distributing common lots and evening out communal shares and entitlements to these shares, the axiaï [values] entitling one to community’ (DT 5, M 24). The miscount concerns the counting of parts when it comes to what is held in common and its distribution. In Plato’s formulation of the ideal city, there is a shift from an arithmetical order, in which transactions concern advantages that are cashed out between individuals, to an order in which the common good of the community is at stake. In asking what each part brings to the common good, this transition involves submitting the arithmetic order of exchange to a telos, to justice as the good of the whole. The harmony of the whole is defined no longer by arithmetical equality, but in relation to an idealized geometry, which is undergirded, however, by a ‘curious compromise with the empirical, an odd way of counting “parties” within the community’ (DT 6, M 24). Plato and Aristotle accomplish this sleight of hand by defining human nature differentially, and apportioning certain individuals to certain parts of society on that basis. For the Athenians of ancient Greece, the liberty of the poor had the effect of reducing the ‘absolute right’ of the rich, transforming it ‘into a particular axia [value]’ (DT 8, M 27). Lacking the wealth of oligarchs and the virtue of aristocrats (see DT 6, M 25), as Aristotle sees it, the only value left to the demos, the people – the poor – was freedom or liberty. ‘The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. In so doing, this party that is not one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle of community and identifies its name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the name of the community itself ’ (DT 8-9, M 27). The demos speaks in the name of an equality that is not in fact its own, but is precisely common to everyone. As Rancière understands it then, for the classical authors, freedom ‘pops up’ to prevent the oligarchy ‘from governing through the simple arithmetical play of profits and debts’ (DT 8, M 27). This freedom is empty in two senses. First, it is based on ‘pure invention’ (DT 7, M 26), since it is premised on the simple fact of being born within the city walls of Athens. This means, for Aristotle, that lowly shopkeepers and artisans, who in his view are no better than slaves – in fact they are worse than slaves in that they have not learnt virtue from their masters – are endowed with the freedom of citizens. The only thing that prevents them from being slaves is the geographical accident of their birth, now rendered a political qualification, but an empty one. The people are the ‘undifferentiated mass’, who lack the positive properties of wealth or virtue, and who appropriate freedom as what is proper to them.

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Yet, freedom is not proper to them. ‘The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest’ (DT 8, M 27). The demos appropriates for itself this ‘simple identity’ with those who have wealth and virtue, the equality that in fact belongs to all citizens, but which the people claims for itself. Hence, ‘the mass of men without qualities identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities have the natural effect of propelling them into the nonexistence of those who have ‘“no part in anything”’ (DT 9, M 28).8 The second respect in which freedom is empty, then, is that, lacking any other positive quality, the people, the demos, lay claim to the freedom they share with everyone else, as if it were theirs alone. Informing the gesture that consigns some speaking bodies to insignificance, so that their existence is negligible, is the distinction that Aristotle draws between voice and speech, one that he lines up with that which differentiates humans from animals. While all animals, human beings included, have the capacity to vocalize pleasure or suffering, only human animals have the capacity of speech. This capacity enables them not merely to distinguish what is pleasurable from what is painful, but also to understand the useful as opposed to the harmful, the just as opposed to the unjust, what is good as opposed to what is evil (see DT 2, M 20). Aristotle defines the capacity of speech – and thus the ability to understand what is harmful or injurious as opposed to pleasurable, what is evil and what is good, what unjust and what just – as ‘exclusive to human beings’ (DT 2, M 20). The trouble is that at the same time, he constantly fudges the line that supposedly differentiates animals from humans, as Rancière acknowledges when he points to the different capacities with regard to logos that Aristotle assigns to slaves and freemen.9 For a community, to be political is for it to be concerned with what a community has in common. By dividing up the common capacity of rationality into different types, distributing these types to different parts of the community, and defining the value of each part of the community Aristotle takes it upon himself to designate who is entitled to a share in community, and who is not. If Aristotle defines slaves as those without a share in anything, for modern society, it is the proletariat that has no part (DT 9, M 28).10 But, if the inception of politics is understood as the counting by a community of its parts, and if it dismisses one part as of no account, as the part that has no part, then the part that has no part is also the founding of the political community as such. ‘It is through the existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community exists as a political community – that is, as divided by

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a fundamental dispute, by a dispute to do with the counting of the community’s parts even more than of their “rights”’ (DT 9, M 28). Therefore, when the ancient poor or the modern proletariat mobilize themselves to contest the order that excludes them and makes them of no account, its contention is with the political order itself. In order to make themselves heard, those who make up the part that has no part (slaves, the poor, the proletariat), will have to intervene in the very order of speech itself. ‘Disagreement occurs wherever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation’ (DT xi, M 13). It is not only a ‘dispute over the object’ under discussion but also over ‘the capacity of those who are making an object of it’ (DT xii, M 15). It thus concerns the ‘tangible presentation of [a] common object, the very capacity of the interlocutors to present it’ (DT xii, M 14). It is this tangible aspect, bound up as it is with the speaker’s position in the political body, and the value the rest of the community attributes to the speaker’s words, that distinguishes the police order from a mere law.11 The police order organizes the ‘reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (DT 28, M 51). Rancière concedes that the ‘police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it’ (DT 29, M 52), but differentiates his notion of the police from the ‘state apparatus’, where the ‘state is portrayed as a machine, a “cold monster” imposing its rigid order on the life of society’ (DT 29, M 52). At the same time, he differentiates policing from the Foucauldian notion of the ‘“disciplining” of bodies’ (DT 29, M 52).12 Rather, the police is a ‘rule governing’ the ‘appearing’ of bodies, the ‘configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’ (DT 29, M 52). Rancière specifies that in order to define the law-like operation of the police, one must first define the ‘configuration of the perceptible’ that inscribes the share a party has, or the lack of it. Hence for Rancière, in order to function as the law, the police is first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise (DT 29, M 52).

It follows, then, that in order to intervene in the police order, politics must take the form of a disagreement, dispute or dissensus that makes a difference in the

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ways in which speaking bodies are allocated to some tasks or occupations, and others not, the way some are relegated to invisibility and silence, while others are not. Thus, Rancière makes good on his stipulation that the split, conflict or dispute in which disagreement consists, and which politics introduces, is a tangible one, which concerns the capacity of those staging the conflict. Women, for example, turned the ‘domestic household’ into a ‘political space’ when it became ‘the subject of argument in a dispute over the capacity of women in the community’ (DT 32-3, M 56). By means of a process of subjectification, through the ‘declaration of a wrong’, feminism thereby brings into existence a party that hitherto did not exist as a party (DT 39, M 64). It does so by introducing a dispute, for instance, about whether ‘maternity is a private or a social matter, if this social function is a public function or not, if this public function implies a political capacity’ (DT 40, M 65). Political subjectification ‘forces’ terms such as ‘women’ or ‘proletarian’ out of their ‘obviousness’ (DT 36, M 60), by redefining or reconfiguring ‘the field of experience’ (DT 40, M 65). It ‘measures the gap between the part of work as social function and the having no part of those who carry it out within the definition of the common of the community’ (DT 36, M 60). Subjectification ‘undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those that have no part’ (DT 30, M 53), thereby exposing the logic of the police order as resting upon an ‘inegalitarian distribution of social bodies’ (DT 42, M 67). Thus, a strike is political when it transforms the ‘relationships that determine the workplace in its relationship to the community’ (DT 32, M 56). It is political in that it ‘gives rise to a meeting’ (DT 32, M 56) of two heterogeneous logics, that of the police and that of politics, where politics is understood as the ‘process of equality’ (DT 30, M 53). It creates a space in which the ‘uncounted’ can be counted (DT 38, M 63). In the police order, the proletariat only counts ‘as those of no account’ – or as ‘the class of the uncounted’ (DT 38, M 62). Proletarians do not exist as a party ‘prior to the conflict they name’ (DT 27, M 49), that is, ‘prior to the declaration of wrong’ (DT 39, M 64). Before naming the wrong that is done to it, ‘the proletariat has no existence as a real part of society’ (DT 39, M 64). Through subjectification, through naming a wrong, a naming that at the same time makes those of no account into a party, a party that did not exist as such brings itself into being by ‘tying the presentation of equality, as the part of those who have no part, to the conflict between two parts of society’

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(DT 39, M 64). In so doing, the proletariat, or women, for example, demonstrate the particularization of the universal (see DT 42, M 67), and at the same time they institute a ‘single universal, a polemical universal’ (DT 39, M 64). They transform identities through ‘disidentification’ (DT 36, M 60), such that ‘women’ or ‘proletarian’ are no longer identified by the part that is allocated by the community of the police order. Women are removed from the naturalized roles in which they had been cast, they are ‘denatured’, and space is opened up where ‘those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part’ (DT 36, M 60). Women or proletarians can now be seen differently, because ‘a fresh sphere of visibility’ (DT 42, M 67) has been made available. This sphere must be kept open, through repeated demonstration of the wrong of inequality, through the constant manifestation of the gap between the police order and politics, since left to itself, it will close down. ‘The persistence of the wrong is infinite because verification of equality is infinite’ (DT 39, M 64). Rancière resists the language of victimization, because the subjects who come into existence through subjectification are ‘subjects whose very existence is the mode of manifestation of the wrong’ (DT 39, M 64). When, in 1849, Jeanne Deroin ‘presents herself as a candidate for a legislative election for which she cannot run’, she stages in ‘exemplary fashion’ (DT 41, M 66) the contradiction between the police logic and political logic. She ‘demonstrates the contradiction within universal suffrage that excludes her sex from any such universality’ (DT 41, M 66). In so doing she is, in effect, making reference to the ‘first requirement of universality’, namely that ‘speaking beings universally belong to the linguistic community’ (DT 56, M 86). She is behaving ‘as though there were a common world of argument’ (DT 52, M 81). Structurally this assumption, the ‘as though’, is similar to the ‘requirement of universality proper to’ the ‘as if’ operative in Kant’s aesthetics, in that it ‘includes those who are not included’ (DT 58, M 88). Deroin’s demonstration of universality takes shape in her inclusion of women among those subjects who have logos. Not only does she include women within the community of speaking beings, but also issues a demand to those who fail to recognize women as belonging to this community, she ‘demands the consent of the very person who does not acknowledge’ (DT 90, M 128), women as part of this community. In this way, she opens up a new community, one that includes those who previously had no part in it. She thereby ‘creat[es] a stage … on which the equality or inequality as speaking beings of the partners in the conflict can be played out’ (DT 51, M 80). In this case, the partners are women and the men who rule them.

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The visibility of this demonstration, the fact that this stage becomes visible at all (see DT 26-7, M 49), depends on its sphere of visibility being held open. The fact that Deroin can stage a conflict is made possible through numerous other infractions and transgressions that have amounted to the incursion of equality into an inegalitarian police order. ‘A political subjectification is the product of these multiple fracture lines by which individuals and networks of individuals subjectify the gap between their condition as animals endowed with a voice and the violent encounter with the equality of the logos’ (DT 37, M 61). Deroin’s intervention is made possible by such multiple fractures, which serve to prepare the ground in such a way that the stage she creates by acting in a way that impinges on the police order becomes visible as a stage, comes into existence as a stage.

Archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics Plato’s archipolitics, Aristotle’s parapolitics, and the metapolitics that Rancière sees as culminating in Marx, constitute what Rancière considers to be the ‘three great figures of political philosophy’ (DT 65, M 99). He sees them all as responses to the ‘paradox of the part of those who have no part’ (DT 65, M 99). While these responses vary, they all reformulate in some way or other the part that has no part, either formulating an ‘equivalent role for it’ or ‘creating a simulacrum of it, by performing an imitation of politics in negating it’ (DT 65, M 99). Thus, for example, Plato allows artisans to be part of the community so long as they do not interfere with its political functioning, while Aristotle produces an imitation of politics, which seeks to defuse its polemicism, as we’ll see further shortly. Rancière construes political philosophy as various reiterations of the internal division of the people as the basic condition of politics (see DT 83, M 121). To understand this, it is necessary to see the sense in which philosophy always comes on the scene ‘too late’ (DT 62, M 96) with regard to politics. Political philosophy, for Rancière, is the name of a ‘polemical encounter … in which the paradox or scandal of politics is exposed: its lack of any proper foundation’ (DT 61, M 95). As Rancière sees it, political philosophy is a response to ‘democracy’s antecedence’, or to the fact that ‘politics is already in place, without waiting for its theoretical underpinnings’ (DT 62, M 96). The politics that is already in place takes shape as ‘a part of the community that identifies with the whole in the very name of the wrong that makes it the other party’ (DT 62, M 96). From the

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point of view of the archipolitics of the ancients, democracy is construed as a politics that falls short of the ‘essence’ of politics, an essence that philosophy is understood to provide from ‘above’ as the ‘truth’ of politics (see DT 82, M 119). Thus, political philosophy is effectively the elimination of politics in favour of philosophy, whereby politics is supposedly elevated to its truth, but in the process the space of democracy is suppressed. This suppression is accomplished in Plato through the imposition from above of the myth of the three metals, according to which each part of the community must perform its proper function for the good of the whole. In the name of submitting to an ideal unity, based upon the notion that the purpose of each class is wholly subsumed in one overriding principle, namely the proper functioning of the whole community, the political participation of the artisan class is reduced to the principle of non-interference. Rancière understands the three paradigms of political philosophy he maps out (archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics) as efforts to identify politics with the police. ‘The basis of the politics of the philosophers is the identity of the principle of politics as an activity with that of the police as a way of determining the partition of the perceptible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (DT 63, M 97). The truth that the assimilation of politics to the police order produces is the truth of philosophy, a truth, however, that the metapolitics of modern philosophy will locate not in a higher essence of politics, but ‘beneath or behind it … as the secret of life and death coiled at the very heart of any manifestation of politics’ (DT 82, M 119). Before examining the dynamic of metapolitics more closely, let’s first explore in more detail Plato’s archipolitics, Aristotle’s parapolitics, and the modern version of parapolitics that Rancière associates with social contract theory. For his part, Plato will hold up the true ideal to which all should aspire, an ideal that is inculcated less through the force of law, and more through the thoroughgoing and all-encompassing education of citizens, who are ‘won over by a story rather than restrained by a law’ (DT 68, M 103). Their training ‘manifests itself as the temperament of the social body’ where the ‘law is the harmony of the ethos, the accord between the character of individuals and the moral values of the collective’ (DT 68, M 103). For Plato, the ideal politics of the city is one in which the community, operating as a harmonious whole, ceases to be political (see DT 71, M 107). Plato’s republic is ‘a community functioning within the regime of the Same’ (DT 64, M 98), one which eliminates the part of those who have no part. Plato’s republic substitutes for democracy a politics with ‘nothing left over’ (DT 65, M 100), one in which there is ‘no empty space’ (DT 68, M 103).

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The order that suffuses and unites the community is one that divides individuals into classes according to their function, such that individuals are usurped by their function, and the community is ‘reconstructed in terms of its functions’ (DT 66, M 101). It is the ‘counting of needs and functions’ that saturates ‘the space and time of the community’ (DT 67, M 102), so that artisans lack the time to do anything other than perform their function as manual labourers. They are the part that has no political function – the part that has no part. Plato appeals to the image of the state as an ‘organism’, a ‘living body’ (DT 64, M 98-99), the parts of which must cooperate with one another for the proper functioning of the whole. This community is one in which the ‘head rules the stomach’ (DT 65, M 100), one in which the prevailing image is the health of this corporeal entity, so that politics is envisaged as the ‘medicine of community’ (DT 82, M 119). Thus, artisans are incorporated into the community on the condition that they observe a principle of non-interference in ‘the affairs of the community’ (DT 66, M 100). They must mind their own business (see DT 67, M 101), and occupy themselves solely with their proper function: their business is to carry out their trade. Plato’s ‘archipolitics’ is a form of ‘archipolicing’, which educates individuals into the rhythm of collective accord, dictating their mood in the spirit of the harmony of the whole, even to the point of eliminating the family (see DT 71, M 107). Aristotle concedes that equality is the principle of politics, acknowledging that all are equal in that all share ‘the equal capacity to rule and be ruled’ (DT 71, M 106). In asserting that ‘all are by nature equal’ (DT 70, M 106), he skirts the question of ‘what makes such an equality natural or why it is natural in Athens but not in Lacedaemonia’ (DT 70, M 106), in order to focus on settling ‘his score with Plato’ (DT 70, M 105).13 This he accomplishes by distinguishing between the ‘virtue of the good man, which is to rule’ (DT 71, M 106) and politics, which exists ‘only because there are equals’ (DT 71, M 106).14 The problem, for Aristotle, is to reconcile two opposing ‘concepts of nature’ (DT 71, M 107). The logic of the first concept is that ‘the greatest good is the rule of the best’ (DT 71, M 107). This is the logic that operates in Plato’s republic, the one according to which those who are said to be less well equipped to rule must obey those who are said to be better equipped. The logic of the second concept of nature is that ‘the greatest good in terms of equality is equality’ (DT 71, M 107). The way in which Aristotle will ‘square the circle’ (DT 72, M 107) is to transform the opposition between the virtue of the good and the justice of politics, into a ‘practical paradox of government’ (DT 73, M 108), whereby it is a question of two parties or factions;

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one party imposes its law on the other, and the other party, the dominated party, is a party of dissension that must be accommodated. Understanding that ‘politics is a question of aesthetics, a matter of appearances’ (DT 74, M 109), Aristotle advances the view that political regimes must ‘cancel [themselves] out’ (DT 74, M 110). Thus, for Aristotle the ‘best democracy is a peasant democracy’, where, in their dispersion and distance from the city, those who are out in the fields do not have access to the space of democracy, a democracy, then, where the ‘demos is missing from its place’ (DT 74, M 110). Similarly, the best tyranny is not one that serves ‘the interests and the pleasures of the tyrant alone’ since this would incite revolt, but rather one that preserves itself by submitting to ‘the rule of law’ and promoting ‘the material betterment of the people and the participation in power of men of substance’ (DT 73, M 109). If Aristotle reconciles the question of virtue with politics by formulating a ‘theory of government’, in which one faction concedes to be ruled over by another, Hobbes produces a modern form of parapolitics when he substitutes for Aristotle’s theory of government a theory of ‘the origins of power’ and shifts the focus from ‘the level of “parties” in power to the level of individuals’ (DT 77, M 113). Unlike Aristotle, for Hobbes, humans have no aptitude for politics, and are not predestined to any final good. In the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ (DT 78, M 114), politics is of the second order – it emerges only as the quest for survival triumphs over desire. Within the scenario of social contract theory, which breaks down the people into individuals, sovereignty is no longer a matter of one party dominating another. Rather, for both Hobbes and Rousseau, ‘sovereignty rests solely on itself ’ (DT 78, M 114). In social contract theory a new ‘structure of wrong’ (DT 78, M 115) is posited, where the dispute ‘relates each one to the whole of sovereignty’ (DT 79, M 115). The parapolitics of social contract theory invents the category of ‘individuality’, which it correlates to the ‘absolute of sovereign power’ (DT 78, M 114). Modern parapolitics thus transposes the paradox of the part that has no part into ‘the division of nature as the passage from natural right to natural law’ (DT 79, M 115), which plays itself out in the relation between individuals and the state. Individuals invest themselves in the state through their rights; for modern parapolitical philosophy it is no longer a question of forms of the just that organize the parts of the community, as it is for Aristotle. The concept of right comes to replace the discourse of justice. In social contract theory, there is a ‘pure and simple’ admission of equality as the ultimate principle of politics (DT 79, M 115). It is only through ‘the total and irremediable alienation of all

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“freedom” in which such equality might take effect’ that freedom can be revoked. Thus, men are ‘dispossessed of ’ freedom (DT 80, M 117) or alienated from their sovereignty, when they agree to exchange their freedom for absolute sovereignty; man becomes distant from himself in a move that ‘absolutizes’ the dispute about freedom into an ‘original contradiction’ (DT 80, M 117), in which each subject agrees to alienate himself from his own freedom. Rancière thinks that the gap between the freedom of man and the chains he imposes on himself ultimately opens onto ‘the gulf of a dispute more radical than that of the Ancients’ (DT 79, M 115). The parapolitics of social contract theory moves away from the class politics in which the ancients had ensconced politics – and for the political philosophers it is essentially ‘class war of which politics consists’ (DT 78, M 114) according to Rancière. In establishing the category of the individual, and correlating it with absolute sovereignty, social contract theory submerges the people in the ‘tautology of sovereignty’, a tautology, however, that is only ‘thinkable’ on the basis of the people. This tautology describes the new structure of wrong, ‘the wrong done to those men “born free and everywhere in chains”’ as Rousseau famously puts it (DT 80, M 117), for it is the ‘distance of man from himself ’ that has become the ‘primary and final basis of the distance of the people from itself ’ (DT 80, M 117). In his metapolitics, Marx recasts the gap between Rousseau’s ‘figuration of the sovereignty of citizenship’ and Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ (DT 82, M 120) as the reality of the interests of the property owner masked by the discourse of citizenship. The term ‘citizen’ covers over the reality ‘beneath this representation’, namely the ‘radical nonright’ of the ‘non-property owner’ (DT 83, M 120). Metapolitics operates as a ‘symptomology that detects’ signs of untruth, it is a ‘discourse on the falseness of politics’ (DT 82, M 119-120). It evaporates the trappings of citizenry to reveal the truth behind the appearances of the sign of citizen, the man who has no rights unless he is a property owner. Marx reintroduces the concept of class that ‘the fiction of man and sovereignty’ was meant ‘to do away with’ (DT 84, M 122). The truth of politics is played out in terms of the class struggle, between those who produce wealth and those who own it. The term ‘class’ operates as a ‘homonyn’, dividing the sense the term has in the police order from its political sense. For the police order a class ‘is a grouping of people assigned a particular status and rank according to their origins and activity’, whereas in its political sense it is ‘a name for counting the uncounted, a mode of subjectification superimposed on the reality of all social groups’ (DT 83, M 121).

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In Marx’s discourse, the term ‘class’ functions ambiguously, oscillating between a positive truth and a force of negativity, as a truth that puts class beyond politics, and as a revolutionary force. In the first sense, class is a truth that resembles that of Plato’s archipolitics, the truth of the ‘illusion of politics’ (DT 84, M 122). The proletariat figures here as a ‘positive force’, as the ‘true movement of society’ (DT 84, M 122). At the same time, the proletarian workers figure as ‘mere performers of revolutionary acts’, as ‘nonclasses’ (DT 84, M 122), so that all political forms are reduced to the class struggle. In becoming the ‘hidden “political” truth’ of ‘all forms of subjectification’, the class struggle becomes the mechanism whereby the illusion of politics is denounced. The name for the truth of its illusion or falsity is ‘ideology’. Rancière discerns in the notion of ideology that Marx introduces a ‘completely new status of the true’ (DT 85, M 123). Truth is no longer ‘the clarity of the idea in the face of the obscurity of appearances’; it becomes ‘nothing more’ than an instrument for ‘highlighting’ falsity. In designating the ‘distance between words and things’ ideology becomes ‘the concept in which all politics is canceled out’ (DT 85-6, M 123-4). For metapolitics, there are two interpretations of the ‘internal division of the people’ (DT 87, M 125). There are ‘those who play the game of forms’, that is, those who work within the ‘system of juridical inscriptions and governmental institutions based on … the sovereignty of the people’ (DT 87, M 125). Then there are ‘those who direct the action designed to eradicate this play of forms’ (DT 87, M 125). These latter act in the name of a truth that sees the ‘ideal sovereign people’ as illusory, and the discourse of rights and representation as merely providing the appearance, rather than the reality, of democracy. The truth behind this appearance is the truth of property ownership and the class structure it supports. For metapolitics then, the appearance of democracy contradicts the reality. The appearance of democracy is to be denounced for the illusion that it is, so that the true forces of history can be revealed. In contrast, for Rancière, politics is a matter of confirmation rather than contradiction. At issue is not the contradiction of appearances, as is the case for metapolitics, but rather to confirm that ‘the demos exists’ (DT 88, M 126), not only in ‘inscriptions of equality’ (DT 87, M 126) such as those that appear in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but also in workshops, suburbs and domestic spaces, where it is invisible to police logic. It is a question of dramatizing ‘the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not’ (DT 88, M 126). In demanding rights, workers or women, for example, take up this gap ‘between the egalitarian inscription of the law and the spaces where inequality

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rules’ (DT 89, M 128) and pose the question of whether they are ‘included in the sphere of manifestation of the equality of citizens’ (DT 89, M 127). In doing so, they ‘invent a new place’ for egalitarian inscriptions of the law. Demonstrations become ‘polemical space[s]’ that hold ‘equality and its absence together’. In presenting ‘both the egalitarian text and the inegalitarian relationship’ (DT 89, M 128), democratic politics engage in a practice akin to that of the Kantian aesthetic community, a ‘practice of the as if’ (DT 90), by calling on the consent of a ‘community whose nonexistence it at the same time demonstrates’ (DT 90, M 128). To demonstrate for a right that does not yet exist, to demand equality from an audience which does not recognize the equality of the constituency of the uncounted as equal to it, is to address an interlocutor ‘who does not acknowledge the interlocutory situation’ (DT 89, M 128), or who does not see that the demos exists in the place that the demonstrators assert its existence. The task of political demonstration, then, is ‘to connect the forms of visibility of the egalitarian logos with the places where it is invisible’ (DT 90, M 129). There is another discourse concerning parts and wholes that subtends the one that organizes Rancière’s account of Aristotle. It is a discourse concerning the relationship of the household to the polis, in which context Aristotle examines the relations of slaves and women. The end for the sake of which the properly human life exists is the good life, and it is for the sake of the polis that households exist.15 The good life is a political life, a life in which the highest human excellence or virtue can flourish.16 The good life is reserved for male citizens, and underwritten by a logic of conditionality about the virtues appropriate to those who comprise the household, women, slaves and children, about their function and nature, and about how they should be ruled over. The relation of the household to the polis is one of conditioning. As Spelman says, In a well-ordered state, women and slaves are not part of the polis, but they are conditions for it. Without their work, the polis could not exist, but they do not participate in the activities of the polis. They are not capable of living lives that exhibit the highest form of human excellence, though it would not be possible for others to live such lives without them. (1988, 38)

Women and slaves provide the conditions necessary for free male citizens to have the leisure to pursue political life. In Aristotle’s words, quoted by Spelman, ‘In a well-ordered state the citizens should have leisure and not have to provide for their daily wants (Politics 1269a34-35)’ (1988, 38).17

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Aristotle differentiates between the functions of slaves and free women and identifies virtues appropriate to these functions. He also differentiates between the type of rule applicable to the master over the slave and that of the husband over wife, comparing the relation of master and slave to that of the soul’s rule over the body, and suggesting that the relations of the ruler over his (free) wife is similar to the relation between two parts of the soul, the intellect and appetite, whereby the husband rules over the wife as the intellect rules appetite (see Spelman 1998, 40). The rule of master over slave he considers to be that of a despot, for the sake of the master, while that of a ruler over his wife he understands to be ‘for the sake of his wife’ (1988, 40).18 The latter relation is not despotic but constitutional, or as Dana Jalbert Stauffer glosses, it is ‘political’, with the proviso that women don’t get a turn to rule, unlike properly political rule.19 The man might, however, ‘hand over some of his affairs to his wife’ (Spelman 1988, 40). The rule of men over women might resemble political rule, but in Stauffer’s words it ‘lacks the main characteristic of political rule – namely that it is temporary’ (2008, 936). Let me pause to note that in characterizing the rule of (free) husbands over their (free) wives as political, while at the same time rendering this rule permanent, Aristotle seems to inscribe this relation as political, but in an ambiguous way, as part of the political, yet not fully political – a part that has no part, we might say. Spelman argues that Aristotle’s account of the subordination of slaves is inseparable from the account of why women should be ruled; gender cannot be isolated from ‘race’ (see 1988, 56). As Spelman puts it, for Aristotle, ‘To have a gender identity is itself a “race” privilege’ (1988, 55) in the sense that ‘only certain males and females count as “men” and “women”’ (1988, 54). It is only in ‘a community that exists for the sake of the good life, not just for life itself ’ (1988, 42) that males are properly men, and women are properly women. It is only in a political community of free male citizens, where men are said to naturally rule over both slaves and women (albeit with different kinds of rule) that human excellence can flourish (1988, 41). The well-ordered state of perfection is one in which slaves are inferior to masters in a different way from the way in which free women are inferior to men. As Spelman points out, Aristotle tends to utilize the categories of women and slaves as if they were mutually exclusive, yet it is clear that by ‘women’ he refers to free women, and by ‘slaves’ he refers to male and female slaves (see 1998, 46). ‘Though a slave may be a female, what defines her function in the state is the fact of her being a slave, not the fact of her being female’ (1988, 42). Thus, not only does the term ‘women’ apply to free women, but also the term ‘man’ applies only to free men ‘insofar as Aristotle uses the term in the Politics to refer to natural rulers’ (1988, 43).

