[note to PTW readers: this is the fourth chapter of my dissertation.

By way of background, my dissertation revolves around an interpretation of Kants theory of taste as providing a radically egalitarian way of rethinking how community is formed, by focusing on the negotiation of the individuals status as judge. This is what I argue, via engagements with the political aesthetics of Arendt, Heidegger, and Rancire, that taste provides for Kant and contemporary political theory: a way of thinking about how subjects assert themselves as judges, how they are recognized (or refused) in the constitution of communities, and what this process means as a kind of permanent undercurrent to the political.]

Sense and Sensibility

Rancires Political Aesthetics and the Sociable Kant

-Maria Smedstad Even if Kants account of pleasure can be read as potentially responsive to the philosophical turn towards historicizing the judging subject, as I suggested in the second and third chapters, there remains open the question of the relationship between particular judgments of taste and the social contexts in which the subject asserts herself through those judgments. If taste is what makes it possible for us to begin to form communities of judgment, those communities never arise ex nihilo, but out of an existing social and political fabric in which the objects of our judgment are embedded. Objects of taste appear to the subject already bearing the weight of social histories. The problem for an account of the social function of judgments of taste is that Kant seems to have provided a theory of sociability without a social theory, an account of 1

one kind of interchange between subjects the negotiation of taste without a way of situating those interactions in the broader demands of social relations. This chapter will suggest that Kants theory is not so tone-deaf to the demands of taste as a discursive practice as appearances suggest, and that there is a flexibility, ironically latent in precisely the formal character of Kants theory of taste, that can help us make sense of the way that these sorts of claims are actually played out in the world. In practice, the a priori claim to judgehood that Kant finds embedded in the judgment of taste can only be made in and through intersubjective negotiation, with all the foibles of language and sociability that discourse necessarily entails. Subjects will inevitably confront assumptions about the kind of questions which are socially viable for understanding an expression of taste, already specified sets of justifications that are taken to be legitimate, sensible in both the words meanings. That the aesthetic judgment of taste involves a particular structure of the judgment that Kant elucidates may be analytically useful, but as a practice runs up against the social fact that aesthetics and taste are already widely circulating discourses, ones with deeply engrained expectations and power relations, and categories that rarely if ever correspond to Kants schematization. This is the critique I took up in the first chapter as the sociological critique of Kantian taste, one that I argued Bourdieu both powerfully articulates as against Kant, and to which I argue the sociologist ultimately falls prey himself. Here, though, the question becomes slightly different: even if Kant has an argument for why a claim of taste might escape the determinations of culture and class, what reason do we have to think that, merely by its formal structure, a claim of taste would be capable of dislodging those hierarchical forms to which Bourdieu was convinced that it must

inevitably succumb? What, at the end of the day, is truly resistive, in more than a personal way, about taste? To those attuned to intersection of contemporary aesthetics and political thought, Jacques Rancire provides a tempting approach to addressing these concerns about Kant.1 The depth of his understanding of the history of the aesthetic criticism and his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of art history make his descriptions of the politics of art appear very much in tune with the social milieu of art that judges of taste confront. His idea that there exist regimes for understanding art, regimes which are inherently related to our collective distributions of sensibility which allow some things to appear in our public world while others are hidden, provides an intuitively powerful framework for thinking about how we are affected by power and social pressure when we are making judgments of taste. And Rancires analytic opposition between politics and policing as practices of organizing the social world provides a concept of politics that connects his overarching aesthetic account of structures of power to a detailed theory of what can count as resisting domination in such an image-saturated world. All of these virtues make Rancires political aesthetics an ideal avenue for working through how a Kantian theory of taste can address the apparent gaps of social theory in Kants own account, particularly given how heavily and openly Rancire is influenced by Kants aesthetics. But reflecting on the difficulties of the day-to-day practice of judgments of taste for Kant opens up parallel problems in Rancires thought, and working through those difficulties requires a close examination of where tensions
1

Rancires works are abbreviated here as follows: AD [Aesthetics and its Discontents]; D [Disagreement]; Ds [Dissensus]; ES [The Emancipated Spectator]; FI [The Future of the Image]; HD [Hatred of Democracy]; PA [The Politics of Aesthetics]. 3

within Rancires approach might threaten to undermine his ability to respond to the problems that power and social hierarchy pose to the politics of art. Rancire provides us with an incisive system for relating problems of domination and resistance to questions of aesthetic practice and individual judgment. Whether that system avoids or inherits Kants evident weaknesses, however, is another question. A new Mixed Regime: aesthetics and the question of structure The social world of Rancires thought is structured by a distribution of sensibility. The essential concept is straight-forward, if involved: at any given moment, for any given community, there exists a system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.2 This distribution at once determines what can appear in the public space and how. It is both a set of claims about what there is in a shared world and where those things belong, a 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 (PoA 12). Beneath the superficial directness, however, lie more troubled depths in this foundation of Rancires system. The most important delimitation of the distribution of sensibility is that it is not a description of the range and possibility of appearance as such, but appearance in the realm of what is taken to be in common, of what forms the sense of the community.3

PoA 13, which describes what Rancire calls the distribution of sensibilitys Kantian sense re-examined perhaps by Foucault. See also D 29, AD 24-5. 3 ES 42, one of a number of places in which Rancire characterizes Platos proscription of poets in the Republic as the original distribution of sensibility meant to legitimize and 4

At stake is the negotiation of the boundary between public and non-public, but in a still deeper sense than that boundary is normally taken, because the distribution of sensibility articulates not just the subjects and objects that appear but even the forms through which those subjects may appear in both public and private, including their many subspheres. This is the substance of Rancires distinction between a distribution of the sensible and concept of an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts; a distribution of the sensible implies something more because it is simultaneously normative as well as epistemological, a polemical distribution of modes of being and occupations in a space of possibilities (PoA 42). Although every distribution is internally sensical,4 no distribution of sensibility exhausts the communitys experience of sense precisely because it designates what can and cannot be, and it is this incompletion that not only generates forms of dominationoperative within the very tissue of ordinary sensory experience (AD 32) but also allows for the possibility of resistance and change to that same empowered polemic of sense. To capture both the polemical and dominative senses of the idea, Rancire introduces the concept of a police distribution of the sensible. In any given moment and in any given community, there might exist in some existential sense a radical plurality of modes of sensibility, but there is normally a dominant distribution that posits a harmonious relationshipbetween the fact of being in a specific time and place, delegitimize the presence of certain kinds of claims in the ethical community. More below. 4 The distinction between sensical and consistent is important here; nothing about the idea of an internally sensical and in some sense whole distribution of the sensible implies that the internal logic of that distribution has to be consistent to itself, i.e. containing none of the internal contradiction to which so much of the post-Marxist critical tradition has staked its discursive relationship to domination. 5

practicing particular occupations there, and being equipped with the capacities for feeling, saying and doing appropriate to those activities.5 Each place and position in the world has modes of seeing and saying appropriate to it, and taken together on the police distributions terms, they form a whole, congruous account of the sensory undertakings of the community. The workplace has certain kinds of speech and certain kinds of figures that can legitimately appear in it, the market has a certain connection of players and plays appropriate to it, the home has a set of characters and occupations, etc. The idea of police distribution captures the double meaning of the English sensibility: it is both a regime of what is proper and, still more perniciously but in a less certain sense, what can and cannot be perceived. The police distribution is something closely akin to what has been called the fantasy of ideology a cogent, dominative rendition of the social sphere meant to organize all of ideologys objects around a constellation of accepted meanings but the idea of the police distribution being orientated around sensibility highlights the degree to which what is at stake is a kind of appearance. Some kinds of perceived phenomena are rendered sensible under the police distribution, others are not, and this is the initial instance of power in appearance. To say that the police distribution puts itself forward polemically, as descriptive of all that can and cannot be, is not to say that all that can be automatically falls under its sway, or simply does not appear.6 On the contrary, Rancires vision describes an
5

