Toni Ross
Jacques Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and politics are currently provoking much interest in international art-world circles and art-historical scholarship. A large part of the appeal of his work may be attributed to his novel articulation of links between art and democratic politics, which, in turn, revises established narratives of modernism and postmodernism. Rancière’s summation of his contribution to art theory speaks of “reframing the temporal categories by means of which modern and contemporary artistic practices are generally grasped” (PtA 19). The specific orientation of this reframing emerges as a concern to “construct a paradigm of ‘historicity’ equally opposed to the symmetrical one-way narratives of progress or decadence” (PtA 21). As such claims suggest, the deconstructive approach adopted by Rancière seeks to modify essentialist or teleological premises regarding modern art’s identity or destiny. Moreover, he combines attentiveness to the philosophical implications of specific art practices with a sense of the historical contingency of what have been accepted as the central premises of artistic modernity. Considering the abject condition of aesthetic theory in art history and criticism of recent decades, Rancière’s weaving together of post-Kantian continental aesthetics with analyses of historical developments in modern art offers those working in the visual arts much food for thought.
The following explication of Rancièrean concepts of visual art examines how they overlap with and differ from conventional theories and historical accounts of artistic modernity. The chapter will also address what might be considered Rancière’s most notable and controversial contribution to art discourse. I refer to his central argument that ideas of aesthetic autonomy and art’s involvement in socio-political life need to be thought as co-implicated rather than distinct inclinations of the modern art tradition.
Rancière’s engagement with the visual arts, encompassing painting, photography, design and the moving image, has emerged relatively recently. Many of the concepts he brings to these fields are gathered together in a small volume of essays titled The Future of the Image (2007), first published as Le Destin des images in 2003. But the ideas essayed in this text are strongly inflected by earlier publications, which bring Rancière’s specific conception of democratic politics to studies of nineteenth-century literature. More recently, however, Rancière identifies a parallel between the visual arts and literature of modernity. He contends that both “share a kind of common political programming, if we understand politics in a broad sense as the reframing of the sensory community” (Aal 180). Such comments indicate the necessity of grasping some of the basics of Rancière’s socially disruptive conception of politics, and his understanding of aesthetics, so as to illuminate the ideas he brings to the visual arts.
In the first instance, Rancière conceives of aesthetics beyond the realm of art as the multiple ways in which any social order establishes, manages, privileges or marginalizes different modes of perception. As Gabriel Rockhill translates Rancière’s terminology, this “distribution of the sensible” refers to communal forms of naturalized perception based on what is allowed to be “visible or audible, as well as what can be said, made or done” within a particular social order (PA 85). Given that Rancière casts social formations as incorrigibly oligarchic, he conceptualizes both politics and artistic operations as capable of reconfiguring hegemonic perceptions of reality. In other words, art and politics share a potential to dispute any sense that existing meanings of sociocultural life are unassailable or inevitable.
At the heart of Rancière’s characterization of democratic politics lies the supposition of the equality of all. This premise is situated as a guiding thread of practices that struggle against institutionalized patterns of domination in all their forms. However, in keeping with the anti-essentialist tenor of Rancièrean theory, the egalitarian maxim is neither construed as a pre-established ontological principle, nor as a fully perfectible goal of political praxis. Rather, in order to generate politics, the axiom of equality is said to require an ongoing process of testing and verification via localized acts of dissent. Rancière reiterates this idea in his critical analysis of a hatred of democracy that has crystallized in sectors of French intellectual life in recent decades, where he writes, democracy “is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts” (HD 92). The contingent and unpredictable gestures of politics are typically directed towards prevailing ways in which a society defines and manages the capabilities and functions of its population. As Jean-Philippe Deranty has proposed, Rancière’s conception of democratic politics may be equated with a kind of “ontological disorder”, where fixed hierarchies and categories of identity are both disputed and transformed (Deranty 2007: 245–6).
The attention Rancière devotes to disassembling hierarchical systems and fixed ontological premises recalls aspects of Derridean deconstruc-tion. However, Rancière’s writings tend to focus on the specifics of art works and the historical valences of different aesthetic philosophies to a greater degree than Jacques Derrida’s reflections on art and aesthetics. Another distinctive feature of Rancière’s approach to aesthetics is signalled by his willingness to investigate and intervene in debates about contemporary art.