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Spelman argues that the crucial concept not only for Aristotle, but also for Plato, is masculinity. ‘In Aristotle what characterizes natural rulers is a form of rationality that is masculine. Plato and Aristotle are alike in presenting an ideal of humanity that is above all else a masculine idea. They only differ with respect to who could exemplify such an ideal’ (1988, 54). While Plato thinks that some women can have masculine souls, Aristotle does not.20 For Spelman, Aristotle’s concept of masculinity ‘is at once a gender and a “race” concept – for as is clear, even if only males can be masculine, not all males can be masculine. One must not only be male but be of a particular “race” to be masculine’ (1988, 54). Let me pause at this point to articulate an important caveat. While I adhere to the terms of Spelman’s analysis here, which is expressed with reference to the terms ‘race’ and ‘gender’, how modern concepts of race and racism relate to ancient Greek views on slavery is a complex question. Arguments that protoracism existed in ancient Greece need to be understood within a context where othering did not cohere with modern conceptions of subject and object. For a fuller discussion of this topic, I refer to the preface of one of my earlier works.21 The wider argument of the current book is to suggest that Rancière’s effort to displace the distinction between form and matter that Western philosophy inherits from Aristotle is not completely successful in that it continues to participate in a legacy that leaves in place the architectonic structures of race and gender that anchor the form and matter distinction in modern formulations of aesthetics and politics. This legacy remains invisible to Rancière’s analyses of the distribution of the sensible, and falls out of his account of the part that has no part. If gender is itself a function of racial privilege in Aristotle, Spelman’s argument might seem to suggest that we should not concern ourselves with gender, but with race, since to utilize the concept of gender might seem in and of itself a racist gesture. Indeed, there is some validity to that argument, and it is one that others have made.22 Spelman’s demonstration that only free males and females count as men and women allows us to see that another logic subtends the logic of conditionality whereby those whose functions are defined by their roles in the household (slaves and women) make the life of the polis possible for free men. This is a racialized logic that grants only certain males and females a gendered status, and suggests that ‘only certain kinds of men are really human’ (1988, 55). So Aristotle’s differentiation between slaves and females should be understood to differentiate between free females and slaves. When he says that ‘the slave has not got the deliberative part [of the soul] at all, and the female has it, but without

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full authority’, we should understand ‘female’ here to refer to free females.23 Witt points to the connection between Aristotle’s claim that there is ‘something lacking in women’s ability to deliberate’ and his association of females with matter and males with form.24 As Witt suggests, ‘It is clear that form is located in the male and matter in the female. Moreover, the female is virtually identified with matter’ (1998, 123). 25 The function of deliberating concerns ‘which form is the cause or principle’ (1998, 123). Witt suggests that the idea is … that there is something wrong with [women’s] forms. There is the vague implication that form is really and fully at home in men (in men who are not slaves to be precise), and not in women. In these statements Aristotle conveys that there is something compromised about the forms that women have, or about the way that they have forms (1998, 123).

Quoting Saxonhouse, Stauffer suggests that ‘the phrase “the female has reason, but it lacks authority” may mean that women’s reason lacks authority in her own soul, or it may mean that women’s reason lacks authority in the world, i.e., with men’ (2008, 937). In favour of the latter reading, Saxonhouse appeals to Aristotle’s citation of Sophocles’s Ajax 293 in support of his argument that different virtues are appropriate to different functions.26 Ajax admonishes ‘his wife Tecmessa to keep quiet when she is attempting to give him life-saving advice, advice that he does not take, to his great detriment. The quotation expresses quite aptly, then, that women’s reason may be sound, but nonetheless lack authority with men’ (2008, 937). On this reading, then, females can deliberate soundly, but men do not accord their deliberations authority.27 Witt argues that Aristotle’s notion of function is a normative and teleological concept – what a thing does determines what it is (1998, 127).28 Furthermore, function ‘carries with it the idea of what is good for the entity in question’ (1998, 127). Since ‘the good life … is the chief aim of society’ (Pols 1278b), everything is subordinated to this end, such that ‘household management and the control of slaves’ (ibid.) find their rationale in the good life, the life of the polis, although slaves and free women do not take part in political. As Witt says, ‘Aristotle asserts that there is … a characteristically human function for which rational soul is the principle or cause. And it is the exercise of that function that constitutes the human good or excellence’ (1998, 127). This function is reserved for free male citizens, as we have seen. While there is disagreement about the implications of Aristotle’s views on slavery and women, some arguing for more progressive interpretations and

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others for more conservative interpretations, there is little doubt, even among the latter, that, in Stauffer’s words, ‘For Aristotle, the best and highest form of human community is the political community’ (2008, 929), and that form and matter are gendered concepts.29 For Witt it is clear, for example, that Aristotle associates the ‘more divine principle’, form, with the male, while he associates matter, ‘the inferior, material principle’ with the female.30 The gendering and racializing of the politics of form and matter plays little role in the series of equivalences that orchestrate Rancière’s understanding of Plato’s suppression of political dissension, Aristotle’s pacification of it and Marx’s displacement of it.31 Yet, not only gendered biases but also racialized biases of political philosophy are well documented. Building on the work of Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract, Charles Mills shows in The Racial Contract, for example, that social contract theory has racism built into it.32 ‘Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the norm, they have been the norm … the Racial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis’ (1997, 93). This has resulted in the norming of nonwhites in moral, epistemic and aesthetic terms: ‘The terms of the Racial Contract norm non-white persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically and aesthetically their ontological inferiority’ (1997, 118). As Mills points out, citing Susan Moller Okin, feminist theorists have shown that whatever else they disagree about, Plato and Aristotle agree on the subordination of women, as do Hobbes and Rousseau (see 1997, 93-4).33 In The Racial Contract Mills establishes a similar pattern with regard to the inferiority of non-whites in the work of ‘Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and their theoretical adversaries’ (1997, 94). Mills argues for the importance of naming the hitherto ‘unnamed global political structure’ (1997, 125) – which became ‘global in the period of formal colonial administration’ (1997, 113) – ‘global white supremacy’ since there can be no ‘serious theoretical appreciation’ of its significance until such naming. He suggests that, ‘Political theory is in part about who the main actors are’ and that for a polity figured as ruled by whites the actors are ‘neither the atomic individuals of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory but races’ (1997, 113). Here, I take it as established that the political theories of the Greeks, social contract theory and Marx are deeply implicated in problematic assumptions about race and gender, and ask how might this implication play out for Rancière’s work, not only for his politics but also for his reflections on art. If Mills is right that political theory concerns who the main actors are, in question is whether for Rancière the major political actors remain masculinist in the

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sense that Spelman suggests we should understand Aristotle’s male citizens. In question then is whether for Rancière the major political actors remain classes that must conform to the ideal of white, male citizens.

Notes 1 Rancière says that ‘politics has no objects or issues of its own’ (DT 31, M 55), and reiterates this idea when he says, ‘politics has no “proper” object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of the police’, in ‘The Thinking of Dissensus’ in Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 5. If Rancière maintains that the objects of politics are nothing other than those of the police order, he also suggests elsewhere that the politics of dissensus can create its own objects when he claims that the politics of dissensus is ‘comprised of a surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a surplus of objects’ (Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 124). 2 See Spelman (1988), however, who argues for a distinction between the terms ‘female’ and ‘women’. 3 See also DT 99, 139. 4 Rancière is citing Plato’s Cratylus, 417 d/e. 5 See Aristotle, Politics I, 1254b 24–5. 6 By the term ‘political subjectification’ Rancière means ‘an ability to produce … polemical scenes, … paradoxical scenes, that bring out the contradiction between two logics, by positing existences that are at the same time nonexistences’ (DT 41, M 66). 7 As Rancière points out, although he distinguishes three values (wealth, virtue and freedom, and identifies each of them as yielding ‘a particular regime’ considered in their own right, namely, oligarchy, aristocracy and democracy (see DT 6, M 25), when it comes to how these blend together in a single community, ‘one single easily recognizable quality stands out: the wealth of the oligoï’ (DT 7, M 26). In the final analysis, politics comes down to a war between the rich and the poor (see DT 11, 30). 8 The reference is to Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 20 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), II: 2, p. 15. 9 Not only is Aristotle prone to statements such as ‘the usefulness of slaves diverged little from that of animals’ (Politics I II: 14). There are plenty of other instances in which Aristotle differentiates between the capacities of humans, as when he pronounces there are by nature various classes of rulers and ruled. ‘For the free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in a different way. And

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Art, Politics and Rancière all possess the various parts of the soul, but possess them in different ways; for the slave has not got the deliberative part at all, and the female has it, but without full authority, while the child has it, but in an undeveloped form’ (Politics, I V: 6). Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, p. 15. Distancing the notion of disagreement from Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, Rancière stipulates that disagreement ‘is not to do with words alone. It generally bears on the very situation in which speaking parties find themselves’ (D xi, M 14). See Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). While it is true that Lyotard defines the differend in terms of genres, phrases and regimens (see p. 137, for example), it is also the case that what is at stake for Lyotard is suffering ‘from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away’ and that ‘to give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim’ (13). Rancière cites Foucault’s elaboration of the police in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a ‘mode of government’ implicated in ‘everything relating to “man” and his “happiness”’ (DT 28, M 51). The reference is to Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique’, in Dits et Ecrits, vol. IV, pp. 134–61. Rancière goes on to say that the ‘petty police is just a particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (DT 28, M 51). He adds that Western societies have evolved so that ‘the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare, and culture. The policeman is destined to play the role of consultant and organizer as much as agent of public law and order’ (DT 28–29, M 51). Rancière is quoting Aristotle, Politics, II, 1261a 41–2. This ostensible equality of all does not extend to women and slaves either in Aristotle’s theoretical ruminations or in the politics of his day, which excluded women and slaves from voting. See Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b. As Spelman points out, there is some dispute about whether the noblest life is one of contemplation or a life of politics, yet whichever life is highest, freedom from the activities of the household is still necessary for those who pursue it. (1988, 196 n. 4). Aristotle also argues that it would be ‘degrading’ if free men were to perform the work of women and slaves, and their subjects would have ‘contempt’ for them, which might lead to ‘revolution’ (Spelman, 1988, 39). See Aristotle, Politics 1278b. Dana Jalbert Stauffer, ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women’, The Journal of Politics, vol. 70, no. 4 (October 2008): 929–41, see esp. p. 936.

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20 As is well known, Plato thinks that the wives of guardians should be allowed to rule in the ideal city. See Plato, Republic. 21 Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. xiii–xxviii. See also Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–an Argument’, The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Wynter shows that although on the one hand, according to Foucauldian orthodoxy, the concept of race could not have appeared on the scene before the concept of the subject arose, and that it is therefore intrinsically bound up with the shift from a theocentric to a ratiocentric model, at the same time, it is a work by a pre-Christian ancient Greek thinker, Aristotle’s Politics, that provides the pretext for the precise terms in which the argument is made for racial differentiation. 22 See, for example, Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987): 64–81. 23 Aristotle, Politics 1260a. 24 As Witt says, for Aristotle ‘there is something lacking in women’s ability to deliberate, a function concerning which form is the cause or principle’ (Politics 1260a 8–14)’ (1998, 123). 25 Witt is referring to Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, 732a 2–10. 26 The line that Aristotle quotes from Sophocles is ‘Silence gives grace to a woman’ (Politics, I 1260a 30). Stauffer translates this as ‘To woman, silence is an adornment’ (2008, 937). 27 Stauffer reports Saxonhouse’s view but she herself maintains the ambiguity of Aristotle’s argument: he ‘allows himself to be interpreted in different ways. He could mean that women are intellectually inferior to men, or he could mean that men’s superior strength lies behind their rule’ (2008, 937). 28 Witt argues that Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism is intrinsically normative, but that once we understand his functional and teleological metaphysics, we can detach its ‘inegalitarian gender associations’ (1998, 130). She argues that ‘form is normative because it is a functional concept that operates in the context of a teleological metaphysics’ (1988, 126). She also argues that ‘what a thing is, for Aristotle, is determined by what it can do’, or by its function, and that the ‘notion of function … carries with it the idea of what is good for the entity in question, and hence what that entity ought to do’ (1998, 127). I agree with Witt that Aristotle’s metaphysics includes a normative dimension, but not that its gender associations are ‘extrinsic and, in principle, removable’ (1998, 130). Witt says that ‘Aristotle’s ergon or function argument in the Nicomachean Ethics turns on the connection between the idea that there is a human function and that performing that function

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Art, Politics and Rancière constitutes the good life for a human being’ (1998, 127), quoting Nicomachean Ethics I, 7 1097b25-29 in support of her point. The problem is, as we have seen above, that in so far as women and slaves are excluded from the life of the polis, they are excluded from the good life. They are the conditions of the good life rather than participants in it. The conclusion Stauffer draws from this is that, ‘The growth and flourishing of political life is … a good common to both women and men, even if they partake of that good in different ways’ (2008, 939). Her argument is aligned in important respects with both Witt’s emphasis of the normative aspect of Aristotle’s functional and teleological metaphysics and with Jill Frank, who argues that Aristotle was not so much justifying slavery or indicating its ‘immutability’, but rather ‘cal[ling] to ethics and politics understood as perpetual and ongoing activities of boundarysetting and keeping’, ‘Citizens, Slaves and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 98, no. 1 (2004): 91–104, see esp. p. 102. Frank suggests that ‘Aristotle does not use nature to establish the prepolitical and necessary conditions of politics. He treats nature [phusis], instead as a question for politics’ (92). As Frank understands it, ‘Nature is thus not immutable but changeable, and this means that the hierarchy it underwrites, though necessary to politics, will be changeable too’ (2004, 92). Frank argues that for Aristotle ‘human nature is constituted, in large part, by the practice and effects of prohairetic activity [activity based on choice]’ (101) and that ‘Citizen identity is … a product of making and doing, where doing is a kind of self-making (by sharing in the constitution, I make myself a citizen)’ (94). Since politics itself is an ‘art and so a product of human activity’ it ‘produces the institutions that help make citizens slaves’ (99). For Frank, ‘Aristotle seems to imply that human nature is as much a product of the regime under which one lives as it is a regime’s cause’ (102). On this basis she argues that Aristotle’s argument that ‘Asians are naturally slavish’ is an argument about their habituation to tyrannies, which makes them act ‘according to the habits fostered by tyrannies’ (102), regimes that they then reproduce. On this basis, she also argues that ‘The hierarchies of the household and polity are reversible’ (102). Witt argues, ‘The locations of the better principle and the worse principle reflects the value accorded to men and women in Aristotle’s culture’ (1998, 129). On my view, even if we agree that Aristotle infuses ‘his inherently normative metaphysics with the social and political realities of his time’ (1998, 130), this does not necessarily qualify his thinking on the matter as progressive, since to reflect the values of one’s time is also to endorse and perpetuate them. See Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 119. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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1997). Also see Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 33 Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

4

Art as Dissensus: Moving Beyond the Ethical and Representative Regimes with the Help of Kant and Hegel

The purpose of the this chapter is to provide an overview of the three regimes of art Rancière identifies, and to build on the previous chapter in order to understand how dissensus functions to redistribute the sensible, not only in politics but also in terms of art. Rancière’s understanding of dissensus, which is characteristic of, but not completely co-determinate with, the third regime, the aesthetic regime, whereby art or politics creates a split, clash or confrontation of two worlds, is indebted to certain key aspects of Kant and Hegel. Focusing upon this philosophical legacy, I emphasize the permeability of the distinction between art and politics for Rancière, yet at the same time, the importance of not completely collapsing art and politics into one another. Along the way, I suggest there is a sense in which Rancière thinks Lyotard ends up captive to the very representative regime he would escape, despite his best intentions. While he does not share Hegel’s pessimism about the fate of art, nor his teleological conception of history, and he certainly does not affirm the political implications of Hegel’s philosophy, one might say that Rancière radicalizes and generalizes Hegel’s insight that art is art, only insofar as it is something else as well. Rancière allows the consequences of this ‘basic contradiction’ to ramify across the spectrum of art, philosophy and politics in a way that resists the reticence philosophers typically display in the face of the political.1 For inevitably, the question of what kind of thing is a work of art, and whether or how the kind of being we ascribe to it is ultimately distinct from the discourse of philosophy itself, is inhabited, structured and informed by ethical, moral and political commitments. How far these commitments are allowed to explicitly orchestrate philosophical reflections in the field that has come to be identified in the modern period as aesthetics, and how far they remain in the background,

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silently conducting what can and what cannot be said, varies considerably from philosopher to philosopher. What is not in doubt, however, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to definitively separate the ontological hierarchy that is posited between the work of art on the one hand, and the philosophical concept on the other, from any accompanying ethico-political commitments. Whether the latter are explicitly stated, systematically explicated, and definitively defended as in Plato, or merely hinted at and left for the reader to reconstruct, ontology and politics are invariably intertwined to the point of being mutually constitutive of one another when it comes to the question of art. Yet so often, when they do not manage to sidestep the issue altogether, philosophers adopt a mildly apologetic stance regarding the politics of art, such that the political overtones of aesthetics are either minimized, or dismissed as an unfortunate but inessential aspect of their thinking about art. Important exceptions to this include Adorno, whose solution to the relationship between politics and art proves problematic for Rancière, as we will see. In a refreshingly rigorous fashion Rancière resolutely refuses to play down the politics of aesthetics, making this a major feature of his philosophical enquiry, and leading us through the conceptual contours of the history of aesthetics in such a manner as to uncover, rather than downplay, their political commitments. In doing so, not only does he avoid subordinating art to philosophy or philosophy to art, but also eschews the melancholic discourses that follow in the wake of Hegel’s proclamation that art has come to an end, the effort to safeguard art against its alleged impurification by commodification or commercialism we see in Adorno, or the enlisting of art in the service of an ethics of absolute alterity that evacuates or disguises its politics, a gesture Rancière attributes to Levinas and Lyotard. In the case of Plato, who becomes emblematic for Rancière of the ethical reign of images, his political agenda is quite overt. Plato famously subordinates the image to philosophy, on the basis that the artist and the philosopher (whether wittingly or not) should share the same intention, but one falls woefully short, where the other succeeds in asking after the true nature of the intelligible world. The artist is condemned because artistic images fail to measure up to the only standard of value Plato judges to be applicable, which is the standard that philosophy provides. Images are judged to be deficient because they are misleading, because they deceive us about the truth, and as such, they can only play a strictly negative role, one that is detrimental to knowledge; they merely achieve obfuscation. Images are a dangerous distraction from what is deemed

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to be the proper task of philosophy, which is to discover the eternal truth of the Ideas. Plato thus assumes a normative and ontological continuity of images and concepts, but finds the former wanting.2 Since images are simply confused or deficient Ideas, artists are to be outlawed in so far as they are content to sow confusion and perpetuate misinformation. Images are only acceptable for Plato insofar as they uphold the ethical and ontological order of the truth. Bolstering up his elevation of philosophers who pursue true knowledge over poets, whom Plato judges to distract from the truth, is a political division of social classes, such that those who produce images that amount to inferior imitations of true knowledge are relegated to the lower ranks of society. Thus, a rigidly hierarchical sociopolitical order supports, facilitates, permeates and is required by Plato’s condemnation of those whose images he understands to interfere with the true perception of the intelligible world. Rancière emphasizes that Plato’s suspicion of mimesis is not just that it corrupts the truth, but that the mimetician confuses the social order, the division of labour that supports the hierarchy he sets up between images and truth, confining workers to a single role, which excludes them from participating in political deliberation. As such, it is the duality of mimetic activity that is problematic for Plato, who maintains that the artisan is assigned ‘by nature’ to one task only, an assignation that restricts artisans to the private space of their work, which leaves them no time for anything else. Each must operate according to his or her (mythologically assigned) nature, and perform the task for which they are best suited, for the good of the whole. This economic distribution of roles and occupations is also a distribution of place and time, a distribution of the sensible, a distribution that is disrupted by the mimetician who ‘provides a public stage for the “private” principle of work’, and thereby ‘sets up a stage for what is common to the community’ (PA 43). Plato’s view is clearly driven by an ethical agenda that enlists politics in his metaphysical and epistemological commitments. Hence Rancière identifies Plato with what he calls the ethical regime of images. Plato judges images as wanting by the stringent standard of philosophy, and hence judges both those who produce what he takes to be corrupt images of the truth, and those who are deceived by these misleading images, as inferior to philosophers. We can safely assert that few philosophers approach the subject of artistic images with a political agenda that is as overt as Plato’s. Aristotle, whose Poetics inaugurates the representative regime, wants to ‘extract’ tragedy from Plato’s world, which demands of mimetic representations

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an ‘ontological consistency and ethical exemplariness’.3 He seeks instead, to impose on it the ‘order’ of representation. He thinks he can do so by transforming the ‘ethical pathos of knowledge into a stable relationship’ such that mimesis becomes a relationship of concordance between a ‘poiesis’ or ‘a way of making’ and an ‘aesthesis’ or an ‘economy of affects’ (FI 112, DI 129). As royalty, Sophocles’s Oedipus ‘satisfies in exemplary fashion the Aristotelian criterion of the prince who suffers reversals of fortune’ (FI 117, DI 133) in a tragic plot that Aristotle understands to elicit the affects of pity and fear. Rancière’s explication of the features of the representative regime, which he takes to follow on from Plato’s ethical regime, and with which Rancière contrasts the aesthetic regime, emphasizes that it is governed not simply by the ideal of verisimilitude or mimesis. Rather, the representative regime is characterized by a host of conventions concerning the propriety or impropriety of what can and cannot be represented, what it is appropriate to represent and what not, what can be seen and heard, and what cannot, what should be felt and what not. Ultimately then, the representative regime turns out to comprise a series of rules and regulations that dictate what can be represented and how it should be represented, and therefore also what cannot be represented: ‘If there are things that cannot be represented’, says Rancière, ‘it is precisely in this regime’ (FI 117, DI 133). Far from art being representative in any straightforward, objective and impartial way, it has always been highly selective in what it depicts, in the manner in which it represents, and in terms of the audience it assumes. The grounding presupposition of the representative regime, as Rancière understands it, is that it defines some subjects as appropriate for artistic representation, while ruling out others as inappropriate (see FI 117-18, DI 133-34). In an extended example that Rancière develops in relation to the representative regime, he suggests that when, in 1659, Pierre Corneille decides to stage his own version of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, he introduces a series of changes designed to render appropriate that which he finds inappropriate. Corneille thus moves offstage two elements that he judges to be excessive, namely the spectacle of Oedipus gouging out his own eyes and the oracles delivered by Tiresias, which he considers to reveal too much too soon. Corneille also introduces new characters, which allows him to include a love interest. Rancière understands Corneille’s manipulation of the plot as a judgement that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy on the one hand, failed to control the excesses of Sophocles’s Oedipus, and on the other hand, failed to rigorously subordinate the logic of the play to the logic of action. The key to Rancière’s understanding of the

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representative regime, and to representation ‘as such’ (FI 112, DI 128), is the idea that if an element is found to violate the rules of what passes for appropriate, that element can be changed, such that it becomes appropriate. The ‘pathos of knowledge’ – which, Rancière suggests, Corneille understands to exceed the logic Aristotle seeks to impose on the tragic genre, of which he considers Oedipus Rex exemplary – refers to the intricate imbrication that pertains between Oedipus’s insistence on knowing ‘beyond the bounds of what is reasonable’, and Tiresias the blind prophet, who does not want to say what he knows, but who ‘says it without saying it’ and thereby prompts the reversion of Oedipus’s ‘desire to know into a refusal to hear’ (FI 114, DI 130). The logic of peripeteia, or reversal in terms of which Aristotle reads Oedipus – whose active knowledge turns to passive suffering, on his discovery that the criminal he seeks is none other than himself – is situated within Aristotle’s effort to harmonize ‘an autonomous arrangement of actions and the bringing into operation of affects’ (FI 115, DI 131). The audience comes to recognize and identify with ‘feelings, volitions and conflicts of will’ (FI 116, DI 132) across the distance that separates them from the ‘fictional entities’ (FI 116, DI 132) presented in characters that are ‘removed in space and time’ (FI 113, DI 129), and who therefore facilitate a dual dynamic of distance and identification. For Corneille, then, Aristotle’s logic cannot contain the excess of Oedipus, whose gesture of blinding himself is too much, too monstrous. It violates the ‘dependency of the visible on speech’ (FI 113, DI 129), which subordinates visibility to the peculiar kind of ‘quasi-visibility’ that constitutes speech. For speech shows without showing; it shows, but it does not show too much. Drawing on Edmund Burke’s explication of the sublime, Rancière says, ‘The descriptions of Hell and the angel of evil in Paradise Lost produce a sublime impression because they do not allow us to see the forms they evoke and affect to show us’ (FI 113, DI 129).4 Were Milton to have shown these forms, the suggestion is, the sublime would have become grotesque, or monstrous, in the same way that Oedipus’s self-blinding is judged as monstrous, and therefore in need of correction, by Corneille. Speech must show that which is hidden or absent through an ‘under-determination’ of speech or through its ‘own failing, its restraint’ (FI 113, DI 129-30). Not only does Oedipus, in Corneille’s assessment, go too far, so too does Tiresias, whose oracles say too much, giving away more than they should, and thus violating the logic of suspense and gradual revelation. They too are moved offstage by Corneille. Thus, an ‘excess of knowledge … thwarts the

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ordered unfolding of significations and revelations’ and an ‘excess of pathos … thwarts the free operation of the spectator’s affects’ (FI 115, DI 131). Further, Corneille ‘subjects the pathos of knowledge to a logic of action’ by introducing new characters, including, among others, a sister for Oedipus and a love interest for her. In providing other characters to whom the oracles (which in fact refer to Oedipus) might refer, Corneille thereby imposes a logic of intelligibility that subordinates the ‘ethical pathos of tragedy’ to a ‘logic of dramatic action’ (FI 116, DI 132) by identifying the causality of action with that of characters. Summing up, Rancière claims that the representative regime employs a ‘triple constraint’ (FI 120, DI 136). First, there is a ‘visibility of speech that organizes a certain restraint of the visible’ (FI 120, DI 136). When too much is shown and too much is said too soon, it must be circumscribed. Secondly, this regime adjusts the ‘relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects’, governing them by the primacy of action. Some actions are removed from sight, while others are subordinated to the introduction of new characters. Thirdly, the representative regime adopts a ‘rationality peculiar to fiction’. 5 This regime of rationality ‘exempts its speech acts from the normal criteria of authenticity and utility of words and images’ and subjects them to ‘intrinsic criteria of verisimilitude and appropriateness’ (FI 120, DI 136). If Aristotle’s Poetics, which hails Oedipus Rex as a model, inaugurates the representative regime for Rancière, this is because it institutes an order in which two hierarchies correspond to one another, that of form over matter, and the distinction of two types of humanity. The tragic poet is understood to impose an appropriate form on events. The plot is organized in such a way as to render the actions of characters intelligible and to elicit appropriate emotions. While what is judged appropriate might change over time, what remains is that ‘the dignity’ of the ‘forms’ of artwork is ‘attached to the dignity of their subjects and different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’ (AD 12, ME 23). It is this correspondence between the subordination of passive matter to active form, and the domination of a class of people of refined sensibility capable of taste, over a class of people whose unrefined taste marks them as those for whom art should not be of concern that Rancière sees the aesthetic regime as suspending (see DMC 176-7), signalling the end of the ‘reign of free form over slavish matter’ (AD 32, ME 47-48).6 Thus there is a dual suspension of power, that of ‘form over matter’ and the corresponding suspension of the ‘power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of men of culture over men of nature’ (AD 31, ME 46). Rancière credits the communicability in Kant’s ‘aesthetic universality’, which he

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reads through Friedrich Schiller (see DMC 176), for displacing this model of domination, according to which an ‘active intellectual faculty constrains passive sensible materiality. The aesthetic suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity makes itself thus into the principle of a more profound revolution, a revolution of sensible existence’ (AD 32, ME 48). Against the background of the regulatory schema for what can and cannot be shown that characterize the representative regime, unfolds the aesthetic regime, in which poetry is ‘anywhere and everywhere’ (FI 122, DI 138), and where the conventions for representation that circumscribe art in the representative regime, as rules for appropriate versus inappropriate subject matter, are abandoned. ‘There are no longer rules of appropriateness between a particular subject and a particular form, but a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever’, says Rancière (FI 118, DI 134). In the aesthetic regime there are no limits placed on representation. Consequently, not only is it the case that, as Rancière puts it, ‘There is nothing that is “unrepresentable” in the aesthetic regime of art’ (DAR 131), but neither are there any intrinsic objects of art.7 This then becomes the hallmark of the aesthetic regime as Rancière understands it: the porosity of the category of art, its impermanence, its permeability. The boundary between art and ordinary life is constantly under negotiation. When Marcel Duchamp shocks the world by placing a urinal in a museum and calling it art, he might be taken to illustrate Rancière’s thesis that ‘common objects may cross the border’ (DAR 125). Objects from ordinary life can become art.8 When the museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University devoted to teaching toleration puts on display an ashtray bearing a caricatured Jezebel, the ashtray ceases to be a commodity and becomes art. As Rancière says, ‘By becoming obsolete … any commodity or familiar article becomes available for art’ (DAR 126). So too, the statue of Juno Ludovisi is art ‘for us’ in the modern, contemporary world in a way that it was not for the Greeks. For the Greeks, according to Schiller and Hegel, Juno Ludovisi was an object of religious veneration in an epoch when art had not yet separated itself from life. It was not yet art in the sense that it embodied, rather, the collective, cultural and religious values of its people, while for ‘us’ the statue is no longer a religious icon. It no longer appears in the context of the world of the Greeks, the world in which it was constituted, harmoniously and seamlessly, as part of life itself, a world in which art did not yet occupy a separate domain from that of life. Torn from this world, the statue now appears in a museum. As such it is available as art to anyone who visits the museum, but it has lost the original function it had for the Greeks, as an expression of life, an expression of religious values.

