Reading Ranciere

Paul de Man and Art History I: Modernity, Aesthetics and Community in Jacques Rancière

Martin McQuillan

‘How “aesthetic” is to be understood here is not self-evident’

(de Man 1986: 63)

This essay is a response to a challenge and a commission to read Jacques Rancière on art. Having worked my way through Rancière’s texts on what he calls ‘aesthetics’ I must confess to a sense of disappointment and to feeling a little awkward in assembling my thoughts to respond to Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp’s friendly solicitation. I feel a bit like someone who sees everyone around them laughing but who fails to get the joke himself. The experience of reading Rancière has been akin to wading through a theory soup of everyone I have ever been suspicious of (a little semiology here, a grating of Foucault there, a large pinch of Althusser, a smidgen of psychoanalysis, a dusting of Deleuze, all with a strong flavour of an un-reconstructed, un-deconstructed French philosophical discourse on canonical art (the national and institutional philosophical variety rather than the exported ‘theoretical’ kind). In contrast say to the complexity and innovation of a thinker such as Derrida, I am compelled to wonder out loud: what is all the fuss about? On the one hand, there is a rather obvious and easily dismissed answer to this question, namely, that of academic fashion. Rancière is someone whose work has been with us for a while (since the collective text, Lire le Capital, with Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and Establet [1965]) but now in the growing absence of senior Parisian figures his time has come. With the assistance of friendly review, anglophone allies and publication with novelty-hungry presses he has emerged along with the likes of Alan Badiou as the next big thing in French Theory. However, it seems self-evident that his writing is not ‘the next big thing’ but rather something quite interestingly ‘retro’. The fashion for Rancière will need to be accounted for because after all, as Paul de Man (someone who was once in fashion himself but no longer) suggests fashion itself is an aesthetic and historical category (de Man 1986: 65). I am by disposition immediately suspicious of the notion of that the future of theory depends upon the uncovering of fresh ‘big names’ from the Grandes Écoles. There is no good reason why this model of translation and importation, that fed the theoretical opening in the anglophone humanities for three decades, should continue unchecked (as we shall see I am equally by disposition suspicious of the model of the model itself). The search for the latest grey-haired authority from Paris is a repetition of a nostalgia that denies the very dissemination that, what we might now be obliged to call, ‘the theoretical tradition’ put in play. Much time and treasure has been spent in American graduate schools and in British research centres constructing the reputations of new grand figures of the French scene at the expense perhaps of local talent or the next generation who might not be that turned on by this imitation of this historical model. Equally, it may be this generation that is responsible for seeking out their own French idols in repetition of a schema they have inherited from the theoretical past. However, comments such as these could be quite rightly dismissed as either in some way theoretically sectarian or anecdotally unrigorous, and there is no reason to be satisfied by them even though they might tell us something about the pathologies of the academy.

There are other reasons why I confess to being under-whelmed by my encounter with the text of Rancière that I will attempt to outline before expanding my discontent into a wider argument concerning the challenge of critical thought to art history and practice. First, and I think most significantly he is someone who is reluctant to read (all Rancière’s issues stem from this). Rancière’s philosophical enterprise is set up around the demarcation of what is translated as three ‘regimes of the art’ (the ethical, the representational and the aesthetic) and from this he seeks a certain clarity of definition around the idea of the aesthetic as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ which then has consequences for the material realm of politics in the Modern period. Accordingly, Rancière needs this dialectical system to work at a level of descriptive and predictive generality. The consequence of this in his writing is that he tends to gesture towards broad brush and universalizing descriptions of artistic epochs rather than the detailed consideration of textual examples that might suggest, explain or challenge a more general theory (for example see Rancière 2007: 14, 20, 103). It is not that ‘reading’ is entirely absent from the text of Rancière, one will occasionally find an instance of literary quotation or a description of an art object (for example, Rancière 2007: 80ff; or Rancière 2009: 27) but that these ‘readings’ are never particularly close. They rarely operate at the level of the signifier, brush stroke or pixel, they tend to be gestures towards what a reading might look like rather than reading itself. Rancière is not someone who goes in for unnecessary textual explication. This is equally true of his commentary on the philosophical which also tends to operate on the level of a general synthesis and frequently at the level of pointed condemnation of the abstract such as ‘postmodernism’ or ‘Critical Thought’ (see Rancière 2009: 25 ff, or 45; or Rancière 2007: 45) without identifying the authors of their ignominy. ‘Postmodernism’ is a particular sinner responsible in Rancière’s view for all manner of errors but which in his writing speaks with a homogeneous voice, effecting unfeasible epochal change despite its clear wrong-headedness. Whenever Rancière offers us a philosophical villain (Barthes on the image or Lyotard on the sublime, for example) his account of them is at the level of his own singular summary rather than a matter of quotation and analysis. Equally, his literary and artistic objects seem to be drawn from a fairly narrow range with a number of notable favourites (such as Madame Bovary, Plato’s commentary on theatre and Godard’s Histoires du Cinéma, for example) being put to use again and again to demonstrate the truth of his philosophical discourse. All this is a problem because it produces a discourse on art in the absence of the challenge of art. The theoretical statements and philosophical system are not sufficiently tested against the singularity of art objects that might otherwise disturb the thetics and axiomatics of that system. Rancière goes to some length for conceptual clarity and is keen to pin down art but does not sufficiently risk his own discourse by offering art the opportunity to get up and walk away with the pin. What we have instead is a series of references rather than readings and these references might just as well be otherwise since they are never fully actualized as readings. The references support a discourse that works at a level of considerable generality that then becomes wholly detached from the objects it purports to describe,