Rancière’s extensive writings on art from the nineteenth century to the present sustain that alliance between democracy and the making contentious of prevailing realities that he proposes. Importantly, however, his discussion of artistic instances typically references different “regimes” or paradigms of art, which provide collective conditions of possibility for individual practices. Contrary to great men (or great women) approaches to art history, Rancière insists that a single artist’s inventiveness is not on its own sufficient “to open the doors of artistic visibility …” (FI 75). Rather, artistic cases are rendered salient and intelligible within specific “regimes of art”, or different systems of making, conceptualizing and assessing artistic activity. Therefore the second meaning of the aesthetic Rancière deploys includes both art practices and their framing theories of production and reception.
Much of this aspect of Rancièrean aesthetics has entailed reinterpreting given narratives of artistic modernity by tracing the historical emergence of what he names the “aesthetic regime of art”. Like many commentators before him, Rancière locates the philosophical seeds of modern art in writings on aesthetics by Kant and Hegel, as well as those of the poets and philosophers of German Romanticism. In fact, he insists that we continue today to “engage with art according to the modes of attention forged in the Age of Romanticism” (Guénoun et al. 2000: 10). At the same time, his writings link artistic movements such as Romanticism and Realism with political upheavals and sociological shifts that in the nineteenth century challenged the oligarchic worldview of the European ancien régimes.
One of the key revisions of conceptions of modernism ventured in Rancière’s writings deposes the technical features of different media as constitutive of the identity of art works. An oft-cited example of this kind of thinking is Clement Greenberg’s thesis that each sphere of fine art self-referentially explores the technical properties unique to its medium. Although Greenbergian doctrine may have retreated since the 1980s, the reification of the medium’s technical properties remains as strong as ever in sectors of contemporary art discourse, whether focused on established art forms or various “new media”. An example of this continuity may be found in current theories of photography.
The first chapter of The Future of the Image addresses the widespread influence of Roland Barthes’ argument in Camera Lucida that bestows ontological priority on the indexical nature of the photographic medium: its mechanical registration of a past reality untouched by artistic manipulation (FI 10). According to Barthes’s well-known formula, the punctum effect of the photograph arises from details that are unintended or uncontrolled by the photographer. Photography may thus be distinguished from painting or drawing in that its apparatus visualizes the world automatically, rather than being wholly formed by the interventions of the photographer/artist. As Rancière paraphrases it, the aesthetic impact of the punctum effect for Barthes stems from its assertion of “the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible” that eludes or resists discursive domination (FI 9). In Camera Lucida the cognitive alterity of the punctum is counterposed with the informational axis, or studium of photographs. The studium designates historical, social or cultural meanings extracted via semiotic analysis of photographs. As Rancière implies, the privilege Barthes assigns to the photographic punctum suggests an exaggerated form of realism (defined by Rancière as hyper-resemblance), where the essence of the medium derives from its purported capacity to directly register the wordless, senseless being of things prior to representation. Rancière’s deconstructive redirection of this argument detaches Barthes’ ontology of photography from any unique technical features of the medium, linking it instead to the aesthetic regime of art, which has informed art practice and theory for at least two centuries. Specifically, he argues that the polarities of punctum and studium express a “double poetics” of the “aesthetic image” as it came to be conceived and manifested within the aesthetic regime (FI 11).
The important concept of the “aesthetic image” (or artistic image) in Rancière’s writings is not confined to the visual arts, but bears on the productions of modern art more broadly. Like other concepts of art that Rancière revises or invents (phrase-image, montage, collage), “aesthetic image” comprises a portmanteau category that combines contradictory principles. In The Future of the Image, the twofold potential of the “aesthetic image” is articulated as an interplay between “the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history”, or as “the unfolding of inscriptions carried by bodies and the interruptive function of their naked, non-signifying presence” (FI 11, 14).
Added to this dialectical phrasing of the “aesthetic image” is a broader conception of artistic operations in keeping with Rancière’s account of the anarchic, routine interrupting gestures of politics. Here artistic images are described as creating “discrepancies” within a given order of expectation or reality (FI 7). This emphasis on the disruptive operations of modern art upon naturalized convention has been a staple of art-historical discourse and art institutions for some time, so much so that it has become an avant-gardist cliché. Although it should be acknowledged that Rancière has recently cautioned against a tendency in the contemporary art world to pre-emptively assume the efficacy of art’s transformative powers (AaI 181). But, perhaps more intriguing from the perspective of art history is the contradictory logic he imputes to the new way of thinking and making art introduced by the aesthetic regime. Early signs of this historical shift emerge in Romantic and Realist art.