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Among the consequences of the continual renegotiation of the boundary separating works of art and the objects of ordinary life, in which can be discerned the Hegelian legacy of the historicity of art, is that objects which previously did not register as art can become art. Whether or not this Hegelian narrative about the seamless meshing of art and life for the Greeks is accurate is less significant for Rancière, than what it tells us about the historical status of the category of art, which shows itself to be malleable, shifting, contingent and unstable. Rather than taking up historicity in a teleological narrative, Rancière develops a narrative around a series of overlapping regimes, three regimes, which do not operate mutually exclusively of one another, but which are nevertheless associated with selective features of a historical sequence of philosophical figures (see PA 50) – first Plato, then Aristotle, then, most notably in the aesthetic regime, Kant and Hegel. Rancière abstracts certain moments from Kant and Hegel, in the service of a larger narrative he wants to tell. Rancière’s deployment of Kant and Hegel in the aesthetic regime is driven less by any exhaustive exegetical fidelity, and more by a highly selective appropriation of certain ideas. His understanding of dissensus and the aesthetic free play is informed by the interplay of the faculties in Kant’s aesthetic judgement, yet at the same time, his understanding of art is informed by the influence of Hegel, especially that aspect of his thinking that Rancière summarizes and distils into the phrase the ‘identity of opposites’, an identity that Rancière also applies beyond its Hegelian application, to Kant’s understanding of genius, for example.9 Rancière detaches these ideas from the philosophical and political architecture that supports them, an ahistorical transcendentalism and cosmopolitanism in Kant, and a teleological vision of world history in Hegel. Rancière is indebted to only certain aspects of Kant and Hegel; his readings are partial, motivated – one might even say his readings are dissensual. Rancière sets Kant and Hegel against themselves, by aligning his contemporaries such as Jean-François Lyotard with precisely those aspects of Kant and Hegel from which he disassociates himself. In Rancière’s view, Lyotard requires of sublime art that it become an art of witnessing the unrepresentable, of testifying to the unthinkable. The art of witnessing is the art that comes at the end of Hegelian thought, after dialectical thought has attempted to cancel all alterity through its logic of determinate negation. The Holocaust is figured as the event that surpasses all efforts to think it. The ‘flash of lightening that traverses the monochrome of a canvas by Barnett Newman’ testifies ‘not to the naked horror of the camps but to the original terror of the mind’ (FI 134, DI 149),

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that is to the ‘unthinkability’ of extermination and to the ‘unthinkable project of eliminating this unthinkability’ (FI 134, DI 149). Rancière thus resists the suggestion that the Holocaust demands the invention of a peculiar language, a language of the unrepresentable (see FI 124, DI 140). To claim that this is a trauma beyond all traumas that requires a language unique to its unspeakability is problematic both because it privileges this one event over others, as if by definition it is more unthinkable than other traumas, and because it runs counter to a defining feature of the aesthetic regime, in which there is nothing that is unrepresentable. To appeal to the ‘irreducible singularity of certain events’, Rancière points out, in fact, amounts to a claim that ‘some things can only be represented in a certain type of form’ (FI 137, DI 153). Thus in Rancière’s view, to assert the unrepresentability of a particular event is ‘vacuous’ (FI 137, DI 153). It is to express the desire that ‘in the very regime which abolishes the representative suitability of forms to subjects, appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the exception still exist’ (FI 137, DI 153). Yet, insofar as he endows the abstract expressionism of Newman – or ‘any other procedure whereby painting carries out an exploration of its materials when they are diverted from the task of representation’ (FI 134, DI 149) – with the responsibility of being the only form of art capable of signifying the unrepresentable, Lyotard casts the Jewish people as those who remember the forgetting of the Other. Against his best intentions in Rancière’s view, Lyotard thereby capitulates to the Hegelian trope of making a form of art stand for a historical people in a particular moment of the ‘development of Spirit’ (FI 134, DI 150). Lyotard claims that the unthinkability of the Holocaust resists ‘dialectical assimilation’ (FI 134, FI 149), yet sees the ‘professed unthinkability of extermination’ as ‘a tendency constitutive of Western reason’ (FI 134, DI 150). In Rancière’s view, Lyotard thereby transforms what Adorno considered to be ‘the “impossibility” of art after Auschwitz into an art of the unpresentable’ (FI 134, DI 150) and thus perfects dialectical thinking rather than resisting it. The critical distance Rancière takes from Lyotard takes shape as a demonstration that to maintain the unrepresentability of the Holocaust is in fact to fall back into the unacknowledged assumptions that govern the representative regime. Having suggested that at the heart of the representative regime lies an appeal to rules that govern what is appropriate to represent, what is inappropriate and what forms are appropriate for what content, Rancière inscribes Lyotard’s insistence on construing the Holocaust as unrepresentable as a throwback to the regulatory scheme governing what can and cannot be represented. At the same

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time, Rancière sees Lyotard as inadvertently subscribing to a Hegelian narrative that makes certain forms of art uniquely suited for a specific subject. If Lyotard is assimilated into Hegel’s penchant for making forms of art representative of historical peoples, and for perfecting, rather than resisting, dialectical thinking, he is also chastised for championing the Kantian sublime. Rancière sees Lyotard as emphasizing the Kantian sublime at the expense of Kant’s analysis of the beautiful. Contrary to what he sees as the undue emphasis of the sublime by thinkers such as Lyotard, Rancière is more interested in Kant’s discussion of the beautiful, in which he already finds dissensus. Rancière is critical of the ethical undertones he sees in Lyotard’s appeal to the sublime as a discourse of the unrepresentable. Just as Rancière associates Lyotard with those aspects of Hegel he finds unappealing, so he distances himself from the discourse of the sublime, which is so central to Lyotard’s engagement with Kant. By holding up the art of Newman, Primo Levi and Robert Antelme as exemplary because this art testifies to the absolute alterity of the other that Western thought has suppressed, Lyotard in fact requires the art of the unrepresentable, the task of which is to witness ‘the unthinkable at the heart of thought’ (FI 131, DI 147), to take on a representative function. Its representative function is to stand for an ethics of alterity, an ethics that marks the absolute otherness of the unthinkable in its unthinkability. Levinas also takes his place, along with Lyotard as a target for Rancière, who finds problematic what he calls the ethical turn in philosophy, which he understands as an evacuation of the political that thereby not only capitulates to representationalist norms with regard to what passes for appropriate, but at the same time revives certain aspects of the ethical regime with which he associates the name of Plato. Kant and Hegel signal the aesthetic regime, which introduces disorder into the ‘mimetic legislation’ (AD 7, ME 16) that Rancière takes to govern the conformity that pertains for Aristotle between poeisis as a way of doing and aesthesis as a way of being affected. Aesthetics effect a break in this adequation of productive nature to receptive nature, a rupture of the threefold relation between mimesis, poeisis and aesthesis that organizes Aristotle’s account of poetic technique.10 The free play of understanding and imagination of Kant’s aesthetic judgement is read through the politicizing lens of Schiller, such that the promise of universality is also a promise of equality, while the creativity of Kantian genius resides in the passivity of not willing, of being governed by no law.11 Aesthetic judgement and the genius who is unaware of what he does become sites in which the domination of active form over passive matter is

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recast, where activity and passivity no longer oppose one another according to the hierarchies of the representative regime, where the subordination of nature to cognition is suspended, as is sensibility’s requirement of an object of desire (see AD 30, ME 45), and where there are no longer two classes of humanity. The paradox that characterizes the aesthetic regime is the neither/ nor of Kant’s aesthetic idea, the fact that it conforms neither to an ‘object of knowledge’ nor to an ‘object of desire’ (DMC 173), but inhabits a gap between the subordination of sensory perception to understanding by the categories, and the subordination of affections to the search for the good. Aesthetic judgement is neither conceptual determination, where the ‘anarchy of sensation’ (DAR 117) is subsumed by an already available concept, nor is it the reasoning of the moral law. Just as Kant’s aesthetic idea inhabits this in between region, in a manner Kant characterizes by the oscillating movement of imagination and understanding, so Kant’s theory of genius embodies the paradox of artistic will that is not willed (see AD 10, ME 19). The artist as genius is a creator who creates without knowing what he is doing, without a law; a law unto himself, the genius breaks new ground, formulating a new law for others to follow.12 The genius of the artist consists in the paradoxical fact that the artist does not know what he or she does. Art is ‘the manifestation of a thought that is unaware of itself in a sensible element that is torn from the ordinary conditions of sensory experience’ (DMC 174). If Kant’s aesthetic judgement (as neither cognition nor morality) and his theory of the genius who does not know what he does are dissensual moments for Rancière, he also finds dissensus in Hegel. The dissensus that Kant introduces in aesthetic judgement, and in his theory of the genius is taken up by Hegel, in Rancière’s narrative, in his commitment to the contradictory thesis that art is only art insofar as it is also something else. Art is art insofar as it is also not art, ‘inasmuch as it is something else than art’ (DAR 123). Specifically, he finds it in the ‘contradictory mutation’ (AD 8, ME 18) of the status of art that Hegel thinks through. On the one hand, there is a ‘new historicity’ (AD 8, ME 18), signalled by the ‘distance’ separating ‘us’ from the world of the Greeks, where art was not yet separate from life, so that the Greek statue becomes art for ‘us’ in a way it was not for the Greeks.13 For the Greeks, the statue is a figure of religious devotion, which was not aimed at as art (see DAR 118). On the other hand, a transformation takes place with the institution of the museum, such that art is open to the gaze of an ‘undifferentiated public’ (AD 9, ME 18), rather than being addressed to the patron or the one who commissioned it, or devoted to the celebration of

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seigniorial splendour or religious ritual. ‘The effect of these displacements’, says Rancière, ‘was to accentuate the sensible singularity of works and to undermine not only their representative value but also the hierarchy of subjects and genres according to which they were classified and judged’ (AD 9, ME 18). Thus, when Hegel re-evaluates paintings from the Netherlands, depicting scenes of ‘domestic and civic life’ (DAR 122-3) rather than religious figures, a series of shifts take place. The type of subjects that are represented, the prominence of the figurative, the boundary between art and commerce, and the relation between form and matter, all undergo transformation. In these paintings, which had enjoyed a certain amount of commercial success, it is the ‘gesture of the painter and the manifestations of pictorial matter’ that asserts itself rather than the ‘figurative subject’. The subject is pushed into the background, and the picture is ‘transformed into an archive of its own process’ (AD 9, ME 18-19). The aesthetic regime breaks with the rules governing what is appropriate and what is inappropriate, and with the model that imposes active form on passive matter, that is, ‘in-appropriation is constitutive’ of the aesthetic regime (AD 11, ME 22). For Rancière, the ‘break with representation in art is not emancipation from resemblance, but the emancipation of resemblance from … the triple constraint’ (FI 120, DI 136) of the representative regime. The emblematic hero of the aesthetic regime is none other than Oedipus, since he is the ‘one who knows and does not know, who acts absolutely and suffers absolutely’ (FI 118-19, DI 134). Oedipus thus exemplifies the ‘identity of opposites’ (FI 119, DI 135), an identity of wanting and not wanting, thought and non-thought, activity and passivity. The aesthetic regime ‘counterposes to the norms of representative action an absolute power of making’ yet at the same time it ‘identifies the power of this unconditioned production with absolute passivity’ (FI 119, DI 134-35). The contradiction of this identity of opposites is precisely embodied in Kant’s theory of genius, for the genius gives the law to himself, ‘and does not know what he is doing’ (FI 119, DI 135). The aesthetic regime, then, does not indicate the end of resemblance, it indicates that the rules excluding certain subjects from representation no longer apply. It indicates an equality of representation, where ‘Everything is equal, equally representable’ (FI 120, DI 136). Rancière suggests that in the aesthetic regime speech is no longer a way of making visible, as it was in the representative regime. Rather ‘an equality of the visible invades discourse and paralyzes action’ (FI 121, DI 137). More specifically, ‘speech is invaded

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by a specific property of the visible: its passivity’ (FI 121, DI 137). Instead of transparency, there is ‘opacity’ (FI 121, DI 137). What confronts us in the aesthetic regime is not action but description; there is a ‘primacy of description over action’ (FI 121, DI 137). Here we find a ‘form of the visible that does not make visible’, but rather, ‘deprives action of its powers of intelligibility’ (FI 121, DI 137). The ‘absolute freedom of art’ is ‘identified with the absolute passivity of physical matter’ (FI 126, DI 142), an identification that Rancière takes to be as characteristic of Flaubert as it is of Antelme (see FI 124-25, DI 140-41). Thus the ‘powers of ordered distribution of knowledge-effects and pathos effects’ (FI 121, DI 137) that governed Aristotle’s conception of poetics are upset. So too the privilege the representative regime assigned to theatrical space as a ‘space of visibility’ is revoked (FI 122, DI 138). Rancière suggests that the ‘organic totality’ that organized meaning for Aristotle ‘is now absorbed into little perceptions, each of which is affected by the power of the whole’ (FI 121, DI 137). He draws on Antelme’s ‘paratactic syntax’ (FI 125, DI 141) to illustrate the ‘appeal to minimal auditory and visual experience’, displaying ‘a logic of minor perceptions added to one another’ (FI 125, DI 141). This ‘paratactic style’ that Antelme adopts is not ‘specific’ (FI 126, DI 142) to the experience Antelme conveys, but rather echoes the style of Flaubert. The minimalist language in which Antelme states plainly a succession of events is the same language in which Flaubert describes how Emma and Charles experience the sounds of a farmyard in Madame Bovary. Here is Antelme: ‘I went outside to take a piss. It wasn’t yet daylight’ [Je suis allé pisser. Il faisait encore nuit] (FI 125, DI 141), and here is Flaubert: ‘She did not speak, neither did Charles. … He could hear nothing but the throbbing inside his head and the cackle of a laying hen somewhere away in the farmyard’ (FI 125, DI 141).14 Such language becomes, for Rancière, the ‘common language of literature’ in the aesthetic regime, ‘in which the absolute freedom of art’ is ‘identified with the absolute passivity of physical matter’ (FI 126, DI 142). It is a language used not only by Antelme and Levi, but also by Flaubert and in Albert Camus’s L’étranger. This is not a language called up by the unrepresentable, of that which is somehow beyond available literary tools. It is the language of everyday use. If the commonplace language of the ordinary is used to capture events that are extraordinary and inhuman, this suggests, contrary to Lyotard, not that there are events – nor indeed a singular event – that are by definition unrepresentable or unthinkable. If ordinary language seems inadequate or inappropriate for the

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task of representing the Holocaust, this is not because of the inherent resistance of any specific event to representation, but is reflective rather, in Rancière’s view, of the ‘principled identity of appropriate and inappropriate’ that ‘is the very stamp of the aesthetic regime’ (FI 126, DI 142). Rancière understands art and politics in the aesthetic regime as capable of effecting different types of dissensus.15 To understand the relationship between art as dissensus and politics as dissensus, we must understand that Rancière takes up the essentially Hegelian contradiction that art is always also something other than art as the paradox of the aesthetic regime, a paradox that is not, however, to be resolved in Hegelian fashion by ultimately prioritizing one pole over another such that a hierarchy results, whereby life is posited above art, or indeed art above life as an unrealizable goal to be striven for. Rather, this tension is to be inhabited, kept alive, revived, with a vigilance that prevents art collapsing into a social ideal and thereby avoids the dangers potentially accompanying such a collapse, not the least of which are the dangers of art succumbing to totalitarianism, on the one hand, and the false pretension of art to purism, on the other hand (Adorno and Lyotard). Were art guaranteed to be completely successful in eliciting certain affects and in motivating certain reactions, it would succeed in its political aspirations precisely to the extent that it also succeeded in evacuating its status as art, in no longer being art, but in becoming politics. We can think this through by referring to an example of a work that Rancière thinks risks completely collapsing art into politics, such that nothing is left of art except a political message, where art disappears and all that is left is a slogan.16 Rancière takes a critical distance from artists such as Martha Rosler, whose ‘photomontages accentuat[e] the heterogeneity of elements’ (ES 28, SE 33), for example Balloons, a work that is part of the series ‘Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful’ (1967/72) in which Rosler registered her protest against the Vietnam War.17 Against the background of a serene domestic space, a man holds a dead child in his arms; Rancière says, ‘the image of the dead child could not be integrated into the beautiful exterior without exploding it’ (ES 28; SE 33). This heterogeneous clash is intended to ‘reveal the imperialist violence behind the happy display of goods and images’ (ES 29; SE 36). Rosler’s art is intended to ‘sho[w] the spectator what she does not know how to see, and mak[e] her feel ashamed of what she does not want to see’ (ES 29-30; SE 36). Such an artist, as Rancière sees it, adopts the pedagogical position of the one who knows, one whose art will play a revelatory role, in which the artist adopts the position of the expert whose task it is to enlighten an

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ignorant viewer in order to mobilize action in the form of a graphic presentation of a contradiction to underline the hypocrisy of the military industrial complex endemic to capitalism. In so doing, Rancière suggests that Rosler’s art loses its identity in serving the unambiguously political, agenda-driven message that the capitalist war machine is hypocritical. The question Rancière raises is whether in making these points, a work of art becomes too didactic to remain a work of art in any meaningful sense, or whether it crosses a definitive line and becomes politics. In construing politics as a matter of staging, of making visible, the miscount as a leaving out of account those who have no part, Rancière understands politics in the sense of dissensus, as a conflict of worlds, a conflict about the meaning of the perceptible, indeed about the very availability of that which can be seen and heard. At the same time, it is a conflict about who is legitimated to speak and interpret what there is to be seen and heard, and to have their interpretations count. Dissensus puts into question what passes for common sense, the ‘police’ order of consensus, and thus provides the possibility of shaping meaning and intelligibility, the seeing of what there is to see, and the hearing of what there is to hear in a new way.18 The very possibilities of seeing or hearing, of perceiving the world, are renewed, such that the transcendental is subjected to a radically contingent, historical process, by which subjects who previously did not count not only insist on being counted, but in doing so change the terms in which subjectivity is thought, and therefore revise the conditions of possibility both of what it means to be a subject and also what it means to both think and perceive.19 For Rancière then, it is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of politics as consensual, which claims to speak for all but in fact speaks only for those who govern the terms on which claims are deemed to have or lack intelligibility. It is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of art that takes itself to be representative, but in fact consists of a set of highly specific and exclusive norms that dictate what can and cannot be represented, how it should be represented, and who is entitled to judge it. Expressed positively, it is a question of seeing what happens when politics is reconceived not as consensus but as dissensus, when representation is no longer restricted by rules of appropriateness, where the operative model of art is porous, rather than a model that secures the boundaries of art by preserving its purity from contamination by everything it stipulates as something other than art.

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Notes 1 Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, Dissensus, p. 118. Hereafter cited in the text as DAR, followed by page number. 2 Of course, it is more complicated than this in that the very dialogues in which Plato dramatizes the views Socrates and his interlocutors exchange are themselves works of art. This is not an aspect of the Platonic dialogues that Rancière emphasizes. 3 Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009), p. 116; Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), p. 132. Hereafter cited in the text as FI, DI. 4 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited by James T. Boulton (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 61–4. 5 In this particular formulation, like so many others have done before him, Rancière, privileges literary art above other genres (even if he allows that poems or paintings can be identified with a story). 6 In the aesthetic regime, there is a ‘rupture of agreement between the rules of art and the laws of sensibility which distinguished the classical representative order. In this order, active form was imposed on passive matter via the rules of art. And the pleasure experienced was taken as verification that the rule of artistic poiesis corresponded to the laws of sensibility. It was taken as verification by those senses could be taken as veridical witnesses: men of taste and men of a refined nature as distinct from those of an uncultured nature’ (DMC 175-6). 7 See also FI 137, DI 153. 8 See Rancière in ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, pp. 291–3. 9 For a good discussion of Hegel’s influence on Rancière see Alison Ross, ‘Equality in the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian Background to Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Revolution’ in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, edited by Jean-Philipe Deranty and Alison Ross (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 87–98. In the present discussion, I explore the dual influence of Kant and Hegel on Rancière’s aesthetic regime, as well as showing how Rancière distances himself from Lyotard. 10 It is the loss of a humanity for whom art was not yet separate to life that undoes the adequation of productive nature to receptive nature. Hence the melancholic nostalgia of those who seek to restore the lost world that is, perhaps, retrospectively imposed on the Greeks. 11 Rancière sees in Kant’s theory of genius an ‘equivalence between the will and the unwilled’ (AD 10, ME 19).

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12 I refer to the genius in gendered terms that reflect Kant’s assumptions, which remain untouched by Rancière. In Chapter 7, I suggest that these terms need to be analysed. 13 Rancière emphasizes that art is art only so far as it ‘expresses a thought unclear to itself in a matter that resists it. It lives inasmuch as it is something else than art, namely a belief and a way of life’ (DAR 123). Hegel’s account of art as part of the ‘plot of the spirit of forms’ yields an ‘ambiguous historicity of art’ (DAR 123). ‘On the one hand … the life of art as an expression of history’ has an autonomy that is ‘open to hew kinds of development’, but on the other hand, this plot ‘entails a verdict of death’ for art, since, ‘When art is no more than art, it vanishes. When the content of thought is transparent to itself and when no matter resists it, this success means the end of art’ (DAR 123-124). What Hegel sees as the ‘limit’ to the Greek artist, is also the ‘condition for the success of the work of art’ (DAR 123). The artist wants to express divinity, but can only conceive of it as ‘deprived of interiority’ (DAR 123). Clearly informing Hegel’s view is the assumption that philosophy can express better than art can, more clearly, what art tries but fails to express. In other words, in a way that is similar to Plato, he assumes the illegitimacy of art on the basis of the ontological superiority of the concept. The ‘history of the forms of art’ is ‘a history of the forms of mind’ (AD 8, ME 17-18), and it is a history that assumes the superiority of a culture that has divided subjects and objects, mind from matter, form from content, freedom from nature, only to cast a nostalgic look back to the Greeks for whom these divisions were not yet in place in the same way, and to draw on them in order to project a future in which culture fulfils itself as nature. 14 See Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 35. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, IL: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1998), p. 9. 15 This does not mean that all art in the aesthetic regime operates dissensually. The three regimes Rancière articulates are not understood as mutually exclusive of one another, so that, for example, representative art can persist under the aesthetic regime, and the aesthetics of such art can have elements of the ethical regime. In Rancière’s view, Lyotard attributes to Barnett Newman’s art a representative function that has ethical overtones, despite Lyotard’s own effort to construe Newman’s art as the art of unrepresentable. 16 Rancière questions both the idea of politics (as social cohesion or consensus) and the idea of art as education, understood on the pedagogical model, where the artist is set up as the one who knows and the spectator plays the part of a passive ignoramus, where the artist’s intention is understood on the model of the active imposition of form on the passivity. This imposition is thus taken to refer not only

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to the material of the work that receives form but also to the minds of the audience assumed not to know. 17 See http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/195582 18 See the interview with Rancière, ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière with Gabriel Rockhill’ (PA 65). 19 See PA 50.

