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Book Review of Jacques
Rancires The Politics of Aesthetics: with reflections on Rancires
art-politics in lieu of the
Deleuzian/Guattarian perspective.
Jacques Rancire, The
Politics of Aesthetics
With an afterward by
Slavoj Zizek
Jacques
Rancire is interesting to me in that he is a critic of defined
disciplines/specializations in favor of a ground of aesthetic pleasure brought
about through a non-identification with ones identity (and/or condition) -
even while he stresses a refusal of containment/confinement that is
simultaneously escapist but possibly emancipatory in its transformational
suggestivity. In other words, he believes in the powers of the imagination.
In his book The Politics of Aesthetics Rancire comes right
out and declares as much already in the forward when he states that he is
concerned here with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create
new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of subjectivity. (p. 9)
So, first off, how can new modes of sense perception be created which can
potentially help remove the subject out of his/her glib indolence? We will here
examine that. Then I will compare and contrast some of Rancires approach to
art and politics with that of the philosophic rhizomatic theory (1) of Gilles
Deleuze (1925-1995) and Flix Guattari (1930-1992), which, at a general level,
supports such an interdisciplinarian connectivist approach as their
rhizomatic theory encouraged non-linear and non-restrictive interdisciplinary
thinking-doing.
What is real is the becoming itself, the block
of becoming, not supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes
passes.
-Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus
The context here for new modes of sense
perception is established precisely by touching on some recent realizations
about the current international art scene that I have been experiencing and
reading about, most devastatingly in Julian Stallabrasss small book Contemporary
Art: A Very Short Introduction. In it Stallabrass describes a theory of the
art market which well explains the current art worlds situation, specifically
arguing that behind contemporary art's multiplicity and apparent capriciousness
lies a bleak uniformity and that this amounts to making culture uncurious,
timid and stupid in the service of a big business ethos of unquestioning
consumer conformity; a pop ethos apparently enforced by some dim-witted and
unspoken social-climbing consensus. Rancire himself stresses that art in
itself is not liberating and can be quite the opposite, depending on the type
of capacity it sets into motion. (March 2007 Artforum, p. 258)
Stallabrass purports too that the unregulated
insular contemporary art market seeks to dupe newbie art rubes into being
enthusiastic participants in the dumbing-down values useful to big business;
values which address all communications to the lowest common denominator of the
mass. Yes, that sounds un-emancipatory to me but also a true reflection of
the deceptive and self-deceptive Cheney-Bush neo-con epoch that we are
enduring. So, the obvious question is: what new modes of sense perception are
possible according to Jacques Rancire if one takes seriously arts responsibility
of resistance?
It is disappointing to report that Rancire does
not answer this central problem of art-politics in this book, nor does he
address the central situation in which we find ourselves where all political
gestures and critical images are potentially consumed and neutralized in the
happy inferno of market commercialization (See the recent book Critical
Mess: Art Critics On The State Of Their Practice edited by Raphael
Rubinstein). Kristin Rosss assertion, in her March 2007 Artforum essay On
Jacques Rancire, that such market mental shackles, can somehow be, via
Rancire, set aside and even denounced (p. 255) seems Pollyannaish in the
extreme. In my view, one can only even attempt what Rancire calls an opening
in the consensus from the formal point of view of art that is generally
excluded through difficulty from the interest of the market. This signifies a
self-understanding and self-construction beginning with what Deleuze and
Guattari call "an intensive magnitude starting at zero". (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 153) This $0.00 worth of course means the vast
majority of art created, but certain formal factors help assure this
unmarketabilty ideal at present, factors such as: dark nihilistic
over-complexity (the dreaded inaccessible factor), electronic impermanence, art
which is overly ambiguous, punk noise, and so on.
So I was wondering while reading Rancires The
Politics of Aesthetics last year what Rancire had to say about contemporary arts
lost commitment to the idea that the core of fine art is that which purports to
transcend the banal economic world and portray a wider vision of political
awareness inclusive of private spiritual, ecstatic or magical themes accessible
through the subjective realm of each individual; a self-perceptional politics
which reveals in minute particulars the wide-ranging spectrum of the
social-political dimensions of the human mind. Im sorry to say he says nothing
specific, but does seem to favor such an approach in general. But the question
of how artists and dealers and critics prevent the market from eliminating that
quality from art and in so making particularly the younger people,
opportunely unintelligent is not addressed in The Politics of Aesthetics. That is the pity, as
he leaves us wretchedly alone to consider the difference between politically
visionary art and market vision, with its mechanical functionalism. So one must
grapple.
