This article was downloaded by: [Macquarie University]

On: 10 July 2009

Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907465010]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Parallax
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713695220

Heteroreductives - Rancière's disagreement with ontology

Bram Ieven

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2009

To cite this Article Ieven, Bram(2009)'Heteroreductives - Rancière's disagreement with ontology',Parallax,15:3,50 — 62

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982728
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534640902982728

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
 parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 50–62

Heteroreductives – Rancière’s disagreement with ontology

Bram Ieven

1. Introduction: Ontology of Abstention

Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

The places in his work where Rancière writes about ontology are rare but crucial. The
reason for his abstention from ontology is not that this branch of philosophy has failed to
capture his interest. Quite the contrary, the few pages he spends discussing various
ontological premises and practices accurately exemplify the decisive import he
implicitly attaches to them. These passages also succinctly evidence his contention that
the influence of ontological practices extends beyond the domain of philosophy. He sees
such practices at work in a modernist paradigm of art, in Plato’s and Deleuze’s
respective ontology of the image and in the ethical regime of visibility, in the old ‘new’
school of philosophy of history and in the ruthless ordering activities of the police against
which politics reacts. In general it can be said that ontological practices are emblematic
for – and are often equal to – a problematic reduction of a myriad ‘possibles’ to ‘a
congruous portion of “the only thing possible”’.1 Ontological practices by definition are
practices of order perfectly in step with the logic of order maintained by the police.

Partition and distribution [ partage], on the other hand, counter such a reduction.
Rancière’s approbation of democracy as ‘an “anarchic” government, based on
nothing but the absence of all claim to governing’,2 is telling of his belief in the
absence of an order. If it would be possible to subscribe an articulate ontological
position to Rancière’s work on the basis of this, then Bergson’s remark on the
absence of order could certainly serve as its focal point:

[I]f the great problem is to know why and how reality submits itself to
an order, it is because the absence of every kind of order appears
possible or conceivable. It is this absence of order that realists and
idealists alike believe they are thinking of [ . . . ]. The idea of disorder,
in the sense of absence of order, is then what must be analyzed first.3

But Rancière’s disagreement with ontology (like his anarchic position in politics) is
not based on an a priori belief in the disorder of things, although it somehow
strangely relates to it. Whereas the police order of ontology forecloses all things
possible, politics searches for a way to open it up again. It can be done through a
distribution or partition [ partage] of the sensible, provided it is clearly distinguished
from an ‘ontological distribution’.4 This does not cause a complete absence of order,
parallax
ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2009 Taylor & Francis
parallax http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
50 DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982728
 but it establishes a split in the existing order or partition of the sensible from which
now a ‘surplus’ emerges.5 It must then be possible to create such a rupture –
somewhere and somehow there exist the means to reintroduce the complexity that
was lost through reduction. The specific nature of the aesthetic regime, I will argue
below, is what makes this possible.

But before complexity is reintroduced by means of partage and even before practices
of reduction take place, there must be something that can be reduced. Some sort of
quasi-original multiplicity – whether in possession of an order, or fundamentally
disordered – must precede these reductive practices if the claim that there are such
reductive practices is to make any sense. This at least is the presupposition of
reductionism. When Rancière suggests that ontology is a practice of reduction it
would appear that he subscribes to this. In that case the relevant questions for
studying the passages in which he discusses ontology are the following:
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

(a) What is it that is reduced in such ontological practices, and (since he condemns
such practices)?
(b) How can we find a way out of such reductive practices and account for the
‘heterogeneity of the event’?6

With the objective of answering the first question I will scrutinize some passages in
which Rancière substantiates his aversion to ontological realism. But before doing so,
and in order to prepare the second question while also giving an adequate view of
Rancière’s argumentative steps I begin by reconstructing his conception of the aesthetic
regime based on several remarks scattered throughout his oeuvre. An acquaintance
with the aesthetic regime will turn out to be of critical importance since this regime is
nothing but a way out of the ontological impasse with which Rancière is confronted.