5

Framing and Reframing Rancière’s Critical Intervention: Foucault and Kant

In this chapter I follow, sometimes closely and sometimes more loosely, the conceptual development of an essay in which Rancière tackles head-on what I take to be the central defining issue of his work, namely, how to construe the relation between art and politics. At the same time, I situate Rancière’s argument in the essay ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’ in the context of some of his most decisive philosophical precursors, drawing strategically on some key texts and ideas in his broader corpus, and developing some suggestions embedded in his critical interventions to indicate two of the decisive framing mechanisms on which he draws in explicating his argument. I adopt this approach as it seems particularly suited to shed light on Rancière’s thinking, the articulation of which is often strewn with shorthand phrases which summarily condense complex moves he elaborates more fluidly, with more precision and exactitude, elsewhere in his corpus. I expand the suggestion broached in the previous chapter that Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime is indebted both to Kant and to Hegel (though I focus more upon Kant in this chapter) by showing that it is in inheriting and reinvigorating a Foucauldian problematic that Rancière effects a displacement of Kant’s transcendental approach, while at the same time breathing new life into Hegel’s dialectical reconciliation of opposites. I will specify two respects in which Rancière’s argument is indebted to Foucault. If Rancière’s modification of Foucault can be identified as a more immediate framing mechanism, he also embeds this framework within a wider retrospective historical sweep, which, as we have seen, looks back to Plato and Aristotle, in terms of whom he specifies the ethical and representative regimes, elements of which still inhabit contemporary politics of art. This is not of course to suggest that there are no other decisive philosophical influences on Rancière,

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only to elaborate the way in which I think these key figures play into Rancière’s philosophical framing and formulations. Let me begin by describing the specific polemic in terms of which Rancière’s argument advances, before going on to frame it in the broader contexts indicated above. At one level, the narrative arc of ‘Paradoxes’ moves from one model of the efficacy of art to another, from a pedagogical model to a dissensual or paradoxical model. The polemical insight that informs this shift, which will be the focus of this chapter, is wielded against contemporary art that takes itself to be politically subversive, yet remains entrenched in pedagogical logics that fail to move beyond the mimetic assumptions of the ethical and representative regimes that Rancière articulates, and which constitute the conceptual architecture against which his arguments unfold. As we have seen, Rancière suggests that pedagogical logic posits an unproblematic, direct causal relationship between the intention animating the artist and the spectator viewing art. The artwork is the vehicle that transmits or conveys to the audience a transformative effect; the artist’s intention is to mobilize the spectator’s intervention into the situation exposed by the artist, eliciting a particular understanding of the world and specific effects, the purpose of which is therefore corrective of spectator behaviour. ‘This logic’, says Rancière, ‘posits that what the viewer sees … is a set of signs formed according to an artist’s intention. By recognizing these signs the spectator is supposedly induced into a specific reading of the world around us, leading, in turn, to the feeling of a certain proximity or distance, and ultimately to the spectator’s intervening into the situation staged by the author’ (DPA 135-6). Rancière problematizes the economy of affects, and the distribution of activity and passivity operative in this model of efficacy, which is embedded in a conception of the relationship between art and politics that he brings into question. Unlike the mimetic gestures characteristic of the pedagogical logics governing the representative and ethical regimes, and into which contemporary politics of art inadvertently relapses, Rancière calls for an understanding of the efficacy of art in relation to dissensus – a dissensual or paradoxical model governs art’s efficacy. For Rancière, not only do art and politics constitute different forms of dissensus, but also the relation between politics and art itself is to be understood in terms of dissensus. He understands dissensus as a specific type of disagreement or conflict, one in which sense dissents from itself. By dissensus, Rancière designates a conflict between ‘sense’ as ‘sensory perception’ and ‘sense’ as the ‘regime of meaning’ that consensus enforces (see DPA 139 and DPA 144). The notion of dissensus, where sense, understood as sensory

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perception, dissents from sense understood as a regime of meaning, is key for understanding the aesthetic regime. In a move that will need to be unpacked, Rancière situates the politics of art within a complex network of logics that he describes as the ‘criss-crossing’ of what he calls the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ (DPA 148). The mistake of the pedagogical logic of the politics of art that Rancière targets is to suppose that there is a direct relation of cause and effect between what an artist intends, and a political transformation in the world. ‘There is no straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world, and none from intellectual awareness to political action’ (DPA 143). To assume that artistic intention will elicit an intended effect on the world is to assume that there is a real world outside of the world of art. As Rancière understands it, there is no such reality ‘outside of art’ (DPA 148). There are, rather, a series of fictions, artistic fictions and political fictions, so many modes of constructing or framing the world. The ‘police order’ is the name Rancière gives to the fiction that lays claim to an indisputable reality, by suggesting that there is only one meaning, a univocal meaning, which is self-evidently true. Politics disrupts the police order of the sensible. It enacts dissensus. The ‘police order is that which passes itself off as the real’ (DPA 148), as the natural (DPA 139), as reality itself. The police order ‘feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances’ (DPA 148-9), appealing to the self-evidence of the particular construction of reality it promotes as reality. Dissensus intervenes in and reconfigures the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (DPA 141) that the police order establishes and legitimates as common sense. Allowing this brief outline of ‘Paradoxes’ to stand as an initial tour of some of its major conceptual and heuristic contours, let me develop the strategic directions and emphases within which I want to situate the concepts I have cursorily introduced, several of which will need to be parsed more carefully. Rancière’s appropriation of Foucault can be understood as the first of two framing mechanisms within which he embeds his analysis of contemporary art that takes itself to be politically subversive, but relies upon the most didactic of gestures characteristic of the ethical and representative regimes, and on the most problematic of metaphysical assumptions. This first framing mechanism, which remains implicit in ‘Paradoxes’, can be specified in two respects, one of which is telegraphed by Rancière’s references to ideology, consensus and economic globalization, and underwritten by Foucault’s critique of neo-liberalism.1 Rancière sees the causal logic operative in the return to politics effected by

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contemporary art as a throwback to the classical theatre of the eighteenth century, which, however, itself replays a basically Aristotelian model of poetics, and as such participates in the representative regime. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already brought into question the mimetic model assumed by the classical dramas of Moliére and Voltaire, whose moralizing theatre is intended to correct the behaviour of spectators, as if the display of virtues and vices onstage could directly impact on how people act in ‘real’ life. If Rancière, like Rousseau, is critical of positing any straightforward causal connection between actors dramatizing a situation on stage and the correction of spectators’ behaviour in the ‘real’ world, Rancière is equally critical of the solution that Rousseau proposes. For, in rejecting one form of pedagogical logic, Rousseau merely embraces another, in nostalgically advocating a return to the unity embodied in the ‘Greek City Festival’, where art is at the same time the embodiment of community (DPA 137). Even as he puts into question the idea that by exposing hypocrisy or displaying tolerance or intolerance onstage actors can directly affect the behaviour of an audience, Rousseau returns to a model of ethical immediacy, which Rancière finds just as problematic as the representative mediation to which Rousseau objects. To be political, in the sense that Rancière embraces, art should not coalesce with the political ideas that it calls for. Political art, in Rancière’s sense, does not just dispute the value of economic globalization by exposing the hypocrisy of hyper-commodified consumerism, for example; it refuses to concede that economic globalization is the only game in town. We used to speak of ideology, but Foucault shows us ideological analysis assumes the transcendental status of a subject presumed to know the truth.2 When Rancière asks, ‘What happens to critical art in the context of consensus?’ (DPA 143), it is Foucault’s critique of neo-liberal ideology that informs his understanding of consensus as the overriding conviction that economic globalization provides the only criterion in terms of which reality can be judged. Whether we conform to that ideology or reject it, whether art provides us with a model of how to act by holding up a model that is intended to cement social bonds that have been eroded by hyper-commodification, or whether art displays a counter-model, by exposing hypocrisy in some shape or form, it fails to displace the ideology of economic globalization. If Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism provides traction for seeing what is at stake in Rancière’s critique of consensus, the other respect in which Rancière is indebted to Foucault is more explicit, if only signalled in a few terse remarks in

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‘Paradoxes’, while elaborated more fully elsewhere. Foucault’s historical a priori, has purchase in facilitating an understanding of how Rancière’s aesthetic regime recasts Kant’s transcendental approach. Rendered through the historicizing lens of Foucault, Rancière’s recasting of the transcendental approach formulates aesthetics as a system that conditions or delimits the possibilities of what can be experienced, what can be seen and heard, and at the same time what claims can be made about it, by whom, and with what authority. The distribution of the sensible organizes the temporal and spatial ways in which the world appears to us, making available to us the possibilities that shape how understanding makes sense of perceptual experience. Rancière puts it like this: Aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (PA 13)

Rancière thus considers his approach to be ‘a bit similar to Foucault’s’ in that it ‘retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental … the search for the conditions of possibility’ (PA 50). Characterizing his approach as transcendental, Rancière goes on to specify that his search for the transcendental is deflected through the Foucauldian insight that the transcendental must be historicized, rendered particular to a specific episteme, when he says, ‘these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression’ (PA 50). We can think of the three regimes Rancière elaborates – the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic – as regimes of ‘perception and intelligibility’ in the sense that he explicates when he says, ‘The visibility of a form of expression as an artistic form depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility’ (PA 50). The relationship between the regimes, however, does not render them mutually exclusive of one another, rather ‘several regimes coexist and intermingle’ (PA 50). Even if the representative regime is ‘dominant’ in one period, it is not abolished by the aesthetic regime. Hence, says Rancière, he tries to ‘de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility’, the regimes of art. At the same time, he ‘historicize[s] the transcendental’ that is, he wants to articulate not the universal conditions of possibility of thought in general, but ‘a

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system of possibilities’ understood as a regime of perception and intelligibility, ‘that is historically constituted’ (PA 50). What Rancière construes as the aesthetic regime is indebted to a retrieval of guiding motifs from Kant’s third critique, such as indetermination and the conflict of the faculties of imagination and understanding, motifs which in effect Rancière takes up and applies to the first critique, especially to space and time as forms of intuition. He thereby radicalizes and historicizes Kant’s metaphysical understanding of how the forms of space and time organize our sensory perception of the world. In thinking dissensus as a way of refiguring the landscape of the sensible, as a redistribution of the sensible, Rancière is effectively challenging Kant’s transcendental approach by taking up some key ideas regarding communities of aesthetic and political judgement from the third critique and reading them back into the first critique. By reading the transcendental through the spectrum of Foucault’s historical a priori, Rancière is at the same time disputing the status of the transcendental as universal and necessary, recasting it as contingent and historical, and in doing so, rethinking the mode in which history conditions thought, thought conditions itself, and the sensible world conditions the possibilities for thinking. In other words, he is taking account of the complex ways in which a world is never brought to us unconditioned, and our thinking of it is never without the constraints of prior, historical conditions. As a result, the task of thinking conditions is never itself unconditioned, and it is in thinking through the difficulties of the ongoing production of this layered relationship of conditions and conditioning that philosophy must content itself, and not with the futile and misplaced attempt to maintain unsustainable universal, ostensibly timeless, ahistorical claims. Space and time are not the uniform, universal frames for understanding that Kant took them to be; the configurations they provide us to make sense of the world are contestable, renewable, revisable. Such configurations congeal into habitual grooves, well-worn tracks along which our perceptions trundle, making it difficult for us to take on board anything that fails to corroborate the narratives that thereby establish themselves as true. Rancière suggests that the ‘efficacy of art’ lies ‘first and foremost in partitions of space and time that it produces to define ways of being together or separate, being in front or in the middle of, being inside or outside’ (DPA 136-7), a formulation that recalls, even as it displaces and reworks, Kant’s formulation of space and time as forms of intuition. The suggestion is that art can reorganize the way we perceive the temporal and spatial ordering of the world, in such a way as to reshape and re-orchestrate

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those communities constituted in and through its judgement. ‘Artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning’ (DPA 141). By bringing into existence new possibilities of framing the world, art is caught up in the shifting of boundaries defining the communities that legitimate, and are in turn legitimated by, the world they see and hear, the world they judge. We might say that the redistribution of the sensible is Rancière’s reworking of Kant’s sensus communis. The bonds that bind communities themselves, the common of a given community, consists of  – constitute and are constituted by – the sense such communities make of the world, and the sense such worlds make of them, the way the world appears to them, and the legitimation the world in turn offers them, corroborating the ways they see and understand themselves and the meanings they accord to objects, reflecting the sense of the world back to them in the significations that cohere communities as meaningful. What is given as the fabric of common experience makes sense to a given community, but through dissensus, such a configuration is swept up and subject to constant renewal, open to incessant reconfiguration in the dissensual movements of politics as much as the dissensual movements of art. It is this temporal, political and perceptual movement that Rancière captures when he describes the criss-crossing of the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ (DPA 148). There is a constant renewal of the ways in which objects arrange themselves according to specific configurations, a ceaseless reordering of the frameworks according to which objects are given specific meanings, there is an ongoing renewal of the frames through which we try to make sense of the world. It is precisely because such meanings are not fixed once and for all that, when Rancière defines the politics of aesthetics in distinction from the aesthetics of politics, he prefaces each phrase with the qualifying caveat ‘if there is such a thing as’ (DPA 140). The distinction between the two can hardly be watertight. Rather, there is a complex topography of folds, a visual and intelligible landscape that is not static, but which re-orchestrates itself in a wave-like motion, subject to intertwining logics, such that the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics mutually impinge on one another. A seascape, then, rather than a landscape. Precisely because the contours of this seascape cannot be pinned down once and for all, the line dividing what is inside and what is outside is not given, but, like the shoreline, constantly redraws itself.

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Having indicated that in his approach to the three regimes he articulates Rancière inherits a Foucauldian problematic that recasts Kant’s transcendentalism let me say more about the second framing mechanism, the broader historical sweep within which Rancière situates the aesthetic regime, the ethical and representative regimes. Together with the aesthetic regime, the ethical and representative regimes structure and inform Rancière’s reflections on art and aesthetics; they provide the scaffolding or framework against which his reflections unfold. While Rancière refers the ethical and the representative regimes to the historical figures of Plato and Aristotle respectively, he conceives of all three regimes as overlapping with one another, and specifies them conceptually, rather than confining them to a particular era. Like the line dividing politics from art, the distinction between each regime is fuzzy in the sense that elements of both the regimes that Rancière situates historically in relation to Plato and Aristotle can find their way into the practice of contemporary artists and aestheticians. We have seen that foundational to Rancière’s conception of the ethical regime is the subordination of images to politics in Plato’s Republic, where politics is understood as the task of harmonizing the aims of individuals for the good of the whole, on the basis of requiring individuals to adhere to the tasks to which they are imagined to be ‘naturally’ suited. Rancière takes up and makes emblematic of the ethical regime the gesture that Plato has Socrates effect in the Republic, when he banishes poets. Images must be sanitized by the requirement that they cohere with philosophical truth, and the social order must be stabilized by resorting to the myth of metals to ensure that individuals adhere to their proper places. The ethical regime is a regime that expunges art in the name of preserving a harmonic social order devoted to the unity of the polity. When images are tamed to promote the harmony of social order, not only are the poets jettisoned, so too is politics (DPA 137). Art and politics are fused together ‘by framing the community as artwork’ (DPA 137). All that matters is the harmony and wellbeing of the whole, in the service of which disparate political voices must be quelled as much as dissenting poets. The well-oiled machine of the ideal city in words requires that those suited to menial work remain in their places, so that the work they perform frees up the time of others for more leisurely pursuits. Thus, it is precisely when such workers refuse to adhere to their allotted roles, refuse to stay put, when they step out of line, and insist on being counted as part of the whole, that they disrupt the given distribution of the sensible, creating in its place a new distribution, one which ‘breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the “natural” order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy

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positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific “bodies”, to specific ways of being, seeing and saying’ (DPA 139). New temporalities and spatialities emerge when workers refuse to be merely workers, and insist on reformulating the common of common sense, demand to be included in discourse, when they take the time they do not have according to their allotted tasks, according to the distribution of social roles. Politics happens, Rancière says, ‘when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing “anything else”, take the time that they “have not” in order to affirm that they belong to a common world’ (DPA 139). In claiming visibility and audibility, they insert themselves into discourses in which their claims become meaningful, in which they can be understood to count as legitimate, as having a point of view worthy of being heard. When a fictional diary recounts the divorce of the ‘fleeting gaze from the laboring arms’ as the worker ‘stops his arms and glides in imagination toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences’, an ‘aesthetic rupture’ or dissensus produces a ‘new configuration of the sensible, overturning the “proper” relationship between what a body “can” do and what it cannot’ (DPA 140). A worker takes the time to gaze at the view from a house when his or her time is supposed to be taken up with laying a floor, where the labour of his or her arms is that for which he or she is being paid. He or she disrupts the distribution of the sensible, by taking the time he does not have – according to the economic and political order that circumscribes him or her as a manual labourer – by using his or her body in a way that defies that order. There is a dissensual reconfiguration of the sensible, a reapportioning of the temporality and spatiality of bodies, a realigning of the boundaries according to which certain bodies are visible while others are invisible, in which specified capacities line up with particular bodies. It is not only the ethical regime that Plato advocates which requires bodies to be kept in their proper places, so too does the Aristotelian representative regime. At the descriptive level, the representative regime might be adequately characterized as a ‘mimetic tradition’ (DPA 135), yet, at the same time as describing it, Rancière is also providing a critique of the representative regime as such. Rancière’s normative assessment of this regime suggests that what and who it represents, how its representations are effected, who is doing the representation, and the audience to whom the representations are directed, all turn out to be highly selective. It turns out, then, that the representative

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regime does not after all represent anything in a straightforward way, rather, it represents objects from a highly specific (we might say subjective) point of view, for highly specific purposes, and for a highly circumscribed audience. It will not come as a surprise, perhaps, that this specificity has traditionally been infused with structured social privilege, and that artists who seek to overturn such a system without intervening in the apparatus of mimesis itself merely succeed in replaying the mechanism in one way or another. They continue to ‘believe that art has to leave the art world in order to be effective in “real life”’ (DPA 137) instead of understanding that there is no sharp opposition between the art world and real life, indeed that what is taken for reality is merely a fiction maintained by consensus thinking. To ‘try to overturn the logic of the theatre by making the spectator active’ (DPA 137) is to retain the idea that artists are fundamentally active while spectators are passive, when in fact, to view a work of art is always a matter of interpretation, and as such spectators are already active. To turn ‘the art exhibition into a place of political activism or by sending artists into the streets of derelict suburbs to invent new modes of social relations’ (DPA 137) is to assume that art as usual maintains a sharp divide between art and politics, while at the same time attempting to subvert the purity of art by transforming it into politics. Yet, this is precisely to attempt to fuse art and politics, as Plato wanted to do, and thus to eradicate art except in so far as it upholds a specific, ideal vision of the state. What, then, is to be done? If current attempts to render art political in meaningful ways fall back into time-honoured tropes that prevent art from moving beyond the mimesis it takes itself to be subverting, in what ways can art claim political significance? Having outlined two framing mechanisms Rancière draws upon, a Foucauldian inspired reworking of Kant, and the specification of the ethical and representative regimes of art, let’s return to the immediate argument of ‘Paradoxes’, in order to flesh out in more detail how Rancière understands political art. Let’s review Rancière’s rebuttal of the assumptions informing a good deal of contemporary art that takes itself to be political. One might be forgiven for thinking that art which excavates biases ‘in mainstream representations of subaltern identities’ (DPA 134), or in how ‘colonizers represent the colonized’ (DPA 136) serves a vital political function, and that as such it constitutes art at its most valuable – as a critical tool for exposing the hypocrisy of the Western world. As we’ve seen, however, several fundamental problems emerge with such an assumption. Bringing into question the model of art’s efficacy underlying much of what takes itself to be political art

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in the contemporary political world, Rancière is concerned to show that art that tries to display the fallacies of mainstream representations, or to show us what ‘revolts’ us in order to incite revolt, to be political by venturing ‘onto the streets’ or by any number of other strategies that fail to displace the ‘mimetic tradition’ is still caught up in a model of art that was ‘debunked two hundred years ago’ and succumbs to the ‘pedagogical model’ of efficacy (DPA 136). The ‘logic of mimesis consists in conferring on the artwork the power of the effects that it is supposed to elicit on the behaviour of spectators’ (DPA 136). Such a model assumes that the artist’s intention can be transparently and unproblematically communicated to the spectator, who will be enlightened by the intention animating the work of art or performance; the spectator undergoes a revelation, the effect of which will be to mobilize an intervention in the world, thereby transforming the world in accordance with the intention of the artist. A passive spectator reacts then to the input of the inspired artist as genius, an empty vessel, to be animated, infused with the spirit of the artist’s creative mind or intention. The point of the work of art will have been to ‘correct’ the behaviour of the spectator. In other words, the artist plays the role of moral arbiter of the world. ‘Art is presumed to be effective politically because it displays the marks of domination, or parodies mainstream icons, or even because it leaves the spaces reserved for it and becomes a social practice’ (DPA 134-5). Such art either remains committed to the mimetic paradigm of the representative regime, in which the artist as expert reveals to the spectator, posited as heretofore ignorant, the reality of the situation by representing it, mimicking it. Or it tries to overturn the pedagogical logic of representation, by transforming art into politics or by taking art onto the streets in order for it to become a mode of direct social intervention. Such art ‘purports no longer to produce duplicates of objects, images or messages, but instead real actions, or objects, that engender new forms of social relationships and environments’ (DPA 146). Rancière is wary of any kind of reduction of art and politics to one another, such as the fusion that occurs in Plato’s jettisoning of the poets in order for the ideal community to emerge, and such as the one that Rousseau evokes. To abandon the art world for the ‘real’ world is another variation of fusing art with politics, effectively eradicating both. In disrupting the narrative that aesthetics has written for itself, Rancière both puts into question the script that artists who take their practice to broadly conform to the (Platonic) ethical regime and the (Aristotelian) representative regime, and points to ways in which artists who take themselves to be breaking away from these scripts are in fact rewriting them in new ways. Thus, artists

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such as Brecht, Godard and Rosler conflate the strategies of ‘representational mediation and ethical immediacy’ by evoking ‘a sensory form of “strangeness”’, as when ‘Brecht portrays Nazi leaders as cauliflower sellers and presented their discussions about the vegetable business in classical verse’. He then aims to bring about an ‘awareness of the reason for that strangeness’, in this case, an ‘awareness both of the trade relations hidden behind hymns to the race and the nation, and of the forms of economical and political domination that are hidden behind the dignity of high art’. Finally, he wants to mobilize individuals ‘as a result of that awareness’ (DPA 142). He thus ‘endeavours to produce a fusion between the aesthetic clash of heterogeneous forms of sensory presentation and the correction of the behaviour through representation’ (DPA 143). What Rancière disputes is whether such processes of ‘dissociation’ can be ‘calculated’ (DPA 143). Or when Martha Rosler ‘juxtaposes photographs of the war in Vietnam with advertisements for petty-bourgeois furniture and household goods’, she might intend ‘to reveal the realities of imperialist war’ and ‘the empire of the commodity’ that underlies ‘American happiness’ and the ‘defence of the “free world”’ (DPA 142-43). Rancière’s point is that in exposing this hypocrisy there is no guarantee that Rosler will succeed in motivating protests against the war, and that in any case her effort might be superfluous. He comments that ‘it is very difficult to find anybody who is actually ignorant of such things’ (DPA 144). For Rancière, artists are political, not because they become pedagogues, in the sense of demonstrating to the public what we should be doing. Rather artists are those who intervene in the perceptual field that makes it possible to assume ‘the self-evidence of a dissensual world’ (DPA 143). It is such self-evidence that artists such as Brecht and Rosler assume, Rancière contends, and in doing so they lay themselves open to the critique of resorting to hackneyed techniques, while at the same time claiming for themselves as artists the privileged position of enlightening the public, as if the role were to educate their audiences, and as if the task of art should be to intervene in the world in order to set it to rights. Rancière diagnoses the politics of contemporary art to be schizophrenic, since artists who are in thrall to the ideology of economic globalization are impelled to shuttle back and forth, in and out of art museums. There is both a temporal shuffling back and forth between novelty and an anachronistic falling back into mimetic strategies, and a spatial scuttling in and out of the museum as a space reserved for art, and a space that is conceived as the real world outside of the museum. In its temporal register this artistic schizophrenia expresses itself, on the one hand, in an interminable resituating of art in ‘ever new contexts’, – ‘late

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capitalism’, ‘economic globalization’ or ‘computer communication and the digital camera’ – yet, on the other hand, in an appeal to the model of art’s efficacy to which Rousseau had already objected on the basis that there is no straight line from the events performed on stage to the behaviour of spectators. Irrespective of the medium, we are still being shown how to act, as if politics needs a blueprint that art must provide, as if the experience of art must reveal to us the true nature of the world, as if art appreciation amounts to understanding how to act in the world. The artist, in effect, still unveils for us the true essence of things, telling us what to do, how to behave. Art thus relies on the most traditional, didactic model in a throwback to the past, while also insisting that it is moving forward with the latest technology. Responding to the consensus that the police order designates as the only reality that counts, namely economic globalization, either artists are engaged in efforts to turn art into something that restores ‘the basic social functions threatened by the reign of the market’ (DPA 145), and art thereby ‘anticipate[s]’ the ‘reality of what it evokes’ (DPA 146), or artists flee the museum altogether, fusing their art with politics itself. The contemporary politics of political art, Rancière suggests, partakes in a spatial schizophrenia in scurrying to and fro, at one moment retreating into the meditative space of the museum, responding to a cohesive, impulse towards unity, which construes art as reparative of the social bond. It seeks to shore up community bonds dissipated by neo-liberal capitalism, and ‘cast an attentive gaze on the objects of the common world and the memory of our common history’ (DPA 145). At another moment such art responds to a dispersive impulse, which abandons the refuge of the museum altogether, in order to intervene in the ‘real’ world. Taking to the streets, artists bring art out to the people, putting it to work to solve economic, political and social problems. Art becomes a means for fixing and re-establishing the communal bonds that have been eroded by commodified culture. René Fernandez, for example, uses an art grant to conduct a survey in the suburbs of Havana, and as a result, to restore a woman’s house in order to intervene in the poverty of the area; artists ‘become masons, plumbers and painters’, in an effort to restore the social bond (DPA 147). In taking art into the streets in this way, turning art into objects that no longer mimic or represent anything, artists might eschew representational art, but they fall into the trap of ethical immediacy when they fuse art with politics. The very fact that art has become a ‘refuge for dissensual practice’ gives ‘a renewed impetus to the idea that art’s vocation is actually to step outside itself, to accomplish an intervention in

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the “real” world’ (DPA 145). At the same time, this effort to ‘exceed consensus by supplementing it with presence and meaning’ capitulates to the ‘oversaturation’ that is the very law of consensus itself (DPA 148). Both the spatial ‘shuttling-back-and-forth between the museum and its “outside”, between art and social practice’ (DPA 145), and the temporal effort to keep up with the latest technological advance while remaining confined to traditional strategies of mimesis are symptomatic of the schizophrenia Rancière diagnoses in a politics of art that cannot settle. It is a schizophrenia endemic to consensus thinking. So long as we adhere to the law of consensus, whether we uphold the laws of the free market in the spirit of competitiveness, or denounce commodity fetishism and consumerism, the reality of economic globalization goes unchallenged. In a formulation of consensus thinking that is clearly indebted to Foucault, Rancière says that consensus thinking insists that ‘there is one unique reality to which everything must be related, a reality that is experienceable as a sense datum, and which has only one possible signification. The context that is invoked to enforce the ideas and practices pertaining to “consensus” is, as we know, “economic globalization”’ (DPA 144). Rancière sees this schizoid behaviour of contemporary artists as symptomatic of consensus as a form of government that imposes one reality – economic globalization, that is, it makes sense agree with sense. In this context, even the efforts to expose the power of commodification through parody are merely the flip side of the economic, political law that presents itself as unquestionable: there is only one reality. It is against the background of the consensual dogma of economic globalization – the police order – that the significance of dissensus accumulates for Rancière. Dissensus is the breaking apart of the univocity that is imposed by the consensus that there is only one reality, and that reality is governed by ‘only one possible signification’, namely ‘economic globalization’ (DPA 144). Whether one conforms to that order or decries it, so long as the terms of that order provide the only currency for discussion, it remains the effective reality, providing the values in terms of which any and all positions are to be judged. For Rancière there is no reality as such, there is no real world. There are only constructions, and the police order is a construction that claims the legitimacy of objectivity for itself by naturalizing social divisions that keep people in their place according to their social functions, and distribute time and space accordingly. This ‘natural’ logic is a ‘distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise’ which ‘pins bodies to “their” places and allocates the private

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and the public to distinct “parts” – this is the order of the police’ (DPA 139), says Rancière. ‘Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the “natural” order’ (DPA 139). The police order ordains that meaning is univocal, and that univocity is cashed out in terms of economic globalization. Dissensus intercedes in the prevailing order, the police order. It redistributes the sensible, and it does so in two different registers – as art and as politics. The ‘police order’ then is a name for the refusal of politics as much as a refusal of art, in so far as politics proposes to change the participants in the conversation, while art composes new propositions on what there is to see and hear, by rendering objects visible in a new way, and lining them up with novel significations. In place of the pedagogical model of efficacy, which he identifies as replaying the causal logic at the heart of the mimetic tradition espoused by eighteenthcentury classical theatre, or the ethical immediacy that replaces it (and the critical art of Brecht and Rosler hovers between the two models), Rancière proposes another model. Rancière appeals to a ‘paradoxical’ model of the efficacy of art, based on ‘indifference’, and operating according to the ‘suspension’ of ‘every determinate relation correlating the production of art forms and a specific social function’ (DPA 138). Rancière takes this ‘paradoxical efficacy of art’ – in which one can hear strong echoes of Kant – to define the ‘aesthetic regime’ (DPA 138). Rancière reads Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso and Schiller’s account of Juno Ludovisi as breaking with representational logic, because they offer nothing to imitate; both of them refuse to anticipate the effects of art on the viewer (DPA 138), embodying, rather, the indifference of the paradoxical model of art’s efficacy that Rancière elaborates. Neither statue is ‘an element in a religious or civic ritual’, neither ‘depict[s] belief ’, refers ‘to a social distinction’, implies ‘moral improvement, or the mobilization of individual or collective bodies. No specific audience is addressed by it’ (DPA 138). The Torso, a ‘mutilated statue’, which Winckelmann takes to be an ‘idle Hercules, sitting among the Gods at the end of his labours’ has ‘no mouth’, ‘no face’ and ‘no limbs’ and so cannot ‘deliver messages’, ‘express emotions’ or ‘carry out action’ (DPA 138). As we saw in the previous chapter, it is from Hegel that Rancière takes up and reinvigorates the notion of the identity of opposites, by which he designates an identity between activity and passivity. Like the rippling muscles of the Belvedere Torso, which resist the distinction between activity and passivity, calling to mind the infinite wash of oceanic waves, whereby one wave gathers up another, each becoming indistinguishable from the other, the ‘torso-less head’ Juno Ludovisi is also characterized by indifference. Rancière finds this indifference summed up is

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Schiller’s account of its ‘aesthetic “free play”’ (DPA 138), an account which is itself of course influenced by Kant’s aesthetics. It is the free play of imagination and understanding, which, in the absence of any determinate concept, is capable of reshaping assumptions about the world which might seem to have been set in stone, but which turn out to be susceptible of reconfiguration. A redistribution of the sensible, of how temporality and spatiality organize our experience of the world can be effected through the conflict of the faculties. The aesthetic object can shake up how we perceive the world. It can do so, but there is no certainty that it will. Rancière understands the relation of art to politics as a paradoxical relation, as operating under an ‘original disjunction’ that entails a suspension of any direct correlation between the artist’s intention and the impact or effect of the work of art on the viewer (see DPA 142). The relation between art and politics is itself one of dissensus (see DPA 140). What then is dissensus? We have said that dissensus is the dissenting of one type of sense from another, the conflict of sense as sensory perception and sense as a regime of meaning. We are now able to clarify that dissensus occurs as a breaking up of the distribution of the sensible that consensus thinking ordains as the only register of meaning that counts as meaningful, that of economic globalization. To reiterate, there are two different forms of dissensus, artistic and political. Both reconfigure the ‘common experience of the sensible’ (DPA 140). How then, more precisely, does dissensus in politics distinguish itself from dissensus in art? In politics, dissensus marks moments at which those whose voices were previously discounted as the ‘mere noise of suffering bodies’ begin to be heard as capable of ‘discourse concerning the “common” of community’ (DPA 139), they begin to count as meaningful. Dissensus in its political register establishes a new configuration of subjectivity whereby the collectivity is reconstituted in such a way as to include those whose part was to previously ‘have no part’ (DPA 142), those who did not count, the ‘anonymous’ (DPA 142). Politics ‘creates a new form … of dissensual “commonsense”’ (DPA 139), a common sense that insists on including those who have been the casualties of a miscount. In this sense politics is ‘the framing of a we’ (DPA 141) that gives a ‘collective voice to the anonymous’ (DPA 142). Politics ‘invents new subjects’, ‘new forms of collective enunciation’ and ‘new configurations between the visible and invisible, between the audible and inaudible, new distributions of space and time – in short new bodily capacities’ (DPA 139). We see here that space and time are not the universal forms of intuition Kant took them to be, but rather that they can be distributed differently.