For me the formal difference is in looking into
and projecting onto something - thereby discovering an emerging manifestation,
as opposed to looking AT something. In that sense it requires an active but
slow participation on the part of the viewer - and a politically visionary art
style demands as much. This required user mental participation is essential in
our climate of mass-media / mass-market / mass-think in that it plays against
the grain of given objective consensus. In that sense politically visionary
painting, for example, becomes more a service product than an investment
object.
Moreover, my deep feeling, which Rancire also
ignores, is that today art must indict - or at the very least play the role of
the jester who unmasks the unspeakable lies of the powerful. It is now widely
recognized that Americans (and the Western World for the most part) have been
deceived and victimized by governmental propaganda and if art cannot rebuff and
contest this grave situation by fueling the political will and imagination of
resistance, I wonder why we need it at all - other than to make rich people
richer. In the current political world it is painfully obvious that we need
investigative strength of mind to heal our intelligence, and so an art that
demands a mental mood of investigation would support such a need.
Fortunately Rancire does encourage a complex
and ambiguous politically visionary art of resistance and investigation; one
which would be increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on
skepticism while undermining market predictabilities as it strengthens unique
personal powers of imagination and critical thinking. This is so as Rancire
urges us to counter the effects of our age of simplification - effects which
have resulted from the glut of consumer oriented entertainment messages and
political propaganda which the mass media feeds us daily in the interests of
corporate profit and governmental psychological manipulations what he calls
the representative regime. (p. 22) This ambiguous politically visionary
aspect of art is what he terms the phantasmagorical dimension of the truth, which
belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts. (p. 34)
Unreservedly Rancire addresses the existence of
this inner phantasmagorical true world - the life of our imagination with its
intense drives, suspicions, fears, and loves which guides our intentions and
actions in the artistic, political and economic worlds. Indeed Rancire makes
clear that our inner world is the only true source of meaning and purpose we
have and a participatory politically visionary art of investigation is the way
to discover for ourselves this inner life. So we see now that in contrast to
our market-frenzied materialist culture, which trains us to develop the eyes of
outer perception, a politically visionary phantasmagorical style of art could
encourage the development of inner sight based on the individual intuitive eye.
Of course Rancire acknowledges that this politically visionary realm embraces
the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces; from the infinitude of actual forms to
formless voids of virtuality.
In this light, Rancire might even say that hot
market artworks have lost their artistic worth by being reduced to poker chips.
Not that that is the artists fault. But what does he say about artists that
utilize his critical phantasmagorical formal via optical strategies to thwart
such abuse? I have yet to discover a reference to them in any of Rancires
mediations on art and politics.
Thus for the practicing artist/theoretician it
remains more relevant to consider the phantasmagorical true aspects (in this
sense the thwarting aspects) which remain detectable in the
Deleuzian/Guattarian fertile philosophical articulations concerning nomadic
thinking-making (2), as they have taken into account the rich ensemble of art
and political relations possible: the diversity, the unexpected links, the
ruptures, the amalgamations, and the connected heterogeneity. In that sense,
Rancire is only repeating in watered-down form what Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari showed us over twenty years ago. Even then their vision of nomadic
life re-opened the way for the phantasmagorical production of subjectivity in
art (in lieu of the objective market) by affirming the befittingness of
difficulty, variety and the necessary right to dissension. Deleuze/Guattari
already have outlined new modes of sense perception which help induce novel
forms of subjectivity, forms that would be composed of variously formed
segments, stratas, and lines of flight which involve territorializing as well
as deterritorializing spacio/psychic activities. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983,
p. 2) Granted, Rancires ideas about the regime of the critical phantasmagoric
relate here as well.
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea.
- Ad Reinhardt, from Art as Art, The selected
writings of Ad Reinhardt
In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancire stresses that
both art and politics reconfigure what is possible to say at a given moment
(pp. 63-66) - a reconfiguration made possible by, in his words, undoing the
formatting of reality produced by state-controlled media (p. 65) Let us test
that thesis of reconfiguration in the actual art world. Shall we?
In the last year I have become intellectually
interested in what is called in the United States the 9/11 truth movement. This
is a consciousness movement made up of people, including many scholars, who
desire to learn the truth about what really happened on 9/11/01 and who was
behind the conspiracy that carried it off. Obviously, this social grass-roots
movement is based on the presumption that the governments story is not fully
true, indeed parts of it are demonstrably false, and that we cannot take the
current governments statements and explanations on faith any longer. In that
sense the movement is skeptical and so thereby motivated by the desire to
pursue knowledge of the truth.