2. Regimes

The dialogue on justice in Plato’s Republic is triggered (and equally thwarted) by a

disagreement with a more poetic conception of justice in the work of the Greek poet
Simonides. Although Socrates esteems Simonides a ‘wise and divine man’,7 because
of the nature of poetry and because of his status as a poet, Simonides is incapable of
providing an adequate definition of justice. There are two reasons for this, both of
which are interdependent on each other. A first is related to the ontology of the
image (literary or otherwise) that Plato develops in his work; a second is related to
the position of the author in the ethical regime. As Rancière remarks, the ethical
regime of visibility is reliant on an attempt to deduce the characteristics of ‘art from
the ontological status of the images’.8 To understand how art works and what art
does, the regime of visibility postulates an intrinsic connection between the image on
the one hand and its ontological foundation on the other. Reading Plato, one of the
exemplary theoreticians and invariable point of reference in Rancière’s thought on
the ethical regime, one can witness how he rejects the image by comparing it with
the real object or idea that it depicts. The representation or depiction is always
invested with an intrinsic ‘deficiency’.9 The deficiency Plato finds in the image as
copy is not simply that it will never completely resemble its original. That would be
parallax
51
 a rather dull point, and moreover one that the representative or poetic regime of art
will have little trouble casting aside. Rather it is related to the fact that in copying
the original the image fails to transpose what is essential to it. ‘Poets’ Plato argues,
‘are imitators of images of virtue and other things they deal with, but do not touch
the truth’.10 When Homer represents the actions of a physician, for example, he may
be capable of adequately representing the appearances of these actions, but the
essence of what a physician accomplishes with these actions is missing – reading
Homer on physicians will not cure a disease. As Stanley Rosen puts it in his
commentary on The Republic, from a platonic perspective ‘only a fool would turn to
Homer or Pindar for instruction in carpentry, sailing, medicine or any other
particular art’.11 This is the first reason why a poet cannot give an adequate idea of
justice. There is an ‘ontological distribution’ at work here.12

In the ethical regime, the relation of the literary image to ontology is such that the
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

representative capacity of the image is tested by holding it up to the capacity of the

actual things it represents. Time and again representation shows an essential
deficiency, but this may not always be obvious at first sight. Because of its
resemblance the image is able to lure its viewer into believing it presents something
essential, something that should be acted upon or taken as an example for moral
conduct. Thus Plato argues in The Laws that when used in the wrong way ‘literature
and poetry’ have the power to ‘invest [impiety] with a pernicious glamour’ that does
not properly belong to it.13 Here the deficiency of the literary image lies in its
misrepresentation of the essence of impiety as a glamorous virtue. The effect of such
misrepresentations on the ethical conduct of the people is potentially devastating
and sufficient reason in the ethical regime of visibility to be extremely cautious with
the use of the images. This is where the importance of the poet as the one who utters
these representations returns to the fore again. This is the second reason why in the
ethical regime a poet cannot but fail in trying to create an adequate representation.
The poet himself is limited in his knowledge and may present something as an
objective virtue while in fact it is nothing but a vice. To counter the devastating
effects this has, in the ethical regime the position of the poet in uttering a poem must
be strenuously controlled. In Rancière’s analysis of the regime, ‘the method of
utterance – the Platonic lexis – is the way in which the poet as a subject relates to the
subject of the poem’.14 The poet must remain present in his utterances and
accompany them in a responsible way, and not hide behind them.

On the basis of what has been said of the ethical regime it is now possible to look at
the way the aesthetic regime differs from it. The first thing to note is that the poet has
a new role in it, that is to say he has acquired a new mode of accompanying his
poetic speech. Referring to the poetics of the aesthetic regime Rancière writes the
following about the new place of the poet as the subject that speaks:

[T]he liberty that shaped the modern poetic revolution is a way the
poet has of accompanying his utterance [dit]. This accompaniment
has as its condition of possibility a new political experiment of the
sensory, a new way politics has of making itself felt and of affecting
the ethos of the citizen in the age of modern revolutions. For politics, in
the modern era, has come to dwell in the very place which has for
Ieven
52
 Plato and Aristotle the non-signifying, the non-representative. The
modern system of political representation is based on a non-
representative figuration that precedes it, an immediate visibility of
meaning [sens] in the sensory.15

The new space for writing constituted in the aesthetic regime immediately opens up a
new mode of politics that differs from the old forms of politics up to such a degree that it
would not even be recognized as such by Plato or Aristotle (the leading philosopher of
the ethical and poetic regime respectively). The place of writing has now shifted to what
was previously unrepresentable, a space where both politics and literature have been
brought into a new relation with each other and have ‘come to dwell’. What constructs
this space is an excess of words in which every word is free to open up to its inherent
ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning. The poet as the subject of utterance no
longer needs to take responsibility for this multiplicity by keeping it under control. Most
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

importantly, the thought that the words of a poet have an essential deficiency and
misrepresent the essence of things has become obsolete. While the ethical regime was
directed by an ontology that – like all ontology according to Rancière – upholds a
‘primacy of things over words’,16 now there is an excess of words standing in the centre of
the aesthetic regime. By implication a poet can accompany his utterances in a markedly
different way from the ethical regime because the ontological link between word and
essence – present in all of Plato’s arguments against poetry – has been severed.