Rancière traces how both art movements set about dismantling the normalized standards of a previously hegemonic artistic paradigm that he names the “representative” or “poetic” regime. This disordering activity is directed towards certain features of the “representative” regime that codified art according to a conception of mimesis conveyed by Aristotelian poetics. While roughly synonymous with what Michel Foucault called the European Classical Age, the representative regime of art does not function as a simple epochal category in Rancière’s discourse. Rather, his studies suggest that while different paradigms of Western art may predominate during particular historical periods, they may also recur historically or operate in combination within individual practices. Having said this, Rancière’s reading of Romanticism and Realism as inaugurating moments of modern art traces three primary ways in which the aesthetic regime registers a waning of influence of the “representative” paradigm.
The key changes in art practice that register a collapse of the representative regime’s norms of artistic excellence may be summarized as follows. First, Romanticism and Realism dismantle the hierarchical system of artistic subject matter, styles and genres consolidated in the representative system. Secondly, art of the aesthetic regime, according to Rancière, breaches ontological divisions between fine and applied art, or between art and non-art categories that subtend the representative framework. The third shift instituted by the aesthetic regime repeals the privilege assigned to the written word and art’s story-telling function in Aristotelian poetics.
Regarding the third displacement of the representative regime’s framing of art, Rancière emphasizes that Aristotelian mimesis refers to the representation of actions, with actions being conceived as logical sequences of words and deeds normally undertaken by human agents, and governed by the ends at which they aim (PtA 14). Consequently, for painting to attain fine-art status in the representative regime, “it first had to demonstrate its capacity for poetry – its ability to tell stories, to represent speaking, acting bodies” (MSDC 75). In this context, the imagistic or visually descriptive capacities of painting are subordinated to the directives of established “poetic” narratives. Rancière reiterates this point in a number of his analyses of the visual arts of modernity, where the visual image, without being entirely cut off from textual operations, no longer occupies a servile relation to narrative intelligibility (FI 39). The relatively uncontroversial art-historical point being made here is that painting of the aesthetic regime no longer acts simply as a vehicle for giving visual form to mythological, religious or historical stories.
Echoing the findings of literary and art-historical studies, Rancière casts Romanticism and Realism as democratizing movements that rejected the hierarchies of the representative order by making visible themes and experiences previously unseen, unspoken or marginalized within the higher echelons of art. The hierarchical logic of the representative regime is expressed by history painting owning a higher status that genre painting, or tragedy being placed above comedy, or the deeds of kings or religious notables above those of commoners, as the proper subject matter of art. On the basis of such gradations of subject matter and genre, Rancière draws an analogy between the representative regime and an oligarchic vision of social arrangements, a vision that naturalizes inequalities between social groupings, as well as divisions between different human capacities and functions (PA 22).
In a number of publications Rancière examines how the novelistic realism of writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo attends to a world of insignificant actors and everyday objects, which acquire a new level of social visibility and symbolic worth (PA 36). In the nineteenth century, works by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Adolph von Menzel and many other realist painters likewise register a new alertness to the anonymous poetry of undramatic, trivial and commonplace aspects of modern life. Rancière therefore reminds us that far from being an invention of Pop Art or postmodernism, the retraction of strict boundaries between high and low subject matter has been on art’s agenda at least since Romanticism. As Chapter 9 has shown, Rancière’s political analysis of emergent tendencies of nineteenth-century art recalls Hegel’s observation in his Lectures on Fine Art that “the more art becomes secular, the more it makes itself at home in the finite things of the world, is satisfied with them, and grants them complete validity” (Hegel 1998: 294).
The “everything speaks” principle that Rancière attributes to the aesthetic regime revokes the hierarchies of the representative system by presuming a capacity for expression inscribed in the world, in all of its manifestations and dimensions. More specifically, according to Ran-cière, the artist, somewhat like the new figure of the nineteenth-century social scientist, becomes an interpreter of signs impressed “on the very body of mute objects”, signs that express the “ciphered meaning of an age, a history or a society” (PtA 17). This idea, which Rancière casts as one side of the twofold aspect of the aesthetic image, recurs in Barthes’ conception of the photographic studium.