ES 42. Rancire first introduces the concept of a police distribution at D 28 as a dual system of distribution and legitimization; the latter entailment is folded into the former in later iterations. 6 The most incisive evidence that Ranciere does not take the police distribution of sensibility at its word in its self-described totality lies in his sustained intolerance towards the common invocation of the unsayable or unknowable, which he criticizes as a confused conflation of older critiques of representation that has been elevated to semi 6

extraordinarily rich sensory world teeming beneath the police distribution of sensibility, and even the arch representatives of the police distribution can on occasion be caught out by the unanticipated. The figure of Menenius Agrippa, retold from Livy via Ballanche, exemplifies the sensory incompletion of the police totality: confronted with the demands of the plebians who have taken to Aventine Hill, he responds with an oratory that restores order to the scene. Despite his success, he is chastised by Appius Claudius, not for an injudicious response, but for admitting in responding that the speech of the mob that their protestations counted as public speech at all.7 But the most important evidence of the non-total character of the police distribution of sensibility lies in his second major structuring concept, the regime of art. The degree of correspondence is ambiguous between distributions of sensibility and regimes of art, the twin pillars of Rancires post-structuralist side. Regimes of art are entwined with distributions of the sensible; the two are responsive to each other and intimately connected, but nevertheless irreducible to each other. The conceptual proximity between the two is evident in Rancires description of a regime as the connection between ways of producing works of art or developing practices, forms of visibility that disclose them, and ways of conceptualizing the former and the latter.8 Regimes and distributions share an ordering function to the forms of visibility and the mythical status in both philosophy and art. See AD 123, and more systematically the concluding chapter of FI, particular 109-123. 7 D 23-4. Rancieres interpretation (or perhaps more Ballanches) of this incident is a curious one, even if illustrative, and is a moment which furnishes the critics who view this account of sensibility as overly reductive with ammunition; Machiavellis account of Menenius begins by noting that Menenius was himself of the plebeians, and his dictatorship was marked by an investigation of the nobles, for the failure of which he submitted himself to the people for judgment, and was embraced (Discourses on Livy 19). More on the problems of this interpretation below. 8 PA 20; see also AD 28, FI 82. 7

organization of sense that articulates the sensibility of the social world; what is more, the political forms of regimes of art are dependent on response to and ways of disrupting the police distribution of sensibility. The arts are themselves for Rancire practices of organizing sense, which means that every organization of the arts to each other is itself also a property of the distribution of sensibility.9 The problem of artisans in Rancires reading of Republic is a conjunction of their place and their products. On the other hand, while distributions of sensibility are historically contingent and variable, representing particular sociopolitical configurations, there have been only three basic regimes for the identification of the arts: the ethical regime, the mimetic or representational regime, and the aesthetic regime. The relationship of these to each other, in turn, is not entirely clear. Underlying the conceptual tension between the distribution of sensibility and the regime of art is an ambiguity in how regimes of art operate in the world. Rancire seems caught between a temporalizing language, which situates the regimes as subsequent to each other in some indefinite but sequential chronology, a spacializing language that sets up the regimes as concurrent arrangements distributed across place, and an intellectualizing language in which the regimes appear to be malleable modes of interpretation taken up, cast aside, and permuted by subjects in their response to particular works. The ethical regime of the arts is exemplified by the Platonic suspicion of the truth content of images and delimitation of the proper aspect of theater: the values of the arts are inextricably tied to their truthfulness and their concrete effects on the community into which they enter. On a conventional reading which Ranciere adopts, Socrates problem
9

AD 28, FI 72. 8

with painted images is that they are lies, and therefore essentially untruthful; simulacra are by definition ethically proscribed. The proper form of the theater becomes the chorus and the choreographed dance, which literally enact a communal form in their performance. The dominance of classical examples and the figure of Plato in the theoretic articulation the ethical regime of lends credence to an idea that this regime is one whose time has passed. But there is good reason to see vestigial traces of the ethical regime throughout even the most canonically teleological account of the history of the Western arts; in Brechts theater of the people10 one reads the resurrection of the notion that the community of the audience represents the primary location of the activity of theater as a reconstitution of class, and one might even see in the turn in performance art towards the participatory as a kind of nostalgic stopgap solution to the failings of contemporary arts post-Vietnam, more overtly critical phase. The mimetic or representative regime replaced the ethical schema of truth and effect with verisimilitude and affect, and through a redistribution of the roles and forms of artifice into the beaux arts saved the artisan from the Republics condemnation for her double role by reassigning her to a tightly regimented sphere in which each art, now properly distinct from the others, had its proper subject and its proper object.11 The supplanting of the ethical regimes critique of the work entailed a concomitant relocation
10 11

ES 6. AD 101; it would be worth exploring whether Rancieres earlier description of the regime at AD 29 as involving the dual articulation of 1. the imposition of form on a specific matter (stone for sculpture, canvas and oils for painting, etc.) and 2. the realization of a representation, is quite the same as the later articulations in the Verso series that dominate my redescription. The later Verso description appears to almost wholly drop the emphasis on former and replace it with a set of qualifications around the latter, which then provides both the qualification of artist as worker and the delimitation of the art. 9

and relegation first witnessed, on Rancieres account, in Aristotles Poetics. Art had a technique of its own that made it both like other techne and distinct from them (mimesis), rather than being simply lies, and the definition of that technical relation was founded on an idea of sensory consonance between the technique of the artist and the affect of the audience, an ability to produce the dual effect of intellectual recognition and appropriate emotion12 that connected a demarcation (this is art, not a truth or a lie)13 to a production process (of the spectators reaction) that made art properly an occupation of workers.14 The founding of Art in mimesis allowed the representative regime to displace the system of intelligibility (a distribution of sensibility itself) constructed by the ethical regime, and do so through a series of internal orderings--the hierarchy of genres in painting and theater, the primacy of text over image in poetry15--that made the occupation of the artist a process of identifying and executing connections between senses and affects, under the certainty that there was an ascertainable correlation between the former and latter that could be made consistent across works and times. The aesthetic regime is not simply the final regime of Rancires tripartite schematic. It is also the regime that makes possible the kind of resistance peculiar to art,
12