Hierarchy in what is represented and restrictions in the way certain issues are
represented dominate the mimetic regime of art. Whereas in the ethical regime a
(mis)representation can have devastating effects, the regime of mimesis differentiates
the political potential of representation. The hierarchy it installs in representation is
analogous to the hierarchies of the political systems within this regime. For example,
in the classic regime emphasis is put on the mise-en-sce`ne of what one wants to narrate.
But this is not done without further thought. Representations of such kind follow a
‘double economy’17 that on the one hand must take into consideration the veracity
of its depiction, but on the other hand must make this veracity dependent on what is
considered suited in the hierarchy of representation. Veracity in representation first
and foremost means that one adheres to the conventions of how certain people of
certain classes are expected to behave. As a result of all this, the classic regime
reinforces the existing political structures.

In the following quote Rancière sums up the four modes of the classical regime of
representation along with their counter-modes in the aesthetic regime:

The primacy of fiction is opposed by the primacy of language. The

division of genres is opposed by the anti-generic principle of the
equality of all represented topics. The principle of propriety
[convenance] is opposed by the indifference of style with regard to the
represented topic. The ideal of spoken word is opposed by the model
of writing.18

In Rancière’s construction of the ethical and classical regime, ontology and politics
take on a central role. The aesthetic regime can subsequently be understood as a
parallax
53
 reaction against both these elements of the older regimes. The politics of literature
only begins with the aesthetic regime. In previous regimes the space from politics
that the aesthetic regime constituted was simply not recognised as such. In the
aesthetic regime, the restrictions imposed upon mimesis through a hierarchy of
representations are countered. What we get is ‘dissolution of the system of differences
that adjusted the representation to the representation of the social hierarchies’.19
This opens a democratic space of writing that will also be a space for politics.

The aesthetic regime is able to create a new space in which a politics of aesthetics or
a politics of literature can take place because it is defined by the way traits and
directives of the previous two regimes are thwarted and perverted, often by holding
them up against each other and making them clash into each other. The aesthetic
regime of visibility can be negatively defined by two actions. The first action – and
also the one to which Rancière draws the most attention – is to destroy the hierarchy
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

and restriction that were imposed upon the subject of representation in art as they
existed in the representative or poetic regime of visibility. Precisely this destruction
of hierarchy – and thus the reaction against the classic regime of mimesis – is what
sets to work the politics of literature. Such a politics is dependent upon the previous
regimes that it has now started to tear down. But it would come to nothing if it
remained captured by ontological restrictions like those that can be found in the
ethical regime. This is why the second action of the aesthetic regime is to sever the
link between art and ontology that was upheld in the ethical regime of visibility.
The two principles of the ethical regime – ontological linkages between visibility
and essence, and hierarchy in representation analogous to the political system –
rendered impossible a free circulation of representations, while at the same time
restricting art to the existing social and political hierarchies. The political potential
of the aesthetic regime is then not something it finds in itself or in its ontological
foundation. To the contrary, its force derives from directives that react against such
ontological or hierarchical foundations. This explains why the aesthetic regime is
able to recuperate distinct traits and characteristics from the previous regimes and at
the same time remains essentially different from it.

The conception of the aesthetic regime as a complication, imbrication and, as a

result thereof, dissolution of the previous regimes in which several, mutually
exclusive traits of these regimes are layered upon each other and are set to work
against each other, can be witnessed in Rancière’s writings on film and the image. In
Film Fables he argues that film operates according to the logic of a fable. This would
imply that film’s narrative construction reinitiates a model of representation close to
that of the representative of poetic regime. But as Rancière is quick to remark, the
essence of film is that it at the same time also undoes the fable. In doing so, the film
fable adheres to a logic that uniquely belongs to the aesthetic regime, even though it
partly goes back upon older regimes. In the analysis of mise-en-sce`ne in cinema,
Rancière explains how the crucial trait of mise-en-sce`ne is something that is unique to
the aesthetic regime and the way it convolutes traits and characters that belonged to
the two previous regimes of art:

A constant principle of what is known as mise-en-sce`ne in the cinema is to

supplement – and thwart – narrative continuity and the rationality of
Ieven
54
 the movement, either by means of visual reframings, or by means of the
aberrant movements imposed by a character who simultaneously
aligns himself with the scenario of the pursuit of the goal and
perverts it.20

Rancière argues that the force of film and other images or artistic expressions in the
aesthetic regime does not rely upon something essentially unique to this regime; the
fable and its mimetic force are also found elsewhere, in other regimes. Rather, it is
the way that the fable and mimesis are put to work, in a heterogeneous mise-en-sce`ne
that thwart and pervert it, that the film fable gains its specific strength, unique to
expressions within the aesthetic regime. The film fable – like a lot of literary works –
rather than turning away from the mimesis, tries to recuperate the force of mimesis
in a different way from the classic regime. This is possible because mimesis is:
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

[T]he psychic and social power through which a word, a behaviour or

an image prompts its analogue; and it is the particular regime of art
that embeds this very power in the laws of genres, the construction of
stories, and the representation of characters acting and expressing
their sentiments.21

While the previous regimes tried to reduce this mimetic force through an ontological
commitment or in establishing a hierarchy of representation, the aesthetic regime
brings out the diversity that is inherent to art.

Such a use of mimesis and the effectiveness of mise-en-sce`ne in cinema are guaranteed
by aesthetics’ abstention from ontology – that is to say, from a position that upholds
the indeterminacy of words or other aesthetic expressions without letting them be
relayed to an ontological principle. This force Rancière sees at work is the ‘coupling
power of the uncoupled, the power of what always precedes oneself’.22 Since this
power ‘precedes oneself’, in other words because this power relies on a coupling that
belongs to neither of the two coupled elements, this is not a power that is located in
‘things themselves’. The ‘clash of heterogeneous elements’23 is what is at stake here.
The heterogeneity of these elements makes up the specificity of the aesthetic regime.

This abstention from ontology is not only a crucial directive for the aesthetic regime
or Rancière’s conception of it; it is also one of the guiding threads of Rancière’s
critique of other approaches to modern art and literature. In his critique on the
modernist paradigm of art, for example, he equates this paradigm with an attempt
to find an ontological basis for modernist art. Such an attempt, he argues, must fail
because it is unable to explain the rupture that modern art causes. Modernism – or
modernatism, as he prefers to call it – has an ontological twitch:

The novelty of the ‘modern’ is the essence of the art, though it had
always been active in the art’s previous manifestations, has now
gained its autonomy by breaking free of the chains of mimesis that had
always fettered it. The new, considered in this light, has always
already been prefigured in the old, and the ‘rupture’, in the end, is
nothing more than a required episode in the edifying narrative
parallax
55
 through which each art proves its own artistry by complying with the
scenario of a modernist revolution in the arts wherein each art attests
to its own perennial essence.24

In the modernist interpretation, contemporary art is finally able to break free from
mimesis. At the same time, the modernist paradigm upholds that there has always
been a tendency in art to break away from mimesis or representation. The rupture
modernist art constitutes is therefore not really a rupture at all. It is merely art
brought to its full potential. In sum, Rancière equates the modernist paradigm,
which holds that every art in modernism moves toward its specificity, with an
ontological (and teleological) destiny given to the arts. By implication, Rancière’s
own move away from the modernist paradigm by means of a distribution of the
sensible would also be a move away from such an ontological modernism. Rancière
is capable of looking beyond the denunciation of mimesis in modern art because he
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

abstains from an ontological analysis that would require him to designate an

essential place to it or to rebuff it altogether. Even more, the aesthetic regime in its
entirety is marked by an abstention from such an ontological move, which is
precisely why it is capable to recuperate certain aspects of mimesis without returning
to an older regime. It uses mimesis and other traits of the previous regimes, but
refuses them their acclaimed ontological importance.

