Jean-Philippe Deranty
Rancière’s notion of “regimes of the arts” appeared for the first time in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004; original French edition 2000). The term captured much of the substantial work of conceptual and historical analysis begun a few years earlier, notably in La parole muette (1998). In this book, Rancière spoke of “systems of representation” and of “poetic systems”. Since then, his many aesthetic writings have greatly refined and enriched the content of that notion.
The notion of “regimes of the arts” is first a descriptive one. It is the gateway to Rancière’s rich aesthetic thinking. At its heart, the notion serves to identify the specific features of the understanding of art characteristic of modern society, that is, the society that was ushered in by the political, economic and cultural revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crucially, the notion serves to contrast the modern understanding of art, summarized by the term “aesthetic”, from a classical understanding, encapsulated in the terms “poetic” and “representative”.
As always with Rancière, though, the notion also serves a polemical purpose. With its help, Rancière wants to contest some of the prominent approaches to art in the contemporary humanities. In particular, the notion is used by him to reject interpretations that frame artistic practices in linear, mono-causal historical narratives: for example, formalist accounts that read the history of an art form as a movement of purification towards the appropriation by that art form of the specificity of its own medium (like surface and colour for painting); or metaphysical interpretations that read modern art works against the background of a teleological vision of history, as the unfolding of some essential logic. The “regimes of the arts” by contrast define only the basic features of historical understandings of art and art forms. Within those broad frameworks, each artist creatively develops his or her own modes of expression.
Rancière lists three fundamental regimes of the arts: the ethical; the poetic or representative; and the aesthetic. After analysing the formal features shared by the different “regimes of the arts”, we briefly delineate the content of those three historical instantiations. The “aesthetic” one is the most important, as it defines the parameters of artistic practice and aesthetic understanding for our time.
A regime of the arts defines the specific ways in which a given epoch conceives of the nature and logic of artistic representation. As Rancière puts it succinctly in La parole muette in relation to literature, it is “the modalities of the relationship between thought, language and world” (PM 67, my trans.). A regime of the arts thus specifies how a given epoch thinks of the ways in which human expressions stand in relationship to the world, what words and other expressions capture from the world. A regime of the arts thus operates on the basis of a certain understanding of language and meaning, and their links to reality. A regime of the arts also specifies the ways in which these expressions take their place within society, what their functions are within social life in general and in relation to the other social activities in particular.
Rancière’s fundamental intent with such an approach is first of all philosophical. He wants to emphasize the fact that conceptions of what artistic practices mean, or of who an artist is, are thoroughly historical, in the sense that they change over time. As Rancière puts it: “There is no art without eyes that see it as art” (FI 72). With this insistence on the historical nature of “ideas of art”, Rancière is a direct heir of the great German philosophers of the nineteenth century (especially Hegel and Marx, despite all his criticisms of them), who emphasized the historical nature, and thus the temporal relativity, of the mental categories through which human beings make sense of the world, themselves and their society.
Rancière’s intent is also political. He wants to insist on the fact that conceptions of what artistic representations are and achieve take place within a broader understanding of society. Regimes of the arts are intimately linked to the “ partage du sensible”, which points to the political underpinning of social perception (see Davide Panagia in Chapter 7). Artistic expressions are not defined in isolation from the rest of the social world. Their significance, that is, both their meaning and value, is characterized in relation to the respective significance given to other activities, but also in relation to the significance of the different elements making up social reality (for instance the home, the workplace, the market, the political institutions), as well as the significance of modes of being (for instance the qualities deemed to be attached to the conditions of worker or political leader), and of socially defined times and spaces.
With these preliminary remarks in mind, we can list the structural elements whose specific relationships define in each case a historical regime. There are different versions of such lists throughout Rancière’s texts, depending on the dimension he wants to emphasize and the contexts of his interventions. Rancière’s preferred mode of presentation tends to focus on three key elements. In La parole muette, for instance, the fundamental scheme revolves around the relations between thought, language and world. If we comb through Rancière’s aesthetic writings, however, we find that there are five basic structural elements. Accordingly, a “regime of the arts” links together, each time in a specific way: the world itself, in its material and human dimensions; what in the world is significant (both meaningful and socially valuable), and thus worthy of representation; language, or speech, or text, as the discursive articulation of meaning; the artefacts in which meaning is expressed, in verbal, pictorial, bodily, cinematic or other forms, for which Rancière uses the generic term image; and finally the community, to which the artist addresses himself/herself, effectively as an actual audience, but also more loosely as a virtual addressee of the artistic message.