When I first became engaged in following these
issues, the movement was quite marginal and rather demeaned as being made up of
conspiracy theorists. This appealed to me however, I admit, not because I
have any interest in conspiracy theories, but in that I was involving myself
with Jacques Rancires ideas about the visible and the invisible, and the
spoken and the unspeakable - as this investigation was - and is issue packed
with ideas of false flag (black) operations that should or could not be spoken
of in public. Thus I sensed a bona fide taboo here at work, as enforced by the
mainstream media and social norms, which I sought to contravene. Surely the art
world was an open forum for any and all aesthetic investigation. But no. After
I told an important Chelsea gallery that this critical subject of false flag
operations was to be the main theme of an exhibition that they had proclaimed
to be desirous of doing on my work, all contact with me was severed and the exhibition
nixed. I assure you that this did not dismay me in the least. Soon I became
increasingly fascinated with some speculative gray areas of this topic, but
rapidly restricted myself to the empirical evidence that tends to disprove the
official government narrative that was established immediately and then
verified in the 9/11 Commission Report; a report directed by a White House
insider named Philip D. Zelikow. The research of Dr. David Ray Griffin is
invaluable in that regard; research that has been generally ignored in the
mainstream media.
But since then, fairly recent polls in the U.S.
clearly show that the government's own unproven conspiracy theory is losing
ground and more and more people are waking up to their pattern of lies and are
asking questions of authority. Indeed, I asked myself just what is
conspiratorial about demanding a thorough impartial examination of that
horrendous event on 9/11 an event that has been used to justify illegal
invasions and have destroyed two countries and killed tens of thousands of
people?
There is much we saw that day that is
suspicious, perhaps most staggeringly that no air defense was effectively used
foe over an hour and a half time period. Then I learned there were secret
multiple war-games taking place at exactly the same time that day, thereby
making it impossible for air defense to distinguish the real from the
simulation, and thus removing the first-rate air defense from New York and
Washington skies. These war-games, which were under the direction of the
Vice-President Dick Cheney, comprise the very heart of what many suspect is a
black operation performed by a small neo-con faction of the Republican
administration. Can it only be a coincidence that the morning of 9/11 both FAA
and NORAD were occupied in air defense drills simulating multiple airline
hijackings?
There is absolutely no excuse for anyone who
supports art, peace and civil liberties to support governmental lies. We know
now that the current U.S. government must now be assumed to be lying until
proven otherwise. At the same time the Bush administration acknowledges that it
has dramatically increased the number of documents classified
"confidential," "secret" or "top secret." Between
the time Bush took office in 2001 and 2004, the most recent year for which
figures are available, that number has nearly doubled. In 2004 alone, 80
federal agencies deemed 15.6 million documents off-limits. And that figure
doesn't include documents withheld by Vice-President Cheney, who refuses to
report to the National Archives the number of documents his office classifies,
even though Bush's executive order requires him to do so. Cheney claims his
office is exempt. I, and others, desire to know just what are they hiding? If
theres nothing to hide, why is the U.S. government hiding everything? So where
is Rancires critical phantasmagoric art that expresses the desire for an
impartial investigation to ascertain the truth? Nowhere to be seen.
Following Rancire mandate, it is important to
cut through the unseeing and unsaying here, as we must consider that the
official account of the 9-11 attack on America is actually a phantasmagorical
conspiracy theory, given that it lacks much credible proof. It is therefore
subject to being judged on the same basis as any other phantasmagoric theory,
that is, skeptically examined through logical inquiry. Therefore, unless the events of 9/11
are critically examined and discussed through art in the search for truth
without apprehension, nothing Rancire says about art and politics are of
meaning, just as nothing we are politically living is true.
III: new animal modes of political and artistic
action
Art perhaps begins with the animal, with the
animal at least who carves a territory...