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As politics, then, dissensus operates by allowing the emergence of ‘those who have no part’ (DPA 142), by the ‘reframing of a “we”’, or through affording ‘a collective voice to the anonymous’ (DPA 142), that is, to those who were previously discounted by legitimated regimes of meaning, through a process of ‘subjectivation’ (DPA 140). Dissensus as art, on the other hand, fosters the creation of a ‘fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed’ (DPA 142). In artistic dissensus, new forms of visibility emerge in the fabric of the sensible, so that what was previously invisible becomes visible or the ‘self-evidence of the visible’ is brought into question (DPA 141). The effect of dissensus is ‘to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings’ (DPA 141). Dissensual art ‘re-frames the world of common experience’ (DPA 142). The effect of such reframing is a redistribution of the sensible (DPA 141). For Rancière, although the distinction between art and politics is one that admits of some ambiguity, equally, it is important that there must be some kind of distinction between the two realms, so that art does not completely turn into politics any more than politics collapses completely into art, as in Plato’s fusion of art and politics into one. Yet, while he resists the reduction of art and politics to one another, Rancière, equally resists the clear-cut line that the police order draws when it appeals to the self-evidence of what it takes to be the real world, the natural order of things. This constitutive haziness of the distinction between politics and art is an important part of his account of art in what he calls the aesthetic regime, of which dissensus is the ‘kernel’ (DPA 140). It is not that all art in a historically determined aesthetic regime is dissensual. As the opening pages of the ‘Paradoxes’ make clear, and as we have already seen, contemporary art which takes itself to be political often partakes inadvertently in assumptions that are governed by the ‘mimetic tradition’ (DPA 135). Despite itself, art conforms to elements of the ethical and representative regimes – the threads that imitate the social bonds they call forth, for example, in a work entitled The People by Chinese artist Bai Yiluo, which consists of ‘1600 ID photos stitched together’ and is intended to ‘point to “the delicate threads uniting families and communities”’ (DPA 146). Rancière observes that this work anticipates ‘the reality it evokes’, that it creates a metaphorical representation of the situation it both embodies and calls for, such that the ‘practice of stitching photos together’ (DPA 146) comes to stand for the social unity the artwork itself is imagined to effect. The work of art thus participates in both the ‘representational

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distance’ of the representative regime and the ‘ethical immediacy’ (DPA 146) of the ethical regime. Rancière wants to avoid the dangers, on the one hand, of reducing art to mere ideology, where its use-value prevails, and its status as art becomes all but evacuated, and on the other hand, he also resists positing art as if it existed in some pure, transcendent ether of its own, uncontaminated by anything as prosaic or banal as politics. The distinction between the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ is not a stable one precisely because there is a constant renewal of that which passes for common sense. With every reconfiguration of the fabric of common sense effected by art, new possibilities are opened up for voices that have hitherto gone unheard to be granted legitimation. It remains crucial however, that while art opens up such possibilities, on account of the original disjunction that defines the relation of art to politics, or what Rancière, also refers to as the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151), art does not guarantee such political transformations. Politics effects a dissensus such that there is no direct line between artistic dissensus and political dissensus. The mistake that the pedagogical logic of contemporary politics of art makes is to suppose that there is a direct relation of cause and effect between what an artist intends, and a political transformation in the world. The ‘politics of art’ are in fact involved in ‘the intertwining of several logics’ (DPA 141). Museums themselves are specific distributions of the sensible, they are ‘“aesthetic” realities in and of themselves’ (DPA 141). They ‘create specific forms of “commonsense”, regardless of the specific message such-and-such an artist intends to convey’ (DPA 141). In Chapter 7, I shall ask what happens when artists address the ‘specific distributions of space and time’ that museums are, and whether particular works of art can intervene in the way in which a museum frames ‘common space and a mode of visibility’ (DPA 138), whether they can redistribute the specific distribution of the sensible that constitutes a museum. If a ‘politics of aesthetics … predates artistic intentions and strategies’ (DPA 141), what happens when artists address the politics of aesthetics embedded in the museum itself? What happens when the ‘anonymous and indeterminate museum spectators’ (DPA 138) that are said to be addressed by an art work turn out not to be as anonymous or indeterminate as might be supposed? What happens when the gaze is rendered less ‘indifferent’ than Rancière seems to assume, and when an art work is less ‘disconnected from a specific destination’ than it might first appear (DPA 139). In other words, when a work seeks to draw attention to the ‘framework of distributions of space and the weaving of fabrics

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of perception’ (DPA 141) that constitute the museum itself, does such a work open up the question of how some of Rancière’s own assumptions might stand in need of reworking? What I hope to have accomplished in this chapter is some appreciation of what Rancière means when he says, There is no ‘real world’ that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ are continually criss-crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics (DPA 148).

In doing so, I have adumbrated the distance Rancière takes on contemporary art that takes itself to be political, but in his view, fails to remain art, falling into the trap of becoming didactic. Along the way, I have pointed out the influence of Foucault and Kant on Rancière’s articulation of the aesthetic regime, and its relationship to the ethical and representative regimes that precede it.

Notes 1 For an illuminating discussion of Foucault, see Shannon Winnubst, Way too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 2 See Winnubst, Way too Cool, pp. 30–1.

6

Form and Matter

I began this book by raising some critical questions about Rancière. The last two chapters engaged with Rancière’s work more exegetically. Here, I return to a more interrogative mode of engagement, in order to track how successfully Rancière rethinks the way in which the classical distinction between form and matter orchestrates aesthetics. I do so first, by returning to Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, and then by providing a critique of Heidegger that is inspired by Rancière. An organizing motif of Rancière’s understanding of Kant is the way in which he locates the decisive operation of dissensus in Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, without turning to the analytic of the sublime, to which many recent aesthetic interventions, including Lyotard’s, have returned.1 He thereby calls into question the privileging of Kant’s sublime over his aesthetics of the beautiful, and by implication, also associates not only the sublime with the formless, but also the beautiful. Key to understanding Rancière’s own focus on the beautiful, rather than the sublime, is the way in which he sees Kant’s understanding of the free play of aesthetic judgement, read through the lens of Schiller, as breaking with the order of domination he construes as having governed the representative regime. Insofar as Kant aligns the sublime with masculinity, and the beautiful with femininity, by turning not to Kant’s analytic of the sublime, but to his analytic of the beautiful in order to elaborate dissensus – a notion that is essential to Rancière’s understanding of the operation of both art and politics – Rancière might also be understood to be moving away from the implicit masculinization of aesthetics in the latter’s emphasis of the sublime.2 However, if in this limited respect Rancière might be said to feminize Kant, in another way, I suggest he remains in thrall to a tradition that fails to put in question the feminizing and racializing conceptual architecture in which aesthetics is embedded. Specifically, I argue that Rancière does not ultimately manage to dislodge this architecture surrounding and supporting the form/

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matter distinction and the series of associated distinctions that he sees Kant’s understanding of aesthetics as disrupting. In order to articulate this argument, I make reference to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art later in this chapter. Before doing so, I clarify why Rancière moves away from the discourse of the sublime in favour of the aesthetics of the beautiful. Here, I return to Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, whose reading of Kant Rancière differentiates himself from, while redeploying some its aspects. Rancière describes his practice as ‘a matter of locating myself in the language of others and, in a way, paraphrasing it … up to the point where suddenly something new, something other, something else appears in those phrases’.3 His reading of Lyotard is a case in point. At stake for Rancière, is the confusion into which he believes Lyotard falls in burying ‘art’s operations along with political practices underneath the indistinctness of ethics’ (AD 15, 26). To understand what Rancière finds disturbing in what he construes as Lyotard’s dissolution of ‘the specificity of political and artistic practices’ (AD 109, 145) in favour of an ethics of indistinction, let’s unpack how, for Rancière, Kant’s understanding of the sublime is a site in which aesthetics defers to morality. For Rancière, Lyotard takes up the Kantian notion of the sublime, but in doing so, he eliminates the political promise that Rancière takes to be inherent in Kant’s aesthetics. Rather than the promise of an ‘unprecedented equality’ (AD 13, 24) to which Rancière takes the free play of Kant’s aesthetics to point, Lyotard substitutes a submission to the law of the Other. For Rancière, Lyotard’s stance of attempting to purify art of the confusion to which he alleges aesthetics subjects it is a way of ‘undoing the alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality’ that Rancière understands to go by the name of aesthetics (AD 21, 34). For Rancière, Kant’s sublime concerns a failure of imagination that results in the revelation of reason’s legislative power in the domain of morality. The sublime ‘translates the incapacity of the imagination to grasp the monument [a pyramid, for example, or a monumental mountain or wild ocean] as a totality. Imagination’s incapacity to present a totality to reason, analogous with its feeling of powerlessness before the wild forces of nature, takes us from the domain of aesthetics to that of morality’ (AD 89, 120). When confronted with a pyramid or a wild ocean, ‘imagination … reveals itself to be powerless to master the form, or the exceptional nature, of the sensible power with which it is confronted’ (AD 92-3, 125). Imagination finds itself unable to provide that which might have been expected of it. As ‘the greatest faculty of sense’ the imagination thus ‘betrays its powerlessness to give sensible form to the Ideas of reason’ (AD 93, 125). Thus

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it ‘proves the power of reason twice over’ (AD 93, 125). First, it is unable to live up to reason’s demand that it ‘provide the representation of the whole’. Secondly, experiencing this failure or the ‘incapacity’ of imagination, understood as the subject’s faculty of sense, attests to the presence of the ‘unlimited faculty’ of reason (AD 93, 125). Imagination is ‘thrown into disarray’, which opens first onto the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic free play of the faculties’ and then in turn to ‘a superior autonomy: the autonomy of legislative reason in the supersensible order of morality’ (AD 93, 125). Thus for Kant, the failure of imagination ‘brings forth the autonomous law of the legislative mind’ (AD 93, 126). If, in the experience of the sublime, imagination’s failure proves reason’s autonomy, the key feature of Kant’s account of the beautiful, for Rancière, is that ‘form is characterized by its unavailability’ (AD 91, 123). In the experience of beauty, there is no ‘conceptual form imposing its unity on the diversity of sensation’ (AD 91). Rather, the beautiful is ‘neither an object of knowledge, subordinating sensation to the law of the understanding, nor an object of desire, subordinating reason to the anarchy of sensations’ (AD 91, 123). This ‘unavailability’ of form makes way for ‘a new form of autonomy’ in the ‘free play of the faculties’ (AD 91, 123).4 Rancière emphasizes the double suspension of negation that characterizes aesthetic experience for both Kant and Schiller, in which experience is ‘subject neither to the law of understanding, which requires conceptual determination, nor the law of sensation which demands an object of desire’ (AD 97, 130-131). Rancière understands this double negation not only as a suspension of the law of understanding and that of sensation but also as a suspension of the ‘power relations which usually structure the experience of the knowing, acting and desiring subject’ (AD 97, 131). As we have seen, Rancière understands the representative regime as marked by the active imposition of what is taken to be an appropriate form on passive matter, which he understands as ‘a form of domination’ (AD 97, 131), since what counts as appropriate is determined by mimetic laws of art ensconced in forms of power and privilege. These laws not only dictate what and who should be represented, by whom and for whom, but in doing so, they also define a distribution of social functions and roles, which they assign to human nature. As we have also seen, there are those whom art concerns, and there are those it should not concern; the latter are to be kept in their place according to a social distribution of the sensible underwritten by a division of human nature into two classes. The class that actively imposes form on matter conceived as passive is the class that orchestrates, arranges and authorizes sensible experience. The relation of form

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and matter participates in the distribution of forms of visibility and audibility, of ways of making and doing, dividing humanity into two classes. It is for this reason that Rancière claims that the relation between Kant’s faculties in aesthetic experience as ‘the “free agreement” between understanding and imagination is already a disagreement or dissensus’ (AD 97, 131). It breaks with the order of domination, and it does so, not merely by blurring the social hierarchy, but also by interrupting and rearranging the forms of sensibility. Read through Schiller, as Rancière understands it, ‘aesthetic common sense … is a dissensual common sense. It does not remain content with bringing distant classes together. It challenges the distribution of the sensible that enforces their distance’ (AD 98, 132). Hence for Rancière, the ‘dissensual common sense of aesthetic experience is … opposed to the consensus of traditional order’ (AD 98, 132). The agreement of imagination and understanding is already disagreement. ‘Dissensus i.e. the rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and repose’ (AD 98, 131–2). Thus, in Rancière’s view, the agreement between Kantian faculties ‘in aesthetic experience is not the harmony of form and matter that Lyotard claims’, but rather it is precisely a ‘break with this … agreement’ (AD 97, 131).5 For Rancière, one does not have to turn to Kant’s account of the sublime in order ‘to discern a disagreement between thought and the sensible’ (AD 97, 131). Reading Kant’s understanding of the beautiful through Schiller’s response to Juno Ludovisi, Rancière sees it as already involving the ‘double bind of attraction and repulsion’ (AD 97, 131). It has a ‘charm that attracts us and a respect that makes us recoil’ (AD 98, 131). For Schiller, the ‘statue’s free appearance … draws us in with its charm and keeps us at a distance through the sheer majesty of its self-sufficiency. This movement of contrary forces puts us in a state of utter repose and one of supreme agitation’ (AD 98, 131).6 The statue Juno Ludovisi both attracts and repels us because it ‘manifests the character of divinity which is also … that of humanity in its fullness: she does not work she plays. She neither yields nor resists. She is as free of the ties of commandment as she is of those of obedience’ (AD 98, 132). As such, the statue ‘stands in contrast to the state that governs human societies and puts each person in his place by separating those who command from those who obey, men of leisure from working men, men of refined culture from those of simple nature’ (AD 98, 132). It is, claims Rancière, this ‘identity between agreement and disagreement’ that enables ‘Schiller to confer on the “aesthetic state” a political signification over and above the simple promise of social mediation implied by Kantian common sense, which hoped

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to unite the elite’s sense of refinement with ordinary people’s natural simplicity’ (AD 98, 132).7 Aesthetic sense is dissensual precisely because, divorced from the conceptual hierarchy whereby form subordinates matter, and from the social hierarchy whereby ‘separate classes have distinct senses’ (AD 13, 23), the beauty of Juno Ludovisi is available to ‘anyone at all’ (AD 13, 24). As the site of aesthetic play and the appearance of the beautiful, Juno Ludovisi is ‘the refutation within the sensible’ of the ‘opposition between intelligent form and sensible matter which, properly speaking, is a difference between two humanities’ (AD 31, 46). Kantian aesthetic experience points to a ‘new form of sensible community’ (AD 104, 140). Schiller understands Juno Ludovisi as exemplary of the free play and free appearance of Kant’s aesthetic idea. Whereas in the representative regime art was defined according to its ‘technical perfection’, in the aesthetic regime it is defined in terms of ‘a specific form of sensory apprehension’ (AD 29, 44), one that is ‘heterogeneous to the ordinary forms of sensory experience’ (AD 30,  45). The latter are embedded in a series of dualities characteristic of an ‘order of domination’ that Rancière construes as ultimately resting on ‘a difference between two humanities’ (AD 32, 47). In the representative regime, this domination takes shape in form’s active rule over passive matter and in the governance of intelligence or understanding over sensibility, whereas in the aesthetic regime ‘inventive activity and sensible emotion encounter one another “freely”’ (AD 13, 24). The statue holds promise in the first place, ‘because it is art, because it is the object of a specific experience and thereby institutes a specific, separate common space; on the other [hand], it is a promise of community because it is not art, because … it expresses … a way of life which has no experience of separation into specific realms of experience’ (AD 35, 52). In Lyotard’s interpretation, art retreats from the promise of collective emancipation in order to retain its purity in endorsing the claims of a specific community. On Rancière’s interpretation, it is matter that comes to the fore in Lyotard’s understanding of the aistheton, but matter fused with a particular approach to form, namely a form bound to the expression of a specific community, the Jewish community. For Rancière an encounter with beauty can undo the concatenation of form with the active shaping of the artist, and matter with the passivity of that which merely receives a form imposed upon it after the fact, as if the relation between form and matter were preconceived, such that the artist shapes passive matter according to a fully formed intellectual idea. Crucially, Rancière shows how

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aesthetic judgement is bound up with the imposition of form upon matter as conceived in the classical and representative regimes, an imposition itself bound up with social distinctions that cannot be divorced from judgements about what counts as art, judgements that are entangled with political judgements. For Rancière, what is at stake in the genius of the artist as Kant conceives it is an artistic intention that is beset by an unwilling or unconscious imperative, a will that is not merely active, but also passive, a willing that is also an unwilling, an activity that is also just as much a passivity, a consciousness that is at the same time unconscious, a knowledge that is also an ignorance. By corollary, beauty is perceived not through anything that can be anticipated, but precisely in a moment that is unpredictable as it is unformed. Kant’s aesthetic idea harbours radical potential because it is a site of play with regard to form, a play which mixes up and reformulates the relation between subjects and objects inasmuch as it repudiates the canons that supported classical conceptions of the mastery of form over matter, activity over passivity and voluntary, subjective intention imposed on an inert world. For Rancière, the paradox of the aesthetic regime is that it promises precisely the elimination of art’s autonomous existence insofar as it holds art to be the promise of its realization as a form of life. As ‘the becoming-life of art’ the end it ‘ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality’ (AD 44, 62). At the same time, it carries the danger of turning into a form of totalitarianism. In Rancière’s view, it is in response to such a threat that thinkers such as Adorno and Lyotard have rejected ‘engaged art’, not in order to embrace a view that conforms to the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ (AD 43, 62), but to endorse a view of art as political insofar as it maintains a status radically distinct from that of ‘objects of consumption’ (AD 96, 129). Yet in doing so, Rancière thinks they risk isolating art from politics, in enclosing ‘the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life’ (AD 44, 62). In Rancière’s view, the tension between politics and art must be preserved; to dissolve it would tip the balance one way or another, such that either art insists on a disengaged purity, or it dissolves itself into the political. Rancière understands the regime of aesthetics as a ‘regime of the functioning of art and a matrix of discourse, a form for identifying the specificity of art and a redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory experience’ (AD 14, 25-6). In sum, then, in the aesthetic regime, the social distribution of roles is no longer lined up with human nature in such a way as to adhere to the norm

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of mimetic legislation, whereby the rules of art ordain that there is a class of people whom art concerns, and a class of people to whom it is of no concern (see AD 12, 23). The free play that is the hallmark of Kant’s aesthetic idea, in which there is a dual suspension of the ‘conceptual determination’ by cognition or understanding and of ‘the law of sensation which demands an object of desire’ (AD 97, 130-131), disrupts the distribution of the sensible that is orchestrated by the legislation of two separate classes of humans. Read through Schiller, Kant’s aesthetic common sense ‘challenges the distribution of the sensible that enforces’ (AD 98, 132) the distance of these two classes, and it does so by a ‘neutralization of the very forms by which power is exercised’ (AD 99, 133). What is at stake here, Rancière insists, is a ‘new revolution’, one of ‘forms of sensory existence, instead of a simple upheaval of forms of state’ (AD 99, 133). Let’s conclude this part of the discussion by reviewing the constraints that Rancière understands to have defined the representative regime, in order to clarify the way in which aesthetic free play in Kant and Schiller breaks with the hierarchical order of representation. In the aesthetics that Kant inaugurates ‘There is a break with the hierarchical order that had defined which subjects and forms of expression were deemed worthy of inclusion in the domain of art’ (AD 10, 20) says Rancière. Stendhal stands, for Rancière, as exemplary of this break. The worth of art is no longer calibrated in terms of the dignity it establishes for itself, in celebrating those deemed worthy of its representation, in which its forms of expression are bound up with the dignity of gods and goddesses or kings and queens. In Stendhal, for example, the most ordinary and apparently insignificant noises and sights become worthy of the artist’s attention, the mundane minutiae of everyday experience become the material of art. Art is born of the ‘pure contingency’ (AD 12, 22) that the ‘proximate’ world presents. For Rancière, Stendhal ‘testifies to an aesthetic regime in which the distinction between those things that belong to art and those that belong to ordinary life is blurred’ (AD 5, 13). By evoking in his autobiographical Vie de Henry Brulard (1835) ‘the first – insignificant – noises that marked him as a child: ringing church bells, a water pump, a neighbour’s flute’ (AD 4, 13), Rancière understands Stendhal to be testifying to ‘the ruin of the old canons that set art objects apart from those of ordinary life’ (AD 5, 14). Rancière claims that in ‘the neighbour’s flute and the water pump which shape the soul of an artist’ (AD 8, 17), poiesis (as ‘a way of doing’) and aesthesis (‘a way of being that is affected by it’) are no longer mediated by mimetic legislation (see AD 7, 16); rather they stand in a relation

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of immediacy with one another. Yet their relation to one another is premised on ‘the very gap of their ground’ (AD 8, 17). That is, it is premised on the loss of the ‘human nature’ that underwrote or guaranteed the mimetic legislation of the representative regime, or else it is premised on ‘a humanity to come’ (AD 8, 17), a community that has not yet arrived but for which the art in question calls. The break with the hierarchical forms of the representative regime which confined the subject of art to highly circumscribed arenas, to the pomp and circumstance of the lives of the rich and powerful, effects a rupture of the ‘norm of adequation’ (AD 12, 22) that pertained ‘between poiesis and aesthesis’ (AD 10, 20), established under the auspices of the mimetic, representative regime. This norm correlated an ‘active faculty’ with a ‘receptive faculty’ (AD 12, 22), a faculty of active intelligence responsible for imposing the appropriate form on passive matter, thereby evoking the appropriate emotional sensibility in an audience that could be moulded to feel whatever was necessary to support the hierarchical order of things. In the representative regime, ‘artworks were tied to celebrating worldly dignities, and the dignity of their forms were attached to the dignity of their subjects and different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’ (AD 12, 23). The aesthetic regime disrupts this arrangement, causing ‘disorder’ such that ‘artworks no longer refer to those who commissioned them, to those whose image they established and grandeur they celebrated. Artworks henceforth relate to the “genius” of peoples and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all’ (AD 13, 24). In the aesthetic regime, ‘human nature and social nature cease to be mutual guarantees’ and there is no longer ‘any hierarchy of active intelligence over sensible passivity. This gap separating nature from itself is the site of an unprecedented equality’ (AD 13, 24). The transition from the representative to the aesthetic regime, thus, lies not only in the subject matter depicted, but also in the shifting contours of those to whom art became available to view. A major development that facilitates this shift is the institution of the museum, which severs ‘paintings and sculptures … from their functions of religious illustration and of decorating seigniorial and monarchic grandeurs’ (AD 8, 18). Henceforth, an ‘undifferentiated public’ comes ‘to replace the designated addressees of representative works’ (AD 8-9, 18).8 We have seen that Rancière is critical of the way that form and matter, along with a series of associated distinctions have orchestrated thinking about art within the representative regime, and that with Kant, the hierarchy between these distinctions is disrupted. Corresponding to the suspension of the power

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of form, understood as active, over matter understood as passive, is another suspension, that of the hierarchy between two different classes of humanity, the class of intelligence over the class of sensation. No longer are ‘different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’, and no longer is ‘the dignity’ of the ‘forms’ of artwork ‘attached to the dignity of their subjects’ (AD 12, ME 23). In the aesthetic regime, the function of art is no longer to celebrate dignitaries, but to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, in the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, in a fleeting instance, to capture the beauty that is to be found in that which might have heretofore been judged to be a trivial existence. At the same time, there is a redistribution of the sensible in the disruption of an order in which certain humans are destined for the roles of rulers and leaders, while others are destined to be those who serve, providing the necessities of life that free their employers to pursue art and politics. In the rest of this chapter, I focus on the relation between form and matter by approaching Rancière’s work obliquely. Heidegger’s critique of the relation between form and matter as classically conceived will be the site of my oblique approach; his recasting of this essentially Aristotelian distinction in terms of the strife of world and earth is fundamental to contemporary aesthetics, including, even if indirectly, that of Rancière. However, Rancière inflects his rethinking of this classical distinction in a manner that, in my view, while not without its problems (as we will see in the next chapter), is much more politically progressive and productive than Heidegger’s rethinking of it within the context of truth recast as aletheia, understood by Heidegger in terms of unconcealment, unveiling or bringing out of oblivion or hiding. In what follows, I elaborate Heidegger’s effort to overcome the pervasive influence of the form/matter distinction in aesthetic thinking, and his ultimate recapitulation of the tropes in terms of which this distinction continues to orchestrate metaphysical thinking, a recapitulation to which I think Rancière also ultimately falls prey. I provide a commentary on selected aspects of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in an effort to show how he construes the work of art, and how his account marks an ultimately inadequately radical departure from the guiding distinction of matter and form, which he claims has been a hallmark of the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics that he sees as preceding him.9 I suggest that the form/matter distinction is embedded in a series of other problematic distinctions, which Heidegger does not manage to dislodge, distinctions that might be understood to anchor the account of form and matter, distinctions that therefore remains to haunt his account. Heidegger’s effort to overcome a

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metaphysical aesthetics remains ensconced in a further series of distinctions which themselves are in need of displacement and rethinking, not the least of which is the differentiation of feminine and masculine. An organizing motif of Heidegger’s argument – indeed his main argument against traditional aesthetics – is the inadequacy of the distinction that characterizes the aesthetic approach to works of art, namely the distinction between form (morphe) and matter (hule).10 Heidegger acknowledges that the form/matter distinction has been associated with a series of other metaphysical distinctions. Form has been ‘correlated with the rational and matter with the irrational … the rational is taken to be the logical and the irrational the alogical … the subject-object relation is coupled with the conceptual pair form-matter’ (PLT 27, H 12). His acknowledgement does not extend, however, to the association, also found in the history of Western metaphysics, of form, rationality and subjectivity with masculinity, and of matter with irrationality, the object and femininity.11 Yet, while Heidegger seeks to shed what he construes as the confining and misleading conceptual framework of ‘formed matter’, he still adheres to the conceptual machinery in which the distinction of form and matter is grounded, an apparatus that not only lines up form with shape, and matter with the stuff contained by shape, but which also construes form as the organizing principle, and associates masculine creativity with this organizing principle, modelling the creativity of artists on the creative capacity of a divine maker.12 By corollary, as we saw in Chapter 3, femininity is associated with passive matter, infused with an organizational and decisively masculine principle/form. Racialized distinctions follow a similar pattern, and although Plato’s chora has been appropriated by various thinkers, including Derrida and Kristeva, as providing a more fertile ground for thinking femininity/maternity, one that in some sense precedes or perhaps gives birth to the form/matter distinction, it is the Aristotelian heritage that asserts itself in Heidegger’s effort to combat the form/matter distinction, an effort that perhaps inadvertently, I am suggesting, adheres to that tradition, despite its attempted departure. If this organizing principle has been traditionally associated with rationality, logic and the subject, Heidegger’s reorientation of the discourse of rationality, calculative thinking and subjectivity recasts the question of truth so that it is no longer understood in terms of correctness, in terms of a correlation or agreement between the concepts of the mind and external, physical reality. Truth is now to be understood as aletheia, as the play of concealment and unconcealment, as the disclosure of beings in their being. One way in which this disclosure happens is

