Focus on the politics of aesthetics

The topic of politics and aesthetics has generated, over the years, a great interest among Sri Lankan literary and art critics and cultural intellectuals. It has been explored at different levels of critical engagement and sophistication. A thinker, who has in recent times, contributed significantly to advance this conversation is the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere.

His work is not as well known as it should be in Sri Lanka, which is, of course, a matter of regret. In this column, I wish to focus on one of his central concepts - in many ways his pivotal concept - namely, the distribution of the sensible. This serves to illuminate in significant ways the conjunction between aesthetics and politics.

During the past decade or so, Jacques Ranciere has emerged as a thinker of the first importance, occupying the privileged space that is adorned by thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze. He emerged as an important figure when in 1968, he co-authored the book 'Reading Capital, with the famous Marxist theorist Luouis Althusser.

However, before long, he became disillusioned with Althusser's form of scientism. Clearly, he has drawn on the formulations of thinkers such as Foucault and Deluze but he has also displayed his ability to move beyond them. Ranciere is a philosopher who cannot be neatly pigeonholed.

Alan Badiou is right on target - I discussed the importance of Badiou in this column sometime ago - when he says that 'Ranciere takes delight in occupying unrecognized spaces between history and philosophy, between philosophy and politics, between documentary and fiction.' I would add to this, between politics and aesthetics. Badiou also makes the apposite observation that Ranciere is 'an heir to Foucault', and that he has 'never been a member of any particular academic community.'

Jacques Ranciere is the author of a large number of books dealing with the intersecting themes of philosophy, history, politics, aesthetics, human rights and so on. Among his books, 'The Night of Labor', 'The Philosopher and His Poor', 'The Ignorant Schoolmaster', 'On the Shores of Politics', 'Short Voyages to the Land of the People', and 'Disagreements' deserve special mention.

'The Philosopher and the Poor' (1983), with its intriguing title deals with a theme close to his heart - the importance of people as a concept for theorizing society and politics. 'The Ignorant Schoolmaster' (1987) is a fascinating archival study. It focuses on the seductive figure of Jacotot, the anti-master. Ranciere's intention in this book, among others, is to expound his idea of the equality of intellectuals.

'The Night of Labour' (1981) is a work dealing with labour history; its focus of interest is the figure of the proletariat. Ranciere is concerned to examine afresh the idea of the proletariat and explain how it has been inadequately imagined by orthodox Marxism. Interesting as these works are, my focus of interest here is on politics and aesthetics.

Therefore, I wish to focus on four books that address this theme directly. They are 'Film Fables' (2006), 'The Politics of Aesthetics' (2006), 'The Future of the Image' (2007) , 'The Emancipated Spectator' (2009). These are all texts that I use in my graduate courses on cultural theory. Many of these texts are short; however, this does not mean that they are easy reads. They demand close attention and are often opaque because of the density of references. Western formulations on aesthetics have been largely shaped by the work of Germans. Thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Marx come to mind. Hence, it is interesting focus on a French theorist who has important things to say about aesthetics.

'Film Fables' has both a historical and theoretical significance. Ranciere discusses early masters of cinema such as Sergei Eisenstein and F.W. Murneau, and modern masters such as Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard. He discusses cinema in relation to theatre and television and raises a number of issues of significance.

There are some highly perceptive observations on the neo-realist cinema of Italy as well as the philosophical writings on cinema by the eminent philosopher Gilles Deluze. How cinema communicates its truth in between images and narratives is a theme that pervades this book. The remarks that Ranciere makes on cinema are directly related to his thematic interests in the politics of aesthetics.

'The Politics of Aesthetics' is a short book comprising five compressed chapters. It consists of a discussion of his central concept of the distribution of the sensible. He explores the meaning of this concept in terms of ideas of aesthetics, modernity and mechanical arts.

It also contains a substantial interview with the author conducted by the translation in which he addresses issues of universality, historicity, equality - all concepts central to Ranciere's undertaking. In this book, Ranciere has sought to re-think the complex relationships that exist between art and politics, going beyond, and in many ways critical of, the approaches advocated by Marxists, the Frankfurt School and post-structuralists.