From the perspective of a historian of aesthetic ideas, dedicated to subtle conceptual shifts between historical periods, or for an anthropologist intent on showing the different cultural meanings attached to concepts that are only superficially similar across cultural spheres, the very broad historical and conceptual scope of Rancière’s three regimes of the arts might sound naive and in need of refinement. For example, and most importantly, his main interest in the shifts between poetic systems regards the rupture that led from the classical regime, centred on the idea of the proper representation, to the modern regime, centred on the idea of expression. In analysing the demise of the representative regime, he seems highly indebted to Erich Auerbach’s famous study of the shifts in the conceptions of mimesis, from Antiquity to modern times (Auerbach 1953). But compared with the detail and complexity of Auerbach’s historical study, Rancière’s very broad categories might seem to provide only a seriously truncated and impoverished treatment of the same matter.
A criticism of that kind would in fact be misplaced. Rancière is well aware of the constant evolution of those fundamental categorical frames through which societies make sense of themselves and of their world. Indeed, his work consists precisely in combining the analysis of the logic of practices with a painstaking attention to their historical specificities. His early work on the history of the labour movement, and his later writings on artistic movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are themselves detailed analyses of the subtle semantic shifts occurring within the modern paradigm. The distinction between different “ideas of art” and “regimes of the arts” in fact provides an indispensable analytical and conceptual language to make sense of these shifts beyond superficial biographical and merely factual data.
The impression that Rancière’s “regimes” are too broad dissolves once we differentiate between two levels of analysis. The categories of the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic, which name the three main regimes of the arts, are not strictly speaking historical categories. They are in fact what we could call meta-historical categories. They point to three different fundamental “ideas of art”, that is, to fundamental ways of linking the five structural elements listed above. It is true that these basic ideas of art can serve to differentiate large historical periods. Taken in order, they do constitute some sort of broad genealogy. But different regimes can also coexist in the same historical period. For example, Rancière’s definition of cinema as a “thwarted fable” means that although cinema could be interpreted as the ultimate embodiment of the principles of the aesthetic regime, it also remains caught up in the logics of the ethical and representative regimes (see Hassan Melehy’s analysis in Chapter 12).
Most importantly, Rancière shows that each regime entails its own central logical contradiction. A regime of the arts is defined almost as much by the way in which it links together the five elements listed above as by the internal contradiction resulting from this. Rancière’s combination of conceptual and historical analysis consists in delineating the different historical attempts at resolving such contradictions. This links up with the previous point. If an art form like cinema remains under the sway of earlier poetic logics, this is like a “fate” (an accurate translation of the French title of The Future of the Image is “the fate of images”) imposed by external circumstances (in particular political and economic imperatives) that prevent it from fulfilling its potential. And that potential is best defined as the attempt by each artist to deal with the specific contradiction of the regime to which that art form most eminently belongs.
The purpose of the distinction between regimes of the arts is not that of historical instruction. Rancière does not aim to compete with Auerbach, for instance, and provide a full historical account of the many shifts in the meanings of “mimesis” or “representation”. Rather, his interest lies in the specificity of the modern period, notably because it is the one in which democracy has become a real possibility. This theoretical agenda means that the two regimes to which Rancière has dedicated the most attention are the modern one, the one he calls the “aesthetic regime”, and the one that preceded it, the “representative regime”. In order to understand the specific potentialities and internal difficulties of the modern paradigm, Rancière consistently contrasts it with the paradigm from which the modern one emerged. As a result, the third regime of the arts, the “ethical” one, is rarely discussed. It was introduced in the writings around 2000, notably in The Politics of Aesthetics, when Rancière was still in the process of firming up his aesthetic thinking. We need to begin with this regime, however, because it is the one that comes first in the historical order.
