Aesthetic Regime Change

A review of Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. New York: Verso, 2013.
 
It’s something of an accident that Jacques Rancière did not become a household name much earlier in the English-speaking world of theory and criticism. Though he took part in and wrote for Louis Althusser’s project Reading Capital in the late 60s, his contribution was not included in the first English translation of that work, so what might have been a blockbuster reception for him at his then tender age (his late 20s) never materialized. His Anglophone recognition came surely but slowly with distinctive and incisive but not-so-flashy books such as The Ignorant Schoolmaster, an almost deliberately minor work about a once important but now largely forgotten radical pedagogue who abandons the position of dispenser of knowledge and model of method to be, rather, a conduit and sounding board for communal, egalitarian learning. In the wake of the deaths of the great maîtres-penseurs of the second half of the twentieth century, Rancière has risen, crème de la crème, to the upper echelon of the most read and invoked theorists of a certain stripe (Continental, lefty, engaged with some combination of philosophy, politics, and art). In his relatively old age and in semi-retirement, he has become extraordinarily prolific and productive. Hardly a year goes by without another slim or fairly hefty volume from his hand.
 
Aisthesis has a claim to being the most substantial book Rancière has carved out. One is tempted to say it is a major statement, and yet it makes many fewer statements than do most of his books, especially the short, programmatic ones.  Unlike the shorter books of late by Rancière, Aisthesis, being rather spare in its grand theses or propositions, does not lend itself to quotation, and it is remote, in its texture, from what has come to be known loosely as “theory.” It’s a hard book to summarize (and to review) because it consists of fourteen separate “scenes” of art production. Though some concerns flow or spill over from one chapter to the next, and there is force to the strictly chronological sequence, the chapters are relatively autonomous. No section is really framed by any other. The historical situation of the work emerges in each chapter, rippling out from some initial charged, usually eloquent response to it and then supplemented by the deft wielding of Rancière’s analytical power and erudition. In this Rancière wears his Marxism lightly, which tends to be an advisable stance when it comes to the elucidation of works of art. Purely Marxist categories can be illuminating of grand structures and dynamics, but are often a little clunky when brought to bear on the nitty-gritty specifics of artworks.  There is a good deal of revelatory work of late that articulates finance capital and the wage-form with the facts and ideas of aesthetic representation, but by and large Marxist criticism works best wielding big categories (bourgeoisie, exchange value) apropos big objects (the origins of the novel, the historicity of a subgenre, etc.).
 
Although there is an argumentative thrust to the very shaping and framing of his subject of study—the aesthetic, i.e. perceiving-receiving side of art that succeeds the neoclassical regime of representation that had held sway in Europe until roughly the late eighteenth century—the value of the book lies far more in the individual readings of works. Or, rather, what Rancière calls “scenes,” because the work is not just considered “in itself,” but embedded in a moment, beginning less with its production (often obscure, hard to date) than its reception. Rancière’s fourteen chapters, while circumscribed to modern Western and almost entirely to European art, are dazzling in their scope: dance, sculpture, drama, opera, photography, film, and more. (There is not so much about literature, on which Rancière has elsewhere written loads.) Each chapter takes as its point of departure a critical response very close to the time of the work’s appearance. So the analysis of Loïe Fuller, for example, does not launch into her dancing proper without being prefaced by the almost immediate response of Mallarmé. This makes the selection of scenes a little arbitrary. Rancière confessed when answering questions about Aisthesis that he might have done an analysis of Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte,” if not for the lack of a rich, appropriate text responding to it. Despite this partly accidental character of the choice of works, the strategy makes sense for Rancière partly because it in some sense gives the work over or back to the spectator or reader. Everybody’s a critic. And that’s a good thing, part and parcel of the (relative, unequal) democratization of the aesthetic that set in around 1800.
 
Rancière contends that the regime of art commencing with the historico-aesthetic phenomenon usually called Romanticism entails a rejection of inherited hierarchies, not least the ranking of genres and the force of genre tout court. All of a sudden, subject matter is cut free of genre (“low” subject matter, for example, had been confined largely to comedy and can be engaged now in any number of aesthetic modes). Rancière is under no illusion that as of around 1800 art is, once and for all, “democratic” in political terms, as regards the politico-ideological values of its producers, much less in the explicit propositions or positions of any number of old-guard works of art. He means, rather, that there is a certain emancipation and a leveling of the conditions of the production and reception of art and, indeed, that momentum shifts, socio-discursively, to the perceiver-receiver of the aesthetic. This shift operates in tandem with a new understanding of the work of art that focuses on its potential. If the work of art had for a very long time—somewhat discontinuously since Plato—been modeled on the organic totality of the body, it says a lot that for Winckelmann the powerful but mere fragment of a body, the Belvedere torso, becomes exemplary of the work of art, not least for what it does not show or “embody.” Art is in good measure defined by what it is not: what is to come after and outside itself. As Rancière cannily remarks, “an art is always more than an art” (129).
 