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in and through the work of art, in its standing out from the recalcitrant, obdurate self-refusal into which it can also withdraw or recede. In this discourse of truth as aletheia, of the disclosure of being that is wrested from its hiddenness, earth is associated with phusis, as both origin, and organizing principle, a sheltering agent that allows the artist to bring forth and make shine ‘for the very first time’ (PLT 45, H 31) the material that, under the artist’s hand, is used not in the sense of being used up (see PLT 46, H 33), but in such a way that the rock ‘first becomes rock’ (PLT 45, H 31). It comes into itself, comes into its own. And as the ‘rock gleams’ it makes visible in a new way the sky against which the temple forms a silhouette. ‘The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air’ (PLT 41, H 27). At stake in Heidegger’s polemic against traditional aesthetics, is its tendency to assume a mimetic stance.13 For Heidegger, art is definitively rescued from any straightforward imitative, representative function. If the materiality of artwork can no longer be consigned to irrationality, the alogical, or the object, if the recasting of truth as aletheia has put into question the model of truth conceived in terms of adequation, where the form of ideas is adequate to the material reality of the world they are taken to represent, according to a preconceived idea of correctness, then how must materiality be thought? Heidegger recasts materiality, not in terms of its falling short of form, rationality and subject, but rather in terms of its appearing in the artwork in a way that is covered over, or unattainable when we approach objects from the standpoint of our everyday experience of the world. The form/matter distinction is introduced, in Heidegger’s account, as a response to the inadequacy of the notion of the thing that focuses on the senses, ‘the thing is the aistheton, that which is perceptible by sensations in the senses belonging to sensibility’ (PLT 25, H 10).14 So long as we approach the ‘thingly character of the thing’ by way of the senses we will never succeed, Heidegger suggests, because: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things – as th[e] thing concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. (PLT 25, H 10)

The work of art disrupts this circuit of signification. Levinas makes much of this point, that is, of the way that colours do not conform to the shapes of objects,

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the way that art goes beyond the view that he attributes to phenomenology, such that a colour is always the colour of something, of a dress, for instance.15 In art, for Levinas, ‘red reddens’.16 Indeed, it is precisely this quality of art, its ultra-materiality, that gives it a somewhat privileged role in Levinas’s philosophy (though finally art’s meaning will be only recuperable through the ethical authority of Levinas’s revised understanding of philosophy). Ultimately, for Heidegger, the capacity of the work of art to provide access to tones or sounds apart from how they are presented within the equipmental world view, or outside the ‘situation’ that ‘always prevails’, or independently of ‘the things themselves’ (PLT 25, H 10) is exactly what is at stake in the jutting out of the earth into the world. One of the inadequacies of approaching the work of art as a thing, for him, is that such an approach can only ever subordinate colours to things, understanding them as meaningful within a circuit of significance that is already dominated by the equipmental approach to beings. The work of art differs from this in that it thematizes, makes available to us, unifies, or brings into relief the spirit of an age. In Iain Thomson’s words, in art we find ‘an understanding of being that does not reduce entities either to modern objects to be controlled or to late-modern resources to be optimized’.17 For the Greeks, for example, ‘the temple worked … to unify a coherent and meaningful historical world around itself (by inconspicuously focusing and illuminating its people’s sense of what is and what matters)’ (ibid.).18 What, then, becomes of the masculine and racial associations with rationality and the subject, and femininity with irrationality and the object in the recasting of the form/matter distinction as the ‘setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth’ (PLT 46, H 33)? Do these associations simply fall away, as Heidegger recasts truth not as a question of correctness, but rather as a question of aletheia, as the disclosure of being from its hiddenness? Or are these associations reinstated in Heidegger’s reworking of the question of the origin of the work of art? In what sense is there a move away from the artist as cause in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’? How successfully does Heidegger accomplish the  move he tries to make away from the artist as the origin of the work of art, in the sense of the artist originating, causing or producing the artwork, and towards art as an origin of the work? How far does the fact that the only art that Heidegger considers in this essay (a tendency reiterated elsewhere in his work) originates – at least where the artist is known – from Western, male artists, already prejudge what kind of work qualifies as art for Heidegger? How far does this compromise Heidegger’s claim to move away from the idea of the artist as

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the decisive origin of art? If only certain types of people are recognized as artists, what becomes of the claim that what matters is not the artist as cause, that rather art is where both the work of art and the artist originate? If there is a move away from understanding art as a thing, and towards understanding it as an event that happens, an event understood as the unfolding of truth, as aletheia, in which there is a setting forth/setting up of earth and world, what kind of world is set up? If the ‘silent call of the earth’ vibrates in the shoes Van Gogh depicts (PLT 33, H 19), in what ways is the Heideggerian notion of world silently circumscribed by European and masculinist preconceptions of who qualifies as an artist on Heidegger’s world view, and how are those entrusted with the preservation of art set up by Heidegger to constitute a community that excludes of non-Europeans, non-Greeks? Even as Heidegger moves towards embracing the idea of the viewer, audience or spectator of art playing a role in constituting art as art, and thereby moves away from emphasizing artistic intention, or inspired, individualistic genius, as determining the character of art, he reinscribes the kind of falsely universalist assumptions implicated in standard readings of Kant’s sensus communis.19 If for Kant, aesthetic judgements of taste ‘should’ be universal – a ‘should’ that carries a moral force that appears to invoke everyone, but turns out to invoke an exclusive community – Heidegger’s appeal to those who preserve art as art also indulges certain traits of exclusivity.20 While the effort to include those who preserve art – the community that witnesses art, and celebrates it as art – in his understanding of that which constitutes art, might, at first glance, appear to be a progressive move on Heidegger’s part, those entrusted with the preservation of art will turn out to be riven with highly predictable class and gender-bound traits. The community that preserves art will turn out to be a distinctly European community, and the art this community preserves will turn out to be of distinctly European provenance. If the shoes Van Gogh painted are attributed by Heidegger to a peasant woman, how far is his account shot through with assumptions about the limitations of her perspective, for whom world and earth exist ‘only’ (PLT 33-4, H 19) in equipment? And why would Heidegger assert this to be the case? Does he assume that a peasant woman who worked in the fields would not have time to go and stand before a painting by Van Gogh, a painting depicting shoes that trudge through the fields, a painting that shows the particularity of a being in its being precisely by abstracting the shoes from the field, distancing them from their unobtrusive reliability, depicting them with no ‘surrounding’ (PLT 33, H 19), suspending the

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context in which they melt into the invisibility of reliability (see PLT 32, H 18), the environment in which they disappear into their usefulness? The nothingness with which Van Gogh surrounds the shoes he paints, the ‘undefined space’ (PLT 33, H 19), abstracts the shoes from the context in which they serve as useful equipment, where they can be relied upon, and makes their reliability available for thematization and reflection precisely in doing so. What if the peasant woman took the time to stand before the painting, would she then understand earth and world in a different way from equipmentally?21 In his suggestion that the peasant woman only understands earth and world in an equipmental context, Heidegger qualifies his use of the word ‘only’: ‘World and earth exist for’ the peasant woman that Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of Van Gogh’s shoes, ‘and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus – in the equipment. We say “only” and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust’ (PLT 34, H 19). Who are those who share the peasant woman’s mode of being? Other peasant women? Peasant men? Are they peasants, at any rate, or people of a certain class, those who work the land, perhaps, who, Heidegger might imagine, are too weary, who trudge too ‘slowly’, to be able to progress from the fields into an art gallery, where they might have seen Van Gogh’s shoes, perhaps too taken up with ‘uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread’ (PLT 33, H 18) to do so, perhaps too taken up with ‘the wordless joy of having once more withstood want’ (PLT 33, H 18)? Is there a difference between those who plough the fields, and those who clean city streets, between the rural and the urban poor? Are all these nameless individuals, peasant women, shippers, charwomen, a part of ‘those who have no part’ (DT 9, M 28) in Rancière’s phrase? Those who live in a ‘simple world’, a world that is understood equipmentally, live in a world that is allowed to function, for Heidegger, as providing a preliminary hold on what the work of art is not. The artwork is not a mere thing, and it is not mere equipment, it is not that which is the type of being for which the matter/form distinction is appropriate. But the simple world in which peasants dwell, a world governed by equipmentality, a world in which peasants do not have, and do not take, the time to see their world from the perspective opened up by art, is not, ultimately, the point. The point, for Heidegger, is to abandon the ‘thingly’ perspective altogether (having benefitted from it in a preliminary way that helps us see that the form/matter distinction is grounded in an equipmental perspective, even if it proves inadequate, ultimately to that perspective).

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Are those who dwell in this simple world not imagined by Heidegger to be open to a world of the play of unconcealment and concealment founded by the work of art? If not, why not? Perhaps they are confined to the truth as correctness, to measuring, to rationality as calculation and prediction, perhaps, in the end, they are not allowed to be thinkers and poets, perhaps they are too busy trying to find the energy to make enough money, to produce enough food to sustain themselves, to be able to go back to work the next day.22 Perhaps they do not understand, because they must not understand, because if they understood, there would be no one to clean the museums. They would all be out visiting the museums, looking at paintings, or painting themselves, in their studios (in the unlikely case that they had done enough cleaning to be able to afford studios). If the cleaners and the farmers understood, those whom Heidegger assumes to be entitled to go, as viewers, to the museums, would be no different from those who clean the museums, or provide the food for museum restaurants. And then, where would we be? If they understood, they might challenge the logos according to which there are those who do, and there are those who think, there are those who lack logos (or, like slaves, only have the type of logos that allows them to follow directions), and those who have logos. Those who have logos, set the terms of the debate, deciding what does, and does not, constitute logos. The world of cleaners is a world of ‘those who have no logos’ (DT 22, M 44), so we are given to understand. The way you can tell, is the way that cleaners are invisible to most of the world. You look through them, past, them, around them. You do not say hallo, or see them as people. You do not see them. They are dispensable. Except when they stop cleaning and go off to become artists. How far is the materiality of art, reworked through the notion of the strife of world and earth, a product of empire, of capital, of its transportability? How far is the provenance, or source of the colours that shine forth in the ‘luster and gleam of the stone’ at issue? Whence came these materials? Who brought them, carried them, quarried them? Did those who quarried the materials with which the temple at Paestum was built see them as ‘mere things’, just as Heidegger imagines the ‘shippers or charwomen in museums’ do? (PLT 19, H  3). What if those who quarried the rocks, those who shipped them, those who fabricated the leather from which the shoes that modelled for Van Gogh’s shoes were made, those who clean the museums in which Van Gogh’s depictions are housed, the peasant woman whom Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of shoes Van Gogh depicts, took the time to see the temple or Van Gogh’s painting? What would happen then? Or perhaps we should ask what does happen when a

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worker, someone whom Heidegger might consign to the lowest of ranks, goes, on a Sunday afternoon, to visit an art gallery? When, rather than resting up in order to replenish themselves through sleep and food, in order to renew their energy, in order to be able to go to work again the next day, cleaning the floors of the museum, a charwoman writes a poem, or a peasant woman who works in the fields works on a book, paints a painting, goes as a visitor to a museum, what happens then? Does Heidegger’s distinction between the work and the thing depend upon a distinction between those who see the artwork as a thing (shippers and charwomen, are his examples of those who might see the work of art as a thing), and those who see it as a work (those endowed with the task of preserving the work of art, a community of art lovers, those with the freedom from repetitive tasks of necessity, those who are accustomed to being cooked for, fed and cleaned for by the others, who lack such freedom)? What if those who saw the art work as a thing, sometimes also saw it as an artwork? What if they stopped seeing it as a thing? Would it then lose its status as a thing? Or is it rather the case that there is a time and a place, even for art lovers, to see the art work as a thing (perhaps as the curators of an art exhibit are making plans to ship art work), and that this slippage between seeing it as a thing and a work suggests that there is no firm dividing line between everyday things and works of art, as Heidegger would, presumably have us think? Is this slippage ontic or ontological? Why would Heidegger, having circled around the question of what type of thing a work of art is for most of his essay, finally say that ‘we no longer raise [a] question about the work’s thingly element’, but rather we question ‘in terms of the work’ (PLT 66, H 55)? This seems to suggest that we must learn, in order to properly appreciate art, not to see art as a thing. Never? Then, how would ‘we’ (we lovers of art, we who are privileged, we curators, who facilitate the moving of art from place to place, a we who tends to be specified as male and European and free of undertaking the tasks that are repetitive and necessary for survival) learn to transport it? Unless we employ others (those who are posited as not seeing art as anything other than a thing) to transport it for us, unless we enforce the distinction between us and them, so that we do not have to see the artwork as a thing. ‘We’ employ others to see artwork as a thing, and not as art. How far does the strife of earth and world Heidegger elaborates facilitate a sheltering and allow a gathering together of only certain mortals, and only specific, non-Eastern gods? If the temple that Heidegger cites as exemplary is a Greek temple, how far is his account mediated by Hegelian preconceptions

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of Greek religion serving as precursor for Christianity, and how much does it justify treating non-European gods as less holy, non-European mortals as less than human? How far does the strife of earth and world reiterate the Trinitarian, dialectical configuration of the movement of Hegelian Spirit? How far does it repeat the tropes according to which Hegel dismisses non-European art as lacking the proper balance of form and matter, the tropes according to which a sublimity overwhelms and confuses the eye through teaming repetition, becoming a bad infinity, or failing to facilitate transcendence? Of failing to overwhelm us, so that we can then step back and bask in our ability to recapture ourselves, to recover from the destabilizing, disturbing effects of art, to master ourselves again? Even as Heidegger effects a move away from the form/matter distinction, since it is still too redolent of equipmentality on his account, there remain vestiges of the Hegelian and Kantian accounts of art from which he seeks to distance himself in his attempt to overcome metaphysics. What happens when the Tracey Emins or the Gillian Wearings of this world become artists?23 What is happening now? What happens when childhood abuse takes centre stage, or video installations in small cubicles are designed to maximize our physical discomfort, as we must share a space in proximity with strangers in order to see and hear confessions of other strangers onscreen, sometimes masked, often telling us things we do not necessarily want to hear, sometimes in voices we do not expect to come out of their mouths? What happens to materiality and to invisibility when Guyana-born Ingrid Pollard’s work raises questions about how a pub name or sign on a building sets up a world in a way that invests its British landscape, and the people, the nations, the communities who inhabit it, as contesting one another?24 What happens when the prerogative of naming a pub ‘Black Boy’ is brought into question by an artist who photographs the pub, and exhibits the photograph as part of an experiment, as an invitation to audiences to read or see, or not see, not read, the sign that says ‘Black Boy’ as significant, meaningful, problematic, and as deeply implicated in a colonial system of slavery? What happens to the community entrusted with the preservation of art? Does not this community become a split community, a splintered community, a community of contestation, does it not become more than one community, communities in the plural, communities whose contestation attests to the irony that the very pubs that have been named Black Boy would traditionally not have been places that welcome black faces? Does not dissensus take the place of any unified, idealized notion of a community, ethical or not?

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Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and ontology opened up the possibility of thinking the essence of the work of art, not in terms of an ontological distinction etched in some timeless dividing line differentiating objects of art from other things for all eternity. He thought the essence of the artwork rather as an event, a happening, a granting, a clearing, but also as a withdrawing or refusal of truth: truth as concealment and unconcealment, as aletheia. The truth of artwork is historical. Yet, Heidegger’s views are circumscribed by certain residual, Eurocentric cultural attachments to ideas that remain critically unexamined in his work. While he wants to move away from the conventions of thinking art in relation to genius, to form and matter, and all its attendant distinctions, he remains entrenched in the metaphysical trappings of race, gender and class that confine his attention to taking seriously only certain types of art, only a highly restricted notion of who qualifies as an artist. While he wants to get away from the idea of the artist as cause of the artwork, he remains attached to it through his failure to question as radically as he might the cultural assumptions that remain invisibly embedded in his account of the work of art. As we have seen, Rancière refuses to completely elide the politicization of art with the identification of a cause. He insists upon the fact that for art to be political in the sense he elaborates, that is, under the heading of dissensus, whereby a political work of art does not tell its viewers or audience what to think, the artist does not impart a message to the public in the sense of communicating an agenda for action, but rather the political work of art retains an indispensable ambiguity. The political work of art, in Rancière’s view, does not call for a particular transformation of the world in line with an intention revealed by the artist through her intention, it does not assemble or identify a community. Rather, it redistributes the sensible, that is, most fundamentally, it displaces the rhythms and patterns according to which we temporalize and spatialize the world. Political art intervenes in the current distribution of the sensible, which is orchestrated and ordained by the political powers that be, and makes available new modes of perceiving the world, new modes of visualizing how things are. New discourses arise to legitimate and sanction these new modes of visibility, discourses no longer circumscribed by scientific norms of time and space. What art does not do, however, is to tell us what to think or show us how to see. It merely makes available new possibilities for seeing and hearing, and in so doing, makes available new ways of thinking, doing and being. It mitigates against the permanent sanction of any one, given, transcendental schematization; it multiplies the possibilities for perception by

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making it possible to interrogate orders of perception that take themselves to be, and pass themselves off as, just the way things are. In thinking art works as ambiguous in their politicization, Rancière returns to Kant’s aesthetic idea, to the way in which art is judged neither by pure nor by practical reason, but in relation to the free play of imagination and understanding. Radicalizing Kant’s insight that aesthetic judgement involves no determinate concept, Rancière shows how the indeterminate free play of imagination and understanding disrupts and displaces the classical notion of how form shapes matter, and the associated distinctions that typically align themselves with this distinction, including activity and passivity, whereby the active and conscious intention of the artist shapes matter construed as passive material that conforms to the voluntary will of a creator who shapes it according to a preconceived idea of what qualifies as art. In taking up Kant’s insight into the free play of imagination and understanding, his understanding of genius as a kind of not-knowing, and the malleability of form, which is no longer dictated by a pre-existent concept, such that art can precisely contribute to the re-orchestration of conceptuality, how far might Rancière be said to open the way to recalibrate the traditional alignment of femininity and raced others with passive matter and masculinity with active form, even if he does not perform this recalibration himself? Feminist and race theorists can build on his thinking through of the miscount, on his taking seriously those who have been said to have no part, those relegated to the (non-artistic) makers and the doers, as if they had no time to think and to take part in politics, as if they were not qualified to reshape the nation or the state. At the same time, feminist and race theorists can help to develop, complement, supplement and sometimes correct those areas of Rancière’s thinking in which he does not push as far as he might. Indeed, feminist and race theorists have already begun to push in this direction, in ways that are consonant with Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible, which can be seen as a creative extension of Kant’s insight that the aesthetic idea is capable of disturbing and reworking the model of temporality and spatiality that he had tried to contain in the notion of pure forms in his earlier critique.25 Art temporalizes and spatializes in a different way – a thought that also radicalizes Heidegger’s notion Es gibt – it gives/there is.26 While Rancière celebrates feminist political struggles, he has tended to ignore the insights of feminist and race theory, and feminist aesthetics. In the next chapter, I seek to stage a conversation between feminist aesthetics and Rancière.

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Rancière alerts us to the extent to which attempts to construe works of art as calls for a unifying community, whether these calls are understood to be ethical or not, remain idealizing at the expense of those who have no part. Instead of seeing art as the embodiment of a lost, or a future community, a community still to come, he sees art as partaking in a redistribution of the sensible, offering different points of view, making available new modes of perception. Art does not bring together, or gather up, the view of things that exist in the cultural, horizonal background, for the most part, inconspicuously informing what we think. Rather it interrupts, disturbs and opens up possibilities for re-envisioning conventional ways of seeing. In doing so, it makes visible the splits, the divisions in communities that are often covered up.

Notes 1 Among many other critics see Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3 Rancière in Abraham Geil, ‘Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 301–310, see esp. p. 305. 4 I take it that the new form autonomy to which Rancière refers is that born of the free play of the faculties of understanding and imagination. 5 See AD 90, 122. 6 Rancière refers to Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), who, in a passage that some readers might find reminiscent of Kant’s concept of the sublime, says, referring to Juno Ludovisi that ‘even as we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly grace, her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror’ (109). 7 Rancière refers to James Meredith Creed’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, p. 183. 8 I think that in fact the public is not as undifferentiated as Rancière suggests, as I suggest in the next chapter. 9 I make no apology for focusing here, in terms of explicit commentary, solely on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001); ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe B5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977),

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though my reading is also informed by other key works, especially Being and Time, and the later 1920 lecture courses. Some might argue that if one were to turn to other works, such as On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) one might find a slightly more sympathetic attitude on Heidegger’s part to non-Western art, although I would suggest that Heidegger lapses into the romantic/sentimental register even here, and in doing so does not really appreciate non-Western art for itself. I have chosen to focus here on the form/matter distinction that Heidegger deals with in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, because I think it is the crucial site for understanding Heidegger’s negotiation of the ontology of aesthetics. This essay is rich and important, and still has not been fully excavated. My effort here is to insist that Heidegger’s attempt to convincingly overcome the form/matter distinction (a distinction to which critics and commentators have paid insufficient attention in their readings of the essay) comes adrift. It founders, or reaches an impasse, because Heidegger fails to question other key distinctions that constitute the conceptual architecture informing and supporting the work that the form/matter pair has done in elaborating aesthetic theory. See PLT 26-27, H 11. Even Heideggerian commentators who pick up on these associations, neglect their implications for the masculine/feminine distinction, or for other related distinctions, for example racial distinctions. See, for example, Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 84, whose reading is, in other ways, illuminating. Aristotle associates form with the masculine and matter with the feminine; in Thomas Aquinas’s medieval appropriation of Aristotelian thought, the model of the divine creator becomes fused with the model of adequation, where truth is understood as correctness. Descartes’s metaphysics lines up rationality with truth and essence in a way that sets up the mind/body distinction as aligned in important ways with the form/matter distinction, a distinction that then plays out in such a way as to line up masculine subjects with the formative power of creators, and feminine (non) subjects with the passive substance of materiality, to be shaped and moulded by their masters/husbands/fathers, whose creative processes imitate that of the demiurge. In contrast, Levinas returns to a mimetic conception of the artwork, although he conceptualizes it in a way that differs from Plato’s straightforward understanding of mimesis as falling short of ideal truth, obfuscating the beauty of ideas. (Of course, nothing is, finally straightforward when it comes to gauging Plato’s views on art in the end, if one takes seriously the dramatic form of the dialogues in which he expresses his condemnatory views of tragic poetry; his condemnation of art is enacted within a dramatic dialogue, which itself is poetically/artfully/artistically

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Art, Politics and Rancière woven, a conversation, in which some interlocutors contest Socrates’s views; unless we take the rather untenable view that Socrates is simply Plato’s mouthpiece, we must take seriously the dramatic structure of Platonic dialogues, as many have argued). The solution of form and matter (which itself turns out to be misleading according to Heidegger) is introduced as an alternative solution to two previous characterizations of the thing, as the ‘bearer of its characteristic traits’ (PLT 24, H 9), and the [Kantian] view of a thing as ‘nothing but the unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses’ (PLT 25, H 8). The problem with both interpretations is that the ‘thing vanishes’ (PLT 26, H 10-11). In the first interpretation the thing remains ‘at arm’s length from us’, whereas the second interpretation ‘makes it press too hard upon us’ (PLT 26, H 11). The problem with the second interpretation is that ‘we never really perceive a throng of sensations …’ (PLT 25, H 10). Rather we hear noises as always already signifying in a definite, meaningful, familiar context (PLT 25, H 10). Of course, the work of art will disrupt such contexts, and Heidegger’s discussion of the empty space, or nothingness out of which the shoes Van Gogh paints comes into its own here. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 187; Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 161. As Levinas says, ‘the search for new forms from which all art lives, keeps awake the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into substantives. In painting red reddens’, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 38–9; Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 50. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, p. 67. Whereas for Heidegger, as for Schelling, art unifies community, for Rancière, art brings to the fore dissensus. Art is significant for Rancière not in so far as it brings us together, harmonizing us, but insofar as it makes available the clash that he thinks through under the heading of the redistribution of the sensible. Art can make visible that which remained invisible. But in doing so it is not restricted to teaching us, it is not merely that which ‘can help us learn’ or ‘understand’ (Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, p. 77). If art can help us see things differently, this different way of seeing is not caught up in pedagogical dogma, it is not a question of the artist knowing something and conveying this superior insight to those who view the art produced from a supposedly elevated perspective. The artwork might, and might not, produce a new way of seeing. The artist leaves it up to the viewer or the audience to look, to see, to gauge the sense (in both senses of

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the word sens) of what is seen. It is not up to the artist to tell us what to think, to disclose the truth. In contrast, however, taking his cue from Schiller, Rancière will read Kant’s sensus communis as opening on to an egalitarian revision of traditional aesthetics. See Christine. Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007). On those who are construed by some as not having time to do anything but work, see, for example, Rancière, PA 12. On the connection between Heidegger’s thinking about art and his critique of calculative thinking see Beistegui 2005. Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005). Prominent artist and Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts, Tracey Emin has established a reputation for her controversial works of art. Gillian Wearing, winner of the Turner prize in 1997, uses video, photography and installations to disrupt expectations and displace normative identities. Ingrid Pollard is a British artist whose work explores the theme of race and landscape, using photography to unsettle any easy relationship between the countryside, nationalism and identity. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See Heidegger, On Time and Being. Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambuagh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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Feminist Art Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order

As we saw in Chapter 3, the police is a ‘particular form’ of an order that organizes the ‘tangible reality in which bodies are distributed’ (DT 28, M 51). By ‘disagreement’, Rancière means a situation where what it means to speak is in question in such a way as to implicate ‘the very rationality of the speech situation’ (DT xi, M 13), or the ‘very situation of interlocution’ (DT 100, M 141). In dispute is the ‘capacity’ of interlocutors to present an object, so that they ‘both understand and do not understand the same thing by the same words’ (DT xi, M 13). Someone might fail to ‘see the object’ an interlocutor is talking about, while ‘clearly understanding’ (DT xi, M 13) what she is saying, for example. An interlocutor might understand that the conversation is about art, for instance, but fail to see the object under discussion as art. Or she might see the object under discussion as art, but fail to see it as art worthy of being granted entry into a museum. In this latter case, what is in contention is aesthetics, the determination of which has historically coincided with determining the rationality of the speech situation, in judging who is qualified to make aesthetic judgements. In the light of the issues raised in the previous chapter, perhaps we should ask who permits the entry of certain objects into art galleries, thereby granting them recognition as art. Who is it that values certain objects as art, and what is the relationship between their artistic value and the tangible distribution of bodies from which these art objects and values emanate? To dispute the distribution of bodies that informs whose work is displayed in an art gallery is to contest the aesthetics determining what counts as art. If, typically, the work of only certain artists is admitted into art galleries, to admit the work of other artists is to disrupt the underlying social distribution of bodies. One need not maintain that certain bodies necessarily produce certain types of art; yet if the distribution of artist-bodies favours certain classes, races and genders, then the art they

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produce will tend to reflect their concerns and set the standard for what counts as art. Since the equality of the part that does not count is rendered invisible by police logic, what counts as art within the sphere of visibility that constitutes the art world will reflect this invisibility. As artists, those whose bodies are typically not well represented in art galleries, on the other hand, are much more likely to be concerned (though will not necessarily be) with making an intervention into the sphere of visibility characteristic of police logic. When they do so, their art is likely to (though will not necessarily) create dissensus by disputing the regimes of visibility available in the police logic of the visible and sayable, including contesting what counts as art. If politics and aesthetics impinge upon one another, then the realm that gets constructed as the domain of art and aesthetics is shaped in part by the exclusions of politics. It is therefore unsurprising that what passes for art, that is, what is generally recognized as qualifying as art, is closely bound up with systems of privilege. The work of the Guerrilla Girls suggests that informal barriers still play a considerable role in determining which works of art are displayed in museums. It raises the question of how far the lasting legacy of the conventions of the representative regime continues to inform who gets depicted and for what ends. The works by the Guerrilla Girls, Renée Cox and 2Fik discussed below draw attention to and rework the ways in which form and matter are implicated in gendered, raced and heteronormative conventions. If our cultural imaginary is structured by unconscious assumptions about the appropriate ways to depict objects, matter or content, it is also structured by who is allowed to count as an artist. If this is the case, then even the passive unknowing of the Kantian genius will be pervaded by such assumptions. One of the questions in the background of this chapter is how far Rancière’s understanding of dissensus as a disruption of the police order can accommodate the fact that what passes for common sense will vary considerably from one community to another. At issue in the present discussion is the need to think through the implications of the fact that various communities constitute themselves around particular sets of assumptions, with the result that what might pass as self-evident or obvious to the constituents of a given community will not be seen as a selfevident truth by another community. Consequently, that which constitutes the police order will vary according to what assumptions pass as self-evident, and how particular communities cohere around that which is taken to be selfevident. To compound the difficulty, what is at stake is precisely what constitutes