The conceptual specificity of the ethical regime of the arts is for Rancière most precisely articulated in Plato’s views on art. This regime is characterized by two fundamental features. First, it is a regime in which artistic representations are judged according to their ontological veracity, that is, the truthfulness with which they accurately represent an ideal model. This model can be a simple bed, as in the famous passage of Book X of the Republic, or the actions of heroes and noble characters, or indeed, as in later theological discussions about the status of images, the divine itself. Artistic artefacts are conceptualized according to their relative closeness and similitude to, or distance from, the model.
Secondly, this ontological veracity, or lack thereof, does not have significance only in terms of knowledge and truth, but also in moral and political terms. Famously, this is the reason behind the banishment of the poets and all artisans dealing in the art of mimesis in Plato’s ideal city: their lies have a moral and political impact, they influence the ethos, the mores and spirit of the community. Hence the term ethical. The ethical regime of the arts is the one in which artistic practices and artefacts are judged according to their direct moral and political worth. It is clear that aspects of this regime remain valid today, notably for film. Many polemics concerning films, as the most popular of the art forms, revolve around their alleged nefarious impact on particular audiences.
The notion of a “representative” regime of the arts first arose in Ran-cière’s work in relation to his study of literature, in La parole muette, published in 1998. This book is one of Rancière’s key works, alongside The Nights of Labour and Disagreement. It is in La parole muette that we find the most detailed account of the defining principles of the “representative” and the “aesthetic” regimes. In the years that followed it, Rancière broadened the conclusions reached in it to apply them to the other art forms, in particular the visual arts and film.
The fact that Rancière’s aesthetic thinking first crystallized around a study of literature reflects the special place literature holds within the regimes of the arts. In the representative or poetic regime, this special place is due to the reliance of all arts forms on a conception of the relationship between meaning and world that favours the verbal articulation of meaning. The name of the general system of representation, “poetics”, is not by chance the same name as one of the art forms, poetry. And whilst Plato is the philosopher to whom one must return to define the conceptual apparatus of an “ethical” approach to art, Aristotle’s Poetics is the philosophical work that gives key indications about the fundamental logic of the “representative” or “poetic” regime.
The classical system of representation, under the tutelage of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and classical rhetoric, made the intelligible, “conceptual” content the primordial part of all the aspects of the art work. The “inventio”, the choice of a right topic, was the foremost element, ahead of “dispositio”, the crafting of the narrative, and “elo-cutio”, the actual linguistic expression of the topic. In works of fiction, the “inventio” concerned above all the choice of the story, that is, the “actions of sufficient magnitude” performed by characters of sufficient relevance, as Aristotle famously argued in the first book of his Poetics. In this system, the specific sense of what constitutes “the poetic”, of what is poetic in works of art, is thus primordially the value of the story, which is dependent on the standing of the characters and on what happens to them. This provides the standard that makes the art works and art forms commensurable: beyond their specific medium, all arts works tell stories; a story from one medium can always be retold in another (from a painting to a narrative, from tragedy to painting, and so on). We understand why such a conception makes “poetry” (taken in a broad sense that includes all fictional writings) paradigmatic among all the art forms. Rancière suggests that the famous sentence by Horace, “ut pictura poesis” (reading a poem is like watching a painting) was in fact also meant the other way around: “a picture is like a poem”.
In La parole muette, Rancière makes this the first principle of the representative regime, and calls it the “fictional principle” (PM 21, my trans.). The first aspect of this principle is the one just mentioned, namely that “the essence of the poem is to be an imitation, the representation of actions” (ibid.), rather than being (as the aesthetic regime will say) a certain use of language. The second aspect of the principle is that it provides the fictional world with its own time and space. This allows the art work to escape the ontological and ethical judgements of the previous regime. This was Aristotle’s key theoretical gesture to salvage tragedy from Plato’s condemnation. Fictional works have their own rules, different from the rules applying to other forms of techne (the generic term for all techniques for the Greeks, including what we now call art). Unlike in Plato’s construct, the arts are not judged according to their ontological veracity or technical efficiency.