Rancière not only explains how variously brilliant or symptomatic contemporaries read his chosen works, he provides trenchant analyses of the scenes in which these works are embedded, with a special attention to the texture of art in its daily life, as it were. A sign of the latter is Rancière’s love of lists, not the catalogues of Homeric and other epics, but the Whitmanesque series of item after separate item. One such, in the essay devoted to Whitman and Emerson, goes on for a breathless half-page, daring us to imagine that the list will stop any time now, except that it doesn’t.  He almost beats Whitman prosaically at his own poetic game.
 
But if we step back a little from these sometime dizzying details, we can see that Rancière has a distinctive historical framework for dividing up the history of Western art. It’s greatly indebted to Hegel in its structure and to Schiller in its values, but it is Rancière’s own and not without its peculiar interest.  What he calls the “aesthetic regime” of art, inaugurated in the eighteenth century and taking full hold around 1800, rebels against the old regime of representation (of which Neoclassicism is the apogee), when even literature and art were grounded in an almost Cartesian confidence in the ability to represent things as they are, even fictionally. That (early) modern regime had displaced the older regime Rancière calls “ethical,” related to what Hegel called symbolic art (largely pre-Classical and Eastern), though Rancière’s concept is more capacious and less dismissive.
 
Rancière had to begin his (quasi-) story somewhere, and I think his choice to begin with Winckelmann (Dresden, 1764) is about as genial and pertinent as can be, when making the case for the new not-quite-tautologically-termed “aesthetic” regime of art. Winckelmann’s grand project was to write an authoritative history of ancient art that would also do justice to the experience of a work of art (registered in his blockbuster, almost giddy passages on the Belvedere Torso, on the sculptural Niobe, and more), all the while attempting to theorize art in the first era of high historicism. In his time only Lessing and Hegel come close to doing as much. Rancière contends that Winckelmann’s decisive break with the past, his modernity, is to leave forever behind the Platonic and post-Platonic conception of the work of art as an organic totality modeled on the human body. In its wake one finds an aesthetic given over to the part, to potential, to expression of a not quite given totality, even if totality is conjured up in the first place. That potential is realized in the spectator, listener, reader, critic, and it partly conditions the democratizing of art in a new way.
 
Rancière traces this dynamic in work after distinct work, across disparate moments, genres, and traditions: Hegel on Murillo’s beggars; Stendhal on love in the age of (possible) upward mobility; Emerson and Whitman drafting a brave new world of ideas and things; Banville pondering pantomime; Loïe Fuller dancing in serpentine fashion, in more ways than one; Ibsen re-thinking tragedy for a not-so-tragic, bourgeois age at the same time that Wagner resuscitates antiquated mythologemes for an impossible total artwork; the project of the decorative arts for Ruskin and the late nineteenth century, productions hardly thinkable outside the world of the factories; Rodin’s Dantesque sculptures implicating movement while standing eternally still; Edward Gordon Craig staging Hamlet when architecture, movement, and light are as important as any words; Chaplin’s mechanical filming of involuntary, mechanical movements; Stieglitz’s struggle to establish the art of photography as just that; Dziga Vertov’s relentless critique of everything via the new language of film, teaching movies how to speak montage; and finally, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, whose formal leveling of its words with Walker Evans’s photographs performs something of the democratization of art production and reception. Rancière somehow pulls all this off, even if he leaves the reader’s head spinning, unable to rest on quotable slogans to help make brutal sense of everything.
 
I think Rancière’s best works to date, whether about a single pedagogue or a single film, were already highly particular. He has far greater than average facility at abstraction—he is almost as fluent in philosophy as can be—but his work illuminates most when zeroing in on a circumscribed object. We have been saying that such analyses in his hands and in this book are not “theory,” and yet the reader could be forgiven for thinking the fourteen readings of scenes in the book add up to something like theory or history-theory, for Rancière does in the end, via the sequence of scenes, provide a variegated account of a huge aesthetic regime, one that resists the standard accounts of modernity and modernisms.  Ranciere’s aesthetic modernity is less avant-gardist, less thoroughgoingly mired in high art, forcing us not to move too fast to grand abstractions, much less to the slogans of manifestos.  But perhaps he sees in the materials of modernity something of what Goethe saw when he thought of facts themselves as already moments of theory.