Jacques Rancière Day 6

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Jacques Rancière taught a class entitled: POLITICS OF AESTHETICS wherein we discuss the relationship between what is allowed to be seen and the dominant political regime.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

How the aesthetic revolution is transformed and ultimately canceled-out. It's not so much what Brecht, Baudrillard, or Lyotard said as much as how they construct the relationship between art and politics. The issue of post-modernism is one of re-framing Modernity. Not a new concept, but a re-framing of art and politics. The way in which they will say farewell to Modernity has led to a reconfiguration of Modernity.

"The Ecstasy of Communication" Baudrillard; published in Hal Foster's Anti-Aesthetics.
Attempts to punctuate a turning point of art, is also a turning point in the sensory experience. These texts are dealing with experience; they also recapitulate what Modernity means, a reinterpretation of the aesthetics of Modernism. The way in which they set the stage for this task is interesting.

• Diagnosis of loss or something that is about to be lost: the loss of separation, no longer borders.
• Tow ideas of the sensory: heterogeneity and homogeneity.
• For Baudrillard it's the loss of subject and object, we have lost alienation. This should be a good thing, in Marxist terms, but the issue is trickier.

For Baudrillard, alienation means illusion, but also this difference between inside and outside; so the problem of desire means we have an excess. Communication replacing alienation, there is no longer heterogeneity, only homogeneity.

Now is the reign of hyper-reality. What has been lost with the digital is, on one hand, the spectacle of the world, and the sacred secret of the inner world. Everything is communicable and there is no separation of the inner and the outer. The specificity of artistic experimentation is lost due to digital reproduction.

If the progress of scientific apparatus is responsible for the end of Modernity, it is also responsible for the inception of Modernity. The birth of photography doesn't mean the task of image-making has been perfected but that painting is impacted and Classical pictures depended upon a certain monarchical perspective on the world.

Photography isn't only the possibility of exact reproduction, but also means the end of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful. §16 is based on adherent beauty vs. free beauty; this was determined by freedom from concepts and perfection of the reproduction in technique.

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Jacques Rancière Evening Lecture

As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Jacques Rancière spoke to us.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

In a sense, it will deal with negation [as was the case with Alain Badiou's the other night]; but less broad in scope.

I am here concerned with the process of unfolding and dissipation of images. What kind of logic is present in images and their processional narrative? Hitchcock's Vertigo is an example of the perfection of the deployment of image in narrative form.

The logic of the film is apparent as soon as the credits. The dispositif of the images from hereon are _____(?)

Deleuze states that Hitchcock is the peak of the image-movement system, but he is also the symptom of the crisis of narrative action.

(2 forms of passivity) Scottie's Acrophobia, 2 fascinations with Death

Let's also consider Vertov's Man with Camera (1929):

The camera has the radical equality of all movement, the Communism of the equal exchange of all images.

The means of fascination used by Hollywood are the remains of a lost cinematic utopia according to Goddard.

An art is never only an art but also the proposition of a possible world and its techniques and elements employed are often the remains of a previously proposed utopia.

Reconfront the suppositions of movement and the look.

[END OF LECTURE]