The second principle is the “principle of genericity”, a complicated term that simply points to the idea of “genre”. Fiction is now separated from other realms, as obeying its own rules, but what are the rules of fiction? What rules should an artist or a writer follow, and according to what rules will their work be judged? “Once again, it is Aristotle who, in the first books of his Poetics, enunciated the key principle: the genre of a poem – epos or satire, tragedy or comedy – is dependent first and foremost on the nature of the object represented” (PM 21, my trans.). The subject of the story dictates the genre of the art work: noble characters performing actions of “magnitude” (gods, heroes, kings, noble souls) will have to be represented in the noble genres of tragedy in the theatre, historical painting and official portraits in painting, and so on. Low characters (folk people, sinners) will be represented in comedy and satire, and in the painting of everyday life.
The centrality of the genre dictates all the other aspects of the art work and thus leads to a third principle that Rancière calls the “principle of convenance”, that is, the principle regarding “what is right and proper”. The genre and the social and ethical standing of the characters dictate the kind of actions the writer will be able to put together in his or her narrative, and the language he or she will be able to use. Equally, the critics and the audience will be especially sensitive to breaches in the expected actions and discourses of the characters. A princess will not be expected to use certain words; certain actions are not allowed to be shown on stage. Four different kinds of criteria define the proper and the improper in artistic representation (PM 23): whether the actions depicted correspond to the nature of human passions in general; whether they conform to the spirit of the people or the main character as reported by the “good authors” (the classics of the canon); whether the current audience’s sense of decency and taste is respected; and finally, whether action and speech follow a pattern commensurate with the logic that can be expected, and the logic of the particular character (Achilles and Ulysses would be expected to behave differently in the same situation). Altogether, although the work of art has been extracted from other forms of social activity, it has to obey strict norms defined by what is proper and what is improper in tight relation to a hierarchical scale.
Finally, the fourth principle is for Rancière the “principle of actuality”. The representation of action is guided by an underlying norm, that of the actuality of speech. This corresponds to the translation in the domain of expression of the hierarchy between the high and the low that structures the entire classical system. The ultimate demonstration of the superiority of the intelligible is in a form of speech that is live and efficient, the speech of important men commanding or converting, or counselling, or convincing other men: a god enunciating a fiat; a king whose decision is final; a general commanding his army; a noble individual winning his opponents to his arguments or counselling the prince; a barrister winning his cause or a priest saving a soul. The ideal case that regulates the whole system is one in which there is adequation of an ideal kind between author, character and audience: the artist’s superior spirit allows him to depict the speech and actions of noble characters for an audience of educated and tasteful people. All along, the norm is that of the power of speech and the speech of power: the audience, composed ideally of powerful men, whose power is demonstrated in the efficacy of their own speech in real life, marvels at the power with which an author has represented a powerful speech in the fictional world. Unlike in the ethical regime, the two systems of norms (in the real and the fictional worlds) are allowed to be different in their content. It is fine to portray on stage the travails of suffering souls and imperfect heroes (Oedipus, or the terrible fate of the Atrides family). But the hierarchy of the high and the low (relating to genre, style, actions, feelings and so on), and the general rule of the power of speech, must be respected.