However, the other incline of the aesthetic regime identified by Rancière disrupts the idea that art channels social and historical meanings inscribed in the material world in all of its manifestations. Instead, the second arm of the poetics of the aesthetic image attests to the suspension or disempowerment of symbolizing procedures. Barthes’ punctum concept may be considered in this light, since it brackets the communicative function of photography to impose the senseless presence of things that find themselves imprinted by the photographic image. But, rather than attributing this vision of the real as non-signifying presence (or chaos) to any technical specifics of photography, Rancière refers to the disordering of established artistic standards perpetrated by the aesthetic regime. Here, he again invokes Hegel when he asserts that the aesthetic regime is caught up in “a new idea of thought itself: an idea of the power of thought outside itself, a power of thought in its opposite” (PtA 17). Hegel, of course, conceived of consciousness as an encounter with and recognition of otherness, and Rancière implies that aesthetic modernity assimilates this dialectical conception of thought.
One indication of the disorder of modern aesthetics traced by Ran-cière is an increased propensity for art to stage promiscuous exchanges between images, words, discourses and disciplines. Since in the aesthetic regime any and everything may lend itself to artistic creation, strict boundaries between art and non-categories become shifting and unstable. This development is amply demonstrated by many twentieth-century practices, where “art is turned to kitsch; or, on the contrary, disused commodities enter the realm of art” (MSDC 105). Moreover, the intermingling of different categories that Rancière views as a hallmark of the aesthetic regime, undoes any stable referential transmission or clear ontological separation between empirical reality and artistic expression. Thus “all the common terms of measurement that opinions and histories lived on have been abolished in favour of a great chaotic juxtaposition, a great indifferent melange of significations and materialities” (MSDC 43). Rancière describes the collapse of the representative regime as ushering in “the great parataxis” of modern aesthetics, where: “It is the common factor of dis-measure or chaos that now gives art its power” (MSDC 45).
In philosophical, specifically Hegelian, or perhaps Nietzschean terms, the dialectic that Rancière assigns to the aesthetic regime co-implicates the rationalizing schemes of thought with that which exceeds, resists or disrupts such procedures. His quarrel with the version of this dialectic expressed in Camera Lucida, arises from Barthes’ privileging of one side of the equation, which, for Rancière, consolidates an entrenched conception of modernism that proponents of postmodernism also accept without question. This is the idea that modernism by definition means the progressive achievement of each art’s autonomy. Just as Barthes seeks to isolate the quintessence of the photographic medium, the familiar idea of modernist autonomy endorses ontological distinctions between different arts so that each may express the fundamentals of their given medium. As Rancière argues, this one-sided thinking of modernism operates in poststructuralist aesthetic theories that locate the truth of modern literature in its staging of the “intransitivity” of language, where linguistic forms are freed of any communicative purpose. In the case of modernist painting, autonomy traditionally designates the historical advance of abstraction, and the self-enclosure of painting from the impingements of society at large. In The Flesh of Words, Rancière characterizes such accounts of artistic modernity as reducing each art to “the exercise of its own autonomous power” (FW 108).
Rancière has traced the continuity of such thinking in the quarantining of artistic images from those circulated by the Society of the Spectacle that recurs in discourses of late modern art. From the Situationists through to contemporary art prognostics of the dissent-deadening effects of mass media on passive audiences, art is defined by its isolation from the products of capitalist spectacle and commodity culture (PL 71–80). In a catalogue essay on the mixed-media works of Alfredo Jaar, Rancière wonders about the continuing critical purchase of art incessantly negating the pernicious effects of a world awash with images spewed out by the global capitalist machine (TI 71–80). Against this rhetoric of catastrophe, Rancière maintains an optimistic attitude towards art’s creative potentials. He argues that in the context of globalization, governmental and capitalist interests devote substantial energy to managing how media images are staged and circulated. Citing Jaar’s work as an exemplary response to this situation, Rancière suggests that rather than restating the sordid truth behind capitalist spectacle, contemporary political art might be better engaged in combining materials from art and media culture in order to create alternative configurations of the visible to those that currently predominate.
