Art as the staging of a »disagreement,« as a sensual, conceptual sounding of its singular policies, finally: art as the implementation of a »dis-sensual« practice. These are some of the formulas that have contributed to giving Jacques Rancière’s political esthetics quite an astounding familiarity over the past few years. These past ten years, hardly any other oeuvre has developed a comparable magnetism or has brought to the artistic idea – especially in its multi-faceted relation toward politics – such a renewed, quotable basis. It is also thanks to Rancière’s theory that, no matter how closely it may be interwoven with established artistic practices, it doesn’t simply bow to them, just as it doesn’t leave them behind, unheeded or possibly even settled once and for all. Rancière’s thinking always opens a new chapter just when it seems present practice is about to catch up. Like a horizon, impossible to overtake – a horizon that is born from the innermost reaches of contemporary art and opens it to an outside that isn’t yet accessible, or at least not very readily.

Only a relatively small body of works, from 2000 to 2004, represent Rancière’s aesthetics, and now they’re finally available in translation. The volume of interviews »Le Partage du Sensible« was the starting point for a debate about renewed art policies; with »Malaise dans l’esthétique« (Original 2004), just recently published in German,¹ the series has already reached its end. And while art magazines still sometimes contemplate at length Rancière’s aesthetics (see »Artforum« March 2007), the artist himself has already returned to dealing primarily with issues of democratic politics and social history, i.e. to a »politics of literature.«² With the exception of several unpublished lectures, the majority of Rancière’s thoughts on the politics of art are thus already available in their final form, and »Malaise dans l’esthétique« marks their tentative – far-reaching and not easy to archive – capstone.

»Malaise dans l’esthétique« follows a blueprint similar to the early studies »Le partage du sensible« (2000), »Le destin des images« (2003) or Rancière’s oft-quoted lecture at the São Paulo Biennial 2004, »The Politics of Art and Its Paradoxes.«³ Current attempts at »de-hybridization« are the starting point, that is: new purity– and specificity laws, today increasingly imposed in the face of ever-growing media and material mixtures in art and theory. Again and again, Rancière exposes a common basis behind the calls for specificity as well as de-specificity; a basis that appears to have been strongly anchored beginning in the mid-19th century, though latently, until the present day: the »aesthetic regime of the arts,« which has overcome – parallel to political demands for equality – any hierarchic classification into high and low, valuable and non-valuable, sublime and crude once and for all in the radical »sameness« of all sensual material and objects that might be art. These differences have now been »un-differentiated« and art is thus currently caught up in a permanent tension between an impulse that pushes »art to ›live‹ and one that conversely separates the aesthetic sensibility from other forms of sensual experience.«⁴

»Malaise dans l’esthétique« is different from the other texts mentioned thus far in that it further formulates these two impulses.⁵ As the two leading aesthetic forms of logic, even of aesthetic politics, Rancière stresses on one hand the »scenario of the aesthetic revolution,« historically more or less discredited, while the project »art becomes a form of life« has repercussions in the current bliss of community and in »relational art«, while also being felt still on the other hand in the »politics of the antagonistic form« – a battle fought in some cases relentlessly, from Adorno to Lyotard, against the compromising of artistic obstinacy and the dissonant, conflicting form dictated by the profanities of the capitalist world of commerce and consumption. This is underlined by an entire chapter dedicated to Lyotard’s late ethics, which places immemorial blame on the beginning of any kind or artistry (or its virtual impossibility) in the face of the absolute historic disaster of the Holocaust. The law of Moses or that of McDonald, the memory of enshrined otherness or the historical catastrophe of absolute egalitarianism – Lyotard’s appeal to the sublime appears to suggest this fundamental disjunction. But, according to Rancière, this last great formulation of the opposing form levels out its political bias by voluntarily submitting its dis-sensual potential to an ethics of insoluble blame and shock that forever alienates.

The current forms of the »aesthetic revolution« don’t appear to be faring much better. Here, it is mainly the boiled-down version of art that looks participative on the surface and whose task it is – along the lines of Nicolas Bourriaud’s »relational aesthetics«– to help revive the lost public spirit in an increasingly disparate world. But as soon as you try to palm off any kind of functionality on art – securing social solidarity, evoking human closeness and neighborhood – there is a kind of short circuit that turns art’s artsiness into a mere surrogate. According to Rancière, togetherness, empathy and encounter (or whatever the surrogate function happens to be called at the moment) are subject to yet another limitation: the »perspective of art, […] that is molded by the categories of consensus«⁶ – consensus being the organizational structure that tries to blank out the original political moment of dissent and conflict in the face of new threats and horrors. Along those lines, Artur Zmijewski’s documenta exhibit »Them« (2007), a crash test of social cohesion and political consensus-building, can be seen as a playful but clearly serious rebuff of such rampant perspectives of consensus.

Rancière, however, points out a »third way« between the two historic blocs of art-turned-into-a-form-of-life and that of the oppositional form, proposing instead a »micropolitics of art« where the »radical strangeness of the aesthetic object and the active appropriation of a common world can be joined.«⁷ This might be the examination’s most provisional part, insofar as the terse taxonomy of these micropolitical forms (1. the humoristic game, 2. the archival gathering of inventory, 3. the creation of encounters, 4. the revelation of enigmas), as Rancière himself says, cannot really be all-encompassing. All in all, a structural problem appears to be hidden in the prospect of unifying the two major kinds of aesthetic politics. A kind of universal model of contemporary art is becoming apparent in the demanded »mediation« between the two, so to speak through the back door: a critical practice that has the task of bringing these two divergent forms of politics into line – if not exactly into harmony, at least into an exciting juxtaposition. But as is the case with all implicit standardizations, the blind spot here as well seems to be that it is simply not possible to order the wide spectrum of approaches to contemporary art to wholly subscribe either to the depiction of what cannot be seen, or to the »life-worldliness« of the aesthetic form, or instead to dedicate themselves to the difficult balancing of the two. Art practices have long been too reluctant, even »dis-sensual« to comply with the theoretically predetermined mediation model.

Rancière, however, adroitly distances himself from this type of standoff or model neutralization of politics and aesthetics. In a comprehensive statement against the »ethical turn-about« that art has begun to make in the spirit of welfare and catering to the community, Rancière again argues that trying to set aesthetic tasks always has the effect of bringing about an »ambiguous, temporary, and arguable caesura.« He is not talking about a recipe of sorts but about any provision that is meant to help open up »non-differentiation,« i.e. art’s turning ethical, from the inside. Only when what tends to be »non-differentiated« has been freed in all its inherent tensions from any aesthetic form and the environment’s claims, from politically-motivated dissent and moralizing »ersatz politics,« only then could art, as a politicized issue worth its salt, again sparkle with renewed élan.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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