Politics and Aesthetics E-Book

Jacques Rancière

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 118

Beschreibung

In this book the influential philosopher Jacques Rancière, in discussion with Peter Engelmann, explores the enduring connection between politics and aesthetics, arguing that aesthetics forms the fundamental basis for social and political upheaval. Beginning from his rejection of structuralist Marxism, Rancière outlines the development of his thought from his early studies on workers' emancipation to his recent work on literature, film and visual art. Rather than discussing aesthetics within narrow terms of how we contemplate art or beauty, Rancière argues that aesthetics underpins our entire 'regime of experience'. He shows how political relations develop from sensual experience, as individual feelings and perceptions become the concern of the community as a whole. Since politics emerges from the 'division of the sensual', aesthetic experience becomes a radically emancipatory and egalitarian means to disrupt this order and transform political reality. Investigating new forms of emancipatory politics arising from current art practices and social movements, this short book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art, aesthetics, philosophy and political theory.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

First Conversation

Notes

Second Conversation

Notes

Afterword by Peter Engelmann

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Politics and Aesthetics

Jacques RancièrePeter Engelmann

Translated by Wieland Hoban

polity

First published in German as Politik und Ästhetik, © Passagen Verlag, Ges.m.b.H., Wien, 2016. English language edition published by arrangement with Eulama Lit. Ag.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2019

Author image on page vi © Marina Faust

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3503-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ranciere, Jacques, interviewee. | Engelmann, Peter, interviewer.Title: Politics and aesthetics / Jacques Ranciere, Peter Engelmann.Other titles: Politik und Asthetik. EnglishDescription: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Translation of: Politik und Asthetik. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018059986 (print) | LCCN 2019005001 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535033 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509535019 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535026 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics--Political aspects. | Political science--Anthropological aspects. | Political psychology.Classification: LCC BH301.P64 (ebook) | LCC BH301.P64 R3613 2017 (print) | DDC 111/.85--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059986 or this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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First Conversation

Peter Engelmann I suggest we begin by talking about your intellectual career, which began with Althusser and followed a structuralist approach, though you soon moved away from this. You could describe your political concern and outline your research on the social movements of the nineteenth century, and explain how you proceeded from there to develop a new perspective on politics and art. After that I’d ask you to explain the major lines of your current critical thought and its theoretical foundations.

Jacques Rancière Agreed.

PE So let’s start from your encounter with Althusser. Perhaps you can talk about how you ended up collaborating on Reading Capital,1 and why you subsequently distanced yourself from that structuralist interpretation of Marx. Or perhaps you want to go even further back?

JR Well, in 1960 I started at the École Normale Supérieure, where Althusser was teaching at the time. I was a young man who had first become acquainted with Marxism more through reading existentialist or religious texts, because in France it was mainly Jesuits who had written good theoretical texts about Marx.

PE You were a Jesuit?

JR I wasn’t a Jesuit, but back then there were practically no theoretical texts on Marx that had been written by communists. And the texts with the most detailed commentary on Marx were by Jesuits, especially Père Calvez, who had written a very extensive book entitled Karl Marx.2 It was he who introduced many readers to Marx’s thought by trying to uncover its philosophical dimension, taking an interest in the young Marx’s beginnings and showing the continuity of his thought. And there was Sartre too, through whom I also became acquainted with communism. Sartre pursued a philosophical, existentialist approach that heavily emphasized the problematics of praxis and alienation. But then I went to the École Normale Supérieure, where Althusser questioned this approach on the grounds that it didn’t concentrate on the real Marx. He explained that the young Marx on which the commentaries focused was the ideological, pre-scientific Marx, and that one should abandon this existentialist discourse. That was the moment when structuralism emerged, and Althusser’s reading forced me to abandon my first approach to Marx. I had pursued it with great enthusiasm and become something of a specialist in early Marx, and I had also written a final dissertation on the subject. I attended Althusser’s seminars on Capital, which were intended to show the rupture between the young and the later, mature Marx. Althusser’s concern was to rediscover Marx’s true theory, which would form the point of departure for rethinking the revolution – but above all to enlighten all the young ‘petty bourgeois’ who lived in such ignorance of the system’s laws that they couldn’t help going astray. This insistence on the theory of ideology was at the core of Althusser’s thinking. And structuralism reinforced a scientistic reading of ideology theory, namely that all people were trapped in an illusion out of structural necessity, and science was needed in order to free them. I followed this direction, which, in a sense, also corresponded with the position of a young student at an elite university. Essentially there was a kind of Marxist aristocracy back then.

PE At the École Normale Supérieure?

JR Yes. You could say we were the best students, the best philosophers, and Marxists at the same time! We were conscious of our role as the intellectual avant-garde. Then came May 1968, a movement that ensued in a way that totally contradicted Althusser’s theory, a movement that consisted of students who should really have been knee-deep in petty bourgeois ideology, with no ability to develop a scientific, Marxist, proletarian consciousness. It was this movement that triggered an enormous subversive movement all over the country, extending to all walks of life. So in 1968 one had the impression of a complete rupture between the Marxist scientistic theory previously adhered to and the reality of this movement, the reality of workers’ revolts, people’s revolts, youth revolts. From that point on I began to criticize this structuralist Marxism, and all the more so when the University of Vincennes was founded after 1968.