rendering it of limited value in the interpretation or explanation of those objects. The discourse seems to exist on its own terms and to refer to nothing but its own status as a discourse on art or as a philosophical system.

Second, and consequently, there is nothing undialectical about Rancière’s dialectic. The ethical, representational and aesthetic regimes of the art in Rancière work, for good or ill, according to a familiar formulation of historical development that we might find in Hegel’s dialectic of the classical, symbolic and romantic. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with an attraction to the hopeless allure of the dialectic (I have commented on this elsewhere (McQuillan 2008: 132)). However, when it comes to something as complex as art or literature, or indeed politics, it is necessary to ask in what way the art object might resist dialecticalization. In accounting for art, literature or politics it is not a question of opposing the dialectic (for that would be the most dialectical of gestures). Rather it is necessary to think in terms of ‘a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectic’, as Derrida puts it in one of the interviews with Maurizio Ferraris (Derrida 2001: 32). Within any dialectical situation there remains an element, which does not allow itself to be integrated into the systematicity of the dialectic, but which presents non-oppositional difference that exceeds the dialectic, which is itself always oppositional. This is what Derrida calls the supplement (among other things) which does not allow itself to be dialectized and which not being dialectical is necessarily then recuperated by the dialectic that it relaunches. ‘Thus the dialectic consists’, says Derrida, ‘precisely in dialectizing the non-dialectizable’ (2001: 32). This scenario is not recognizable as the dialectic in any easy sense of synthesis, totalization, identification and transcendence. Rather this non-dialectical dialecticity of the dialectic is a form of synthesis without synthesis, what Derrida frequently terms ‘ex-appropriation’, which is both an essentially anti-dialectical concept and the necessary condition of dialectics as such. The point here is not that, as Rancière says, a new regime of art does not necessarily abolish the previously dominant one (2004: 50), thus rendering Rancière’s schema different from the classical dialectic. Rather, it is that when we read Hegel, for example, closely (see McQuillan 2010), this situation is exactly what happens in Hegel all the time, particularly when he risks his dialectic against the singularity of art objects; and that this sort of epochal contamination and co-existence is endemic to the dialectic as such. Whenever Hegel’s dialectic comes into contact with the art object we are always left the non-dialectizable residue that problematizes the dialectical approach and renders the text of Hegel only ever an allegory of the dialectic. The point would be that given that philosophy since Heidegger has taken this disarticulation of the dialectic really quite far, especially in relation to art, it is something that a philosopher of the theoretical tradition writing today might hope to treat as something to be gone through rather than ignored entirely. Given that the non-dialecticity of the dialectic is probably just about the most difficult thing to think about in relation to philosophy, this absence might explain the current popularity of Rancière.

Fourth, and finally for now, what is one to make today of Rancière’s use of a term like the ‘sensible’? While one does not need to deprive oneself of the metaphysical inheritance and its vocabulary (it is after all the only resource open to philosophy), Rancière’s privileging of art as a category has in common with all aesthetics the foundational assumption of a division between the sensible and the intelligible. It is the very cornerstone of his writing. However, as with all aesthetics as philosophy his writing works towards a reduction of that distinction in favour of the intelligible (Rancière might deny this but we shall shortly demonstrate this). It thus effaces the art it privileges by positing it as secondary from the beginning: it is not by accident that the art object is seldom allowed to speak for itself in his discourse. Any attempt to reduce the distinction in the opposite direction, as Rancière frequently does (for example Rancière 2010: 12) continues to rely on the same structure of transcendental contraband that is constitutively unable to disarticulate the predicament it has entangled itself within and the tropes upon which it relies. On this question of the inheritance of philosophical terms, it will be necessary to put into question the transcendental terms of Rancière’s discourse: art, aesthetics, politics and history. This can only be done (given all that has been said above, which will no doubt have sufficiently tried the reader’s patience) via a close reading of an exemplary text by Rancière. However, before I take that particular turn I would like to consider what Paul de Man has to say concerning the general problematic that Rancière has chosen to confront, what Rancière calls ‘le partage du sensible’ and what de Man calls ‘aesthetic ideology’. In so doing, I would like to posit by way of counter-example the sorts of questions that Rancière’s writing might have chosen to address through reading rather than synthesis. Accordingly, we might find that Rancière despite himself might be engaged in a considerable philosophical struggle, the stakes of which run beyond the currently fashionable or generational misprisions.