ES 60, in which Rancire argues, in a way that seems to fit the early intuition on the relationship between regime and distribution, that this connection itself must presuppose a general concordancebetween sense and sense, the same consensual property articulated by a police distribution of sensibility. 13 FI 120 provides the most detailed formulation of the rationale of this transition to techne, as founding arts legitimacy as verisimilitude through a triple constraint: a model of visibility of speech that at the same time organizes a certain restraint of the visible; an adjustment of the relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects, governed by the primacy of action, identifying the poem or painting with the story; and a regime of rationality peculiar to fiction, which exempts its speech acts from the normal criteria of authenticity and utility of words and images, subjecting them instead to the intrinsic criteria of verisimilitude and appropriateness. 14 PA 43; see also FI 38-9, 73 15 FI 74-6 and 39, respectively 10

the power in arts appearance. While the representative regime of the arts seems at moments to be closely tied to the idea of a police distribution of sensibility, the break with that regime which inaugurates the aesthetic paradigm seems to be a type of emancipation that is simultaneously the flight from the strictures of the representative regime (ES 60) and a specific form of disruption of sensibility. Rancire identifies the birth of the aesthetic regime with novelistic realism, in which an epoch and a society were deciphered through the features, clothes, or gestures of an ordinary individual (Balzac); a sewer revealed a civilization (Hugo) (PA 32), and the rehabilitation of genre painting the representation of ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities, which used to be contrasted with the dignity of history painting as comedy to tragedy (FI 76). If mimesis provided the arts with a stable relationship between each other and the world into which they had to fit, the aesthetic regime came into being when that orderly relationship between subjects, mediums, and sensations was disrupted by the interjection of a heterogenous power: the subjects, media, and sensations excluded as the representationals concessions to the ethical. To the orderliness of the mimetic, the aesthetic counter-posed the conjunction of opposites, the incongruence of illegible appearances and inappropriate responses.16 This initial characterization, however, highlights just how the language surrounding the break between the representative and the aesthetic regimes brings into relief the ambiguity in the conceptual scope of a regime. At moments, the break seems
16

Rancieres use of the Oedipus mythos to characterize this incongruence as the one who knows and does not know, who acts absolutely and suffer absolutely is particularly evocative, and allows Ranciere to bring in the Kantian genius as the active power of nature, opposed to any norm, which is its own norm. But a genius is also someone who does not know what he is doing or how he does it. FI 118-19. 11

to be tied through relatively discrete artistic movements to a specific time (the dawn of the nineteenth century) and place (France and Northern Europe); the regimes themselves are then above all spatiotemporal, and as such can be witnessed through changes in works over time and space. At other moments, the break seems to be essentially one of conceptual paradigm, such that what is important about the change is not the nature of particular products of art but the generation of particular mode of understanding the work of art (Schillers Juno Ludovisi, to which we will return in a moment), one that could be conceptually responsive to representation, but nevertheless transhistorical. The characterization as spatiotemporally distinct seems quite inescapable when he argues that this anti-mimetic revolution that destroyed the representative regime in painting started at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the revocation of the hierarchy of genres (FI 76); presumably it occurred in other arts at other times, but the ineluctable connection is between a type of work (genre paintings, in this case) and a certain moment of the pursuit and valuation of that type of work. In the case of literature, it is the coming of a specific kind of work that marks the break: the novel the novel called realist (FI 121) exemplified by Madame Bovary. On the other hand, the nature of a regime, precisely because it is wrapped up in Rancires conceptualization of sensibility as prescriptive, cannot ever be divorced from a different articulation between practices, forms of visibility and modes of intelligibility (FI 76), in short a way of seeing and saying art that cannot be reduced to or even definitively be described as a property of a work. Certainly, Rancire explicitly invokes specific movements and moments of development in each of the arts, almost of all of which, as described above, occurred in a more or less contiguous time and place.

12

But just as he sees the early tremors of its arrival in Kants separation of pleasure from the concept (ES 66), one might as easily see its tentative first steps in Joseph IIs Nationalsingspiel, where the operatic stage became a harem in the first concerted sorties against the hegemony of Italian operatic tongue and tone, or in the fantastic hybrid forms of a Christianized natural (or a naturalized Christian) world found in Celtic illuminations of the Vulgate and Vetus Latina.17 If what is at stake are forms of intelligibility (FI 73), then we would fully expect that we should be able to see novelty in the past (FI 82), that the birth of a new form of sensory apprehension would extend the possibility of that specific experience (AD 30) beyond those works explicitly produced in response to a given concept of art. A new way of formulating Art need not exclude all previous art from its purview. It is in Rancires repeated invocations of Juno Ludovisi that we begin to see this ambiguity not simply as an indistinction but as a constitutive tension, a productive tension that is part of what gives the concept of a regime of art not just its analytic purpose, but the substance of its connection to distributions of sensibility. In a sense, for Rancire the figure of Juno Ludovisi was made twice; first in antiquity, and again in Schillers Fifteenth Letter. That Schiller followed Classical scholarship of the day and the passion of Germanys literati in likely misidentifying the Junos provenance gives an ironic undertone to his resuscitation of a Greek ideal of beauty over the Roman,18 but
17

See, for example, the symbol of Saint Mark in the Initium Evangelii Ihu or the Book of Marks more famous folio 27v, which portrays each of the Evangelists as half-human, half-animal creatures. 18 we can, from this single trait, understand why we have to seek the ideal forms of a Venus, a Juno, an Apollo, not in Rome, but in Greece. On the Aesthetic Education of Man XV:8 (trans. E. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 107. 13

steals none of the force of his rearticulation of that Greek ideal around a concept of beauty that challenged both the representative regimes constriction of the proper activity of sculpture to active form imposed on passive matter, and its parallel escape from the ethical regimes condemnation that made of mimesis an appearance drawn from a reality that would serve as its model (AD 29-30). This is not simply a property of Juno itself, which could as easily be understood under the representative regime as exhibiting all of the necessary expressive conventions to qualify as Art, but rather the result of Schillers displacement of its figure into a different sensorium: the property of being art is no longer given by the criteria of technical perfection but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension (AD 29), free appearance that was for Schiller that wonderous stirring of the heart for which mind has no concept nor speech any name.19 The aesthetic regime needed no new crafts to be born on that Roman face, though it would adopt them later; it needed only a new way of experiencing the sense of the material before the audience of art. The set of rote connections that determined the sculptures place in the Arts was replaced with a mode of apprehension of a categorically different kind, and an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned (PA 17). But at the same time, this was not an act of some kind of absolute sovereignty of the viewing subject. It was a rearrangement made possible by the particular way in which the Juno Ludovisi fulfilled the criteria of the representative regime, a way that made possible Schillers rereading on its surface an entirely different set of signs. This is why one can locate the regime of the arts in neither a particular set of practices for the production of
19

Except that Schiller had already given it a name, as he drew from Kant: the true form of beauty in judgment. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 109. 14

works (a novelistic realism of prose, a re-conquest of the surface for painting) nor in a particular critical practice for apprehending those works amongst spectators. The regime is not in the hands of artists or spectators, but both, and must be in both, because the regime is not a set of properties or a set of visualizations, but the connection between one and the other.20 What initially appears as an equivocation between spatiotemporal and cognitive characterizations is a product of the regimes function as a bridge between practices of making, which must exist in places and times and change across them, and forms of sensation, which, after the fashion of the tradition of aesthetics in which Kant situated himself, appear as intelligibilities. If this productive tension solves a problem in understanding the concept of a regime of the arts, however, it makes more problematic the relationship between that regime and the distributions of sensibility to which it must respond. The result of centering this tension is that it is no longer clear why the aesthetic regime constitutes a regime at all. If regimes are taken to be particular organizations between practices of making and modes of intelligibility, specific arrangements of the two, the aesthetic becomes a cipher, not a different articulation between practices, forms of visibility and modes of intelligibility (FI 76), but difference in articulation itself, disorderliness as such in contradiction to orderliness as such, rather than particularities of either. Rancire wants to make of this relation of orderliness to difference itself the new mode of being that is the aesthetic, one in which the order of mimesis is inhabited by a heterogenous power. That in turn recasts the representational regime as any constellation of appearance, intelligibility, and propriety that is taken to be ordered or complete on its
20