A similar move is to be found in Rancière’s criticism of Deleuze, whose articulation

of a break between two ages of cinema is reputedly ‘based on a rigorous ontology of the
cinematographic image’ and is therefore not an actual break or rupture at all, but
once again shows ‘what is fundamentally equivocal in “modernist” thought’ – i.e.
the alignment of ontological and historical development in the arts.25 Likewise, in
his early denunciation of Althusser, Rancière admits that Althusser acknowledged
the ‘power of words’ but rejoins that Althusser was never able to accept words as
more than a ‘representation’ of a more fundamental state of affairs.26 Althusser
therefore falls back within ‘the old metaphysical conception’.27 Finally, in his
philosophy of history too Rancière takes a stance against ontology. There he argues
that one must chose between either true historicity and accept the ontological ascetic
attitude that is required by it; or ontology and accept the unidirectional, teleological
view of history that cannot be extracted from it. Ontology and real historicity are
mutually exclusive. It is at this point that modernism fails again, he argues: ‘The
idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history,
whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of
heterogeneous temporalities’.28 In contradistinction to this, what is highlighted in
Rancière own treatment of history is, as Ricœur puts it, ‘the impossibility of
establishing the place of history within discourse’.29

The aesthetic regime is a composite and layered regime and it is precisely because of
this that it undoes the ontological claims that regulate the previous regimes of
visibility and thereby opens up a heterogeneous space with a heterogeneous
spatiality and temporality. It is this space in which politics in the modern era has
‘come to dwell’, as I have argued. By implication, In Rancière’s work the efficacy of
modern politics is largely dependent upon a move away from ontology and toward
aesthetics.
Ieven
56
 3. Ontology

Ontology tries to answer the question of what there is. But ‘everything’ may not be
the only possible answer.30 For even a hardcore realist can admit that posing the
question is not in and by itself a neutral affair. We can take from Derrida the idea of
the ‘question of the question’. It is possible to speculatively assert that opening to the
question of Being also inevitable forecloses certain domains of ‘everything’. These
domains independently and indubitably exist, but we do not have access to them;
they are real, but nevertheless excluded in posing the ontological question. Such an
approach takes into account the possibility that there may be an ‘inscription in the
structure of the Fragen [questioning]’ that limits the extent to which we can open up
reality.31 Such a limitation does not stem from our limited capacity to understand
the world (although this is an issue for consideration too), but from our limitations in
stating the question of Being. As Derrida’s choice for the word ‘inscription’ in the
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

quote above from Of Spirit suggests, this may well be a material limitation, or a
quasi-material limitation, marked by an absence that he believes is at work in the
heart of the subject of knowledge.32

Through the unresolved interstice between the question about ‘what there is’ and
the structural limitations this question imposes on our knowledge of what there is,
the problem of order slips in. This is also where, for Rancière, politics slips in – or
rather, police. The question that ontology poses is one marked by ‘active form that
imposes itself on inert matter’.33

Rancière’s own position is still different from this. For him the limiting
intertwinement of active and passive in ontology is not what is decisive. More
important than the limitedness of this ontological model is the fatal consequences it
has on politics. In the light of this, the only way out for a political philosophy is to
simply abstain from ontology altogether, he seems to suggest. An approximation of
Rancière’s abstention from ontology becomes possible through a confrontation with
Léon Brunschvicg’s rigid definition of idealism, by now a classic in French philosophy:

Idealism maintains that metaphysics may be reduced to a theory of

knowledge. The affirmation of being rests upon the determination of
being as being-known; an admirably lucid thesis (pending further
analysis of the word known) in contrast with realism, which rests
upon the intuition of being as such.34

Rancière’s position cannot be placed on either side of the dichotomy outlined here.
His work undertakes a further analysis and refinement of what it means to know, to
such an extent that it escapes the definitions of both realism and idealism given here.
The reason for this is that instead of reducing metaphysics to a theory of knowledge,
he considers metaphysics or, more appropriately, ontology as a reduction of a theory
of knowledge, as a reduction of what can be known to a very limited set of possibles.
He turns the definition upside down and asserts that metaphysical or ontological
realism is in fact an inverted idealism according to which what can be known is only
what there is. Such realism (it would be better to say ‘inverted idealism’) is not
guided by an intuition of being as such, but by a rigid police operation of ordering.
parallax
57
 The primacy of the aesthetic over the ontological when it comes to thinking politics
and the possibility for political intervention can be understood by gauging Rancière’s
bias against ontological realism (or inverted idealism). As I argued in the previous
section and will extend upon in the next section of this article, the aesthetic regime
provides the means for a heterogeneous intervention in the political. Rancière’s
eagerness in probing the conditions of possibility for such a heterogeneous political
intervention in aesthetics is directly related to his conviction that such a heterogeneous
intervention is strictly impossible within a realist ontological framework.