II. Demanding Histories

Of all of the troubling and challenging things that Paul de Man has to say some of the most troubling and most challenging concern history. The implications of de Man’s writing for the idea of history and historically determined disciplines such as the History of Art or Cultural History has never been fully elaborated; the challenge of de Man’s later writing having been swept away by the sound and fury that accompanied the posthumous discovery of his wartime journalism. However, in the light of the current interest in the historical determination of the aesthetic proposed by Jacques Rancière, it may be beneficial to return to those texts. First, against stereotype, de Man states in the text transcribed from the Messenger Lecture series as ‘Kant and Schiller’ that the topic that has emerged most forcefully from his reading of figurative language in literary texts is ‘the question of reversibility, linked to the question of historicity . . . [it is] more interesting than any other to me’ (de Man 1996: 132). De Man has in truth been a frequent commentator on history up until this point, including for example the provocative closing line of his reading of ‘The Social Contract’ (the manuscript of de Man’s text was written as early as 1972 (see de Man 2010)). Now, there is a piece of work to be done (‘Paul de Man and Art History II’) that would deal exclusively with the implications of the Aesthetic Ideology book for the discipline of Art History. I do not propose to undertake a full elaboration of this here. Rather, I would like to consider what de Man says about history and aesthetics in this text on Kant and Schiller and in several essays that precede it in the de Manian corpus. The first of these is the relatively early essay, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’. Here de Man outlines the institutional difficulty of putting history itself in question. He suggests:

The vested interest that academics have in the value of history makes it difficult to put the term seriously into question. Only an exceptionally talented and perhaps eccentric member of the profession could undertake this task with sufficient energy to make it effective, and even then it is likely to be accompanied by the violence that surrounds passion and rebellion. (de Man 1983: 145)

From here he goes on to offer an account of Nietzsche’s ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Histoire für das Leben’ [‘Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life’] as an example of one such talented eccentric. What the talented, if not institutionally eccentric (he only ever taught in elite IVY League universities) de Man draws out of Nietzsche is the idea that not only might literature and modernity be incompatible concepts but that ‘history and modernity may well be even more incompatible’ (de Man 1983: 142). This is an important stake in the context of a discussion of Rancière since he equates the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ with Modernity itself (Rancière 2004: 24). De Man’s reading goes something like this: there is nothing specifically modern about modernity (1983: 144) – the term has its roots in Late Latin, modo meaning ‘just now’ giving modernus in Middle English. Modernity is then a problematic term in literary history because it names an epoch in which writers become aware of the impossibility of being modern. This is merely indicative of a more general difficulty, ‘the problematic structure of a concept that, like all concepts that are in essence temporal, acquires a particularly rich complexity when it is made to refer to events that are in essence linguistic’ (de Man 1983: 144). De Man’s reading is then drawn not towards an account of his own modernity but the challenge to the methods of literary history that this conceptual difficulty implies. For example, Modernity (as conceived by literary history and avant-garde writers as their own time keepers) invests in the power of the present as an origin only to discover that ‘in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present’ (de Man 1983: 149). In this way, Modernity and history are in some curious way incompatible terms and not, as literary history has it, a sub-set of one another. Literature itself, says de Man, has an impulse towards immediacy and in this sense is always a question of a modern consciousness. Accordingly, literature is the most modern of things and so is equally incompatible with a straightforward notion of its own historicity. However, following Nietzsche, de Man suggests that the diremption of history-oriented educational practices and the impulse of the modern spirit in art towards the making of a ‘new time’ must be understood in historical terms. The modernity of literature, says de Man, before his encounter with the vocabulary of deconstruction, presents ‘an unsolvable paradox’ (1983: 151) that both denies and affirms its own specificity as an attitude towards immediacy. Now, all of this, insofar as it is valid, could equally be said of art in general, which sits ambivalently between the categorization of the art historian and the artist’s own modernity. In fact, the example that de Man goes on to take up is that of Baudelaire’s essay of Constantin Guys as the ‘painter of modern life’ and ‘emblem of the poetic mind’ (de Man 1983: 157) who is both a modern man of action and a record keeper. De Man’s commentary at this point concerns both Baudelaire and Guys in an interchangeable way, literature and art having no clear distinction at this point as both are equally concerned with negotiating the problematic of the collapsing walls between the conceptualization of history and modernity. De Man draws out of his encounter with Baudelaire the suggestion that despite their impulse towards the modern, literary (i.e. artistic) texts know themselves to be fictional and allegorical ‘repetitions [. . .] forever unable to participate in the spontaneity of action or modernity’ (1983: 161). Accordingly, as soon as art or literature replaces a singular moment of invention with its repetition as a textual and successive movement that involves more than one distinct moment, it ‘enters into a world that assumes the depths and complications of an articulated time, an interdependence between past and future that prevents any present from ever coming into being’ (de Man 1983: 161). Hence, literature or art itself as signifying practices may not be compatible with the idea of their own modernity; just as the falling away of this present moment gives literature and art a duration and historical existence. De Man goes on in this essay, first published in 1971, to wonder ‘whether a history of an entity as self-contradictory as literature is conceivable’ (1983: 162). Certainly to think of literature in terms of a positivistic literary history, as the collection and classification of empirical data, is to assemble a history of something other than literature. This disciplinary practice, says de Man, might open

the way to, if it doesn’t get in the way of, what he calls ‘actual literary study’ (1983: 163). Equally, any formalist study of literature that claimed to be a-historical would merely be presupposing this same idea of history that its own methodology was unable to account for (such is the nature of the oppositional gesture that reaffirms that which it opposes).