AD 28; PA 20; FI 82. 15

own terms. Rancires answer to the concept of a regime becomes a kind of perspectival formalism: the mimetic is a sensorium taken to be homogenous to its own sense of order, the aesthetic is a sensorium taken to contain both a sense of order and a power heterogenous to that order.21 This perspectival formalism makes the relationship between the mimetic and aesthetic regimes a different kind of proposition, one in which the distribution of sensibility at the given moment specifies the substance of the dividing line between the representational and the aesthetic. We have a distribution of sensibility, and that distribution constitutes the bounds of propriety from which the representational mode of relationship borrows its understanding of the orderliness of its order. As Rancire said, in Hugo the sewer revealed a civilization; that sewers interjection is now through the judicious hands of Claude-Michel Schnberg and Alain Boublil the very paradigm of orderly relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects, and that even before the arrival of Susan Boyle on the scene. The incongruities of French melodramas juxtapositions function on a set of disanalogies now commonplace to the school-age child, part and parcel of a distribution of sensibility in which the sewer is filled with Ragged Dicks and Annies. But this defining distribution which makes it possible to say
21

There are a number of the more specific articulations of each regime that this reading of regimes renders problematic, but one of particular note is the idea that a peculiar characteristic of the aesthetic regime is that it declares its heterogeneity...by abolishing the boundaries that distinguished art objects from other objects in the world (AD 101). Taken strictly formally, however, the dissolution of a boundary between what constitutes art works and other works according to the presence of the heterogenous principle is itself an ordering of a division of works, which is to say the articulation of a sphere of works which are formally homogenous despite their specific heterogeneity. This is not a semantic trifleit perhaps helps explain why the works of art that adhere to this regime, despire having declared the dissolution of the boundary of their definition, are so readily identifiable (and marginalizable, if so inclined) as such. This problem will radicalize in the final layer of Rancieres analysis, the resistance of particular aesthetic works. 16

that the heterogenous element is indeed so, in turn, can only be assumed by any agent on the scene, so to speak, whether it is the artist who produces the work, the critic who interprets, the passerby whose gaze falls on the work and alights again. This seems to make Rancires mode of articulating the spatiotemporal dimension of both regimes and distributions, the anchor of work in the picture vanishingly relevant as against the anchor of intelligibility. This problem will become especially acute in final layer of Rancires politics, his account of the resistances of works of art: why, if we accept the perspectival formalism reading of regimes of art, would we think that a resistive quality inheres in any work of art? Put another way, Rancires dilemma is this: the more seriously we take his perspectival formalism as a solution to the textual tension in his characterizations of regimes, the more reductive his regimes and distributions become as descriptions of particular works, moments, subjects, or events. The more these regimes and distributions are specified, the less perspectival formalism is able to hold the material-perspectival tension together, and the more the characterizations are forced to slip to one side of the tension or the other. But that specificity is precisely what makes the aesthetic as a regime of art possible from the outset; the aesthetic is a set of practices of particular disjunctions produced by the appearance of things which should not appear, and what cannot appear can only be known through that polemical catalogue of propriety which I suggested from the outset is the primary characteristic of the distribution of sensibility. Something must appear amongst the given that could not, as well as be seen appearing. In short, distributions of sensibility cannot be transhistorical, and regimes of art must be. The regimes of art must be transhistorical, but if they are, they can no longer be

17

understood as responding to the specific problems of domination and resistance germane to the contexts into which they intervene, distributions of sensibility. Distributions of sensibility cannot be transhistorical, unless they exist at an extraordinarily high level of abstraction, at which point they lose their meaningfulness as fields in which politics can occur. Hence we are left simply with an ambiguity, one that seems irresolvable given the dilemma Rancires account of structure has set him. Even if we felt so inclined, we could not leave the description of distributions of sensibility and regimes of art at too much generality or remove, because that generality risks reifying any specific distribution of sensibility, in a way that undercuts the very possibility of an aesthetic regime of art, and resistance to existing sensibilities. But every narrowing attempt at specification makes less tenable the framing that holds regimes of art and distributions of sensibility together. A passage from The Politics of Aesthetics is illustrative of the problem: The arts of mimesis had their autonomy within the order that united their boundaries and their hierarchies with the order of domination. Art of the aesthetic age, conversely, declares its heterogeneity to the forms of experience of domination. But it does so by abolishing the boundaries that distinguished art objects from other objects in the world (PA 101). On the one hand, we have ages of art, one for mimesis, one for the aesthetic. On the other hand, we have a basic iteration of Rancieres perspectival formalism: the mimetic arts were (note that first phrase is in the past tense) consonant with their contemporary orders of domination, aesthetic ones are heterogenous to it. Surely, Ranciere cannot be suggesting that there was no resistive art before the aesthetic age, not just because it seems patently untrue (Rembrandts The Night Watch, for example), but because it

18

cannot be the case on his own terms. The resistance of the aesthetic as the interjection of the heterogenous into order has to be transhistorical, not just for the description to make sense, but also because it is identical to something else, something on the second level of Rancieres analytic pyramid: politics. The Meanings of Politics Ranciere uses the term politics22 in thoroughly idiosyncratic way, a way that allows him to espouse a theory of political resistance uniquely suited to his conception of structure. He frequently equates the aesthetic regime of art to politics, occasionally simply uses the phrase the aesthetic regime of politics (e.g. PA 14) or aesthetic politics, (e.g. PA 63) but the substance of the identification of the two is that politics is consubstantial with the very definition of the specificity of art in [the aesthetic] regime...because it defines that which comes within the province of art through its adherence to a sensorium different to that of domination (AD 30; see also PA 63, HD 49). Politics is not a realm, but always an action, the interjection of something that was not supposed to be counted in public into that space, one that always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual formsthe way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed: a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings,
22

Although it would make a fascinating subject, I am setting aside examining the relationship between politics and democracy in Ranciere for length and focus reasons. At times, Ranciere seems to equates the two, for example when he writes this aesthetic regime of politics is strictly identical with the regime of democracy, the regime based on the assembly of artisans, inviolable written laws, and the theatre as institution (PA 14); Hatred of Democracy, however, tells a more complicated story in which democracy becomes the paradoxical condition of politics (HD 94, and the surrounding chapter), and seems also to be described as identical. The question is made all the more complicated by Ten Theses on Politics, reprinted in Dissensus, p. 27-44. 19

an expression does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears (PA 63; see also AD 24, 25, 115; PA 51.). Because the political must be supernumerary, the interjection of something that is not already publically counted, it must revolve around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time (PA 13). In other words, politics exists as a response to the police distribution of the sensible. And its peculiar mode of response, which makes it aesthetic, is to redefine the community as something that it already was against something it was said to be. As Rancire puts it, politics always come after [police], even if its principle equality is logically prior; that it is never an originary act, but a paradoxical identity of contraries (Ds 206). The previous example of Aventine Hill will suffice to illustrate both this point, and why the inherited tension between regime and distribution is recreated in Rancires account of politics. In Disagreement, the plebeians who took to the Hill interjected their own speech, which they of course always had, into the discursive sphere in which it was not supposed to be speech, merely lowing. Menenius Agrippa, on this account, merely compounded the problem by recognizing what the plebeians had asserted was already true, and thus made audible to the Roman Senate what the senators could already hear. 23 But if Menenius must have been a bit under-thoughtful to be surprised by the speech of the plebeians, the aristocrats of the Roman Senate must have been abysmally nave to simply conclude from Menenius engagement that since the plebs have become
23

