Rancière, Jacques, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

Jacques Ranciere. A isthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. New York: Verso, 2013. 272 pp.Jacques Ranciere's A isthesis (first published in French in 2011) is a provocative and fascinating rewriting of the history of modernism and of the very concept of artistic modernity. The book is relevant for Whitman studies since Ranciere devotes much attention to Whitman's role in the evolution of modernism.Ranciere's account starts in 1764 and ends in 1941 (but the French philosopher notes that it could be extended beyond that historical moment). In spite of the linear and chronological order of presentation, Ranciere insists that this history happens through events of electrical interruption that take place in different contexts and artistic scenes: sculpture, literature, dance, pantomime, theatre, photography, and cinema. By tracing a series of overlapping patterns, the book shows how figures as different as the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann, writers Walt Whitman, Stendhal, and James Agee, and sculptor Auguste Rodin all contributed to the challenging of old artistic taxonomies which "defined discourse as a body with well-articulated parts, the poem as a plot, and a plot as an order of actions" (xiv). Ranciere avoids any description of these figures as isolated champions of modernity, contextualizes their work, and shows how they participated in a networked, gradual revolution that led to a blurring of the traditional distinctions among different arts, thus eroding the classic dichotomous borders that used to separate art and life, the artistic and the prosaic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, the high and the low, the beautiful and the ugly. This progressive break with established taxonomies caused a radical displacement in the perception of what art signifies, yielding what Ranciere has called in previous works the "aesthetic regime of art."For Ranciere, there have been three "regimes of art." In the "ethical regime of art" (in which art was not even identified as such, and it was fully heteronomous as it served the purpose of providing ethical models for the community) and in the "representative regime of art" (in which art was recognized in its specificity and autonomy, but only if it followed precise composition rules in order to belong to fixed artistic genres), art supported the maintenance of the existing distribution of the forms, fields, and hierarchies of human activities. In the "aesthetic regime," however, art ceases to do this and aims instead at "(re)distributing the sensible." This latter idea, which had appeared in previous works by Ranciere, such as Dissensus and The Politics of Aesthetics, is in fact at the very center of this new book: in Ancient Greek, aisthesis means "what can be perceived by the senses." Liberated from ethical agendas and representative taxonomies, art (re) distributes the sensible by becoming a mode of aesthetic experience-an experience that instigates a perceptual rupture, a dissensual (and therefore inherently political) reframing of reality. Ranciere's perspective is clearly in polemical opposition to the Adornian concept of art's autonomy and to the Greenbergian notion of modernism as the exceptional outbreak of an avant-gardist "high art" that became an end in itself, an art thus in opposition to industrialized culture and kitsch art. Aisthesis aims to show that, on the contrary, the motto of modernity, as incarnated by the aesthetic regime of art, became that of shuttling between art and life, and that there was nothing exceptional in the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. …