However, it is towards the end of this essay that de Man’s theoretical rigour becomes ever more challenging to the authority of literary history. De Man is not saying that there is no history or that history is a fiction. Rather, the narratives of literary history can only ever be metaphors for the fluctuation that this essay describes and ‘history is not a fiction’ (de Man 1983: 163). Positivistic histories of literature transcend the literary text as text by viewing literature as something it is not, an empirical fact, even if we are thrown back on history as a mode of studying literature because, as the Formalists and the Structuralists discovered, there is no adequate science of literature given its instability and fluctuations. ‘Could we conceive of a literary history’, asks de Man in conclusion,

that would be able to maintain the literary aporia throughout, account at the same time for the truth and the falsehood of the knowledge literature conveys about itself, distinguish rigorously between metaphorical and historical language, and account for literary modernity as well as for its historicity? (1983: 164)

This task would seem to present an enormous challenge to literary study, one that would involve a revision of both our understanding of temporality (already contaminated by a historical hierarchy between past, present and future) and a reconsideration of the idea of history as a succession of generative moments in which the ancestral past begets its succession as a moment of unmediated presence, which in turn is capable of repeating the same generative process. This would have obvious implications not only for the study of art history or cultural history but all history in general. However, de Man suggests that the task may be less considerable than we might assume because in fact during the act of reading we do indeed take for granted these literary aporias, making good reading the actual production of literary history.

The point of returning to this 1971 text by de Man, in the context of a discussion of theoretical approaches with some currency in 2010, is to remind ourselves of the structural inadequacy of attempting to construct a history of art, and a dialectical history of art at that, which is unable to read. That is, to understand the art object or literary text in terms of what it is (something that solicits a reading and only exists in that reading) rather than what it is not (empirical data in a history of human subjectivication). It would be difficult to imagine what a ‘Rancièrean’ reading of an art object or literary text would look like (he is reluctant to fully elaborate one) because he does not approach art or literature in this way (i.e. on their own terms). Instead art and literature for Rancière are always just ‘data’ that prove the truth of a dialectical philosophy and its sub-categories. This is difficult because, on the one hand, the privileging of art and literature in Rancière turns out to be just another submission of them to philosophy, and on the other hand, in silencing the art object we find ourselves once more in the presence of the teacher and his historically oriented educational practices. De Man ends the essay with one of his characteristic concentrated and hitherto (in the essay) undeveloped affirmations: ‘If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions’ (1983: 165). Here de Man opens the door to what Rancière calls ‘the politics of aesthetics’, but not because good readers can interpret the events of history but because the temporal concept that we call history has its place in the linguistic moment when we give a name, category and narrative to the material (such as the War on Terror or the French Revolution) that replaces a singular moment of action with its repetition as a textual and successive movement that involves more than one distinct moment. History as a practice and idea is textual because it approaches the material as an articulation of an idea of time in which an interdependence between past and future prevents any present from ever coming into being; at once preceding the material and transcending it simultaneously through a narrativization that could just as well be otherwise (no doubt there are many French Revolutions). History can only ever be the metaphor of its own historicity, something like an allegory of history.