For their conversations on what follows on this example, I am grateful to Robert Gooding-Williams, Lindsay Knight, Patchen Markell, and Aletta Norval, during the latters visit to the University of Chicago. 20

creatures of speech, there is nothing left to do but to talk to them.24 certainly not savvy class warriors, by any account, this secret council of wise old men (25). The oddity of this example tell us about the instability inherited from Rancirean structure. Unlike the concept of a regime of art, there is no question that politics as a concept of activity is transhistorical for Rancire, because politics is defined here by a formal relationship to distributions of sensibility as such; as long as there have been ordered terms, one would expect to find the aesthetic interjection of the excluded. But this creates a problem for the connection between the political and structure, one that reiterates the central tension in the account of structure itself. Here, the tension in perspectival formalism between the uniqueness of situation of the work of art and a transhistorical perspective on its interjection is replayed as a tension between the transhistorical nature of politics qua politics, and the necessity of its intervening in particular moments in time and particular iterations of police distributions of sensibility. Superficially, this appears to be the virtue of Rancires adoption of a perspectival formalism: of course, the argument might go, in their specificity every moment of political intervention will look quite different from other specific moments of politics, because they are responding to very different situations, but that only militates in favor of adopting a formal, transhistorical concept of the political, because it allows us to see that what connects these substantially different interventions is an essential character of intervening into a police distribution of roles and relations. But it is not that simple, precisely because the transhistorical principle of politics now has to occupy and take into account two different temporalities: in Kants terms the standpoint of Man and the view
24

D 25-6; Norval also cites this passage. 21

of Nature, in more contemporary parlance the place of actors and of history. Politics is supposed to produce meaning, but what it can mean within the temporality of the embedded actors is in tension with what politics can mean from the view of history. This tension should be most evident when one considers the logical extreme cases entailed in the concept of a distribution of sensibility: one case in which the distribution of sensibility is absolutely unresponsive to interjections and one case that is absolutely responsive; in other words, one that is structured by an operative assumption that deviations from the normal distribution are both absolutely forbidden and irrelevant to the norm, and one in which the police distribution is structured by the assumption that deviation and eruption is, itself, normal and cognizable within order itself. As our transhistorical version of politics approaches each of these poles, its meaning declines, but for opposite reasons. In the case of the former, the eruptive appearance of the proscribed has no meaning because sensibility is closed; Menenius responds as apparently Appius Claudius expects of him, and simply walks by (or one might think of more Borgian responses that would effect the same). In the case of the latter, the eruptive appearance of the proscribed has no meaning because its sensibility is radically open. In short, the transhistorical concept of politics requires a transhistorical theory of the sensible meaning of introducing new subjects and objects, [rendering] visible what had not been, and [making] heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals (AD 25); the idea of a polemical distribution of sensibility, to which politics is a response, denies that such a theory is possible. This is, however, a theoretical problem, to say that Rancires concept of politics entails two assumptions that it cannot simultaneously hold. As a practical matter, this

22

means that politics either has to presume an extraordinary naivety on the part of those invested in defending police distributions of power, or the political arts must accept that not only their strategy but their meaningfulness is going to be radically contingent and dependent on the ordering strategy of the police distribution of sensibility, which doesnt appear to hold out a great deal of hope for potential actors. This practical level of the conceptual tension that runs through the concept of structure and the account of the political is played out as a question of political action and agency in the final level of Rancires approach, his theory of dissensus and the work of art. The Recalcitrant Spectator Rancires twin accounts of agentive political intervention his understanding of dissensus and the resistive potential of the work of art both inherit a double tension from their dependence on Rancires accounts of structure and the political. First, from the regime of art which gives rise to works and in the work must be situated, the resistance of the work of art inherits the necessity of bridging its own materiality and its dependence on an audience, or the ineluctability of perspective. Dissensus faces a parallel tension, on the one hand interjecting into the distribution of the sensible a practiced exclusion, something that was present before but not, and on the other hand dependent on the response of its own audience, practitioners of sensible distribution (which we all are). Second, from the understanding of the political, they inherit a tension between the two temporalities by which each will be judged and through which each will resist. As a result, Rancires ways of describing the political function of aesthetics and the aesthetic function of the political seem caught between two languages: one of enactment, which settles around the moments in which Rancire is describing works of

23

art in their material particularity and dissensus as an activity, and one of response, which settles around the moments in Rancire is trying to describe the works situatedness and dissensus efficacy. The difficulty confronted by dissensus, as the Rancirean art of politics, is clear from the problem left by the end of the discussion of politics. 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 significationthis is what a process of political subjectivation consists in: in the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible. (ES 48) But dissensus, as must be clear from this passage, cannot exist simply as organization as a passive property of the sensible world, precisely because it involves a reconfiguration, an action of uncounted capacities. It must be practiced. But this immediately presents the deceptiveness of Rancires occasional use of the language of rupture and event inherited from Lyotard and Althusser. Unless one holds to a political ontology that understands ideology or the dominant regime of counting as extraordinarily rigid and inflexible towards alternative figures to the established order, which Rancire refuses when he rejects the idea of a single regime imposing its obviousness on all, dissensus must bridge the demands of both being other than what is (the counted cannot simply be recounted) and appearing as other. This was, after all, the virtue of Rancires concept of a distribution of sensibility, that it encompassed the field of perspectives under which the sensible is rendered, and not simply the monolithic vision of the state or the One. So Rancire suggests a third term: the resuscitation of a third way of affecting, one

24

that escapes the dilemma of representational mediation and ethical immediacy aesthetic efficacy (ES 63-64).25 Rancire invokes a particularly Schillerian reading of Kant to get the work of art out of the trap he has set it. Dissensus, as the political act par excellent, attempts to disturb the order of the police distribution of sensibility by reintroducing the part that has no part. The work of art, however, is not a political act, indeed it opposes its own forms to those constructed by the dissensual interventions of political subjects (AD 33).26 One of the primary mistakes of the world of post-high modern art was that it was pressed into a political service for which it was ill-equipped: art, uncertain of its politics, is increasingly encouraged to intervene due to the lack of politics in the proper sense (AD 60). Properly understood, for Rancire, art can be neither a vehicle nor substitute for politics, but rather represents a metapolitics, one that aims to overcome political dissensus by switching scene, by passing from the appearances of democracy and the forms of the state to the infra-scene of underground movements and the concrete energies that comprise them (AD 33).27 These concrete energies, from Kants feeling of life
25