As previously indicated, Rancière tends to focus on the various ways in which modern art activates slippages between different ontological categories, and normally separated levels of experience. In the chapter of The Future of the Image entitled “Painting in the Text”, for example, he disputes the consensus that modernist painting be defined by its expulsion of words or representation through the purely painterly assertion of its own nature. The arguments proffered in this text engage in critical dialogue, not only with Greenberg, and French formalist Maurice Denis, but also the particular view of (modern) art’s mission proposed by Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze’s thinking of modernist painting is put forward in his book on artist Francis Bacon. Here he proposes that by projecting the material tangibility of its basic means (colour and line), pictorial modernism offers immediate access to a sensory stratum of experience normally repressed or disavowed by rationalizing procedures. By evacuating representational forms, modernist painting registers the existence of an orderless, non-synthesizable world of sensational life that reason both arises from, and regularly denies. Rancière shifts this argument by insisting again that the logic of the aesthetic regime need not be characterized by a strict separation between the mute pathos of material life and art’s signifying operations. He also makes the rather obvious, but easily overlooked, point that what modernist painting made newly visible has from the beginning required the mediation of words, just as Deleuze’s privileging of painterly presence depends on his discursive eloquence.
“Painting in the Text” exhibits Rancière’s own articulacy in a concrete analysis of the “plaiting” together of words and visual forms, presence and representation that, for him, characterizes the bivalent logic of the aesthetic image (FI 79). Here he cites a fragment of nineteenth-century art criticism by brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt. Published in 1864, this text interprets a still-life painting by the eighteenth-century artist Jean Siméon Chardin. Rancière focuses in particular on the “mat-terism” of the Goncourts’ metaphorically rich chronicle of Chardin’s painting of dessert fruits, which at times transmutes the precise depiction of natural objects into an assertion of the tactile palpability of pigment and traces of the painter’s brush. The Goncourts write, for example: “In one corner there is apparently nothing more than a mud-coloured texture, the marks of a dry brush, then, suddenly a walnut appears curling up in its shell, showing its sinews, revealing itself with all the details of its form and colour” (FI 80).
This passage reminds us that art history, since the nineteenth century, has viewed realist painting as adopting techniques of intrusive impasto that intensify the physical qualities of painted pigment, thereby obscuring or muting the representational efficacy of the picture. Pictorial realism has thus been channelled into that narrative of modern painting, continued by Deleuze, that locates painting’s essence in an assertion of the painted matter’s independence of representational operations. As Rancière observes, the Goncourts’ reading of Chardin not only prefigures the future of Impressionism and the action painting heuristic of Abstract Expression, but also recent art-theory appropriations of Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe and Deleuzean aesthetics. However, contrary to the advocacy of a perceptual immediacy specific to modernist painting, Rancière stresses the active role played by the Goncourts’ discourse in enhancing features of Chardin’s art previously unnoticed by eyes not guided to see them. In this example of creative art criticism: “Linguistic tropes change the status of the pictorial elements. They transform representations of fruits into tropes of matter” (FI 81). Rancière therefore concludes that the recognition of novelty in art practice is necessarily related to shifts in the discourses of art criticism and art history. In this respect, the visibility of a modern preoccupation with the materiality of paint arises from particular linkages between visual forms and discursive operations, rather than their isolation from each other. Rancière contends that instead of separating linguistic and visual forms, the aesthetic regime introduces a different “regime of imageness” to that of the representative system.
The “regime of imageness” concept refers to particular ways in which words and images interact within a particular regime of art (FI 11). By undoing the hierarchical relation between visual and narrative forms sustained by the representative regime, modern aesthetics instigates situations where:
Words no longer prescribe, as story or doctrine, what images should be. They make themselves images so as to shift the figures of the painting, to construct this surface of conversion, this surface of forms-signs which is the real medium of painting – a medium that is not identified with the propriety of any support or any material.
(FI 87)
To describe the medium of modern painting as a surface of transformation, or departure from self-same identity, gives equal credence to different tendencies of modern painting. It may encompass the “purity” of some forms of abstraction, as well as the mixing of visual, linguistic and object forms in Cubist collage, or Conceptual Art’s interjection of bureaucratic language formats into the field of visual art (FI 87–8). Rancière’s conception of the medium of painting as a surface of conversion, where visual and discursive forms, different media and disciplines exchange places, overlaps with aspects of his political theory. It recalls his conception of egalitarian politics as disruptive of stratified partitions of identity, of social roles and capacities calculated and managed according to socially authorized badges of identity.
