SubStance

1. The Politics of Aesthetics

Politics resembles art in one essential point. Like art, politics also cuts into that great metaphor where words and images are continuously sliding in and out of each other to produce the sensory evidence of a world in order. And, like art, it constructs novel combinations of words and actions, it shows words borne by bodies in movement to make them audible, to produce another articulation of the visible and the sayable.

(Rancière, Film Fables, 152)

The connection between Jacques Rancière’s political theory and his writing on art pivots on a conception of the contingency of patterns of social meaning and order. In his major work on politics, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière holds that events able to disturb a prevailing distribution of order may be understood as instituting new conventions of meaning, and thus must have first negotiated and altered a sensory field in which they did not previously exist. Altering prevailing patterns of meaning is possible, he argues, because such patterns have “no basis other than the sheer contingency of any social order” (25); nonetheless these patterns have force and significance because they exist at the level of the partitioning of a field of sensory perception. He explains these ideas by means of a reference to theatre:

Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it. It must first be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who can’t see it and who can’t see it for good reason because it doesn’t exist.

(26–27)

Rancière’s use of a theatrical conception of displacement aims to stress the elements of artifice involved in the staging of such political scenes. His examples of political disagreement concern the struggle for comprehension in which the very questions of what is at issue in a dispute and who is speaking are themselves at stake. There needs to be a redistribution of social roles and functions for the disagreement to be [End Page 128] visible. In particular, this understanding of politics makes it clear that any social order is an imposition of incapacities. The modality of social order thus understood is primarily one of an imposed, tendentious differentiation of capabilities that becomes legible in the processes and means of particular acts of contestation.² The artifice of the theatrical scene shares with politics the displacement of “natural” relations between bodies and places. Acting in a role is one way that such “natural” relations are altered. Rancière wants to extend this theatrical principle into a general way of thinking through the implications of the artifice and thus the ungrounded nature of any “natural” hierarchy, but also of all roles. Rather than a defense of “identity politics” then, his attachment to the axiom of “displacement” forms part of a view of political action as provisional and prospective; it does so by drawing on the role of artifice in theatrical works to explain and contest “natural” hierarchies.

His references to literature may also be considered in terms of their import for this reflection on political topics and themes. The excess of words to what they name (things) or mean (ideas) supports the political significance of dis-incorporation that he terms “literarity.” In Dis-agreement he defines literarity in more precise terms as a threefold excess of words 1) to what they name, 2) to the requirements for the production of the necessities of life, and 3) to the modes of communication, which legitimate and reinforce a given social order. In a reformulation of Aristotle’s dictum regarding “man’s” status as an animal with the additional capacity for politics, Rancière writes that “The modern political animal is first a literary animal, caught in the circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of each.”(Dis-agreement, 37). His understanding of words as able to effect “a disidentification” from “the naturalness of a place” (36...