The Aesthetic Regime of Art: Dimensions of Rancière's Theory

The Aesthetic Regime of Art: Dimensions of Rancière’s Theory International Conference, Ljubljana, November 27–28, 2015 at the Atrij ZRC – Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Novi trg 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Conference Programme and Abstracts Friday, November 27, 2015 10:00 – 10:15 Opening of the Conference PART 1: Fiction and the Sensible 10:15 – 10:45 Rok Benčin, Metaphorical and Metonymical Equality: From Rhetoric to Aesthetics 10:45 – 11:15 Steven Corcoran, The Aesthetic Regime of Art: “The Lost Thread” of Strategy 11:15 – 11:45 Nina Seražin Lisjak, The Aesthetics of Jacques Rancière: The Role of the Sensible in the Politics of Art 11:45 – 12:00 Pause PART 2: Aesthetics and Socialism 12:00 – 12:30 Ivana Perica, Hybridity: Discussing Austromarxist Aesthetics with Rancière 12:30 – 13:00 Lev Kreft, Dandy Socialism 13:00 – 15:00 Lunch PART 3: Scenes from Photography and Film 15:00 – 15:30 Jan Babnik, Photography – Everyone’s Little Tramp 15:30 – 16:00 Natalija Majsova, Taking Cinematic Aesthetics into Outer Space: Paper Soldier and Dreaming of Space 16:00 – 16:30 Darko Štrajn, Immediacy as an Attribute of Cinema as Art 16:30 – 16:45 Conclusion Saturday, November 28, 2015 PART 4: Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Art 10:00 – 10:30 Bojana Matejić, Rancière: Art and the Demand for Human Emancipation 10:30 – 11:00 Mojca Puncer, Paradoxes of the Politics of Aesthetics: Artistic Striving for Community 11:00 – 11:30 KITCH (Nenad Jelesijević & Lana Zdravković), Subjectivation in Contemporary Art: Loosening of the Performative Order Based on the Statics of Performer–Spectator 11:30 – 11:45 Pause PART 5: The Aesthetic Regime in New Contexts 11:45 – 12:15 Polona Tratnik, Survival Tactics and Tools as Tactical Media 12:15 – 12:45 Ernest Ženko, Aesthetic Regime of Art in the Context of Media Archaeology 12:45 – 13:00 Final Discussion and Ending of the Conference Organizatorji conference: S podporo: 2 Abstracts PART 1: Fiction and the Sensible (1) Rok Benčin: “Metaphorical and Metonymical Equality: From Rhetoric to Aesthetics” A decade and a half before Aisthesis, the magnum opus of Jacques Rancière’s work on the aesthetic regime of art, the term aisthesis was introduced by Rancière in Disagreement, his key contribution to contemporary political thought. In Disagreement, a draft idea of the aesthetic regime of art is presented as one deeply intertwined with modern forms of politics. In the period between the two books, the relation between political and aesthetical equality comes into focus. I will argue that this relation can also be grasped through another kind of differentiation in Rancière’s notion of equality. In Disagreement, Rancière claims that the capacity to make metaphors is one of the conditions of the occurrence of emancipatory politics. In other places, e.g. in The Emancipated Spectator, it is metonymy rather that is presented as the most significant political figure. The choice of the figure is by no means irrelevant, since philosophers from Heidegger to Deleuze have dismissed metaphor as belonging to the abandoned metaphysical sphere or even as suggesting an oppressive kind of politics. More recently, Ernesto Laclau discussed metaphor and metonymy as the “rhetorical foundations of society”. Nevertheless, Laclau’s use of Gérard Genette’s analysis of Proust to define the relations between both figures, suggests a move into the sphere of fiction and aesthetics, as defined by Rancière. Focusing on the concepts of metaphor and metonymy as they appear in Rancière’s works, I will trace the implications of the move from the rhetoric of society (Laclau) to the aesthetics of politics (Rancière). Rok Benčin ([email protected]) is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and an assistant professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU. He recently published the book Okna brez monad: estetika od Heideggerja do Rancièra [Windows without Monads: Aesthetics from Heidegger to Rancière] (ZRC Publishing House, 2015). 3 (2) Steven Corcoran: “The Aesthetic Regime of Art: ‘The Lost Thread’ of Strategy” In The Lost Thread [Le fil perdu], Rancière continues his reflections, within the aesthetic regime of art, on the connections between art and the everyday, as well as between art and politics. The Lost Thread maps a process of destruction of literature in the representational regimes of the arts, i.e. of what had been understood under the name of “fiction” ever since Aristotle, and the simultaneously advent of modern fiction. In contradistinction to many modernist narratives, Rancière here dispenses with the dialectical schema of destruction and creation, whereby creation follows in a second movement after the work of destruction has cleared the way. In The Lost Thread, this process of destruction is not merely the rejection of a negative term or a moment to be passed through in order for the new to appear but instead is a positive means of construction, an activity provided