Abstract
Jacques Rancière’s work has become a major reference point for discussions of art and politics. However, while Rancière’s negative theses (about what “political art” is not) are becoming widespread and well understood, his positive thesis is still poorly understood, owing partly to Rancière’s own formulation of the issue. I first clarify Rancière’s account of the links between politics and art. I then explore a gap in this account; Rancière has stuck too closely to a politics of art’s reception. I argue for a politics of art production, which would expand the possible engagement between politics and art.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Rancière (2009c, p. 285).
Rancière (2009c, p. 326n. 8).
Davis (2010, p. 157).
Samuel Chambers (2013, p. 184n. 7) suggests that the concept of the distribution of the sensible actually “supplants” the concept of the police in Rancière’s writings after the mid-1990s, “capturing the idea of a police order but on a broader level.” This claim, if right (and it seems correct to me) would simply be the flipside of what I say here: that “the police” is a special or restricted version of “the distribution of the sensible.”
Rancière (2010, p. 152).
Rockhill (2009, p. 199).
Rancière (1999, p. 28).
See, e.g., the preface to Aisthesis (Ranciere 2013, p. ix): “Art as a notion designating a form of specific experience had only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century.”
Rancière (2009b, pp. 60–61).
Rancière (2009b, p. 62).
Rancière (2009b, p. 61).
Rancière (1999, p. 63).
Rancière (1999, p. 65).
Rancière (1999, p. 82).
Rancière (2004, p. 62).
Rancière (2009b, p. 75).
Rancière (2009c, p. 285).
Rancière (2010, p. 119).
Rancière (2009c, p. 284).
Rancière (2009b, p. 59).
Rancière (2009c, p. 285).
Rancière (2004, p. 60).
Rancière (2004, p. 56).
Rancière (2004, p. 45).
Rancière (2004, p. 39). We therefore must distinguish between the question I ask in this essay—What would it mean to say that a work of art is political?—from the question of the politics of art as such. This latter question is the one taken up by Malik and Phillips in their thought-provoking essay, “The Wrong of Contemporary Art” (2011). Thus Malik and Phillips will refer to “aesthetics-art” rather than just “art,” and locate the political efficacy of “aesthetics-art” in the split (and free play) between poiesis and aisthesis.
Rancière (2009c, p. 277).
Andy Warhol, (1977, p. 101) writes:
Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.
The reference to the Queen of England is actually from a paragraph earlier, but the passage I have just quoted gives the best summary of Warhol’s idea. Warhol is specifically thinking about the equality of fungible commodities, of course, but I take it that the same notion of “equality” is at work in Rancière’s understanding of the politics of aesthetics.
Rancière (2004, p. 40).
Rancière (2004, p. 65).
Rancière (2004, p. 40).
Rockhill (2009, p. 200).
Chambers (2013, p. 60).
Chambers (2013, p. 60). This “impurity” of politics that Chambers demonstrates in Rancière’s work is therefore absolutely in line with Rockhill’s (2009) argument, despite the latter’s worrisome use of “le politique.” Art is not some a priori political battleground, waiting for the police to clash forces with the demos; rather, the politicization of art is what it means for “politics” to happen in and over art. Art is in this sense a potential battleground, rather than a playing field: Like all battlegrounds, this is simply an ex post facto way of describing a place where a battle has been fought, which can of course happen anywhere at all.
Rockhill (2009, p. 206).
As I have hopefully made very clear, this idea is in complete agreement with Rancière; I am unsure why Rockhill himself seems to take this as a point of contention between the two of them. More confusingly still, after he has spent several pages arguing that the meaning of a work of art is socially produced (in its reception and appropriation) rather than ontologically inscribed—and, furthermore, acting like any of this would be news to Rancière—Rockhill (2009, pp. 206–207) goes on to attempt to demonstrate the consequences of his “disagreement” with Rancière by reading a political meaning off of the form and content of three films. In other words, Rockhill finds a different meaning “ontologically inscribed” in three films, and seems to take this as proof that he is approaching the issue differently from Rancière.
Rancière (2010, p. 37).
Hallward (2009, p. 142).
Rockhill (2011, p. 34n. 10).
Foreman and Seguín (2014, p. 28).
Highmore (2011).
Rancière (2004, pp. 60–61).
Rancière (1991, pp. 66–67).
Frith (1988).
Rancière (2009c, p. 284).
My thanks to an early, anonymous reviewer of this essay, who pressed me on this point.
Rancière (2009a, p. 36).
Chambers (2013, Chapter 1).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. In Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Robert Hullot-Kentor. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chambers, Samuel A. 2013. The lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Oliver. 2010. Jacques Rancière. Malden: Polity Press.
Foreman, Mozelle, and Bécquer Seguín. 2014. Cinema, scenes, aesthetics: An interview with Jacques Rancière. Diacritics 42(3): 22–35.
Frith, Simon. 1988. Picking up the pieces. In Facing the Music, ed. Simon Frith, 88–130. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hallward, Peter. 2009. Staging equality: Rancière’s theatrocracy and the limits of anarchic equality. In Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill, and Philip Watts, 140–157. Durham: Duke University Press.
Highmore, Ben. 2011. Out of place: Unprofessional painting, Jacques Rancière and the distribution of the sensible. In Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman, and Richard Stamp, 95–110. New York: Continuum.
Malik, Suhail, and Andrea Phillips. 2011. The wrong of contemporary art: Aesthetics and political indeterminacy. In Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman, and Richard Stamp, 111–128. New York: Continuum.
Momus. 1991. “Pop stars? Nein danke!”. http://imomus.com/index499.html. Accessed 6 June 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009a. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Transl. Steven Corcoran. Malden: Polity Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009b. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009c. The method of equality: An answer to some questions. In Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill, and Philip Watts, 273–288. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2010. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Trans. Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum.
Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Trans. Zakir Paul. New York: Verso.
Rockhill, Gabriel. 2009. The politics of aesthetics: Political history and the hermeneutics of art. In Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill, and Philip Watts, 195–215. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rockhill, Gabriel. 2011. Rancière’s productive contradictions: From the politics of aesthetics to the social politicity of artistic practice. Symposium Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 15(2): 28–56.
Warhol, Andy. 1977. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lampert, M. Beyond the politics of reception: Jacques Rancière and the politics of art. Cont Philos Rev 50, 181–200 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9369-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9369-1