In Disagreement, he provides the following description of what he understands by the

term realism:

Realism claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to

observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only

doing the only thing possible to do. The consensus system that
absorbed the historical and objective necessity of former times,
reduced to the congruous portion of ‘the only thing possible’ that the
circumstances authorize. The possible is thereby the conceptual
exchanger of ‘reality’ and ‘necessity’. It is also the final mode of ‘truth’
that metapolitics perfected can offer the logic of the police order, the
truth of the impossibility of the impossible. Realism is the absorption
of all reality and all truth in the category of the only thing possible. In
this logic, the possible/truth in all scholarly authority is required to fill
in all holes in the possible/reality.35

Judging by how Rancière, in the pages surrounding this quote, stealthily changes the
meaning of realism from political realism to ontological realism and back again, it is
clear that his discussion with realism is of decisive importance to his own position
toward both politics and ontology. It accurately touches upon how he envisages the
relation between these two and it is telling of how he considers ontology first and
foremost as a politics, or rather as a police that is introduced into reality to maintain
order. That all ontology is in fact police logic corresponds with a tendency Rancière
finds in philosophers to reinstate ‘the exact identity between politics and the police’.36

It should however be possible to complicate matters, since the definition of realism as

that what sticks to observable reality is an inadequate description that fails to do
justice to realism. The problem with Rancière’s definition lies in its use of the adjective
‘observable’. This may just be a passable definition for political realism, but it
certainly fails to do justice to ontological realism. To propose that only what is
observable is real is about as close as one can get to Brunschvicg’s definition of idealism
(‘the affirmation of being rests upon the determination of being as being-known’). In
contrast, ontological realism suggests that there exists a complex reality
independently from what we can observe; it pleads for ‘ontological depth’ and
acknowledges that things exist without or beyond our knowing.37 If anything it is a
plea for a more complex understanding of the relation between knowing and being.
It can acknowledge that the means at our disposal to know reality may be limited, and
in fact it is eager to stress this point; but the limitedness of our capacity for knowledge is
Ieven
58
 an epistemological matter, not an ontological one. If anything, realism has reiterated
the difference between the contingent shortcomings of knowledge and the
independent existence of what is known. What we can know of reality is real, but it
is not necessarily all of reality.

Rancière subsequently asserts that realism is something quite different from what it
pretends to be and defines it as the ‘police logic of order’. But this definition again
fails to adequately depict realism’s take on reality as existing independent from our
knowledge of it. It has even been argued by critical realists that the contingency and
complexity of contemporary sciences can only be explained by taking an ontological
realist position.38 Instead of taking this into account, in actual fact Rancière’s text
alters the conditions under which it becomes possible to provide a definition of
realism: his definition suggests that realism cannot be defined by looking at what it
says about the nature of reality but must be defined by looking at what it does to
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

reality. This may be a politically relevant question, a question concerning the

politics of knowledge-gathering; but it says nothing of a theory’s intrinsic attitude
toward reality. At all events, a more subtle and also exciting move would have been
to argue that how one conceives reality does something to reality, somehow changes
it. But even so Rancière has decided to study only what realism does, and by that he
means its reputed police logic. This logic consists, not surprisingly, in a reduction. It
reduces the possibles of reality; it absorbs reality in a reductive way. From a myriad
of possibles the police logic of order extracts only one possible – a ‘necessity’.

Again, ideas of political realism and ontological realism intermix here. For the
purposes of political realism it is opportune if there is only one possible, imposed
upon it by the necessity and limitedness of its own time. But to succeed in presenting
reality as ‘the only thing possible’ such a political realism must look for a more
profound way to influence reality directly. A form of political realism is invented
that is in fact nothing but the continuation of political realism by other means.
Philosophers and their respective political philosophies – or ‘the politics of
philosophers’39 – take part in this practice of intermixing politics with all kinds of
ontological practices. As a result, not only do they equate politics with police logic,
they create ‘archipolitics’, ‘parapolitics’, and ‘metapolitics’ that are all intended on
destroying real, innovative politics. Metapolitics is the name given to the more
recent ways political and ontological realism intermix:

In the modern ‘political philosophy’ apparatus, the truth of politics is

no longer located above politics as its essence or idea. It is located
beneath or behind it, in what it conceals and exists only to conceal.
Metapolitics is the exercise of this particular truth.40