The Emancipated Spectator introduces the third term solution, which is echoed in substance in Aesthetics and its Discontents, as a response to the apparent failure of the left-critical strategy of revealing the concealed that he argues left the Left in a melancholy and the Right in a post-critical critical frenzy (ES 40). But in some ways, this failure was a product of just that tension that Ranciere recreates in his own concept of structure: the problem of Left critique, on Rancieres accout, was that it turned out that there was nothing revelatory about the revelation, and no Menenius to turn the Senates ear (see in particular ES 40-48). 26 I am setting aside the question of whether this account of the function of the work of art is consistent with Rancieres earlier accounts; I do not think that it is (PA 9, 39-40, 45), and I do not think it matters, as this most recent account of art, on the reading I advance below, represents a mature attempt to come to grips with the tensions introduced by his own categories and thought previously. 27 An immediate and legitimate question, which I do not take up here, is why Ranciere would want art to overcome dissensus, when it seems to be so clearly normatively 25

and the contestations over judgment it gives rise to, are Arts free appearance. Art becomes the promise of something permanently dissensual, a freedom in excess of the political play of appearance and disappearance, a freedom in indifference to every particular political project and in its refusal to get involved in decorating the mundane world (AD 40). Arts free appearance itself then embodies the tension it confronts rather than trying to overcome it, it is itself divided (AD 102), embracing a double meaning of being simultaneously political and apolitical. On the one hand, it is very much dissensual in the sense that it cracks [the situation] open from the inside. Moreover, just as the beautiful did for Kant, it promises a new, different shared sensibility of community by being an object of a specific experience and thereby institutes a specific, separate common space (AD 35). In that sense, it promises a new life in common based on an egalitarian principle of shared aesthetic experience. On the other hand, it creates these new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought only on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated (ES 103). Art is metapolitical (or metadissensual) because the thing that it presents as in common, beauty, is itself a common factor of dis-measure (FI 45; also AD 43-44) which disrupts the distribution of sensibility with something that by its nature cannot be made sensible. Arts metadissensus is a permanent scene of the refusal of identification, an impossibility of closing any given distribution of the sensible.

elevated in his explicitly political work. This might give some sense to why Dissensus might be read, as I note in n43, as resurrecting some his old understanding of art that seems to push it closer to being identical with dissensus as a political strategy. 26

If this feels much like Kants own understanding of the problem of art, its consequences for the politics of dissensus appear less satisfying. The embrace of the constitutive tension set for art appears to leave dissensus in one of two places, both of which appear in Rancires accounts. The first leaves dissensus precisely where we left it, caught between the competing demands of Rancirean structure and politics. The second is that dissensus has to simply become art, that is to say must embrace the same internally tense character. Both strategies are in evidence in Rancires Ten Theses on Politics, but neither quite satisfies the demands set by Rancires structuring concepts. In short, Art has been rescued from the paradox of the aesthetic at the expense of dissensus, the art of politics. Before Rancire had fashioned arts solution to the tension confronting it, the meaning of dissensus as a political intervention was articulated through the concept of disidentification. In disidentification, the political interjection of the part that has no part takes a more specific form than it does for other theorists on whom Rancire is drawing. Disidentification subjectifies, that is to say inscribes bodies as sites of political contestation that would otherwise simply be counted as natural, by [measuring] the gap between an acknowledged partand a having no part. The disidentification of a worker, for example, measures the gap between the part of work as social function and the having no part of those who carry it out within the definition of the common of the community, the difference between an inegalitarian distribution of social bodies and the equality of speaking beings (D 36). This disidentification must take the form of a statement, an assertion of that distance, a speaking out that creates polemical scenes, that bring out the contradiction between two logics, by positing existences that are at the

27

same time nonexistences (D 41). Jeanne Deroins 1849 run for a political office for which she was not eligible on account of her sex is exemplary for Rancire because it was not a simple denunciation of an inconsistency or a lie, but the staging of the very contradiction between the police logic that defined women out of the public space and the political logic which is at the heart of the republican definition of community, universal suffrage. Deroin put on display the distance between the social inequality of restrictions by sex of eligibility for office and the formal equality of the French Republic. The difficulty from the point of view of Rancires account of structure is that this formulation simply recapitulates the material-perspectival issue of regimes. In Disagreement, the problem is particularly acute, because his descriptions of how dissensus works is almost exclusively through a language of direct institution.28 The argument for this seems fairly clear; subjectification occurs when something is turned into an object of contestation, ipso facto the very articulating of something as contentious is disidentificatory in and of itself. No response is needed, because what matters is that a scene of conflict (D 33) has been set. Experiences of conflict are created, and that is all that is required. But Rancires own examples make it evident that this cannot be the case. For the plebeians shouting to constitute dissensus, they could not do without Menenius explaining to them their place, because to teach the plebs their place this way he must assume they understand what he is saying and so contradict the police distribution of bodies who are put in their place and assigned their role (D 33). It is Menenius speech
28

Its worth noting, for example, that in the description of disidentification cited above, Rancire relies on the same language of exposing the wrong for which he chastises naively critical art in The Emancipated Spectator. 28

that makes possible the staging of the distance of dissensus. When Auguste Blanqui declares to the magistrate that his profession is proletarian, he requires that the magistrate immediately [object]:that is not a profession. The coup de grace language of dissensus could as easily be replayed on the other side of the equation, but never is. In Blanquis tale, the magistrate ultimately has the court clerk list proletarian as a new profession. Would a conflict still have been staged if the magistrate had simply rolled his eyes and proceeded with the trial, while the clerk silently recorded political activist (both one of the professions of the French code, and perfectly accurate)? Blanqui certainly experiences the conflict between the police order of class hierarchy and egalitarian principle of the Republic, but one presumes that he already did. The judge did not. In fact, Rancires account of the aesthetic should point out precisely the impossibility of this language of self-evidence. His examples work because they presume a listening audience, an audience which accedes to the characterization of the conflict as a conflict. This is not a case of asking whether a hierarchy falling in the Republic makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. The dissensual act only enters the world through and in response to the conjunction of distributions and regimes. Here, Rancire is haunted by his own rejection of discourses of the autonomy of art. Absent a faith in the self-articulating capacity of great art in evidence in Clement Greenberg or August Rodin, one can no longer have an account of the efficacy of dissensus or subjectification absent an account of its reception, itself as uncertain as the structural grounding of works referent. The problem of art, here, is precisely the problem of dissensus as well: dissensus must produce a dissensual image. If it is

29

admitted that there can be no unproblematic and semi-theological appearance that cannot but be acknowledged, there can be no aesthetic politics absent an understanding of the processes by which multiple responses to the dissensual image can be negotiated by and between spectators. If the power of the dissensual image is not to be founded on that consensus which Rancire rejects as the problem with discourses of ethos, then the most important judge of the political act is precisely the one who is least likely to accept it: the recalcitrant subject. The difficulty is not the subject who views the resistive work and says I dont get what this means; this is in some ways the ideal political observer of Rancires dissensus, who recognizes the disruption but does not posit for it a ready alternative designation, who sees the marchers in the square but cannot readily assign them to a known and readily-placated political front. The spectator that the operation of disidentification seems unable to accept is the one who sees that which is proclaimed by the artist or critic or activist to disturb the distribution of the sensible, and who is not disturbed, the spectator who simply takes the work either as wholly commensurate with the understood distribution, as a Manhattanite who sees Franz Kleins New York, N.Y. and says that it is obviously of Wards Island Bridge, or dismisses it altogether as an irrelevancy. The power of the spectator is to refuse unproblematic acceptance of the works heterogeneity, to resist pretensions to disruption and resistance as readily as the easy strictures of the accepted distribution. Effaced in Rancires account of the eruptive power of the dissensual, and too often in the valorization of protest, is that the public work of politics has at its heart the paradox of all art: it must bear a specific meaning for the spectator (its dissent), and yet refuse subsumption to meaning commensurate with the