Another salient example of Rancière’s revision of official accounts of modern art history occurs in the chapter of The Future of the Image titled “The Surface of Design”. This essay questions a longstanding and ongoing polarity in art history between two divergent political gestures of modern art. The first involves the assertion of aesthetic autonomy, and a view of art as disconnected from normalized modes of perception. This roughly Kantian idea of aesthetic experience as resistant to instrumental assimilation has traditionally located art’s critical powers in its autarkical isolation from everyday patterns of experience. In the opposed camp are the projects of various avant-gardes, which turned artistic practice towards the creation of new symbols and designs of collective life. Here art loses any separate status on account of its incorporation into the aims of social or political transformation. As Rancière notes, this ambition co-ordinates not only the programmes of Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus, but also earlier applied arts movements such as the German Werkbund, founded in 1907, and the British Arts and Crafts Movement of the mid nineteenth century.
The two cultural practices discussed in “The Surface of Design”, those of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and modernist designer Peter Behrens, are normally placed on opposite sides of modern cultural tradition. In literary history, the art of Mallarmé is often treated as the apotheosis of modernist aestheticism. While Behrens, as a founding member of the Werkbund and a design consultant for the German electrical company AEG, is commonly situated within a lineage of modernist design movements that sought to transform the spaces and objects of collective life. However, Rancière’s unorthodox reading of these practices proposes that Mallarmé and Behrens have something in common. They share a “spiritual” mission to create artistic forms or “types” that “outline the image of a certain physical community”, that “define a new texture of communal existence” (FI 95, 97).
This argument involves positing a link between Mallarmé’s poetic experiments and Behrens’s application of reduced geometric forms to designs for household goods, advertising formats and buildings he created for AEG. At first glance, Mallarmé’s art would seem to be more difficult to characterize in these terms. However, on Rancière’s reading, this exemplar of symbolic obscurity activates exchanges between different artistic fields, as well as activities extracted from popular culture and everyday life, an obvious example being the poet’s famous late production, Un coup de dés. Here abstract forms and signs of poetic language, graphic design, the spatial choreographies of dance, and the unpredictable resting places of dice share the planar surface of the page. By enacting that cancellation of hierarchical division that Rancière associates with the aesthetic regime, Mallarmé’s art is recast as inventing a mode of writing that seeks to express symbolically, formally and materially an egalitarian vision of social arrangements. In Rancière’s words, Mallarmé sought to compose the “shape of a world without hierarchy where functions slide into one another” (FI 107).
Peter Behrens, by Rancière’s account, also seeks to develop a vocabulary of simplified design forms that symbolize an egalitarian vision of common life. Like other theorists and practitioners of modernist design who formed the Werkbund, Behrens considered an overabundance of decorative featurism then being applied to household commodities to be the aesthetic counterpart of social stratification, and a hangover from aristocratic culture (Schwartz 1996). In this respect, Behrens, according to Rancière:
thinks of himself as an artist, inasmuch as he attempts to create a culture of everyday life in keeping with the progress of industrial production and artistic design, rather than the routines of commerce and petty bourgeois consumption. His [design] types are symbols of common life.
(AR 140)
Rancière’s discussion of Behrens and Mallarmé together suggests that ideas of aesthetic autonomy and of artistic practice symbolizing new forms of life are not as antagonistic as normally assumed. Rather, they comprise two sides of the aesthetic regime that emerge historically in tandem and tension with each other. The “surface of design” incorporates symbolic expressions of art’s independence from predetermined expectations, as well as instrumental applications of cultural practice.
While Rancière undoubtedly sustains an avant-gardist view of art as inventing new forms of collective life, he does not subscribe to any idea of art becoming indistinguishable from the social field, as popular accounts of the art–life nexus might suppose. His reticence towards this perspective may be clarified by examining two other concepts he formulates: phrase-image (sentence-image) and montage.
In The Future of the Image, the “sentence-image” and its analogous term, “montage”, are understood as responses to the disorder unleashed by the aesthetic regime. They denominate devices of artistic reasoning that acknowledge the heterogeneity of art’s resources, while drawing art back from collapse into sheer nonsense or full submission to communal consensus (FI 46). As this precarious engagement with contending forces suggests, the sentence-image does not entail a simple blending of images and linguistic sequences. Rather, Rancière speaks of the sentence-image as combining visual and textual elements differently to their interaction in the representative system, where the image occupies the secondary role of enhancing narrative plausibility. The sentence-image overturns this hierarchical relation in two ways. First, while textual forms still maintain rational linkages between different elements, they simultaneously assert their material palpability, a process that impedes conceptual transparency, disturbing the smooth sequencing of cause and effect. Secondly, the visual image assumes a newly active power, that of disrupting rather than fleshing out textual directives (FI 46).