with its own narrative and temporality. It might be said that in Rancière’s conception, the advent of the modern novel, or literary realism, is describable as a process of destructive creativity. That is what I’d like to show in the first part. In the second part, I would like to highlight the implications for the politics of literature that this process of creative destruction – to be rigorously distinguished from Schumpeter’s so-called gale of capitalism – entails. The model of strategic action, that of great men hoping to achieve great ends or of great politics, is closely tied for Rancière to the representational regime of the arts, with its division of humanity into two – the distinguished and active men of high class and the invisible and passive men of work. As this process of destruction is strongly tied to a principle of equality, the politics of literature in the aesthetic regime of the arts thus entails a dismantling of this model of strategic action – and indeed Rancière points to many literary examples that consecrate its ruin. This outcome would seem to be intimately tied to the modern novel’s undoing of the “lie” of strategic mastery. If, as its name suggests, realist literature has an epistemological claim, a pretention to demystification, this is surely it. Now, concomitant with the transgression of the boundaries of great politics, or state politics, this ruin goes hand-in-hand with the masses’ demonstrations of political equality. The dismantling of the representational regime of the sensible, and in particular its strategic model of action, is the flipside of the advent of modern processes of equality, both in politics and everyday life. Yet it 4 would seem that this opening is equally disenabling: it seems the effects of political equality, for example, are obtained only at a distance from strategy. In Rancière’s conception, then, politics is at the very least hampered in its ability to effect “real” change in any strategic fashion, and indeed seems ultimately devoid in his work of any power of anticipation. But is it possible to have a politics without a strategy of some kind? I argue that the status of political strategy in Rancière’s work is intimately related to this non-dialectical process of creative destruction in literature and that this seems to relegate the notion of strategy to the paradoxical status of a necessary illusion. Steven Corcoran ([email protected]), researcher at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, is the editor of Dissensus (Bloomsbury 2010), a collection of Jacques Rancière’s essays, as well as The Badiou Dictionary (EUP 2015). His translation of Rancière’s The Lost Thread is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (2016). He is currently writing on the dialectics of social and political emancipation. (3) Nina Seražin Lisjak: “The Aesthetics of Jacques Rancière: The Role of the Sensible in the Politics of Art” Jacques Rancière examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics and develops a conception of art’s political dimension that responds to some of the main issues related to the politics of art. Modernism separates autonomy and politics and defines them as properties of art and not of experience. As Bürger demonstrates, Adorno’s idea of the autonomy of art leads to political inefficiency. While Rancière’s omission of the problem of the institution of art should be critically considered, the idea of the aesthetic efficiency, where the receiver participates in the production of the political effect of art, can function as a counterargument to the institutional inefficiency. Ideas about the end of modernism do not grasp the paradoxical character of the aesthetic regime of art because they chronologically distribute contradictory properties, such as art's specificity and its indiscernibility, like Danto does. I focus on the crucial role of the sensible in Rancière's conception of art's politics. I show that there is a specific conception of aesthetics and the sensible at the basis of Rancière's conceptual 5 apparatus. This basis needs to be rethought since it is only partially explicated by the author. Therefore I review Rancière's references to Kant and Schiller and their consequences. I examine two notions of aesthetics in Rancière's works. I show that in the context of Kant's conception of sensibility and reason as two singular faculties of knowledge, aesthetics and the distribution of the sensible concern a hierarchical relationship between reason and sensibility. The distribution of the sensible can be understood as an apriority that determines the possibilities of experience and constitutes the relationship between sensible perception and meaning. Kant's substitution of the objectivity of knowledge with the necessity of an intrasubjective apriority is relativized once more by Rancière through a historicization on an intersubjective level: the relationship between sensibility and reason turns out to be the contingent foundation of any social formation.

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