As mentioned earlier, a regime of the arts is defined as much by its constitutive rules as by the specific contradiction that emerges from these rules. What is, according to Rancière, the peculiar contradiction of the representative regime? The clearest account of it appears in later texts, when the initial analyses dedicated to literature are broadened to the field of the visual arts (in particular in FI 113–23: “What representation means”). The primacy of speech means the primacy of the textual over the visual; or, to refer to the five key elements above, of language and text (the discursive articulation of meaning) over image (the forms created by artistic practice, which can also be verbal images). The power of speech is to “make visible”, to name and explain what is invisible, either because it is distant (in space or time), or hidden (like the inner motives of characters, or some invisible forces at play). But because of all the constraints operating in the representative system, notably on the narrative level, this “making-visible” must be gradual and can never be complete. The logic of action demands that the story be organized on the logic of cause and effect, with an appropriate presentation of all key logical relations. This necessarily entails delaying the presentation of some aspects of the narrative, and remaining silent over others, those that would get in the way of the most efficient presentation of action. Similarly the need to be true to characters’ and audience’s “passions” demands that some things be shown and explained while others remain unsaid (for instance, the gouging of Oedipus’ eyes must never be shown on stage). Accordingly, “speech makes visible, but only in accordance with a regime of under-determination, by not ‘really’ making visible” (FI 113). Or: “This system adjusts the relations between what can be seen and what can be said, between the unfolding of schemas of intelligibility [language, text] and the unfolding of material manifestations [image]” (FI 117). It is clear that such a poetic system is highly unstable. The system has built into it the temptation to present images that are not already or fully justified in terms of their integration in the plot or by the logics of morality or affects; or to disrupt the accepted logic of story-telling and to reorganize the narrative according to a logic different from the cause–effect relations or the logic of discovery enunciated by Aristotle in the Poetics. The exploration of such breaches in the representative logic is precisely what the shift from the representative to the aesthetic regime makes possible.
The aesthetic regime is Rancière’s name for artistic modernity. This new regime is ushered in along with the political revolutions. The representative regime was based, as we have just outlined, on the com-mensurability of the structures and norms organizing the social and the fictional worlds: like the real world, the fictional had to abide by its own hierarchy of topics, genres and styles. Similarly, a series of imperatives commanded the relationship between meaning and expression, duplicating in the fictional world the ideal relationship between the intelligible and the material in the real world. Underneath these similarities operated the basic principle that the noble, the powerful and the knowing are naturally destined to rule over the low, the poor and the ignorant.
But the advent of democracy and with it the rise of the principle of equality challenge this hierarchical worldview and the aesthetic system that duplicated it in the fictional realm. Of course the emergence of the principle of equality does not magically erase hierarchical structures in real societies. Indeed, one of Rancière’s most famous pairs of concepts describes the intertwining of structures of hierarchy (the police) with the egalitarian challenge to these structures (politics proper), which is inherently built into hierarchy (see Chapters 4 and 5). Translated into aesthetics, this means that even in the new regime, modern art remains partially under the sway of the representative logic, despite the possibilities opened up by the new regime. Cinema is the best example of an art of modernity returning to a classical, representative format in the majority of its productions.
But political equality does create the conditions for an entirely new regime of the arts. The simplest way to describe the basic features of the new regime is by showing how it performs the systematic inversion of the four principles of the previous one (PM 28–9).
The primacy of fiction (of inventio over elocutio, of the narrative over expression) is replaced by the primacy of language. Poeticity, what is “poetic” in the art work, what distinguishes it from other artefacts and makes it a special, spiritual entity, now stems from the powers of language itself, not from the arrangement of actions. Language is no longer seen as a medium in which a truth external to it comes to be represented, as a means to an end. Expression itself is the end now. This shift affecting the art work relies on a more fundamental shift, one that concerns the way in which meaning and world are seen to relate. In the aesthetic regime, the world itself, at all levels, including the material ones, is seen to entail meaning. Even the pre-human is symbolic. The exemplary thread Rancière follows in the beginning of La parole muette is that of Hugo’s novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. Hugo’s book is built like a cathedral, not because the author has randomly decided to build his book on the model of its central building, but because the cathedral is itself already like “a book of stone”, that is, something that is more than just brick and mortar, a spiritual entity full of meaning. The artist’s job then is to rearticulate in a human way the expression already present in the stone, the statues and the architecture. More broadly, what is true of a man-made monument in this particular example is also true, within the new regime, for natural entities (as in British romanticism but also Hugo’s or Baudelaire’s poetry), for historical forces (in the realist novels of Balzac, Dickens or Tolstoy) or social realities (as in the novels of Zola).
What made the arts comparable in the previous regime were the stories they were all to represent. Now the common element is that all arts are a form of language, bringing to a kind of superior form and reflexivity the discursivity inherent in the world itself. The change from one regime to the other corresponds to the change from a poetic system where representation (mimesis) is the guiding principle to one where it is expression.
