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The Injunction of Aesthetics and Politics

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Jacques Ranciere in The Politics of Aesthetics implicates aesthetics and politics as part of the same paradigm in a series of short essays and an interview. Ranciere poses three "regimes" in art: the 1) political/ethical, 2) poiesis/mimesis and 3) aesthetic. Using these regimes, Ranciere develops an acute sense of modernism and postmodernism on the basis that the former tried to represent the "teleology of historical evolution and rupture" (p. 28) and that the latter mournfully reversed the notion of historical contingency wholesale. Ranciere's address of a "politics of aesthetics" and "aesthetics to politics" posits an interesting injunction between what often seem two disparate fields of practice. The Politics of Aesthetics remarkably investigates two knotty matters: political theory and art-theory using methods derived from materialism and marxism. Ranciere writes of art that it happens and, as such, makes visible. This visibility opens up multiple "universal" possibilities, contrary to the singularity of a universal transcendent truth of non-happening in art. Yet, Ranciere does not say what appearance these possibilities should have, but that they be aesthetic and political--a fascinating finding.

Interesting essays badly translated.

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This sort of book is always a pig in a poke and the pig is the translation. the translater here, one Gabriel Rockhill, is either very badly edited by Continuum (always possible) or is a dreadful writer. If you want an introduction to Ranciere, read _The Ignorant Schoolmaster_, which is translated by kristin Ross. I can't imagine why Continuum put out such a shoddily edited book, except maybe they figured, cynically, it would be read by art students, on whom actual prose is wasted. If you're in art school, you're already wasting thousands on a useless degree, but here is sixteen dollars that you can save. Don't buy this book.

Blinging It Post Althusserian Marxist-Structuralist Style!!!

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I have found this book entirely engrossing, despite some of the author's arcane writing style. The subtitle, The Distribution of the Sensible, is the major focus of the book,which is central to the author's ouevre. I find instances where he is building on both the notions of Foucault's power and knowledge equations of disciplinary discourse and Weber's processes of rationalization. The analysis of history as a possible fiction narrative is unique and erudite, as is his rethinking of Benjamin's "aura" in the arts as a distinction between mimesis and aesthetic forms of artistic production, which was a rethinking of Hegel's "Spirit". I dig it.