Art and Politics: Rancier The distribution of the Sensible

In this article - conversation, Rancier defines his perspective on the aesthetic and its relation to art and politics. 

He is against the more traditional way of understanding art as part of a linear history, or through a post-modern/deconstructive perspective as a series of ruptures of one regime with the next (parricidio).   

I would also add that he is offering a way of moving beyond Bourdieu while not away from him. In that Bourdieu does not leave much space to discuss the practice of art beyond the function in h reproduction of class and status in a given social order. 

He defines Aesthetics as:  


"a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes a certain idea of thought’s effectivity). Defining the connections within this aesthetic regime of the arts, the possibilities that they determine, and their modes of transformation (Ranciere XX, p20). 

A subsequent notion is the distribution of the sensible, as the modalities in which a collective defines a realm of the sensible and also distributes it amongst its members in regards to their participation capacities to participate in this realm. 

Aesthetic practice as "forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community." 





The aesthetic is one of the modes through which the community comes together as "it" identifies what is going to be regarded as art and not and what are the different regimes of visibility/discourse/making/practice. I add: aureability.  

This he distinguished this form of understanding aesthetics from the way art has been understood as the history a history of the mediums and their forms and rules of representation, their hierarchies.


First, he identifies the discussion of arts as images. He goes to Plato and a regard "arts" as any practice of representation, some truth others with the purpose of simulacra.  These last differentiated in their origin and their purpose. Simulacra provide education and fit in the city's occupations, it provides and affects an ethos to the community. In this sense "ethos" of art is not a separate sphere of sociality. An example is the greek tragedy and how it educates people about the law. At this moment there is not an idea of art as a separate sphere and rather any occupation is linked with art or a way of doing.
     

An ethical approach to art is thus the first type of development [I add: in the western world], one where art is pedagogical, demanded to contain truth and contains general principles of law and organization of society. The second is the representational one, at the moment in which specific forms of art are separated from other forms of doing (work) and become a social realm. Art becomes simulacra and each medium follows specific rules and genres. The third is the aesthetic.


The first form is the ethical, is normative, abstarct, pedagogical. In this first theatre is  related to democratic politics in ancient Greek and how tragedy enables the emergence of monarchy as a political regime where there is a superior order subordinating the collective.

This second he considers the poetic, dimension of arts, one that focuses on the representational / rupture power of the art pieces.  or in the other way as a history of the vanguards rupturing with the previous forms of what is deemed visible, legible, acceptable, (I would even think real?). This second is the more traditional way of thinking of the arts and of their history.  The representative moment will then separate it as a sphere: question the links between mimesis and poiesis, identify mediums and forms of doing. It is not initially prescriptive criteria but rather a pragmatic one. Substance becomes criteria for the divisions. An example is the modern novel, that moves away from the abstract characters of the greek tragedy and into the minute descriptions of the everyday, including action and thought process of mundane people ie Madame Bovary. this is for him a sign of the democratization, art becoming part of the move into modernity, creating a modern subjects. 

The third moment is the aesthetic one, where is not about a division of the arts but about the making of the sensible "factory of the sensible and the contestation that results in a specific distribution of the sensible. Distribution is not homogenous ethos (in the sense of Geertz) but is part of the conflict of wh can access to which type of activity. I understand that as a result there are realms of the sensible, is this something of the type of Bourdieu's fields, yet quite different in that they are not necessarily institutional.   




 For him the sensible does not reside in the author or the piece or the action of sense, but in the action that produces and negates at the same time. What I get away is that he is talking about emergence beyond agency or the signification of a piece or the structure of the act of viewing. But rather as the coming together, the relations of all of these with the beyond: ie in a detailed literary description what constitutes the "sensorial" is not the author or the description or reader's interpretation but rather the link of these and the beyond, some type of sensing that emerges in the description? I am not absolutely sure it is this,  this is my take.  

The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’ is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in [67] a space of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to raise the question of the relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work and artistic ‘exceptionality’. p 42

In the nineteenth century, this suspension of work’s negative value became the assertion of its positive value as the very form of the shared effectivity of thought and community. (...) Production asserts itself [71] as the principle behind a new distribution of the sensible insofar as it unites, in one and the same concept, terms that are traditionally opposed: the activity of manufacturing and visibility. 
 

Art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the commu­nity's self-presentation. The texts written by the young Marx that confer upon work the status of the generic essence of mankind were only possible on the basis of German Idealism’s aesthetic programme, i.e. art as the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of the community.p 44

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