In a different approach but with reference to the same concept, Slavoj Žižek
described metapolitics as ‘a politics that legitimates itself by means of a direct
reference to the scientific status of its knowledge’.41 Yet the ontological realism
operative in metapolitics was never ontological to begin with. It is a politics or police
order passing itself off as realism – a more adequate name, however, would be
political reductionism. Rancière suggests as much, arguing that it is the ‘“political
philosophy” apparatus’ that is under scrutiny here. But despite his implicit
parallax
59
 acknowledgement of the faux-realist position of police logic he is not ready to adjust
his view on ontology and instead draws the general conclusion that all ontological
practices are somehow related to a reductive grasp over reality. Politics and
ontology thus become mutually exclusive and trying to mix them always means ‘the
achievement-elimination of politics’.42

4. Conclusion: Aesthetic Truth and Universality

By reducing all possibles, realism reduces the heterogeneity and contingency from
which a political moment can arise. This provides us with an explanation for
Rancière’s rejection of ontology as a practice that can productively engage with
politics or aesthetics. His work is searching for those essentially open moments in
which a partition can take place. But in return, his principled abstention from
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

ontology opens a myriad of problems that will not be easy to solve without returning to
ontology in one form or another. One of these emerging problems, with a longstanding
liaison to both ontology and politics, is the status of universality. If there can be no
recourse to ontology, how are we to conceive of universality? First, we could concede
that in Rancière universality is ‘a logical operator that exists only to the extent that it is
enacted’.43 Indeed, to put it in the terms that have been recurring throughout this
article, Rancière distinguishes between universality as a ‘founding ontological
principle’ and universality as ‘a condition that only functions when it is put into
action’.44 But the truly tenacious aspect of the problem, as I hope is now clear, is of
such kind that we must also be able to explain what enacts universality without recourse
to ontology. It is here that we can resort to the aesthetic regime. As I have argued
above, the specific nature of this regime is such that it reacts against ontology and
opens up a new space for politics. When Rancière argues that the ‘political universal
only takes effect in a singularized form’, this singular universal must be understood as
emerging from within the aesthetic regime; and as a result of the heterogeneous
composition of the aesthetic regime it remains a ‘singular’ universal, the several
different aspects of which cannot be reduced to an already given (ontological) unity.45
Rather, it results from a partition and redistribution of the sensible.

The status of truth presents Rancière with a similar problem (and it receives a
similar solution in his work). A non-reductive, heterogeneous truth is possible on the
condition that it is articulated from within the complex aesthetic regime. There
exists, writes Rancière, an inevitable ‘phantasmagorical dimension of truth, which
belongs to the aesthetic regime or arts’.46 Whereas in other regimes the search is
always for a ‘truth hidden behind the description’47 or behind the representation – a
truth, in short, sought in things themselves, with an ontological basis – the aesthetic
regime introduces an entirely different truth, one that emerges from the ambiguity
and multiplicity of its aesthetic expressions. Truth thus becomes something that
emerges within heterogeneity.

Rancière’s solution to a self-imposed problem of ontological reductionism seems to

open up a whole new terrain for politics in which the aesthetic takes on a leading role.
While this is promising and has lead to fascinating new articulation of concepts such as
truth and universality, it is not without deficiencies. To begin with, Rancière’s
Ieven
60
 ‘solution’ necessitates a sustained resuscitation of ‘ontological indeterminacy’.48 Such
indeterminacy is only achieved in the aesthetic regime. A transformative practice in
politics or aesthetics, and the distribution of the sensory that can take place within the
aesthetic regime depend on such ontological indeterminacy. In doing so, instead of
thinking of ways in which the reality can be opened in all of its complexity and
heterogeneity, Rancière creates an aesthetic double. This double is supposed to
counter the reduction of ontology with aesthetic heterogeneity; but if this
heterogeneity and the specific truth and universality it engenders and enacts are to
have any efficacy, they too must be located in a space and time that properly allows
them to emerge. Aesthetics may contribute to it, but it will never suffice; it may
guarantee the heterogeneity and enactment of universality and truth, but in
emerging, in as far as these are to be real truth and universality they must be
warranted by an ontological claim asserting the conditions of their possibility.
To explain complexity and heterogeneity, including that of the truth and
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009

universality, recognition of ‘ontological depth’ 49 is essential. Abstaining

from ontology remains a paradoxical move; and this all the more so since a large
part of Rancière’s aesthetic and political work is dependent upon this abstention.