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the givenness of community; who is allowed to belong, and who is not, who is recognized as belonging, or granted the legitimacy to belong, and therefore what constitutes a community is in question. While there are many different types of communities, here I will primarily be concerned with those that constitute themselves as loosely affiliated political communities, made up of those who identify as feminist, and/or as antiracist or as demonstrating solidarity with trans communities. Within each such group there will be multiple differential perspectives; there are many sometimes conflicting, ways of understanding feminism, antiracism and transgender. I reflect here, upon how such differences play themselves out with reference to Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus in relation to feminist art. We have seen that in construing politics as a matter of staging, of making visible, the miscount as a leaving out of account those who have no part, Rancière understands politics in the sense of dissensus, as a conflict of worlds, a conflict about the meaning of the perceptible, indeed about the very availability of that which can be seen and heard. At the same time, it is a conflict about who is legitimated to speak and interpret what there is to be seen and heard, and to have their interpretations count. Dissensus puts into question what passes for common sense, what Rancière calls the ‘police’ order of consensus, and thus provides the possibility of shaping meaning and intelligibility, the seeing of what there is to see, and the hearing of what there is to hear in a new way.1 The very possibilities of seeing or hearing, of perceiving the world, are renewed, such that the transcendental is subjected to a radically contingent, historical process, by which subjects who previously did not count not only insist on being counted, but in doing so change the terms in which subjectivity is thought, and therefore revise the conditions of possibility both of what it means to be a subject and also what it means to think and perceive.2 For Rancière then, it is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of politics as consensual, which claims to speak for all but in fact speaks only for those who govern the terms on which claims are deemed to have or lack intelligibility. It is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of art that takes itself to be representative, but in fact consists of a set of highly specific and exclusive norms that dictate what can and cannot be represented, how it should be represented, and who is entitled to judge it. Expressed positively, it is a question of seeing what happens when politics is reconceived not as consensus but as dissensus, when representation is no longer restricted by rules of appropriateness, where the operative model of art is porous,

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Figure 1 Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? 1989 © Guerrilla Girls and Courtesy guerrillagirls.com

rather than a model that secures the boundaries of art by preserving its purity from contamination by everything it stipulates as something other than art. I turn first to a work by the Guerrilla Girls, in order to both think through Rancière’s appeal to dissensus more thoroughly and introduce a qualified challenge to it. We might approach this work in two different ways. At first glance, we could regard it as simply occupying the role of a political slogan or manifesto, which didactically attempts to tell a public what to think. Understood thus, the work would purport to reveal a truth for an audience that stands in need of revelation. This work of art would thus fit seamlessly with the ‘pedagogical’ model, whereby a previously ignorant public is ostensibly enlightened through exposure to a ‘meaningful spectacle’, which elicits ‘awareness’ of the state of the world (PA 62-3). In serving a political purpose the work would mobilize the public, galvanizing its viewers into action, and in the process, it would evacuate its status as art by resolving itself into a political agenda. The work of art would position itself so as to provide ‘forms of awareness or rebellious impulses for politics’ (DPA 149). Art would thus ‘take leave’ of itself in order to become a form of ‘collective political action’ (DPA 149). Just as Rosler’s work denounces the capitalist war machine as hypocritical, so the Guerrilla Girls would decry the art establishment as a sexist institution.3 In as much as we take the point of the work to be self-evident such that its ‘political formula[e]’ is readily ‘identifiable’ (PA 63), its political commentary can be dismissed as largely redundant. If the ‘message’ of the work of art is so readable as to be completely obvious, not only is the artistic status of the work of art in question, so too is its political merit. In fact, since the Guerrilla Girls first produced this work, the number of female artists whose work the art establishment deems worthy of one-person shows, as

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documented by further works by the Guerrilla Girls, remains consistently low, which suggests that however obvious the message might be, there is still a need to reiterate it. In question for Rancière is not only, whether in making a political point a work of art becomes too didactic to retain its status as a work of art in any meaningful sense, whether it crosses a definitive line and becomes a political statement. The question is also whether a work of art advocates a form of politics that adheres to a model of consensus, which posits a community to come that would be unified according to a shared ideal in a manner consistent with romanticism (and which, as such, would paper over the miscount), or whether, in view of the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151) the work of art ‘questions its own limits and powers’, accepts its ‘insufficiency’ and ‘refuses to anticipate its own effects’ in ‘framing a new landscape of the sensible’ (DPA 149). Rather than assimilating this work by the Guerrilla Girls to the pedagogical logic from which Rancière seeks to distance art as dissensus, or critiquing it for its aspiration to leave its status as art in order to become a political slogan that inspires collective action according to the logic of consensus, let’s consider from an alternative point of view this work, which I will refer to for the sake of argument as a work of art (some might see it as a political poster – it was, after all, commissioned as a billboard). In fact, part of both the complexity and the appeal of Rancière is his insistence upon maintaining the ambiguity of borders between works of art and other objects, political or otherwise. It is of some interest that this particular work concerns itself not only with the art of politics, but also with the politics of art. That is, it offers a commentary on the relationship between the artist and the subject of the work of art. It does so not by asserting a political position, but by posing a question. It asks a rhetorical question and juxtaposes the question with two empirical claims. The question, ‘Do women have to be naked in order to get into the Met museum?’ is juxtaposed with a claim about the gender of artists whose work is on display in the museum, and a claim about the gendering of the subjects represented in the works displayed. If the number of female artists represented in the modern art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum is less than 5 per cent, and 85 per cent of the nudes represented are female, the implicit conclusion is that the vast majority of works representing ‘naked women’ (PA 53) are by male artists. If we read the question that is being posed, not only in the context of the observations specifying the gender of the majority of artists on display and the subjects they represent, but also against the background of the image of a female body that

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is foregrounded, we understand that what is being asked is not merely whether there is a relation between the gender of the artists represented in art museums, and the subject matter they represent. In question, rather is how women’s bodies are being represented, and what purposes their representation serve. In question is whether the only way that women can be granted access to museums is in the form of representations that present women as passive objects of a male gaze. Women, then, would only enter into museums in the guise of material content for male artists, who impose artistic form on the passive matter to which women’s bodies have been reduced, in representations by men and for a heteronormative masculine symbolic. The active imposition of form on passive matter that is a hallmark of the representative regime for Rancière is here explicitly aligned with male subject-artists representing female object-bodies. By asking about the gendering of subjects typically displayed in museums, and how they are typically represented, we can understand this work as commenting on some of the defining features of the representative order, the norms that dictate, in Rancière’s words, ‘which subjects and forms of expression were deemed worthy of inclusion’ (AD 10, ME 20), or what artistic conventions are appropriate for which subjects. We can see this work as commenting on the fact that the representative order ‘set those concerned by art apart from those that it did not concern’ (AD 12; ME 23), and as challenging typical assumptions about whose concern art is. Here, the subject is represented as a supine figure reposing in a fashion that specifically cites a painterly image, and in doing so also evokes a litany of paintings spawned in the same tradition. Yet, the work does not merely cite this painting or mimic this tradition – though it does this, thereby reminding us that at issue here is not whether female nudes should be on display in museums, but how they are displayed, by whom, for whom, for what purposes, and with what effects. The question posed is whether one of the effects is to preclude women from being taken seriously as artists, or from having art as a serious concern. At the same time, this work by the Guerrilla Girls subverts the tradition it playfully cites, replacing a woman’s head with a gorilla’s head, fusing a female figure with the head of an animal (repeating, with a critical edge, a trope that has been effected so often before – one thinks of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew). Gorillas are often caged in zoos for a public to view, a reference perhaps to the passivity of the women on display by male artists in museums curated for the pleasure of spectators. The gorilla head points to the habitual association of women with animals, to the reduction of women’s speech to noise, at the same

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time as it refigures women’s alleged wildness as a refusal to be contained within the frame of animality. To recycle a point made by Catherine Mackinnon in a slightly different manner, we might ask, tongue-in-cheek, what chance does a woman have of having her art or words taken seriously, of being construed as an artist or heard as an art critic, when she is reclining, naked, in a museum within a frame?4 On this occasion, the riposte must be, every chance. Far from quelling the speech of the unidentified collective group that goes by the name of Guerrilla Girls, this particular framing of a supine female body graphically represents their speech within the same frame. Their speech spills out beyond the frame, putting into question a history of well-rehearsed tropes and conventions that define the appropriate depiction of women’s bodies. Yet, if there is an insistence upon being heard, there is also a playful citation to and incorporation of a history of art that reiterates old themes in a new way, transgressing and revising the norms that infuse them in a humorous manner. The work performs a citation to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, which dates back to 1814.5 The pose of the female body that appears in Ingres, recumbent on a chaise longue, is readily recognizable in the version presented by the Guerrilla Girls, but a gorilla head replaces the female head, and a question is posed by the script written above the figure. The question this work by the Guerrilla Girls is asking us then is, how much has really changed in the years separating us from Ingres? How long will it take for 50 per cent of the artists represented in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or any other major art institution, to be female, and how would this transform not so much which subjects are depicted but how they are depicted, for what ends, and with what effects? The Guerrilla Girls have updated their figures, originally provided for 1989, and updated in 2005 and 2012, when the percentage of female artists to female nudes on display were 3 per cent to 83 per cent and 4 per cent to 76 per cent, respectively. Similarly, in another work, they provide figures for how many women had one-person shows in NYC galleries. In 1985, only one woman had such a show at the Modern. In 2015, one woman had such a show at the Guggenheim, Metropolitan and Whitney, and there were two one-person shows at the Modern.6 There is a robust line of male artists following in the steps of Ingres, whose inspiration is not hard to map, whose work ‘we’ are well accustomed to viewing in art museums, for example, Pablo Picasso’s, La Grande Odalisque d’après Ingres, 1907.7 In a well-documented history of art, Ingres’s influences in his 1862 Le Bain Turc, for instance – which depicts the inner sanctum of a harem, where

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women relax, enjoying the company of one another – have been traced back to Raphael.8 In turn, his theme has shaped a profusion of female nudes, inspiring a series of further painters, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas. We might begin to construct an alternative history by referring to Baby Back (2001) by Jamaica-born American artist Renée Cox, a work included in ‘American Family’.9 Like the Guerrilla Girls, Cox also cites Ingres’s Odalisque, imitating the pose of the female nude depicted there, but changing the colour of the skin and thereby challenging white, European, ideals of beauty. The work is a self-portrait, in which the artist wears red high, spiky heels, dangles a phallic whip from her hand, and reclines on a chaise longue, her back to the viewer, her buttocks prominent, calling up other works by Cox, in which she implicitly imitates the cartoon caricature images to which Saartjie Baartman was subjected, when she was paraded in Europe as a freak, her remains having been returned by the Museé de l’homme to their rightful country of origin only in 2002, although her death was in 1815.10 If Cox plays with the question of race, other works refigure gender and class.11 A long series of works have responded to Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque. In The Great Maiden by Moroccan artist 2Fik, a bearded figure reposes in a fashion that again echoes Ingres’s Odalisque, in which the female nude turns her head coyly over her shoulder, acknowledging the gaze of the viewer, and dangles a feather fan from her right hand.12 The fan, which is also suggestive of autoeroticism, a phallic appendage, becomes a whip in Cox’s rendering, a reference to slavery, perhaps, but one that reverses the power relationship of white domination, since here it is a black woman who wields authority over the whip.13 In 2Fik’s rendering, the fan becomes a feather duster, held by a hand clad in a bright pink rubber glove, accompanied by a plastic spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the left foreground of the picture, and a vacuum cleaner in the right background. In this context, the headscarf worn by the figure, citing Ingres’s turban, is reminiscent of a bandana that might be worn by a cleaning woman – worn here, however, by a trans figure. 2fik’s reclining body is on display, while the paraphernalia of housework codes her in a way that both indicates and departs from the subservient, feminized service roles to which cleaners and housewives, usually employed for poor wages or unpaid, are typically consigned. Often consigned to invisibility, the task of cleaning takes on a highly visible role here in the shape of a trans figure, challenging conventional gender configurations, and mimicking, even while departing from, the class privilege of the reclining females depicted

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by Ingres in works such as Odalisque and Le Bain Turc, women attended by, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s words, their ‘generally pritty’ slaves ‘braiding their hair in several pritty manners’.14 In Rancière’s terms, the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik can be understood to pave the way for the redefinition of ‘the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been’ (AD 25; ME 38), staging an implicit challenge to the standard ideals of beauty represented by Ingres and the tradition of white, female nudes in which his paintings are inscribed. Like Cox, the Guerrilla Girls and 2Fik, by incorporating a recognizable reference to a female figure who has her back turned to us – but referring in this case to Ingres’s The Turkish Bath – rather than La Grande Odalisque, and by devoting the rest of the framed work to a mirrored surface, the Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto also pays homage to Ingres. Il Bagno Turc in a playful yet critical way, puts into question the conventions of spectatorship assumed in Ingres’s work.15 In Ingres’s Le Bain Turc the gazes of the female subjects are averted from the viewer. The female nudes are passively observed. They do not return the gaze. In Pistoletto’s 1971 piece, the figure still has her back to the viewer, but, as we look at the piece, we see ourselves looking; our own image is mirrored back to us by the reflective stainless-steel surface of the work, so that the spectator’s gaze is returned from within the frame of the work. If we stand in a certain position, we find ourselves positioned as if we were the reflection of the woman, whose face we do not see (as if her face remains veiled), as if – were she looking into a mirror – she might see not her own reflection, but us, the spectators, looking at her, so that her image is refracted through our ideas of her. In Pistoletto, whatever assumptions or frameworks we bring to the work of art (whether they are objectifying, Orientalist, heteronormative or of some other character) we are asked to take responsibility for our looking, for our construction of the work. Just as Ingres superimposes his Eurocentric vision of women on those he depicts in the inner sanctum of the Turkish Bath, so Pistoletto might be understood to draw out the superimposition of Ingres’s masculinist/Orientalist gaze, rendering the ownership of every spectator’s gaze explicit, and thereby problematizing the authority that underpins the latent, unconscious racism of an Orientalist gaze that takes itself to be neutral. If the Guerrilla Girls focus attention upon the relative scarcity of female artists represented in public art museums in relation to the relative plethora of female nudes depicted, Cox brings into focus the invisible standard of whiteness

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informing both the museum culture and the feminist challenge the Guerrilla Girls pose to it, while 2Fik draws attention to the heteronormativity and gender stereotypes of museum culture, which are reflective of culture in general. In doing so, Cox and 2Fik interrogate assumptions that pervade communities that constitute themselves as feminist, which are capable of constituting their own versions of the police order. Considered in this context, Pistoletto, in turn, might be said to draw attention to the continual refraction of that police order. Every time a different spectator views his work, the work itself reflects an image of the viewer, and is thus continually reconstituted by the series of museum visitors who find themselves framed within the work. The emergence of the museum plays a significant strategic role for Rancière, in that it marks a period of transition from the representative regime – in which works of art ostensibly celebrated the dignity of those who commissioned them, or served the role of religious illustration – to the aesthetic regime, when the addressee or spectator becomes ‘undifferentiated’ (AD 9; ME 18). Henceforth, says Rancière, ‘artworks relate to the genius of peoples and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all’ (AD 13; ME 24). Let me pause here for a moment, to mark the words, ‘at least in principle’ [en droit au moins] – for herein lies the difficulty on which my concerns focus, which Rancière thereby signals, albeit obliquely and in passing. The works of art by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik indicate that the museum spectator is not as undifferentiated, as Rancière might assume. Rather, museums, the exhibits they display, and the audiences they target are themselves implicated in nationalist, colonialist, racist and cisgender agendas, which the works by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik render visible and put into question. Whether the political messages of these works of art will be obvious to a particular viewer will depend to some extent upon the communities within which they live, and what assumptions are taken for granted. Central to Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime is Kant’s free play, which, for Rancière, heralds an ‘unprecedented equality’ (AD 13; ME 24), promising an overcoming of Voltaire’s division between men of taste and those of coarse sensibility, a division that consists of conceiving of two humanities as ‘separate classes’ that ‘have distinct senses’ (AD 13; ME 23). There is, says Rancière, ‘no longer a hierarchy of active intelligence and sensible passivity’ (AD 13; ME 24). So too the hierarchy of subjects and publics is blurred. Yet the question raised by the Guerrilla Girls, and by works such as that by Cox and 2Fik, is whether this hierarchy is not still very much intact, when it comes to

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the race, gender and heteronormativity, not only of representation, but of artists. They point to the ways in which the gendering and racing of art works will be read differently according to context. Precisely in raising these questions, the Guerrilla Girls, Cox and 2Fik also challenge the implicit framing of audiences to which they point. If this is indeed the case, then I am suggesting that in some contexts the Guerrilla Girls might be understood to intervene in ‘reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible’ (AD 25; ME 38) as Rancière puts it, since their art work distributes ‘spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular’ (AD 25; ME 39) in new ways. In raising the question of whether women are still considered largely objects in the context of museums still dominated by male artists, and by inscribing women’s positionality as subjects who interrogate this state of affairs, the Guerrilla Girls are precisely opening up the arena for addressing the political question of who constitutes the community in Kant’s sensus communis. In foregrounding the question of race, Cox is issuing a challenge, one that might suggest that the intervention of at least this particular work of the Guerrilla Girls itself needs to be complicated. In fact, some historical and theoretical excavation suggests that Cox’s implicit challenge to the Guerrilla Girls taps into the Orientalism that can be stipulated in relation to Ingres, which the Guerrilla Girls – although they address the racism of the institution of art elsewhere – leave unaddressed in their transfiguration of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.16 As an art collective, the Guerrilla Girls offer an opportunity to interrogate the individualist assumptions that inform Rancière’s appeal to Kant’s understanding of the genius. We might ask whether Rancière tends to preserve the individualism of Kant’s theory of genius, even as he decries the view that equates Kant’s theory with that of the unique (see AD 10; ME 19). The Guerrilla Girls refuse the canons of the individual artist, identifying the origin of their work only with a group that remain unnamed and anonymous, in a deliberate ploy to undermine the importance of identity and the cult of the individual artist, thus implicitly challenging the idea of the solitary genius. The work emanates from a political movement, a collective movement, a wider feminist movement, to which its collective authorship might be understood to allude, precisely to the extent that the Guerrilla Girls, with their underground tactics, refuse to go by their own names, preferring to adopt the names of past female artists, thereby blurring the boundary between past and present, calling up a history of women artists. The work also blurs the boundary between high art and low art, calling up a tradition of high art in a graphically comic manner, and crossing genres, inhabiting a

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Figure 2 Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? 1989 © Guerrilla Girls and Courtesy guerrillagirls.com

space that is indeterminate: Is this a poster, a political billboard, or is it a work of art that belongs in the Met? And what would be the difference? Not only is the question of authorship and linear temporality muddied by the collective anonymity of a group consisting of a constantly changing membership, and of individuals who represent themselves by taking on the names of historical female artists, so too in this particular case, the work destabilizes itself, rewriting its own history. Another piece appears in 2014, which the Guerrilla Girls refer to as a ‘remix’, updating the original work, in which a second female nude, a still from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, is superimposed on the figure that cites Ingres’s female nude, and the words referring to the number of female nudes in the Met are replaced so that the text now reads, ‘Do women have to be naked to get into music videos? While 99% of the guys are dressed!’. In another citational work referring us back to the figures quoted by the Guerrilla Girls within the context of the United States, no image at all appears, simply the words: ‘It’s even worse in Europe.’17 This series of works present us with the question of whether or how Rancière’s reflections can accommodate feminist critique. At the same time, it brings to Rancière’s work a history of feminist critique, a body of scholarship, thinking and activism that makes it possible to formulate Rancière’s understanding of political and artistic dissensus in terms of feminist concerns. The Guerrilla Girls transform the passive female figure represented by Ingres into an active speaker. Cox draws attention to, and intervenes in, the construction of the female figure (again, in the particular works on which I focus here) as white. 2Fik disrupts

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gender norms that typically align certain body parts with feminized scripts, and certain service roles with women. Such artists are capable of shifting the terms of discourse, sight, and the perceptual field, in such a way as to alter the landscape of the visible. The history of feminist critique is itself contested ground, in which conceptual and political battles have been fought and continue to play themselves out over the claims of intersectionality. Queer theory has contested the heteronormativity of feminist theory, the transgender movement has contested the normativity of both, questions have been raised about the relevance of class to an invisibly middle-class feminist theory, and race theorists have contested the implicit ownership of feminist theory by white feminists. A history then that might itself be understood in terms of a series of clashes between the police order of feminism as usual, and moments of political dissensus that stage the imperative to redraw the map of feminism so as to render it capable of structural challenge and transformation. As sites of invisibility are rendered visible, so too the claims of those who have assumed the right to dictate the terms on which feminism is meaningful, the right to define the logos of feminist theory or activism, are put in question. Rancière acknowledges that the way in which the police order is defined, and therefore what will qualify as political dissensus, is dependent upon context when he suggests that, ‘The politics of works of art plays itself out to a larger extent – in a global and diffuse manner – in the reconfiguration of worlds of experience based on which police consensus or political dissensus are defined’ (PA 65). This suggests that whether a work of art amounts to a political slogan or not will depend on how the community that receives it constitutes itself, on what counts as common sense for a given community. A writer cannot control how her words might be received any more than an artist can control the meaning of her work of art (see PA 62). Yet, it is worth speculating that were a spectator to identify themselves under the sign of feminism, the chances are that the significance of the work of the Guerrilla Girls is likely to have acquired a level of self-evidence that it will lack in other contexts. The same might be said in reference to Cox’s Baby Back, depending upon how its viewers understand themselves as configured with regard to race, or with reference to 2Fik in relation to trans concerns. In this sense, whether a redistribution of the sensible takes place or not is dependent on what constitutes common sense for a given community. Depending on how a given community constitutes itself, what counts as common and what does not, certain questions

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will not merely be salient, but all too familiar; or else they will not appear at all: they will remain invisible, unintelligible, incoherent, irrelevant, meaningless, beside the point, or perhaps outlandish, threatening and abrasive. It is precisely around such divisions that dissensus takes shape. By taking a work produced by the Guerrilla Girls feminist collective, by Cox, by 2Fik or by Pistoletto and suggesting ways in which these works challenge one another as well as some of Rancière’s assumptions, my effort has been to explore the relationship between particular political movements and Rancière’s understanding of how political art functions as dissensus in the aesthetic regime. By emphasizing the contextual character of the relationship between the police order of consensus that orchestrates prevailing perceptions and the dissensual fracturing of common sense, my effort is directed towards refining the sense in which Rancière’s conception of politics might be understood to operate. On the one hand, Rancière provides a vocabulary that can shed light on feminist interventions, precisely in the manner that intersectional approaches to feminist theory require. That is, as certain exclusions that were previously invisible and unintelligible, even to progressive politics, are rendered salient and meaningful, what constituted common sense proves itself open to revision, through an ongoing process of challenges. On the other hand, feminist philosophy, politics and aesthetics can illuminate Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus, which appeals to a state of affairs that a given community takes as self-evident, a self-evidence that the operation of dissensus brings into question. We need to take seriously and think through the fact that communities are differentially constituted with regard to what passes for self-evident. Rancière’s own understanding of what is self-evident is liable to be constituted in such a way as to emphasize certain factors as salient, while ignoring, disregarding, or failing to see others as salient. My discussion here is offered as a way of explicitly opening up Rancière’s aesthetic considerations to a feminist sensibility – a gesture I assume he would not oppose, but would rather welcome, given his sensitivity to feminist concerns elsewhere in his work – thereby illustrating that his aesthetics are amenable to being opened up in this way. There is a sense in which the narrative arc of this chapter might be said to replicate the problem it tries to address, by moving from the Guerrilla Girls to Cox to 2Fik. Perhaps it will be said, with some justification, I should have begun with 2Fik, or Cox, since by foregrounding the Guerrilla Girls, I continue to tell the story of feminism by centring the experience and reflections of white women, and only acknowledging as an afterthought African American feminist and trans challenges to what is thereby assumed to be white, heterosexual and cisgender

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ownership of feminist thought. After consideration, I have chosen to take this risk both to respect the sequential appearance and citational references of these works of art, which can be read as playing off one another, and to illustrate how feminism both participates in establishing new versions of the police order, and is capable of conflict, fracture and dissensus. How well feminism can accommodate dissensus varies from one context to another; its success in doing so might be taken as an index of its vitality and continued importance as a movement. The necessary tensions of the feminist movement continue to play themselves out. The artworks discussed above will tend to elicit divergent responses from communities that have become more or less attuned to implicit heteronormativity, sexism or racism of social norms, and the ways they are embodied in art institutions. Such overlapping communities will be more or less sensitive to the concerns of one another. The degree of sensitivity to the dynamics of race, gender, or heteronormative presumption, is not reducible to how one identifies in relation to these categories; neither is it insensitive to it. It is a question of how much thinking, reading, reflecting and challenging one has done in order to appreciate the degree to which our ways of seeing, perceiving and thinking are inevitably caught up in normative orders of which it is difficult to become aware; even when we are aware of them, the normativity is difficult to combat. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that an optics of unconscious dictates what we see and what we do not see, how we orchestrate and react to the world, how we schematize and react to people as raced, classed and gendered and so on, and to interrogating such optics. Art can distil such schematizations and as such can render them available for interrogation. It can also participate in and help to produce new schematizations. In question of how we perceive the world and how the world can be brought under contestation, how it can become another world, how we can perceive it differently in fundamental ways, how the structuring of race, gender or heteronormativity, for example, can arrange what there is to see or hear or understand. Art can bring into conflict two different worlds, producing dissensus. It can also draw attention to the multiplicity of worlds, and police logics. The very conditions of possibility for understanding can undergo revision.

Notes 1 See the interview with Rancière, ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière with Gabriel Rockhill’, in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 65. Hereafter cited as PA.