30

existing distribution of the sensible (this is something easily taken care of). The power of appearance can exist only in the familiar that is unfamiliar. She looks like One: embracing the ambiguous image With an older friend, a true lover of art with an exhaustive knowledge of the cultural milieu of America in the second half of the 20th century, I attended an event which brought together six works of performance art (so self-identified), more or less distinguished from each other by time and space. One piece revolved around a domestic diorama into which the audience was invited to enter leisurely. It was constructed around aesthetic tropoi recognizable for many as exemplifying the suburban ideal of the early 1950s. A young woman in a lab coat and clipboard approached my friend Paul, and began to inquire in a studied voice about his preferences in various items of dcor, apparently (to Paul, as he explained later) invoking the rise of the scientific model of adapting production to consumer preferences. For a moment, he stared at the performer silently in his usual dignified manner, apparently unmoved. Suddenly, he broke into a series of wild and inscrutable gesticulations, his entire body thoroughly involved, all the while remaining as if mute. In a matter of moments, the actor was shaken and had difficulty maintaining her intonation. Soon, she broke character entirely and desperately hurried to another audience member.29 Paul, needless to say, has no difficulties with speech. His response to the confrontation of Jessica Hannahs installation and its performance exemplifies in more active form the spectator response portrayed by
29

The piece was The Living Room, by Jessica Hannah, at IN>TIME, 3/27/10. A short sneak peek montage of material (as well as the artists statement) can be viewed at: http://www.jessicahannah.com/JessicaHannah/The%20Living%20Room.html 31

Smedstads young woman, one that allows the problem of the coexistence and interpenetration of multiple regimes of sensibility to be returned to the questions about Kant with which the chapter opened. In the preceding section, I suggested that Rancires approach to the multifarious nature of regimes of sensibility leaves his account political action with a radically uncertain foundation. But perhaps, this conclusion will suggest, rather than clinging to a conception of political agency that that foundation cannot support, we can establish of a reading of dissensus which, on Rancieres own terms, makes that uncertainty simply the admission price, so to speak, and allows dissensus to take on the same constitutive tension on which art is precariously balanced. When in The Emancipated Spectator Ranciere comes round to a solution to the problems plaguing dissensus, though he leaves much work to be done in reconciling it with his earlier account of politics, this seems to be precisely the path he takes. Dissensus reappears not as a distinct figure that is the act of politics, but as a part of arts balancing act. The poverty of the perspective of naively critical art, on Rancires account, is that it misses the double movement, or the transition from the disidentifying disjunction of the political-aesthetic moment to the rearticulative moment of beauty, which is specifically community founding, but a peculiar kind of community that, because it takes as its origin the disidentifying disjunction, can never be given a specific, identitarian content. The kind of community promised by the aesthetic is one of being together when apart.30
30

Ranciere takes the phrase from the Mallarm poem The White Water Lily, and notes in one of his grumpier moments that apparently, contemporary art and social life no longer have anything to do with those poetic landscapes of the 1880s. Indeed, we live at 32

While politics promises a common sensation that is the transformation of the sensory fabric of being together (ES 56), the aesthetic promises a different kind of community. That community is a community of sense, or a sensus communis31 (ES 57) that embraces the analytic split of art, between a reconfiguration of the sensible that produces a new distribution of sensibility (that is, the political) and a free appearance that resists absolutely integration into the sensible distribution. So the political split of dissensus is built into art as the originary split of the aesthetic community. Dissensus stage[s] a conflict between two regimes of sense, two sensory worlds (ES 58). This staging itself creates a community, the dissensual community, which is the political community formed by a shared experience of a sense of disjuncture. The subject of that dissensus has changed from its specifically political formulation to something much narrower, but it keeps the same form, indeed applies the content of the dual structure of the aesthetic to the form of dissensus. Where, in its political incarnation, the juxtaposition of dissensus was between two positions of the figure using the example of Jeanne Deroin, one in which the subject was acknowledged as a specific part of the sensible whole that could be counted (citizen) and one for which the subject could not be accorded a part (woman) the dissensual aesthetic juxtaposes countability (the cause and effect of redistributing the sensible) to uncountability (free appearance which only resists cognition) as such. The countable, the dimension of the art that reconfigures the sensible by trying to exploit determinate causes and effects between a time when artists do not much care for water lilies except for the purposes of postmodern parody or even painting (ES 52). 31 I am bracketing for a moment whether this makes sense as a translation of sensus communisthe way that it might not is precisely what, I will argue, makes the difference between Ranciere and Kant in this. 33

techniques and audience effects, is a new expression of the community that exists now.32 But the uncountable, the dimension of art that resists subsumption and cognition, is an expression of a community that is not yet, a community to come in the reception of the aesthetic. And this is what involves the judge, in a way that the political formulation of dissensus could not, because the free appearance of the uncountable becomes the matter of taste. This uncountable fits neatly into the place of the Beautiful in Kant, in fact is Rancieres version of the Beautiful: aesthetic dissensus submits its ability to posit the uncertain community-to-come to the judge, and the judge may either join in that becoming-community by participation in judgment and its sharing, or not, if she finds that the dissensual aesthetic does not live up to its bill and refuses to play. In so doing, the aesthetic becomes itself simply the form of dissensus, and this can perhaps make sense of Rancires description of the aesthetic as metapolitical or, simultaneously supporting and resisting dissensus. Rancire has recapitulated the Kantian relationship between the Beautiful and the Good, and substituted in the dissensual for the moral. This move of holding out aesthetic dissensual community, however, is unlikely to satisfy Michael Dillons or Norvals critiques, whose primary concerns remain, compounded by the fact that the community that can come out of this kind of formal dissensus is still less concrete than the ones promised in Disagreement and Ten Theses. If a purely formal version of dissensus in the aesthetic can convert the materialperspectival tension into a constitutive one that is itself what is held out for judgment, any dissensus which involves filling out the content of the countable and uncountable (which
32

Note that even to make this argument, I am still relying on immediacy and enactment; this only disappears in the second half of aesthetic community, the community to come, which is made up of judges in the same sense that Kants is. This fits my proposition that dissensus, as a concept, has never lost the difficulties cited above. 34

presumably practical political struggle would) remains mired in the problem. We might ask, with Dillon, what grounds we would have for considering the dissensual community better than the police distribution,33 or with Norval what dissensual community promises in terms of a bond between people. And here, for a brief moment, Ranciere makes a nod towards Kantian taste that I want develop further, when he writes that the construction of a solitary place aims at creating new forms of socializationbut collective discussion of [the works] design already actualizes the form of community that is its goal (ES 59). Dillons challenge is at its heart a very simple one, familiar to students of Foucault and Derrida as well as Rancire, because it parallels Habermas famous accusation towards the former of crypto-normativity. And the problem here is that Rancieres replication of the Schillerian reading of Kant, in transposing the free play of beauty into free appearance as a form of life, also replicates Schillers normative problem, one that was absent for Kant because taste could only provide a faculty that advances interest in the good analogically, and supported other societal interests by extension, but by itself provide no normative ground whatsoever. Ranciere replays Schillers turn in perhaps more detail than Schiller himself. Dissensus is both in the position of the Good in Kants schema (that which Beauty/Free appearance replicates in abstract form while refusing the determination by reason that would make the Good possible), and also the appearance itself, insofar is it is the emergence of a particular entailed but uncounted. As a result, free appearance must play
33

