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November 5, 2007
Robert Palmer, in Distribution of the Sensible, a review in Variant, of Jacques Rancière's 'The Future of the Image', says that in recent books such as The Flesh of Words, The Politics of Aesthetics and Film Fables, Rancière time and again implicitly and explicitly builds on one of the basic insights from his earlier text Disagreement. Palmer says that:
politics involves a ‘distribution of the sensible’, where this can be understood as a legitimization of certain ways of seeing, feeling, acting, speaking, being in the world with one another... Put bluntly, Rancière suggests that art or aesthetic practices (for example, the novel, photography, film, painting...) can be political to the extent that they play a key function in this ‘distribution of the sensible’. So if, as Rancière wants to argue, politics revolves around “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak” around “ways of doing and making” a shared sense of what we have in common, then ‘artistic practices’ are always-already political: that is, “aesthetics is at the core of politics”.
In Disagreement politics, emerges through the formation of a mode of subjectivity that begins to speak for itself, through a call to be heard and seen in public space.
Politics, then, is antagonism, the disruption of the hitherto constituted political order (Rancière pointedly refers to this as the order of police, an order of administration, the politics of maintaining order…) by a subject who emerges and demands a role and a part to play in a reconfigured public sphere (Rancière often talks about this emergent mode of subjectivity as a ‘part with no part’ in the given, as that part of society with as yet no properly defined place…). So we can begin to see that the term ‘politics’ can come to signify a double meaning and significance from a Rancièrian perspective. There is the politics of maintaining order (politics as police) and a politics of disruption (‘political subjectivization’), the instrumentality of administration and its destabilization. Key here, for Rancière, is the ability to see how politics as police precipitates a depoliticization of the public sphere and to understand how such a depoliticization can be concretely challenged in public space by those hitherto excluded or marginalized
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