Given that History and all the historical disciplines such as ‘the History of Art’ then depend upon a consideration of textuality that extends well beyond a certain archival, palaeographic or antiquarian competence, de Man wonders in the 1982 essay ‘Reading and History’ why hermeneutic subtlety ‘is rarely demanded from historians, among historians, least of all from literary historians’ (de Man 1986: 59). Now, certain art historians and literary historians (I’m thinking of the likes of Fred Orton and Mark Currie) might be in a position today to say with some justification that they have taken on board the lesson of de Man here. However, this is by no means universally true, with connoisseurial art history remaining the dominant discourse of our universities, galleries and research councils. One could add here for good measure, with our new philosophical idols as well. There is almost nothing in Rancière’s historical categorizations that one could point to as hermeneutically intricate. We continue to live in an unchallenged culture of the historian and this epoch needs to be understood historically; equally the idea of the epoch itself also needs to be understood historically. The figure of the historian may well be one of the defining motifs of what we continue to call Modernity, co-terminus with the idea of the author and the figure of the critic, indicative perhaps of the literary origins of disciplinary history as a modern phenomenon. As such, history itself would be a modern category; not in the sense of its temporal location in, say, the eighteenth or nineteenth century (Michelet, Gibbon, Jaurès, etc.) but in its literary, poetic or artistic attitude to its own modus as its point of departure and consciousness (Herodotus, Thucydides, Pliny). History, unlike literature, does not recognize itself as fictional or allegorical, any more than philosophy does. Instead, the writing of history, like the writing of philosophy, involves a system of synthesis that conveys an impression of methodological mastery that simultaneously effaces its own written status and the linguistic factors that would interfere with the synthesizing power of historical discourse, by claiming special referential exceptionalism with respect to its object of study (the material facts of history) as if bullets on a stage and bullets in the street were not also a case of assiduously distinguishing between reference and referent. In this sense, the writing of history is also an aesthetic category whether one is a historian of the Annales school or a dialectical philosopher of the new school. History and practices of historization must also be part of the aesthetic regime of the sensible even if they come to dominate the discursive construction of that regime in a way that can neither be avoided nor understood by that discourse. This is significant because it calls into question the attempt at conceptual mastery around the category of the aesthetic in Rancière. Rather than identifying the aesthetic as a form of provisional cognition (as Hegel does), Rancière, like so many others before him, imagines the aesthetic as holding the promise of totalization making, as de Man says of Jauss’ Rezeptions-ästhetik, a symptom ‘into a remedy for the disorder that it signals’ (de Man 1986: 64). At this point I will break from these two de Man essays to return to the text of Rancière in order to put into play some of the implications of de Man’s challenge to the historization of art around a recent collection by Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (2009).

III. A Model Education

The Rancière text is the result of a solicitation from the Swedish performer and choreographer Mårten Spånberg to open the fifth International Sommerakademie with a reflection on the artist and the spectator in relation to ideas first proposed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991 [1987]). This is then, from the beginning, a book that is tied very closely to the possibility of an aesthetic education. As we shall see, such a proposition is not without historical precedents and these precedents are not without consequence for Rancière. The idea of the ignorant schoolmaster, following the singular Foucauldian case of Joseph Jacotot, is a pedagogical scene in which the teacher does not set out to transmit knowledge to the pupil but rather a renunciation of explication as an educational strategy in favour of the equal intellect of the student being assisted to learn something that neither master nor pupil had known before. Now, as a commentary on education, Rancière’s 1987 text is at pains to suggest an educational scene without hierarchy and resulting in intellectual emancipation rather than popular instruction (see Rancière 1991). However, this is not the same thing as an education without model. Rather, while Rancière–Jacotot’s pedagogical paradigm makes a different assumption regarding the idiom of educational delivery, it still assumes the repeatability of a set of relations as an educational structure. All education ultimately assumes equality between pupil and master as its telos, and so the intelligence of the pupil and the potentiality of equality is assumed throughout the traditional pedagogic scene; Rancière–Jacotot merely short circuit the relationship without displacing the idea of the educational model as such. Autodidactism is still a model. The repeatability of the model of ignorance is assumed in the solicitation Rancière accepts in The Emancipated Spectator, that is, that this model can be applied to the spectator with regard to the work of art. Further to this, as with all of Rancière’s writing on art, he begins from the position of assuming the category of the aesthetic and the need to work this category within the strict limits of his own definition of it. In fact, ‘aesthetics’ (along with ‘art’ and ‘culture’) might just be one of the vaguest terms in the philosophical lexicon precisely because it attempts to name a fluctuation that challenges meaning itself. None the less, Rancière will hold to this most archaic of terms and hope that by the power of his political good intentions his discourse will be immune to the metaphysical virus it brings with it. This is a bit like attempting to hold back the plague with a sprinkling of holy water. As soon as we are in the realms of an aesthetic education, even an ignorant one, we are participating in the history of aesthetics as a series of footnotes to Schiller’s creative misprision of Kant. Rancière is aware of this and will lean on his own version of Schiller as the book proceeds.