In (De)void of Politics A Response to Jacques Rancieres Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 6:4 (2003); the article of course contains considerably more depth than I am intimating here. Although I disagree mildly with both his reading of what constitutes politics for Ranciere and its messianism, Dillon also gives an admirably dense and judicious account of the politics of Rancieres earlier publications in A Passion for the (Im)possible, European Journal of Political Theory 4:4 (2005). 35

a double role for Rancire. On the one hand, it cannot be evaluated in comparison to the many distributions of sensibility produced by the interplay of dissensus and police, because it represents an absolute, something that in its resistance to cognition can literally provide no thing to compare, by definition. On the other hand, in its connection to dissensus it is supposed to provide the promise of another form of life, the community to come, which means that it cannot escape the question of why the sensible change demanded by dissensus should replace the present sensibility. In being a form of life, free appearance becomes a comparable thing, or at least a value in the rubric of comparability. By contrast, in Kantian taste, there is no-thing that must appear as gesturing towards the community-to-come that disturbs the distribution of the sensible, because free appearance is itself the sensation of taste that opens up the possibility of that community of judges to come, the solicitation of one judge to another for shared judgment. The distinction I made to Schiller sets up the disjunction between Rancire and Kant: for Kant, it is the play of the faculties towards the representation of the work that is a free appearance, not the work itself. Kantian art, as I argued with Arendt, also carries a disjunction between a regime of art for its own appreciation, and a heterogenous power which is the pleasure in beauty irreducible to rules of the art regime. As it does for Rancire, this disjunction is what makes possible and inaugurates the community to come in Rancires terms, or a lawful sociability, in Kants. The difference is that, for Kant, there need be nothing dissensual about the form of the work, because the heterogenous power is derived from a non-cognitive pleasure in the representation of the work to myself, prior to the regimes reference in the arts appropriateness to sociability, which is

36

the empirical interest that is combined with it. Put another way, Kantian taste disaggregates beautys heterogenous power into a power, which analytically precedes even the cognizability of the work as a work (or as anything else), and a heterogeneity, which makes it possible to understand the work as a produced candidate for beauty but is in and of itself irrelevant to the free appearance incarnate in pleasure. This is the shade of difference captured in Kants phrase that beautiful art will agree punctiliously but not painstakingly (Ak 5:307) with the regime of art into which it fits. It is also why on Kants terms there was always a free appearance in beauty in the representative regime of the arts; the representative and aesthetic regimes of art were always two sides of the same coin that could only exist in each others presence, as the previous chapter showed. In short, Kants account of beautiful art requires only a suitability to mental excitement, which is itself (by way of Arendts argument) the possibility of a space of free appearance, not a form of free appearance itself. This returns us finally to Norvals critique. Norval lamented that Rancires disidentificatory politics appeared to leave no ground for the formation of bonds of community, no kernel around which people could constitute their togetherness. In a sense, she is quite right about the Schillerian sense of dissensus, indeed it seems like that Rancire would crown it one of the virtues of dissensual politics that it refuses the politics of constitution in favor of a permanent agitation against the possibility of a political inside. This is, after all, the most basic tenet of Rancires structuralism that evades Dillons critique: the question is not producing new or superior constellations of order, but the problematization of the ordering of the sensible, as ordering. Whether one thinks it a weakness or a virtue, the consistency of Rancires critique of consensual

37

politics ultimately leads him to put forward dissensus as a mode of permanent disjunction. But in a more Kantian version of Rancires aesthetic community, her concern is not only acknowledged as the right question to be asking of a theory of community, but points to what is novel about the potential responses of Kants taste, as a mode of constituting community. The Kantian answer is that these issues, taken against the political purpose of dissensus, undermine dissensus ability to fulfill its own analytic demands, but in the context of Kantian taste are in fact the strengths of social promise that taste holds out. And this is what reading the interpretation of the structure of Kantian taste that opened the dissertation, through the lens of Rancires recrafting of Kant, provides: a way to understand why it is precisely the social fragility and uncertain indeterminacy of judgments of taste that give them the social power that they have. In some terminal sense, one cannot say what discussions about Kantian judgments of taste must be about, in general, because taste is not a candidate for determination. But this is too superficial a response; what one can say is that when we make a judgment of taste, what we invoke is something that can never be quite subsumed by the things we might proffer as explanation, and that is itself a sense that can be shared. In the terms of Rancires dissensual aesthetic, we share a sense that there is a something, a same something, that is beyond the rubrics we have available for it. There is a gap in experience, which in dissensus must be an experience of disjunct between countings, but in Kantian taste is simply a pleasure created only in the impossibility of the faculties fulfilling their own operations. That same something can inhere in anything that we make an object of taste, and this is the power of Rancires intuition that the most important thing at stake in dissensus is the rendering of something as a scene of

38

contestation. To make a claim of taste about something is to make of it a scene of the possibility of the common, of being able to ask of each other whether there is something that disrupts our capacities to understand. And this is why, most importantly to worry about the lack of a foundational basis for judgments of taste, to disagree about taste is simultaneously to affirm the possibility of the thing in common; indeed taste cannot do without precisely that disagreement. In other words, what one talks about in the creation of a community of taste is as much what cannot explain beauty as what might excite it. This is simultaneously why the inability of claims of taste to prove their tastefulness is a necessary part of the intersubjective function of taste, and not a weakness in it. If taste had a means of showing itself definitively as such, than the dissensual scene could be foreclosed as quickly as it was established. This is a tension the political function of dissensus can never quite come to grips with, because it needs to articulate itself in terms of the self-evidence of a gap. But this forecloses the possibility of the radical openness of taste, because it provides the understanding with the rule for its own fulfillment. The risk was never that the conversation of taste would be over before it started because it would not be taken as taste. The risk was the opposite: that taste would be immediately known as taste, that dissensus would be seen in an instant as the gap on which it staged its scene, and each would pass immediately into the purview of the sensible. And so in the last reckoning, the backgrounding environment of social hierarchy and predispositions of the aesthetic towards determined ends (status, in its many guises, achievement), the things that threaten to reveal a judgment of taste for being a fraud, are simultaneously what makes it possible for taste to be a discourse of sociality, an entre to

39

community, and not consigned to being a lone sovereign judgment of the mind of the possibility its own cognition. Dissensus must resist. Taste is not resistive, at least not in specificity, to particular lines of hierarchy. It is not resistive for the reason that Rancire saw art to be founded on a tension, why the aesthetic could adopt the form of dissensus but could not adopt its content, precisely the sense that Ranciere intuited when he noted that the aesthetic supercedes the meaning of having a scene of conflict between two distributions of the sensible. Taste must be challenged by interest, it must be suspected of motivation, even if it is by the subject holding her own judgment up to the spotlight. This leaves, finally, the figure of the recalcitrant spectator, what I called the limit case of the possibility of dissensus: a Menenius who simply walked by, a court clerk who nonchalantly recorded Blanqui as an activist and not a proletarian. Here, Kant must confess the recalcitrant spectator to be the limit of tastes ability to inaugurate social bonds as well. Perhaps, with the one who will not listen, nothing can be said, and something must be done, if that is even possible. But this is ultimately the vulnerability that taste must accept, and indeed gives it some last savoring of appeal, because it imposes a final humility on the judge of taste. Even if we can expect the assent of all to our judgment, we cannot simply institute or enact it. For taste to be taste, and not the imperial a priori of the subjects reason, it requires the figure of another who can truly refuse, and refuse not just dissent in argument, but its discourse altogether.

40