This does not imply that Rancière’s work can say nothing meaningful about reality,
but rather that he can only say it from within the aesthetic regime; it means that he
remains undetermined over the ontological status of what happens within the
aesthetic regime. When the distribution of the sensible takes place it structures the
realm of the sensible.

A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation

between a shared ‘common’ [un commun partage´ ] and the distribution
of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form
of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is
visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible.50

From within the aesthetic regime it is possible to anticipate what lies outside of the
sensible realm; and via a distribution of the sensible it can sometimes be introduced
within this realm. But given its ontological abstention, I would argue, it can never
come in to play; that is to say, what lies at the core of political change can never take
on a political effectiveness unless it has first passed through the bottleneck of the
aesthetic regime. In my account, this implies that nothing can be said about the real,
qualitative nature of the heterogeneity of truth that Rancière talks about. Despite
the acclaimed heterogeneity of truth we end up with aesthetic reduction that
operates as a ‘supplement’ that has ‘no origin’.51

Notes

1 3
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans.
Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis and A. Mitchell (Mineola and New York: Dover
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Publications, 1998), p.220.
4
pp.132-3. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The
2
Jacques Rancière, La haine de la de´mocratie (Paris: Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill
La Fabrique, 2005), p.48. (London and New York: Continuum 2006), p.27.

parallax
61
 5 28
Jacques Rancière (2001). ‘Ten Theses on
Politics’, trans. R. Bowlby. Theory & Event, 5:3
(2001); Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du Politique
(Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), p.235.
6 30
Jacques Rancière, Politique de la litte´rature (Paris:
Galilée, 2007), p.185.
7
Plato, The Republic, trans. by R. E. Allen (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006)
p.6/331e.
8
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by G. Rockhill
(London and New York: Continuum, 2006),
p.103.
9
Plato, Phaedo, in The Last Days of Socrates:
Eutypho, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. H. Tarrant &
H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003),
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:14 10 July 2009
p.141/75a.
10
Plato, Republic, p.333/600e.
11
Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008),
p.369.
12
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.27.
13
Plato, The Laws, trans. T.J. Saunders
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p.432/899d.
14
Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The
Politics of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004), p.11.
15
Rancière, The Flesh of Words, p.13.
16
Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the
Poetics of Knowledge, trans. H. Melehy (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
p.15.
17
Jacques Rancière, La parole muette. Essai sur les
contradictions de la litte´rature (Paris: Hachette, 1998),
p.25.
18
Jacques Rancière, Le Parole Muette, p.28.
19
Jacques Rancière, Politique de la litte´rature (Paris:
Galilée, 2007), p.30.
20
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. E. Battista
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), p.16.
21
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, p.23.
22
Jacques Rancière, Politique de la litte´rature, p.59.
23
Jacques Rancière, Politique, p.60.
24
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, p.108.
25
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, pp.107-8.
26
Jacques Rancière, La leçon d’Althusser (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974), p.177.
27
Jacques Rancière, La leçon d’Althusser, p.178.
Bram Ieven is a lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, The
Netherlands.
Ieven
62
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.26.
29
Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans.
K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), p.340.
William van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point
of View (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1953), p.1.
31
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit. Heidegger and the
Question, trans. G. Benington & R. Bowlby
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
p.18.
32
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C.
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), p.69.
33
Jacques Rancière, Film Fobles, p.117.
34
Brunschvicg, cited in Vincent Descombes,
Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and
J.M. Harding (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.19.
35
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.132-3.
36
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.64.
37
Roy Bhaskar, A Possibility of Naturalism. A
Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human
Sciences (third edition) (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), p.12.
38
Roy Bhaskar, A Possibility of Naturalism, p.12.
39
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.64.
40
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.82.
41
Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception (London
and New York: Continuum, 2006), p.188.
42
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.65.
43
Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine, Polem-
icization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.121.
44
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.52.
45
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.52.
46
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.34.
47
Jacques Rancière, ‘Thinking Between Disci-
plines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge’, Parrhesia, 1:1
(2006), p.9.
48
Jacques Rancière, Names, p.7.
49
Roy Bhaskar, A Possibility of Naturalism, p.12.
50
Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses’; Jacques Ran-
cière, Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique,
1998), p.240.
51
Jacques Rancière ‘Ten Theses’; Aux Bords,
p.235, p.231.