The opening, eponymous essay in Rancière’s book offers a model for an emancipated spectator of performance (the theatre and in particular the theatre as discussed by Plato is one of Rancière’s favourite leitmotifs). For Rancière, there is no theatre without a spectator, who in the traditional manner of theatre is held in passivity and ignorance by the action on the stage before being led to knowledge of the reality concealed and revealed by the action. In contrast, the emancipated spectator would be one who became an actor ‘dispossessed of this illusory mastery, drawn into the magic circle of theatrical action where she will exchange the privilege of rational observer for that of being in possession of all her vital energies’ (Rancière 2009: 4). So far, so the Barthes of S/Z and ‘The Death of the Author’. However, Rancière goes on to deal with the question of the theatre as an exemplary communal form. As an embodiment of ‘the living community’, the emancipation of theatre will, says Rancière, involve an opposition to ‘the illusion of mimesis’ and a ‘critique of the spectacle’ (2009: 6). Citing the proper name of Artaud (as opposed to reading any of his texts) Rancière suggests that drama, the true essence of theatre, when ‘presented as a mediation striving for its own abolition’ might be the basis for a reformulation of the logic of theatre and lead us to a description of intellectual emancipation. The analogy here is then between the autodidactic student and the active spectator: Jacotot’s model is translated, but in principle repeatable, in another set of relations and at this point in his essay Rancière embarks upon a lengthy summation of his previous work on Jacotot. If Rancière is offering a model for an aesthetic education it would be one based not on the explication of a set of exemplary texts as touchstones for good taste but on a drawing out of the spectator from a passive attitude to be transformed into an active participant in a world shared by the artists, actors and spectators. In this situation, just as the pupil learns from the ignorant schoolmaster something he does not know himself, so the performance in the theatre in this new relation would not be a transmission from actor to audience but ‘a third thing that is owned by no one, but which subsists between them’ (Rancière 2009: 15). Accordingly, Rancière is offering us a form of communion without mediation, which he calls ‘the affirmation of a communitarian essence of theatre as such’ (Rancière 2009: 16). The assumption of the communitarian nature of theatre is fundamental for Rancière and the emancipation of the spectator is not at the expense of the community. The shared experience of anonymous individuals marked by ‘irreducible distances’ produces ‘an unpredictable interplay of associations and disassociations’ (Rancière 2009: 17) that disrupt the otherwise given distribution of the sensible (i.e. their role as passive spectator) leaving the newly active spectator with ‘no time to spend on the forms and insignia of individuality. That is what the word “emancipation” means: the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look: between individuals and members of the collective body’ (Rancière 2009: 19). This is a slightly curious idea of what the word ‘emancipation’ means: in its normative usage it refers to freedom from slavery from the Latin verb emancipare, meaning to be transferred as property. Here it would seem to mean the freeing of the individual from their previous atomized role in order to embrace the commune. In Rancière’s political schema this escape from the policed role of the passive spectator to an embrace of an active communism constitutes the emancipation of the spectator. In fact, in this essay, Rancière’s ultimate concern is with the ‘emancipated community’ as a community of narrators and translators who have actively appropriated their own stories (2009: 22). Although not translators who have worried about the impossibility of translation.

This is stirring stuff and I hope not an inaccurate account of what Rancière has to say in this essay. On the one hand, much will depend here upon one’s disposition towards the commune, the comme une. However, leaving that aside for the moment I would like to question some of the emancipatory claims made in and for this text. First, we have the issue of the model. The model offered by Rancière is no doubt progressive, even ‘radical’ in its own way: who would not wish to be an active constructor of meaning and teller of their own tale? However, what Rancière presents here for the opening of the Sommerakadamie and the opening of his book is a model of emancipation for the spectator of art that is based on a description of the spectator of theatre, the one being analogous to the other, who in turn is analogous to Jacotot’s Flemish pupil who wants to learn how to speak French. However, the spectator of art is not reducible to the theatrical spectator because art (pictorial art, sculpture, even so-called performance art) is not a communal experience in the same way that theatre might be, if Rancière’s a priori assumptions concerning theatre are correct. The co-option of the spectator of art for the living community by the sleight of hand that substitutes one experience into another masks a violent appropriation that will need to be accounted for, as will the difficulty of a model for art in which art itself is entirely absent. Second, the blueprint for the emancipated spectator is a model for an aesthetic education based upon Jacotot-Rancière’s alternative pedagogic scene and as such would not seem to disrupt Schiller’s own model of aesthetic education. The model that Schiller offers, one in which the ignorant pupil is introduced to a range of paradigmatic texts in order to cultivate knowledge of aesthetic taste, would seem at first glance to be a repeat of the very Platonic model that Rancière wishes to oppose (it would take too long a diversion to demonstrate that in fact such a model is nowhere to be found in Plato, so let’s leave that for a later date). At this point we might also raise the issue of Rancière’s own explication of the model that is nowhere reproduced by his actively participating audience at the Sommerakademie but is presented to them by the invited and privileged professor. However, what Rancière and Schiller both share is the model of the model itself. Schiller’s aesthetic education involves the resemblance of the pupil to another, the work of art that they are invited to imitate. In this way Schiller’s pupil from the beginning is only ever copying a reproduction or representation. However, the work of art is only exemplary of, and a displacement for, the authority of judgement derived from the teacher who prescribes the educational programme. Rancière would be at pains to distance himself from such a scenario, but readers of The Emancipated Spectator are at several calls away from Jacotot’s francophone. On the one hand, there is the slightly comic scene of the professor at the Sommerakademie, like Brian addressing the masses, earnestly telling his rapt audience that they are all different. He encourages them to tell their own story before offering them the universal paradigm of someone else’s story (Jacotot’s students) and exhorting them to collectivization. A certain ventriloquism has taken place here in which the thematic of Jacotot’s story stands in place of an actual dismantling of the boundaries of the pedagogical scene, which remain firmly in place between Rancière and his readers. A scene in which we are still left with the specular model of the text as imitation and an aesthetic education that depends upon the authority of