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2 See PA 50. See also DT 138, 186. 3 In fact, the Guerrilla Girls also attack aspects of capitalism, including a work that lampoons art collectors, the text of which reads: ‘Art is sooo expensive … we completely understand why you can’t pay your employees a living wage!’ See http:// guerrillagirls.squarespace.com/projects/ 4 See Catherine Mackinnon “Francis Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 193. My reference to Mackinnon is tongue-incheek, and does not endorse her views on pornography. To be absolutely clear, I am certainly not condemning the representation of female nudes (or any other nudes) in art galleries or elsewhere. 5 See http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/une-odalisque 6 Works by the Guerilla Girls can be found on their website. See note 3 above. 7 https://theartstack.com/artist/pablo-picasso/la-grande-odalisque-d-ap 8 http://www.louvre.fr/mediaimages/le-bain-turc 9 http://www.reneecox.org/american-family 10 See S. Osha, “Venus and White Desire,” Transition, 99 (2008): 80–93. 11 See http://search.it.online.fr/covers/?p=45 12 See: montrealgazette.com/tag/the-great-maiden 13 Thanks to Simon-Morgan Wortham for helping me think about this point. 14 See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters 1708-1720, vol. I, edited by Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 314. 15 https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/Michelangelo-Pistoletto-Il-Bagno-TurcoThe-Turkish-Bath-1971 16 The text of one of their works, for example, reads ‘Only 4 Commercial galleries in N.Y. show black women. Only 1 shows more than one’. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/guerrilla-girls-no-title-p78806 (accessed 26 June 2015). 17 www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerilla-girls-its-even-worse-in-europe-p78801

Concluding Reflections

I write out a sense that Ranciére is profoundly right, that he captures and expresses so much that is vital in his understanding of the redistribution of the sensible, and the ways in which dissensus can interrupt the police order. I also write from a sense that he misses, overlooks or fails to see so much that is vital in the politics of intersectionality. If ‘political dispute’ is ‘an interlocution that undermines the very situation of interlocution’ (DT 100, M 141), the politics of interpretation undermines the very articulation of the police order. There is not one police order; there are many. There are conflicting worlds, which contest one another, which sometimes overlap with one another, which often collide with one another, collisions that can be dissensual. There are also underground worlds, worlds that cut across continents and seas, networks of feminist, queer and trans theorists, decolonial and race theorists, and communities of contestation within these worlds. As María Lugones puts it, ‘Resistant networks are often historically muted or distorted. Communication is complex. Expressive gestures, acts, movements, and behaviors are often incommunicative with respect to some audiences and communicative with respect to others; meaning is often conveyed obliquely, indirectly, sometimes in ways hard to access but always differentially accessible to audiences related in terms of social power’.1 There is not one dominant world, there are many, and the world that dominates in one context is not the world that dominates in another. While in one world, a work by the Guerrilla Girls might be political in the sense that Ranciére opposes, in another world it might function dissensually. Whether the message of an artwork is clear is dependent upon the world in which it is perceived. Perhaps it is impossible to capture all at once the complexity of miscommunication and communication, of significance, insignificance and missed significance. Yet, it is not impossible to acknowledge the salience and importance of registering that this complexity exists in ways that will make it difficult for all of us, even those of us who are interested in trying to do so, to see or understand the ways we are implicated in different forms of dominance. Rancière claims that ‘the name of

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an injured community that invokes its rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone’ (1992, 60). Yet, the history of feminism, to take just one example, suggests otherwise. It suggests that the false universality of terms such as ‘men’, ‘citizens’ or ‘humans’ (1992, 60) is often replicated in political efforts to make visible invisible categories such as women, with the result that movements that take themselves to be in the name of women in general, in fact operate in ways that exclude women who are not white, cisgendered or able-bodied. This is not to contest that it should be otherwise. It is to acknowledge that the dream of solidarity Ranciére imagines is often absent, and to insist that it is there, is to fall prey to an imaginary that is constituted by sites of invisibility that demand to be excavated. To maintain that ‘the first motto of any self-emancipation movement is always the struggle against “selfishness”’ (1992, 59) is to risk overlooking that one’s own privilege will tend to make one blind to sites of vulnerability to which one’s habits of perception are not attuned, and to the work that needs to be done to become so attuned – the work of redistributing the sensible. To fail to be attuned to such sites of tension will not make them go away, just as to ignore what Aristotle has to say about women, and how it is interwoven with what he says about slaves, does not negate its political legacy. In the introduction I suggested that Sojourner Truth’s appeal ‘ain’t I a woman?’ raises questions about the generality of the subject Ranciére assumes to constitute the category of humanity in the logical schema of social protest. Influenced by Lugones’s concept of multiple ‘worlds of sense’, the idea that lived worlds ‘organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple’, Talia Bettcher argues for an understanding of trans that illustrates how the term ‘woman’ operates differently according to the context of its signification.2 The claim to be a woman by someone belonging to a trans subculture might operate smoothly, in a way that is uncontested, while in dominant culture it might not.3 This suggests that belonging (or not belonging) to a community plays a crucial role in whether or not one’s claim to be a woman (in this case) is heard as intelligible. In one world it will make sense, while in another it will not. Similarly, whether one belongs to a community that identifies as feminist, trans or African American will affect one’s response to works by the Guerrilla Girls, Renée Cox and 2Fik. If, as Ranciére suggests, Flaubert anticipates Adorno in writing the first anti-kitsch novel, I have suggested that in killing Emma, Flaubert also prepares the ground for the feminization of mass culture that is characteristic of high modernism, and that he does so by displacing his Orientalism onto the character he must kill. Flaubert makes Emma into the vehicle by which he himself, as

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the forerunner of critical theory, can transcend the temptation to which she succumbs, and for which she must be killed. Emma treats the equivalence of art and life as if art were life, she materializes the spiritual. She puts blue vases on her mantelpiece; she mistakes art for furniture. What differentiates Emma from Flaubert in the end? Emma is the matter, or the content of the literary form Flaubert administers, she is the matter shaped by Flaubert’s active form. Emma is the object, the objectified; Flaubert is the author, the writer, the inventor, the subject. Emma is the passive vessel through which Flaubert’s meaning flows. In this gendered division of labour, how far has Flaubert departed from the gendered Aristotelian metaphysics of form and matter, and how far does Ranciére reiterate this failure, when he fails to mention or to notice it? How far might Ranciére’s failure to see this gendering be underwritten by his neglect of the complexity with which Aristotelian form and matter are embedded in a narrative that interweaves the inferiority of slaves to masters and women to men, and the legacy of this interweaving for political theory and aesthetics? In question is whether Rancière does not put back into play, in Panagia’s words, the very ‘forces of necessity that arrange [peoples and objects] according to a specific structure of correspondence and representation’ (2014, 293) that Rancière sees Flaubert’s style as breaking away from. What must we say about Sojourner Truth? Must we say that her speech belongs to the ‘world police’ which ‘can sometimes achieve some good’ (DT 139, M 188)? Should we say that Sojourner Truth’s speech does not qualify as political in Rancière’s sense because it appeals to her identity as a black woman who is a slave? Or, should we say that it does qualify as political because it addresses itself to white women, who at the time of the speech were still fighting for their own recognition as political subjects, and as such did not constitute a party that was ‘already given’ (DT 102, M 143)? Or, should we rather turn the question around and ask how Rancière can fail to consider how Flaubert’s Emma embodies an Orientalist feminization of mass culture? Or, how he can represent Aristotle as if the rule of husbands over wives had no bearing on his Politics, and as if it were not interwoven with his discussion of slavery? Should we ask how Rancière can ignore the fact that the logic of social contract theory or that of Marx’s analysis of labour is thoroughly colonialist and sexist? What does it mean to disqualify in advance instances of political subjectification as insufficiently political or democratic in Rancière’s sense, when his own ‘political’ discourse itself often reflects invisible white masculinity? How can Rancière demand that properly political instances of subjectification will be ‘floating subjects that deregulate all

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representation of places and portions’ (DT 100, M 140), when his own discourse fails to deregulate such representation? I have put into motion, during the course of this book, Rancière’s notions of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible. I have shown how these are notions indebted to Kant and Lyotard, along with other philosophers, notions that twist away from their authors even as they recall and recapitulate and regurgitate them. Rancière has a way of reading authors so that they say something else, say something slightly more than perhaps they wanted to, than they would have done, than they meant to; he moves them through a process of disidentification. He takes their texts, and reshapes their histories, he receives their concepts, and he bends them into something new, so that when you go back and read Kant and Hegel it seems as if they had always been saying something different, as if they were saying this new thing all along. He has the mark of a philosopher, a thinker, a cultural critic who makes it easier to dip into the history of philosophy, as if you were licking an ice cream, easier to find something there that is very much more to your taste than you might have found before. Kant’s conflict of the faculties becomes dissensual, and the monochrome universality of time and space starts to syncopate into different rhythms, mellow patterns that go up and down and round and round, and that do not always synchronize with one another. Art can make this happen, and so can politics. In Fear and Loathing (2014) with the use of masks, through which we see the eyes and mouths of speakers, Gillian Wearing frames faces in ways that dislocate race, gender and age cues, as we listen to traumatic confessions of individuals whose identities are partially disguised.4 The masks cover most of the speakers’ faces, so that we only see their eyes and mouth – enough to discern the colour of their skin, but not enough to read their expressions. In a 1977 work 2 into 1, by having the words of a speaker lip-synched by another speaker, Wearing both makes visible and puts into question the gendered and age expectations we typically bring to what we see and hear, by disrupting these expectations.5 The sighs and repetitions, the tone of a voice, its hesitations, are transfigured because of the dislocation of the sentiments and thoughts these voices express from the cultural systems of reference that might normally render them legible and intelligible in relation to particular faces, genders or ages. Thus, when two young boys are seen to speak in the voice of their mother the mixture of sentiments she feels for her sons, the cruelty of some of their remarks is thrown into relief, but so too are the cultural, gendered systems out of which they arise. The material ticks and affects of the voices we hear, their despair, resignation, hopelessness,

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hate, love, admiration, self-doubt, humiliation, recrimination, impatience and derision are embodied in ways that are unexpected, such that the expectations we bring to what we hear are both made visible and put into question. In this way, Wearing’s work can be understood, in Rancière’s words to ‘und[o] the sensible fabric – the given order of relations between meanings and the visible’ (PA 64). The photographs and video installations of Gillian Wearing throw into relief the normative expectations we bring to our perceptions, in terms of race, gender and age, for example. Wearing plays with the dominance of visual understanding, displacing and dislocating the smooth operation of visual cues with auditory cues. Daniel Barnes describes the effect of Wearing’s ‘iconic series’, Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what other people want you to say (1992–3), in terms that also offer insight into her work 2 into 1.6 As Barnes says, Wearing ‘stopped people in the midst of doing something else’, and demanded that they ‘have a thought to share’, asking them to write down their immediate thoughts, allowing their ‘consciousness’ to ‘spil[l] over’. Barnes describes the effect of the placards, held by members of the public, which Wearing photographs in terms of the ‘disparity between the look on their faces and the thoughts written on their cards’. A policeman, who is supposed to help people, writes simply HELP. An urbanelooking business man in a suit writes on his placard ‘I’m desperate’. In 2 into 1 the effect of disparity is starker still, when Wearing undercuts the gendered, affective, and age-specific expectations produced by the visual cues of the two white middle-class twin brothers in school uniforms, sitting on chairs next to one another. As they lip-synch the words of their mother, who is reflecting on her relationship with the two boys, they appear to voice the conflicting, fraught and poignant sentiments their mother harbours for them, a mixture, as she says at one point, of love and hate. This technique calls up, among other things, the waywardness of generational transmission of affects, and parenting techniques, and the gendering thereof. At the same time, it persistently refuses to give way to one gender or the other, one age or another. Using the same technique, Wearing has the boys’ mother appear to voice the words of her sons, including the view that she has a flair for the dramatic, sometimes saying ‘I can’t go on’, as if she were in a ‘Laurence Olivier play’. We hear these words in the voice of her son, but we see her face, with her lips moving. One can all too easily imagine this characterization, intoned by one of the boys, to have been adopted from their father, who is unknown as far as the video installation is concerned; this simile is too mature to have come from one of the twins, no matter how ‘sophisticated’

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they think they are. The boys concede that their mother is ‘good at looking after’ them, but think that she ‘is not very good at arguments’. As for their mother, she thinks that Lawrence is ‘adorable’, ‘very bright’ and ‘beautiful looking’, but that he can also be very cruel, and has a habit of putting his finger on the truth, as when he calls her a ‘failure’, something which she herself feels she is, and when he diagnoses her inability to follow through on things. The way in which Wearing plays with our expectations in works such as Fear and Loathing and 2 into 1 highlights and problematizes the routine assumptions and expectations around gender, race and age that structure everyday life. There is a fabric, a warp and weft of the world that passes for acceptability. It happens every day, every second, every millisecond; it happens all over the world: in corridors, conferences, workplaces, streets, the tube, universities, in the desert; little instances of aggression, microaggressions, little gestures, not so little gestures, a series of words, a string of unchallenged assumptions feeding seamlessly into the fabric of things. You’ve seen it all before a million times. A male tennis coach, who is coaching both men and women, in a social holiday resort setting refers to the serve of a top-twenty player as ‘girlish’. Glances are exchanged among all the women present. It is pointed out a few minutes later in the nicest possible way, thrown into the conversation, as if haphazardly, that it is interesting how Serena Williams serve is in fact faster than some of the men’s. The comment goes right over the male coach’s head, who concedes: Yes, Serena Williams serves ‘like a man’. And while we are on the subject of Serena, the racial context of her reception on court and off by tennis aficionados is brought to the surface by a series of observations by the poet Claudia Rankine, who in her book Citizen refers to all the manifestly incorrect line calls made by white umpires in crucial tennis games that Serena Williams would have won without those blatantly incorrect line calls. ‘Neither her father nor her mother’, says Rankine ‘nor her sister nor Jehovah her God nor the Nike camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world’ (C 26). Rankine says the way in which Serena Williams’ body can appear in the ‘historically white space’ of the world of tennis reminds her of ‘Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”’ (C 25). If politics is, as Rancière suggests, a matter of aesthetics, and aesthetics is white, do black bodies ‘fluctuate’? Are their ‘moments, places, occurrences’ (DT 89, M 127) only achieved when ‘thrown against a sharp white background’ (C 25), or can they transform the colour of that background? How

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can those ‘fragile and fleeting’ inscriptions of equality that manage to establish themselves be extended and maximized, so that the power of these inscriptions is materialized? (DT 88, M 126). When is anger insanity, and when is it something to let go? When does an individual become capable of claiming a right to anger in the face of the ‘low flame’, the ‘constant drip’ (C 32) that constitutes the ‘quotidian struggles against dehumanization’ (C 24)? When is silence acquiescence to invisibility, and when is it just exhaustion? How do you negotiate the short circuit between invisibility, visibility and hypervisibility? When do you carry what does not seem to belong to you, and how do you recognize that it is part of what made you you (see C 55)? Thinking together Rankine’s reflections on what it takes to become a citizen (C 151) and Rancière’s reflections on the distribution of space and time suggests new ways of framing and counting subjects. If perception is structured by ‘the partition of the perceptible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (DT 63, M 97), such divisions inform what subjects see and hear, what we allow ourselves to feel, how we judge the world and gauge ourselves in relationship to its reality, its sanity or insanity, our sanity or insanity, how our perceptions and judgements are structured by doubts and disbelief, by blindness and failures. ‘He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?’ (C63) There is the incursion of the unconscious into the field of perception. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t see you. … No, no, no, I really didn’t see you’ (C77). When are the omissions of sanctioned perceptions just omissions, and when do they themselves become moments of insanity? When the frames of culturally sanctioned perception are tilted so that they momentarily come into view, can we take those moments and use them to reshape the wrongs of the world, rework the structures of perception that make the world the way it is? This question twists away from Rancière. Rancière’s notion of dissensus operates by redistributing the sensible. When a political or artistic act intervenes in the fabric of the world it can reshape temporality and spatiality. Art can slow the world down or speed it up, it can make time stop in its tracks, it can freeze a black moment into a flower, spelling out the petals by tattooing them onto the pure bright shiny glistening limestone underfoot, or swirling it into a mosaic snake that curves its stretchy way along the entire length of the promenade. Waves of black that rise up to meet you, making the pavement come up at you as you run over them, engulfing you, nearly swallowing you whole, swelling and swerving like a roller coaster so that you feel like the ground is going

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to eat you up, and you are spilling over, falling through the world, and the ground is not flat any more, it is seething, curling so that you might just topple into the other side, where the waves are crashing and spuming onto the long, thin, white symmetrical steps that pave their way for you to walk on into the sea. Art can zigzag time up and down a bronzed and burnished strip of a geometrically planed hill, it can turn the dark purple of a midnight sea into a night of unending blue from which you might never recover. It can spread itself out in a fragrant glory of blue and green and yellow tiled pavement for you to walk over and on top of and underneath in your imagination, twisting and turning into the simple, clear shapes of colour, better than Mondrian, because you can walk on them, and let their tones seep into you as the city bathes you in its, white, incandescent light, so luminous it tips not just into blue but sometimes into almost lemon yellow.

Notes 1 María Lugones, Pilgramages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against multiple oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 25. 2 Lugones, Pilgramages/Peregrinajes, p. 20. 3 Talia Mae Bettcher says, ‘When a trans woman says “I’m a woman” and her body is precisely the kind of body taken to invalidate a claim to womanhood in mainstream culture, the claim is true in some trans subcultures because the meaning of the word “woman” is different … Indeed, in some trans subcultures, trans women can be taken as paradigmatic women rather than as women who are only marginally so, i.e., on the border of male and female. This contestation is not merely verbal, since it tracks a contrast in underlying gender practices: there can be situations in which a trans woman lives a rich and vibrant life as woman, has friends as a woman, is loved as a woman, inhabits a social milieu in which she is a woman in a trans subculture, and perhaps experiences sexual violence as a woman while simultaneously being viewed as a man who lives as a woman in dominant culture. In that culture, for example, if she were incarcerated, she would be housed in jail as a man, with other men; her entire life as a woman could be obliterated’, ‘Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 2 (2014): 383–406, see esp. p. 389. 4 See http://sfaq.us/2015/01/everyone-gillian-wearing-at-regen-projects/ 5 https://youtube/36WUgFMDY-M 6 http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/public-faces-and-private-lives-gillian-wearingwhitechapel-gallery-london/ (accessed 27 July 2015).

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Index 2fik

on excellence 75 on form and matter 16, 75–6, 130, 162 on function 75 on household 72 on justice 68–9 on logos 10 parapolitics 66 poetics 104 on political community 76 political philosophy of 17 politics 21 on politics as aesthetics 69 on reason 10, 75 in relation to the police order 26 and the representative regime 86, 101 on slavery 18, 24, 163 on slaves and women 15, 19, 21, 57, 72–5 on Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex 86–8 on speech and voice, distinction between 15 on two different kinds of humanity 12 on virtue 19, 68–9 on women 19, 22, 76, 162

146, 152–3, 162

Adorno, Theodor 84, 91, 96, 126, 162 aesthetic cut 118, 149 aesthetic regime 89, 92, 94, 103, 108, 119, 128–9 and the form/matter distinction 95, 126 and museums 89, 93 paradox of 126 recasts Kant’s transcendental approach 105 in relation to dissensus 96, 117 relation to Kant’s third critique 105 in relation to sensory apprehension 125 Stendhal as exemplary of 127 suspension of determinate relations 115 transition to representative regime 128 and the unrepresentable 90 aesthetics of politics 103, 107, 118 affects 48, 86–8, 96, 102, 165 and indeterminacy 50 Agamben, Giorgio 21 Ahmed, Sarah 42, 45 Akerman, Chantal 43, 48–9 Alice in Wonderland 23 alienation 70 Althusser, Louis 20 anonym 11, 16–17, 162 Antelme, Robert 92, 95 appetites 10 archipolitics 26, 66–7 Arendt, Hannah 21 Aristotle 1, 2, 57–8, 61–2 on appetite 73 on authority 75 on deliberation 75 distinction between voice and speech 62 on equality 68

art dissensual practice of 113 political 43, 110, 148 porosity of category of 89 relation to philosophy 84 relation to politics 2, 44, 55 n.15, 101 Baartman, Saartjie 152 Belvedere Torso 115 Brah, Avtar 17 Brecht, Bertolt 112, 115 Burke, Edmund 87 Camus, Albert 95 capitalism 37 class 8, 138, 148 class struggle 57, 70–1

176

Index

consensus 58, 102–3, 110, 113–14 and art 149, 157 and the police order 147 in relation to distribution of the sensible 116 in relation to economic globalization 104, 114 Corneille, Pierre 86–8 Cox, Renée 146, 152–7, 162 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 21 Degas, Edgar 152 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 10, 22–3 democracy 6 Deroin, Jeanne 65–6 disidentification 2, 65, 164 dissensus 2, 24, 27, 93, 97, 107, 164. See also under aesthetic regime; Hegel; Kant and ambiguity 138 and art 146, 149 artistic and political 116–17, 156–8 characteristic of relation between art and politics 116 as a conflict of worlds 147 as disruptive of the police order 103, 115 dissensual model of art 102 and feminist art 148, 158–9 as free agreement between imagination and understanding 124 as kernel of aesthetic regime 117 relation to distribution of the sensible 106, 115–16 distribution of social roles 123 distribution of the sensible 5, 36, 37, 85, 103. See also redistribution of the sensible and aesthetic/dissensual common sense 124 disruption of 108, 127 in relation to Aristotle 16 in relation to dissensus 116 in relation to feminist art 147, 155 in relation to museums 118 reordering of temporal and spatial possibilities 105 in relation to the ethical regime 14 Duchamp, Marcel 89

Emin, Tracey 137 equality 2, 4, 71–2, 128 and aesthetic regime 154 in relation to logos 2, 66 in relation to police logic 146 in social contract theory 69 ethical regime 14, 86, 101–2, 105, 108–9, 111, 118, 119. See also under Plato Felski, Rita 4–5 feminism 64, 147, 157 feminist theory 22, 24, 139, 156 Fernandez, René 113 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 23 Flaubert, Gustave 4–16, 162–3 hysteria 6 Madame Bovary 5, 7, 95 form 53 n.1, 79 n.28, 91, 105. See also under aesthetic regime; Aristotle; Hegel; Heidegger form and beauty in Kant 123 form in distinction from matter 27, 95, 121, 129, 146 attached to dignity 129 Heidegger’s critique of classical distinction 129 as racialized and feminized 121, 132, 139 in relation to activity and passivity 123, 125–6, 129, 150, 163 in relation to associated distinctions 128–9 in relation to femininity and masculinity 130, 139, 150, 162 in relation to Lyotard 124 in relation to rationality/ irrationality 130 forms of art correlated with social function 115 as gendered in Aristotle 76 shifting forms 119 suspension of supremacy of form over matter 88–9, 125, 128 Foucault, Michel 101, 104, 110, 119 critique of neo-liberalism 103–4 historical a priori 37, 53 n.2, 105 freedom 61, 70

Index gender 3, 57, 73–4, 76, 138, 164 of artists 145, 155 and literary fiction 13 stereotypes in Flaubert 6, 8, 12 genius 111, 128, 133, 138, 154 Godard, Jean-Luc 112 Guerrilla Girls 27, 146–58, 161–2

177

ideology 103–4, 118 impersonal literature 27 indeterminacy 41 indifference 115, 118 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique 151–3, 155 Juno Ludovisi 89, 115, 124–5

‘half-caste’ 44 Hegel, G.W.F. 83, 89 and the aesthetic regime 26, 92, 101 on art as representative of Spirit 91 artwork as event 133 and dissensus 93 on form 99 on form and matter 94, 137 historicity of art 90 Spirit 137 on sublimity 137 Heidegger, Martin 121–2, 129–39 earth 129, 132–4, 136 equipmentality 134, 137 European, masculinist overtones of discussion of work of art 133 on the form/matter distinction 27, 131, 134, 137–8 Greek temple as work of art 132, 136 mortality 38 ontic/ontological distinction 38, 136 reliability 134 truth as aletheia 129–33, 138 usefulness 134 on the work of art 27 on the work of art as event 133, 138 on the work of art as thing 131, 133–4, 136 world 38, 129, 132–4, 136 heteronormativity 155, 159 Hobbes, Thomas 69–70, 76 Holocaust, the 26, 90–1, 96 horizon 47 hysteria 6, 8, 11 identification in Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy 87 impossibility of 28 identity of opposites 90, 94, 115

Kant, Immanuel 24, 83, 119, 164. See also under form aesthetic experience 14, 123 aesthetic idea 93, 125, 127, 139 aesthetic judgement 14, 92–3, 101, 105, 121 and the aesthetic regime 26, 90, 92 aesthetics of 65, 72 relation to morality 122 on the beautiful 121–2, 126 Copernican revolution 38 Disinterestedness 14 and dissensus 93, 124 faculties 15 faculties of imagination and understanding 106, 124 free play of 123, 127, 139, 154 Foucauldian reworking of 110 free play of understanding and imagination 92, 116, 122, 124 genius, concept of 92–4, 126, 139, 146, 155 on the inferiority of non-whites 76 on reason’s legislative power 122–3 sensus communis 107, 155 on the sublime 92, 121–2, 124 transcendental approach 101, 105–6, 108 understanding of space and time 7, 27, 39, 105–6, 116, 139 Levi, Primo 92 Levinas, Emmanuel 84, 92, 131–2 logos 1–3, 60, 66, 135. See also under Aristotle egalitarian 72 in relation to women 65 Lopez, Alan 23 Lugones, Maria 162

178

Index

Lyotard, Jean-François 26, 83–4, 90–2, 96, 164 on the aistheton 125 and ethics 122 rejection of art as consumption 126 rejection of engaged art 126 and the sublime 121–2 Marx, Karl 26, 70–1 Matisse, Henri 151 matter 53 n.1. See also under form Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 38 metapolitics 26, 66–7, 71 Mills, Charles 76 Milton, John 87 miscount 18, 58, 61, 116, 139, 147, 149 Moliére 104 museums 112–14, 118, 128, 135 and gender and race of artists 149–50, 153–4 in relation to the distribution of bodies 145 Mwangi-Hutter, Ingrid 26, 50–2 Newman, Barnett nonsense 23

27, 90–2

Oedipus. See under Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex opacity 95 Orientalism 11–13, 16, 153, 162–3 Panagia, Davide 4, 7 parapolitics 26, 66, 70 part that has no part 16, 20, 57, 66, 69, 73, 134, 147 and the anonym 11 and constitutive wrong 60 and dissensus 116–17 and the distribution of the sensible 74 redistribution of the sensible 59 and gender and race 8, 15, 19, 139–40 and identification and disidentification 2, 28 and lack of time 68 and the miscount 97 and parapolitics 69 and the proletariat 60 and speech 63 Patterson, Orlando 38, 45

pedagogical model of art 102–3, 111, 115, 118 whether relevant to the Guerrilla Girls 148–9 Phoenix, Anne 17 Picasso, Pablo 151–2 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 153–4 Plato 24, 58, 59 archipolitics 66–8 community 67–8 and the ethical regime 85–6, 92, 101 ideal city 61 jettisoning of the poets 111 myth of three metals 67 political philosophy of 17 in relation to the police order 26 on the soul 14–15 subordination of art/images to philosophy 84–5, 108, 117 on virtue 19 on women 76 police order 2, 27, 57, 63–4 and conflicting worlds 161 and consensus 58, 147, 158 and the distribution of bodies 145 and feminism 157, 159 logic of 65 and naturalizing social divisions 114 passes itself as real 103, 107 in relation to class 70 in relation to equality 4, 59–60 in relation to political philosophy 17, 67 and self-evidence 146, 158 political philosophy 67 politics 2 akin to Kantian aesthetics 72 of art 118 and consensus 112, 114, 147 dissensual 57 as interruption of the police order 58–9 as inventing new subjects 116 logic of 65 politics of aesthetics 103, 107, 118 as process of equality 64 in relation to economic globalization 114–15 in relation to philosophy 66 as sole principle of equality 58 as usual 58

Index Pollard, Ingrid 137 poor 20, 60. See also under rich and poor Porterfield, Aubrey 10–12 Proust, Marcel 13 Rabbit-Proof Fence 24–6, 35–48 race 3, 73–4, 76, 138, 164 of artists 145, 147, 155 and community 157 race theory 22, 24, 139 in relation to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary 12 Rankine, Claudia 24, 166–7 Raphael 152 redistribution of the sensible 27, 39, 54 n.11, 46, 83, 129, 167 and community 157 and dissensual art 117, 138 as dissensus 106, 109, 161 and habits of perception 162 in relation to temporality and spatiality 116 as reworking of Kant’s sensus communis 107 representative regime 86, 94–5, 101–2, 104–5, 108–9, 110, 118, 119. See also under Aristotle and imposition of form and matter 124, 126 mimetic paradigm of 111, 128–9 in relation to art as technical perfection 125 in relation to dignity 128 in relation to the gender 146, 150 transition to aesthetic regime 128 rich and poor 1 struggle between 21 Ristelhueber, Sophie 49 Rosler, Martha 96–7, 112, 115, 148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 69–70, 76, 104, 113 Schiller, Friedrich 89, 115–16, 124 aesthetic experience 123 free play of aesthetic judgement 121, 127 schizophrenia 7, 9, 12 slavery 1–3, 19, 57, 61. See also under Aristotle colonial slavery 51

179

social contract theory 69, 76 Sojourner Truth 16–17, 163 Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex 86–7 sovereignty 69–70 space 48, 114 distribution of 116, 118, 155 in relation to Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy 87 saturation in Plato’s community 68 spatiality 37, 167. See also under Kant; space new spatialities 109 and the redistribution of the sensible 138 in relation to the statue Juno Ludovisi 125 spatial scuttling in and out of museums 112–14 Spelman, Elizabeth 3, 72–4, 77 Stendhal 127 stolen generation 38 subjectification 59, 64, 66 temporality 37, 167. See also under Kant; time new temporalities 109 and the redistribution of the sensible 138 temporal shuttling back and forth 112 time 48, 109, 114, 134 distribution of time 116, 118, 155 in relation to Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy 87 saturation in Plato’s community 68 transcendental 138, 147. See also under Kant transgender 147, 157, 162 trauma 91 universality

65

Van Gogh, Vincent 133, 135 Voltaire 104, 154 Wearing, Gillian 24, 137, 164–6 whiteness invisibility of 21, 153 Williams, Serena 166 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 115 Witt, Charlotte 16

180

Index

women 3, 57, 64, 71. See also gender and feminism Woolf, Virginia 7, 9, 12–13 workers’ rights 71 world clashing of worlds 41 Molly’s world in Rabbit-Proof Fence 39 as raced, classed and gendered 159

wrong 1, 18, 58, 62, 66 constitutive wrong of politics 59–60 and feminism 64 in relation to social contract theory 69 Yiluo, Bai

117

21,