Put simply, Rancière’s concepts of sentence-image and montage refer to practices, ranging across literature, theatre, film and the visual arts, that link heterogeneous elements in ways that maintain some tension between and within the combinatory components. In this respect, the sentence-image tempers the “chaotic force of the great parataxis” by bringing together the incompatibles of “phrasal continuity” and the “imaging power of rupture” (ibid.). Instead of blending harmoniously together, the disordered materials that “hang together” in the sentence-image manufacture effects of disturbance, while maintaining some semblance of meaningful connectivity or “measure” between the different elements. Rancière analyses montage operations in numerous examples of modern art. However, before turning to these cases, it may be useful to consider how the sentence-image concept departs from another influential post-structuralist theory of modern art.
The dialectical articulation of the sentence-image as an encounter between sense-making and the disruption of homogeneous meaning may be contrasted with Jean Francois Lyotard’s concept of the affect-phrase, which ties modern art to an aesthetic of the sublime. A number of Rancière’s publications set up a critical dialogue with the modernist sublime formulated by Lyotard, where the affect-phrase concept signals a materialist radicalization of Immanuel Kant’s account of sublime experience. For Kant, sublime feeling has little to do with art, since it ultimately authorizes the active power of reason and moral judgement over the phenomenal world. Lyotard, similarly to Deleuze, reverses this conclusion, accenting the mind’s indebtedness to a sensuous, corporeal or unconscious dimension of experience that is ungraspable by concepts, measures or forms (Lyotard 1991: 142–3). Lyotard therefore characterizes the specific task of modern art as bearing witness to the mind’s powerlessness when confronted with the unrepresentable: as staging material events that resist conceptual or representational capture. For Lyotard, the affect-phrases of sublime art suspend exchanges and linkages between elements that normally sustain discursive procedures, or indeed the qualitatively indifferent economic transactions of capitalist culture.
In a number of contexts, Rancière has identified the theological implications of Lyotard’s aesthetic theory. In his view, Lyotard, responding to various ethical catastrophes of the twentieth century, subtracts all emancipatory aspiration from the avant-garde tradition. Instead, art’s task is to betoken what Rancière phrases as humanity’s “inescapable enslavement to the Other”, whether this figure of transcendental determination recalls “the Thing” of Freudian psychoanalysis or the Jewish god that proscribes graven images (SLS 15). Rancière clearly considers Lyotard’s assertion of an unbridgeable gap between the senso-rial signs of art and the ideational universe to be in keeping with those theorizations that make aesthetic autonomy definitive of artistic modernity. Alternatively, his concepts of the sentence-image and montage propose a paradoxical linking of art’s separation from and engagement with other spheres of experience.
The particular conceptualization of the modernist technique of montage proposed by Rancière nominates two primary ways in which art creates some sense of intelligibility (“common measure”) out of the disorder inaugurated by the aesthetic regime. These two modalities of montage are named dialectical and symbolic (FI 56–7).
Dialectical montage operates in art forms that choreograph clashes between incompatible elements in order to set forth conflicting visions of reality – in particular, to present alternative realities to those purveyed by hegemonic constructions of communal life. In a recent essay titled “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics”, Rancière writes that with dialectical montage: “The clash of heterogeneous elements is supposed to provoke a break in perception, to disclose some secret connection of things hidden behind everyday reality” (CAPA 41). Historical examples of dialectical montage include bizarre encounters between objects (umbrella, sewing machine, ironing board) proposed by Surrealist method, which upgraded the unconscious of dreams and desire as the repressed counterparts of bourgeois morality and social convention.
Rancière also associates dialectical montage with twentieth-century activist photomontage that includes the work of John Heartfield and Martha Rosler. According to his reading, each of these artists appropriates mass media and advertising materials to expose a social reality riven by political conflict rather than buttressed by consensual homogeneity. Rancière mentions Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home” series in particular, which was produced in the USA during the latter years of the Vietnam War. Here Rosler montages advertising imagery, resonant with ideas of American affluence and domestic complacency, with press images of the brutal conflict in Vietnam (FI 56).
More recent examples of art contoured by dialectical montage cited by Rancière include the mixed-media installations produced by Hans Haacke over many decades. These works typically bring into view a second order of economic rapaciousness and hidden violence covered over by idealized or therapeutic constructs of art’s cultural value. In all of these cases, according to Rancière, the mixing of heterogeneous elements produces a discernible political message that denounces the verities of a given socio-political order, while creating “a vision of history as a locus of conflict” (FI 60).