proscribed judgement. It might be the case that an aesthetic education is not possible without the idea of mimesis, even if the aesthetic regime of the arts was supposed to displace the representational regime for Rancière (Rancière 2007: 73–6). Rancière’s appropriation of the spectator of art for the living commune is just as violent a gesture as Schiller’s co-option of the pupil of aesthetic taste as a citizen of the state. What is absent in both Schiller and Rancière, and which makes the appropriation violent, is critical reading. In the case of Schiller ‘reading’ takes the form of imitation of the artwork, in Rancière his own reluctance to read offers us no model for critical reading other than the synthesis of the exemplary. Jacotot’s pupils may become active readers of French but Rancière’s readers are offered an imitation that conceals the idealization it performs. In this sense, Rancière’s ‘emancipated spectator’ is just another product of a system devised by Schiller that as de Man suggests in his own reading of the aesthetic letters, ‘succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that it makes possible’ (de Man 1984: 289).

One could also take Rancière to task over the notion that the teller of a tale is ever in any way master of her own story but at that point one would really be in the position of reminding ourselves of things that should never be forgotten. Rather, by way of drawing this discussion to a close I would like to press on a little further into Rancière’s text to pick a little more at this question of the emancipated community (another classical term that Rancière wishes to use with impunity). Towards the end of the second chapter in The Emancipated Spectator, ‘The Misadventures of Critical Thought’ (which names a series of seeming theoretical errors without naming, or quoting, anyone responsible for them), Rancière states that the ‘collective understanding of emancipation is not the comprehension of a total process of subjection. It is the collectivization of capacities invested in scenes of dissensus’ (2010: 49). A few lines earlier he has glossed the scene of dissensus for us:

what ‘dissensus’ means is an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all. It means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification. (Rancière 2009: 48–9)

The definition of ‘dissensus’ goes on but we are once more back in the familiar territory of the teller who is master of her own tale, a political agent independent of the disruptive, mediating effects of signification and unencumbered by the interference of the wholly other. In the next chapter, ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community’, Rancière goes on to define ‘an aesthetic community’ which he explicitly calls ‘a community of sense, or a sensus communis’ (2009: 57). Having positioned himself in the orbit of Kant he loops back to define the sensus communis in terms of figures of dissensus, suggesting ‘to the extent that it is a dissensual community, an aesthetic community is a community structured by disconnection’ (Rancière 2010: 59). To go too quickly here, but to get to the point, Rancière correctly surmises that the figural and ruptured nature of the aesthetic is a problematic basis for building a community and suggests ‘the ontology of the dissensual is actually a fictional ontology, a play of “aesthetic ideas” ’ (2009: 67), placing his own collectivization of dissensus on a much less firm footing than it might otherwise appear. This one might think would knock the declarative confidence out of the self-knowledge of emancipation, but Rancière salvages his project through a pass by Schiller suggesting that because what he is calling ‘aesthetic separation’ implies ‘there is no longer any boundary separating what belongs to the realm of art from what belongs to the realm of everyday life’, then this is why ‘the “aesthetic education” conceptualized by Schiller after reading Kant’s third Critique cannot identify with the happy dream of a community united and civilized by the contemplation of eternal beauty’ (Rancière 2009: 69). It would seem that Rancière’s understanding of Schiller is very different from that of de Man in his essay on Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater. In truth, neither de Man nor Rancière ever quote Schiller at any length and both use him as the model of a model they wish to either oppose or support. However, while we might provisionally accept from Rancière that in Schiller there is no love of a ‘community united and civilized by the contemplation of eternal beauty’, there is still a community that reproduces itself through education as the state. Rancière’s own aesthetic community is also a political community but one characterized by separation and dissensus that constructs political relations according to aesthetic effect, which for Rancière means an originary ‘suspension of any direct relationship between cause and effect’ (2009: 73). He calls this diremption of reference and referent ‘dis-identification’; and following the logic of the ignorant schoolmaster he reads the ‘emancipated proletarian [as] a dis-identified worker’ who eludes the rhetorical persuasion of the artist in a multiplicity of connections and

disconnections that constitutes a ‘community of dis-identified proletarian subjects’ (Rancière 2009: 73).