PE How did this university come into existence?

JR Essentially, one can say that the state gave the radical leftists and the Marxists a university of their own. A university where one could truly practise Marxist, structuralist, semiological science. Those who were there had two choices: either one played along – and Althusserianism was the theory for entering into this schema, as it were – or one didn’t want to be co-opted, and refused to be the Marxist poster-child of bourgeois culture. In my case that led to a critique of all the theoretical preconditions from which people had been proceeding until then. I decided on a critique of Althusser, and of all theories which claimed that Marxist science had to help those people who live in a state of illusion to attain consciousness. Then I told myself that to test my critique I would have to take on a historical study that would allow me to gain a genuine understanding of labour history, and of history from the bottom up. So I set about doing work on the labour archives, about the period in which Marx began to write.

PE That was in the early seventies?

JR Yes, that was around 1972, 1973. I thought that there had probably been a wasted opportunity for an encounter, or let’s say, a lack of understanding between Marxist tradition and the labour tradition.

PE You went to the archives and became a historian?

JR Yes, I actually became a historian.

PE And you visited archives in France and Amsterdam?

JR Primarily French archives, later some others too. In Amsterdam I went to the archive of the Institute of Social History, but spent much of my time at the National Archive. I researched in the archive collections of the various utopist groups, especially those of the Saint-Simonists and the Icarian workers. But my great discovery was the documents of Gauny, a carpenter from the nineteenth century who was a Saint-Simonist. As if by a miracle, he left behind boxes full of documents that have survived – and one always says that the voices of the people remain unknown and leave no traces! There were eight boxes at the archive, with texts, letters, poems, the collected writings of a Saint-Simonist carpenter who had experienced the nineteenth century as a writer. Here someone ‘from below’ had left traces! Proceeding from all these archival collections, especially those of the carpenter, I began to undertake a critique of my own position. I was searching for a true workers’ thinking, or people’s thinking, whose foundations lay in the culture of the people, the workers. It then became clear to me that the workers’ activism had come about through an attempt to liberate themselves from a particular workers’ identity that was defined by domination.

PE To become part of the bourgeoisie?

JR To reach a way of thinking and of perceiving the world where one no longer thinks as a worker, but rather begins to have a share in all forms of culture and thought which the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and the different factions of the ruling class had hitherto claimed for themselves. What I ultimately discovered was that the class struggle and all conflict phenomena aren’t simply a head-on opposition between a class with its culture, its ideology and its interests on the one side and a different class on the other side. Many of these phenomena were essentially problems of boundaries; there was the will of these workers to emerge from a kind of captivity and become fully fledged subjects of a shared world. That was evident on many different levels, for example in the fact that strikes were organized on the basis of argumentation. Suddenly, strikes were no longer just expressions of a balance of power, but became something like assertions of intellectual ability, an ability to argue and to discuss a situation. They proved that it wasn’t a matter of being stronger, it was a matter of carrying out sensible actions. It was the same with the will to write poetry, for example. The bourgeoisie, the great writers, said to the workers, ‘Write folk songs!’ But the workers wanted to write tragedies, not folk songs. So I was interested in all these phenomena relating to boundaries and transgression.

PE You discovered that the political struggle, the class struggle, was at once a kind of cultural struggle among those who wanted to be accepted into a culture from which they’d previously been excluded? Is that how one could see your political perspective?

JR But one shouldn’t get too fixated on the concept of culture, which is a rather complicated concept. At any rate, what I actually discovered was this intellectual and aesthetic dimension of class struggles. The class struggle was originally the struggle to gain access to a particular lifeworld (monde vécu) from a different lifeworld. That can be expressed in culture, because culture is a form of connection to an existing unity. But what the class struggle really calls into question is one’s belonging to a class as the assignment to a particular presence in the world, a particular perception of the world, a particular language. Essentially the class struggle contains the will to emerge from the alleged situation that one thinks as a worker, acts as a worker and sees the world as a worker.

I genuinely think that this dimension, which I called ‘aesthetic’, is very important. ‘Aesthetic’ not in the sense of viewing works of art, but rather in the strong sense of one’s relationship with the perceived world. That was extremely important for me, and led to a very unusual philosophical habilitation thesis that I published as a book called Proletarian Nights.3 It was a philosophical thesis, yet didn’t contain a single philosophical thesis, a single argument. There were only stories, narratives, a kind of montage of letters, poems, workers’ newspapers and pamphlets that tried to give an account of this struggle on the boundary between two worlds. This montage tried to render visible the fact that the revolution was, in a sense, first of all an aesthetic, a sensual matter. I called this book Proletarian Nights because it seeks to make visible the efforts these people undertook to escape the simplest and most immediate form of coercion that burdened their lives, which dictates that if someone works all day, they have to sleep at night so that they can carry on working the next morning. One could say that the emancipation of the workers begins where the workers decide not to sleep but to do other things: to read, to write, to gather at night. That was a very important point, and it allowed me to define both my view of politics and my view of aesthetics.

PE