The other category of montage (symbolic) denominated by Rancière also gathers together disparate elements from art and non-art fields, but it produces a different perception of history. When discussing symbolist montage, Rancière regularly invokes the late productions of Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, the filmmaker’s eight-part video work Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). In the last episode of this monumental project a title insert provides Godard’s definition of montage: “To bring together things which have never been brought together and don’t seem disposed to being so”. In Histoire(s) Godard puts this definition into practice to a hyperbolic degree, by creating an elaborate paratactic fabric out of extant cultural materials from multiple historical sources. These materials include film images, sounds, titles or dialogues, news photographs, the spoken and written words of philosophers and art historians, passages from novels and poems, fragments of paintings, songs and advertising signs. Rancière argues that while Godard’s cinema has traditionally been, and may continue to be, viewed through the prism of dialectical montage, symbolic montage provides the keynote of the Histoire(s) project (FI 62). Contrary to the dissensual logic of dialectical montage, symbolic montage connects disparate elements to create affinities and analogical connections between divergent categories. As stated in The Future of the Image:
Between elements that are foreign to one another it [symbolic montage] works to establish a familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging, a shared world where heterogeneous elements are caught up in the same essential fabric, and are therefore always open to being assembled in accordance with the fraternity of a new metaphor.
(FI 57)
Rancière then proceeds to articulate a certain historical continuity between the fraternal logic of symbolic montage operative in Godard’s late work, and the aesthetic category of mystery formulated by Mal-larmé. Mallarméan mystery, however, has little to do with an idea of art manufacturing effects of mystical inscrutability. Rather this term relates to the previously mentioned socio-political reading of Mallarmé’s art developed by Rancière. Mystery here refers to the staging of convergences between heteroclite levels of experience that gesture to the possibility of a shared human world. While Rancière analyses a number of segments of Histoire(s) du cinema to convince us that Godard’s late works tend towards symbolic montage, the aforementioned idea of mystery is expressed especially succinctly in a line from Godard’s film Nouvelle vague (1990): “The past and the present that they felt above them were waves of one and the same ocean.” Thus, while dialectical montage constructs a vision of community as susceptible to dissent and contention, symbolic montage, according to Rancière, creates a “redemptive” image of communal connectedness (FI 63).
Although Rancière refuses to allocate any singular direction to modern art, his recent publications do trace shifts of emphasis in contemporary practice, as well as various curatorial tendencies. Extending his analysis of symbolic montage in Godard’s late work, Rancière perceives an increasing departure from dialectical montage in favour of art works that exhibit “a new sensitivity to the signs and traces that testify to a common history and a common world” (FI 66–7).
The widely circulated theory of “relational aesthetics” developed by art curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe 1990s art provides one indication of the alteration Rancière refers to. Bourriaud declares that relational art is inclined by a democratic ethos since it stages real-time events that foster social interaction and dialogue. In this respect, relational art creates situations where temporary communities might be formed. He also surmises that artists of today are less likely to adopt an antagonistic perspective towards the status quo, since, while the “imaginary of modernism was based on conflict, the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences” (Bourriaud 2002: 31). Such claims echo the fraternal logic of symbolic montage outlined by Rancière, who in a number of publications cites Bourriaud’s account of relational art restitching the broken threads of community (MSDC 67). Rancière, however, has expressed certain reservations about a “shift from dialectics to symbolism” in contemporary art. He suggests that this trend arguably participates in a contraction of spaces of political dispute that he associates with consensus-based models of politics that currently overdetermine thinking on democracy (CAPA 48).
In The Future of the Image and elsewhere, Rancière implies that art that continues the political legacy of the aesthetic regime navigates the logics of both dialectical and symbolic montage. On this basis, art drawn to dialectical montage falls short if it posits a deeper truth behind present realities without sustaining a sense of the social realm being open to contested meanings. Alternatively, art of symbolic montage loses political energy if it privileges some foundation of human community insulated from political dissent. In a recent essay, Rancière proposes that critical art needs to “keep something of the tension that pushes aesthetic experience toward the reconfiguration of collective life and something of the tension that withdraws the power of aesthetic sensoriality from other spheres of experience” (CAPA 41). This twofold formulation suggests that Rancière’s approach to modern art seeks to plot a path between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetic philosophies. One of the lessons of his analyses of art practice is that these philosophies continue to impinge on how we perceive and respond to art of modern times.