What he is aiming to do is to rescue aesthetics from the restricted conceptual space it has been confined to and explain the intersections of politics and art. It is here that his concept of the distribution of the visible, which I will explain presently, becomes important. 'The Future of the Image' is a book that extends the interests already articulated by Ranciere. It is an attempt to re-conceptualize the role and function of images in contemporary art, keeping in mind the all too important intersections between art and politics. In this book, he engages critically some of the theories of Foucault, Deleuze, Barthes, Adorno, Lyotard etc.

He is critical of some of the attempts of thinkers such as Barthes to think through the concept of image as manifested in works like 'Camera Lucida'. As with all his other books, he expects the reader to be involved closely in the unfolding of the argument. As the eminent cultural critic Kristin Ross observed, 'His art lives in the rigor of his arguments - its careful, precise, unfolding - and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actor, as an imbecile.'

Jacques Ranciere's works, then, constitute a complex unity. One central concept that holds them together, and animates them, is his idea of the distribution of the sensible.

This concept lies at the heart of his discourse on aesthetics. It is also vitally connected with his idea of politics.. As Ranciere himself remarked, the idea of the distribution of the sensible 'is the vital thread tying together all of my research.' As he said, 'I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.

A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive pars.'

To put it in more simple terms, what Ranciere is focusing on is what is seeable and sayable in society and who has the power to do so. One can see here, I think, a line of thinking that originated with Michel Foucault's ideas of 'discourse' and 'episteme.'

His cherished idea was that of equality of participation whether in art or politics. Ranciere's concept of the distribution of the visible is closely interwoven with his ideas of politics and social order. He sees two types of politics.

The first is what he refers to as the politics of order which reinforces the existing patterns of social order and power structures. The second is politics of disruption which encourages those citizens denied the right to full participation to acquire a sense of agency and seek to change the existing political order. Clearly, Ranciere is interested in the second type of politics.

The notion of a free individual participating fully in the democratic process is central to Rancier's thinking on politics and aesthetics. His ideas on aesthetics grow directly out of his conceptualizations of politics and democracy. He said that, 'democracy is not a regime or a social way of life.

It is the institution of politics itself. ' For democracy to function properly, he calls for new forms of subjectification.

What he means by this is not the perpetuation of subjectivities that are already in existence but the introductions of new voices that seek to articulate new visions and are at the same time disruptive of regnant power structure. His notion of aesthetics, which he uses not as a blanket term covering all art but rather as a way of talking about art, makes sense only in the context of this idea of politics and democratic participation. In Ranciere's writings, there is a natural flow from politics to art to cultural theory.

For Jacques Ranciere, then, the distribution of the visible entails the legitimization of certain modes of seeing, speaking, acting, living in society. Aesthetic practices are important in the sense that they serve to advance this regime of visibility, articulation and living. Therefore, what aesthetic practices should do, according to his thinking, is to challenge the existing discourses of seeability and articulation and create new ones, thereby expanding the space of agency of individuals who have been denied participation. To the best of my knowledge, I have not seen the following connection made: It seems to me that the best way of understanding Ranciere's concept of the politics of aesthetics is to think what an aesthetic program of subaltern historians (Ranajit Guha, and his colleagues) might look like.

So what is the significance of Ranciere's understanding of politics and aesthetics, his concept of the distribution of the visible, for our own needs in Sri Lanka.? Let us, for example, consider the topics of art criticism and the discourse on art in Sri Lanka. This is indeed a field in which there is very little writing.

Even so, one needs to ask questions such as, who is commenting on the art scene? From which perspectives? What are the theoretical frameworks being used? Who are shut out of the discourse? Such questions have a direct bearing on the idea of the distribution of the visible that Ranciere is talking about. The same kinds of questions can be raised in relation to, say, literature or film.

Jacques Ranciere's work on politics and aesthetics is important and repays close study. To my mind, one of his defects is that he is too idealistic in the sense that while his observations are accurate and significant, he does not indicate a practical path out of the predicament he so clearly delineates.