The second and third principles, that fictional works must belong to a specific genre dictating the type of discourse and of actions depicted, now become void. If every entity potentially holds a deep meaning waiting to be rearticulated, it no longer makes sense to categorize topics and characters into genres organized along a high–low axis. Every subject, any action, from the most heroic to the most trivial, can be treated in any genre, with the use of any style. One of Rancière’s favourite examples is Flaubert, who uses the same sublimely poetic style to narrate the spiritual torments of Saint Anthony’s temptations in the desert, the epic revolt of the mercenaries against Carthage in Salammbô or the drab world of provincial life in Madame Bovary.
Finally, the fourth principle (live, efficient speech, the speech of power as ideal model) also gives way. Language is now the norm, but language is present in different forms everywhere. It is not the preserve of men of power.
At first the universal scope of the notion of language (captured in the Romantic motto that “everything speaks”) seems to overlook the simple fact that there are two fundamentally different forms of language: the metaphorical “language” of nature and things can only be an implicit or indirect one, not to be confused with language in the strict and proper sense, human language. In the new regime, however, these two types of language are intimately related, simply because the human world is now conceived as an inherent part of the world as a whole. Human language is now seen to reflect in a higher order of awareness the indirect language of the world itself. But the expressivity of human language would not be possible without the general expressivity of the world. And this logic of reciprocal exchange and belonging, which views the smaller part as participating in but also rearticulating the reality of the larger part, is also at play between the language of the singular artist and the language of the community. In the end, the regime is premised on the model of a circle uniting in one phenomenon of general inter-expressivity the artist, his or her community, and the world itself:
the representative circle defined in a specific way the society in which the act of speech took place, as a set of legitimate relations and criteria of legitimacy between the author, his “subject” and the audience. The rupture of this circle makes the sphere of literature coextensive with social relations. It brings together in one direct relation of inter-expression the singularity of the work of art and the community that the latter manifests. Each expresses the other.
(PM 51, my trans.)
What is the contradiction that lies at the heart of this new regime? Rancière formulates it by focusing on the Romantic paradigm and its unravelling at the hand of Hegel in the Lectures on Aesthetics. Inspired by Schiller’s seminal lectures on poetry, the young Romantics had fashioned a consistent vision of the poem as a “fragment” re-expressing in the realm of human discourse the poetry inherent in the world, thus proposing a new model of community in touch with its deep forces and the forces of the world. In the poem, the unity of individuality and collectivity, world and society, language and matter, nature and spirit could be pointed to in anticipatory fashion. In particular, the famous “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism”, the utopian project devised by the young Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, linking poetry, philosophy and politics, became the paradigmatic example of avant-garde political–aesthetic projects for the next two centuries (Critchley 2001).
But this utopia contained a major contradiction. On an immediate level, the contradiction is between the first expressive principle (that the poetic is a dimension of the world itself) and the second (that any subject can be represented in any genre, using any style). The “indifference” of style in relation to its subject would appear to equate with the ruin of the principle that was supposed to define the new status of poetry: that it would capture in the right human words the implicit meaning of the world. If style is indifferent, then what could secure the necessity of poetic expression?
