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]

Jacques Rancière Day 4

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

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 EGS, 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.

Today we will first discuss democracy and equality and then to what montage means.

Let's redefine the reality effect of Barthes.

• The point is not knowing why this object is here but rather the political effect. 
• The reality effect, according to Barthes is a tautological proposition: this object affirms the Real. 
• But for me it is an equality effect - any object is equally capable of being an art object and thus the expansion of the sensible. 
• Our capacity for the aesthetic effect is similar and politically it allows for the possibility of a community gathered in its ability to communicate these experiences.

There is something in action, though. In The Red and the Black we see equality is questioned; also in Leaves of Grass (1855) which had the same democratic effect as Madame Bovary (1856).

The extract "Song of Myself" has the perfect quality of all characters and activities (see page 40 from 1882 edition, right):

All of this becomes a quaint symphony of the city. What interests me is this infinite inclusion where everything is both material and spiritual. All things are equivalent, given by the voice which absorbs all of these.

This is the first time where writing is being extended into something beyond writing through a device, a new construction of totality. Plotinus was a big influence, so there is this procession of the world. The "Song of Myself" is the voice of multiplicity with its equivalence of all things. But it seems impossible to have stable political entities in this because there is political subjectivization when there is a section of society which is not allowed to have a voice.

Here we have, in section 26 (see image on left from 1882 manuscript) the tension between aesthetic democracy and political democracy. On the other hand we have the aesthetic democracy is not so different from the Communist Revolution - look to young Marx: The task of critique is to reveal the world as it is, so the world can do its work; an act of confession, revolution is an act of confession. **

This was 1843; in 1842 Emerson wrote to Whitman something similar. Aesthetic equality goes beyond politics because we can't compose political subjects, it is more than just revolution and politics.
The spiritual link for Emerson and Whitman, as well as the German Idealists (of which we must include "Young Marx") is that the material world is spiritual, a collapsing of the transcendental principle and a lowering of the metaphysical horizon to an immanence. The point here is not to discuss the distinction but to show the two poles from which we can come to this aesthetic revolution.

**NOTE: It seems that Rancière is paraphrasing Marx here, I'm not sure if this is an artifact of translation or his interpretation. The closest I can find to what Rancière says Marx said is from the Introduction to Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843):

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. (itals. original)

Democracy is always an excessive presentation, aesthetic democracy is the equal capacity to live any kind of life or the community to act the enactment of a shared capacity to experience and communicate, to be a member of the sensorium, where we can share that experience in communicating to anyone else.
In a world of economic domination there is no ability to interact with the world (alienation); the fear that Bovary introduced was that everyone suddenly was allowed to question their ability to participate.

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