-Gilles Deleuze from Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Even so, or until then, Rancire acknowledges
that all methods, explanations, and theories (including his reconfiguration of
the sensible which, btw, smacks of portions of Deleuzes book Logic of
Sense)
inevitably distances consciousness from its first sense of full and total
participation. For this full sense we need the body engaged and hence
Deleuze/Guattari's emancipatory interest in "becoming-animal" is
accommodating. For them, to "become animal is to participate in movement,
to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to
reach a continuum of intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the
significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter
of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs". (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1986, p. 13) Whether this discovery of animal honesty through
Rancires desire for critical phantasmagoric truth is possible and thus is
capable of delivering Rancires hoped for a change of sensibility (p. 10)
remains an open and fascinating question. But what strikes me today is that
even in the midst of our fervent political angst - based on our current
conditions of great distrust and deception coupled with feelings of helplessness
current interest in Rancires critical phantasmagoric remains justified, if
somewhat redundant given the gifts of consciousness we have already received
from Deleuze and Guattari. Yet as Rancire urges, we may not restrict nor
resign our consciousness to the unsayable and the undoable in art and politics,
for according to Deleuze, consciousness itself is "the passage, or rather
the awareness of the passage, from less potent totalities to more potent ones,
and vise versa." (Deleuze, 1984, p. 21)
Joseph Nechvatal
Paris
Notes:
This review/essay is informed by an email and snail mail
letter I have written to Jerry Saltz in response to his Village Voice essay
Seeing Dollar Signs: Is the art market making us stupid? Or are we making it
stupid? (unanswered and unacknowledged) now posted on my blog at http://post.thing.net/blog/244 and to
an email I sent Rosalind Krauss following her March 27th talk at La Maison
Franaise at New York University (unanswered and unacknowledged). Also it
benefited from a hypothetically ongoing, but currently stagnant, interview of
myself by Catherine Perret (For the completed Part I see: http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/2new/Perret-Nechvatal%20talk.htm)
I must also note that regardless of Rancire statement in his March 2007
Artforum interview with Fulvia Carnevale that I write to shatter the
boundaries that separate specialists (p. 257) I was unable to locate an email
account for him using the standard google search engine to discuss these views
directly with him.
(1) In the philosophical writings of Deleuze and
Guattari the term is used as a metaphor for an epistemology (that in philosophy
which is concerned with theories of knowledge) that spreads in all directions
simultaneously. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 7) More specifically, Deleuze
and Guattari define the rhizome as that which is "reducible to neither the
One or the multiple. (...) It has neither beginning nor end, but always a
middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes
linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object...
." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21)
(2) It is pertinent that in A Thousand
Plateaus
Deleuze and Guattari describe this shift towards boundlessness as one's
becoming a body without organs (BwO) in terms of our self-shifting
representational planes emerging out of our field of compositional consistency,
for the BwO (according to them) is an insubstantial state of connected being
beyond representation which concerns pure becomings and nomadic essences.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 510) Deleuze and Guattari go on to say that
the BwO "causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a
spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space nor is it
in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree - to the degree
corresponding to the intensities produced". (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 153) According to Brian Massumi, the translator of A Thousand Plateaus, the BwO is "an
endless weaving together of singular states, each of which is an integration of
one or more impulses". These impulses form the body's various
"erogenous zone(s)" of condensed "vibratory regions"; zones
of intensity in suspended animation. Hence the BwO is "the body outside
any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body
in terms of its potential, or virtuality". (Massumi, 1992, p. 70)
References:
Deleuze, G. 1984. Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights
Deleuze, G. 1990. Logic of Sense. New York:
Columbia University Press
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1983. On The Line.
New York: Semiotext(e)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1984. Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1986. Nomadology:
The War Machine. New York: Semiotext(e)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1994. What is
Philosophy?. London: Verso Books
Griffin, D. R. 2004. The New Pearl Harbor:
Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9-11, Olive Branch Press
Griffin, D. R. 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report:
Omissions and Distortions, Olive Branch Press
Griffin, D. R, editor, with Peter Dale
Scott. 2006. 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals
Speak Out, Vol. 1, Olive Branch Press
Griffin, D. R. 2007. Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular
Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, Arris Books
Massumi, B. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism
and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT
Press
Rubinstein, R. editor. 2006. Critical Mess: Art
Critics On The State Of Their Practice, Hard Press Editions
essays by: James Elkins,
Thomas McEvilley, Jerry Salz, Raphael Rubinstein, Katy Siegel, Lane Relyea,
Arthur C. Danto, JJ Charlesworth, Nancy Princenthal, Carter Ratcliff, Eleanor
Heartney, Michael Duncan and Peter Plagens.
Stallabrass, J. 2006. Contemporary Art: A Very
Short Introduction, Oxford University Press
Bio Note:
Edgewise Press is publishing a book
Winter 2008 containing selected writings by Joseph Nechvatal called "Immoderate
Moments Selected Writings on Art and Technology 1995-2000 "
http://www.edgewisepress.com/main.html