The Romantic theory of the fragment seemed capable of dealing with this contradiction, because it emphasized strongly the subjectivistic, voluntaristic aspects of poetic practice. The poem was not supposed merely to reflect an already-existing meaning present in the world, nor an already existing community, but actively to anticipate and indeed help bring about a unity to come. As a result, the poem could both be utterly subjectivistic and yet, as announcement of a future world of meaning, an objective mirroring of the world itself. The two principles remained in tension in the present but could be united in the projected utopia. Hegel’s critique undercuts this construct. Hegel accepts the model of a full adequacy between the artist’s singular voice, the “spirit” of a historical community and the material world. But, as he argues, this model does not capture the essence of modernity. Rather, it corresponds to classical times, a time when Homer could be seen both as a unique voice of genius and the mouthpiece of an entire culture. Hegel’s “operation consists in transforming romantic poetry into a theory of classicism” (PM 65, my trans.). Ulysses, the archetypal character of the classical age, made his own bed: this symbolized the lack of radical gap between the human, the material and the natural worlds. His virtues pointed to the entire value system of his culture. His dealings with the gods also demonstrated a relation of familiarity between the human and the superhuman. In the Greek character was thus captured the perfect circularity between the levels of reality, from the natural to the human and the divine, which the Homeric poem recaptured a second time again in poetic expression. By contrast with the epic world, in the age of the division of labour, material objects can no longer be taken as expressions of their owners; modern science makes it impossible to view nature as an expressive realm mirrored in human spiritual powers; and complex societies make the dream of a unity of individual and community impossible. The utopian dream expressed in the “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” was thus only a description of the past. Famously for Hegel, the power of art to capture a whole epoch is a dream gone by, which today is replaced by the prosaic languages of the positive sciences and philosophy.
Through his emphasis on the dreary “prosa” of the modern world (the term that captures the impossibility of universal poeticity) and the impossibility of the Romantic programme, Hegel unveils a second, deeper contradiction, which for Rancière structures the whole modern aesthetic regime. This second contradiction is between the ideal of writing the language of things themselves, and the lack of a necessary link between signifiers and their referents. This lack prevents expressions from fully capturing the meaning of the world, either because the latter remains reticent to expression, or because it overflows it. The contemporary paradigm of the arts for Rancière is one in which, on the one hand, artists strive to develop expressive means that would be commensurate with the meanings of the world itself, and in tune with a state of the community (present or future); while on the other, any attempt to link meaning and expression in some necessary way is doomed.
This feature of the modern paradigm makes any attempt to signify and express inherently incomplete and hazardous. In the terms listed earlier, image takes precedence over text: the figurative expressions created by language use (not just verbal images but also those of all the other media) are not exhausted by their intended meanings. The representative paradigm put images under the sway of the story (the intelligible, “conceptual” aspect): the “sayable” was to regulate the “visible”; logical connections gave an order to the successions of figures. In the aesthetic regime, the inverse takes place:
contrasting with the representative scene of the visibility of speech is an equality of the visible that invades discourse and paralyses action. For what is newly visible has very specific properties. It does not make visible; it imposes presence … (and possesses an) inertia that comes to paralyse action and absorb meaning.
(FI 121)
In the new regime, meaning can be found at all levels of reality (principles of expressivity and symbolicity), but no expression can fully capture this meaning. Rancière summarizes this as the twofold identity of logos (meaning, the intelligible) and pathos (passivity, brute presence of things that “absorbs meaning”): “the immanence of logos within pathos, of thought within non-thought”, and “of pathos within logos, of non-thought within thought” (IE 31). Against Ulysses, the archetypal figure of the classical regime, Oedipus is the symbol of the aesthetic age: a hero who knows and does not know, who is fully active yet utterly passive (IE 27; FI 112–19).
Such insistence on the excess of the signifier over the signified could make it sound as though Rancière shared the views of famous post-structuralist authors like Lyotard or Derrida. But Rancière’s aesthetics is not based on a deconstruction of the metaphysics of truth and language. Rather, his purpose is to underline the contradiction operating at the heart of the new poetic system. That contradiction is a direct consequence of the principle of symbolicity: if the things themselves contain meanings that overreach the narrow scope of socially constrained interpretations (beyond the representative logic), how could any language, as a form of social convention, even literary language, ever fully capture these meanings? The idea of an expressivity of the world liberates language and expression to such an extent that it can no longer be brought back under control.
The contradiction, however, does not lead to a literature or to an art of the un-sayable and the un-representable. Rather, the contradiction is for Rancière a productive one: each writer and artist faces its challenge and invents his or her own ways to try to circumvent it. Indeed, this is the mark of all genuine artistic projects: they have faced and attempted to do something with the overwhelming possibilities opened up by the demise of the constraining representative logic. Rancière’s concern in aesthetics is the same as that in politics: to establish, on the basis of a productive contradiction at the heart of the modern world, the possibility of free, creative action.