Now, Rancière is not one for what he calls ‘postmodern politics’ but this aesthetic community of emancipated, dis-identified subjects is beginning to look a lot like the product of a theory that wants to have its postmodern cake and it. However, what remains undisturbed here is the very idea of community itself and the long historical bond from Schiller that ties that community to the aesthetic. The aesthetic remains an exemplary and unifying category and model for education, even if this education is said to be taking place according to a different typography. As with the philosophical tradition since Schiller, in which Rancière’s text is firmly rooted, there remains an a priori valorization of art as a model for human experience, even if it is frequently only the idea of art rather than specific works of art in Rancière. At the same time art is subordinated to the telos of Rancière’s ambition, the emancipated collective in which political relations (the collectivization of the dis-identified proletarians) matters more than the ‘fictional ontology’ of aesthetic relations that binds them together. In Rancière we will not find any ‘and therefore’ moments in which the emancipated community collapses or fails as a consequence of its aesthetic provenance. Rather, the aesthetic community in Rancière seems able to hold itself up on nothing but the gaps produced by dissensus and separation. This might be true enough but it suggests that Rancière’s proletarian community is just another ideological ruse resulting from a linguistic illusion. At this point, the latterly introduced autodidactic proletarian is in danger of seeming like a principle of closure not open to the same critical discourse that Rancière directs towards the bourgeois artist; and the construction of the emancipated collective is really only a displaced version of collectivization of the idea of art as culture in Schiller, which leads in both Rancière and Schiller to the political order of the state (different as this might be for Rancière and Schiller). Rancière states elsewhere that ‘artistic practices are not “exceptions” to other practices’ (2004: 45), meaning that artistic practices are also subject to the inequalities of the distribution of labour. However, as we saw with de Man’s idea of reading as the production of literary history, this is actually not true and that artistic practices are exceptions, perhaps the only exceptions, because they contain within themselves as their own haeccity the self- contradiction of falsehood and knowledge, metaphor and history, active reader and orphaned text, in which the distribution of labour and the distribution of the sensible do not run according to pre-determined tram lines.

A couple of things concern me at this point. Firstly, as in Schiller, philosophy itself seems to have dropped out of the educational picture for Rancière. His sensus communis is an aesthetic community, not a community of thought (philosophy is not taught in Schiller’s aesthetic education). While, as suggested above, Rancière’s own writing does not follow the model of ‘the ignorant philosopher’ (perhaps philosophy is an exception to this model), his notion of emancipation as aesthetic effect at once relegates art to a popularization and metaphorization of philosophy and hands the aesthetic to the masses. That is to say, the collective have culture but not philosophy; and in this sense Rancière is a much more Schillerian thinker than a Kantian one. The very acceptance of the supposed separation of art from philosophy, with which the opening solicitation of The Emancipated Spectator begins, is a fall into an aesthetic trap that we might find indicative of Schiller rather than Kant, who always inscribes art within the philosophical enterprise as a philosophical problem to be understood as such rather than an object that philosophy has to be brought towards in order to arrive at another destination, that of politics. Finally, if I might return to Paul de Man’s challenge to art history, the other business that has fallen out of Rancière’s sensus communis is its historical nature. I am not referring to the epoch-making proletarians who resist the police regime of the sensible but rather the passage from cognition to performance of a community of the dis-identified. As de Man states in the text on Kant and Schiller, history is ‘not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality, but is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition’ (de Man 1996: 133). For de Man this emergence is not dialectical, nor a continuum, nor is it reversible. It is a one-way street that does not allow for the reinscription of history back into cognition. Any regression that would imagine a return of the ‘materiality of the inscribed signifier’ as history to cognition would no longer be historical because it would take place according to a temporal mode that would no longer be history as such (de Man 1996: 134). Rancière’s aesthetic community by contrast creates history not by means of its own choosing but by dissensus and the potentiality of separation, which at once assumes an idea of history as a temporal continuum without being able to approach this idea critically as the effect of the aesthetic gestures that also produce the community’s notion of its own materiality. In Rancière’s schema, the claim to equality is the a priori condition of possibility for politics not as an ontological principle but as a condition that must be put into action in order for politics to be thought (Rancière 2004: 52). This action would then be the motor of history in an aesthetic community of dissensus. However, inequality itself is not an action, it is a relation and an economic relation at that (let us understand ‘economic’ in its fullest sense here) and is therefore itself irreducibly conceptual. The worry here would be that ‘inequality’ and the community of dissensus is transforming a language of cognition into its own language of power and repeating the same aesthetic distribution of the sensible it is seeking to rearrange.

Perhaps this somewhat polemical response to Bowman and Stamp overstates the case against Rancière in order to better hit the target of the current theoretical scene in which the texts of Rancière circulate. And without doubt Rancière is one of the more sophisticated and democratic-minded thinkers on that scene. However, the emancipated reader of today might begin to contribute more effectively to the debates engendered by Rancière’s intelligent texts by resisting the self-idealizations of theoretical declarations in favour of a practice of critical reading that can distinguish between politics in the street and politics in prescription.

Works Cited

De Man, Paul (1983), ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 142–65.

— (1984), ‘Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press.

— (1986), ‘Reading and History’, in The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

— (1996), ‘Kant and Schiller’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

— (2010), Textual Allegories [online], ed. Martin McQuillan, http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1091.

Derrida, Jacques (2001), A Taste for the Secret, Cambridge: Polity.

McQuillan, Martin (2008), Deconstruction after 9/11, New York: Routledge.

— (2010), ‘Aesthetic Allegory: Reading Hegel after Bernal’, in The Origins of Deconstruction, eds Martin McQuillan and Ika Willis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rancière, Jacques (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kirstin Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

— (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum.

— (2007), The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.

— (2009), The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.