The aesthetic exception: Essays on art, theatre, and politics

By Tony Fisher

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art’s politics is limited to a recondite space of ‘autonomous resistance’. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art’s exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to ‘effect’ to offer a nuanced account of art’s political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the ‘new’ through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526170156

Book preview

The aesthetic exception

The aesthetic exception

Essays on art, theatre, and politics

Tony Fisher

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Tony Fisher 2023

The right of Tony Fisher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

ISBN 978 1 5261 7016 3 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Flag Amendment, Washington DC, USA-21st Oct, 1989. Charles Tasnadi/AP/Shutterstock.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For Amanda, Beatrice, and Tilly

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The horizon of the aesthetic

Part I: The aesthetic exception

1The paradox of the aesthetic exception

2Crossing the threshold

3The institution of art: Critical and theoretical reflections

Part II: Political art after the communicative turn

1The classical debate revisited: Sartre, Brecht, Adorno

2Art of the communicative turn: Habermas and the political

3What is the proper way to display a US flag? The work of ‘dissensual speech’ in art

Part III: Taxonomy of the political theatre

1Foundational problems and problems of foundation

2Displacement effects: Althusser’s ‘Brecht’ and the theatre of the conjuncture

3Activist theatre of the conjuncture: Janam and the politics of the street theatre in India

4The ‘closure’ of the political theatre (and the critique of postdramatic reason)

5The political theatre ‘redefined’

6The theatre of the planetary conjuncture: Milo Rau’s Congo Tribunal

7On taxonomic strategies

Notes

Index

List of illustrations

1Edgar Heap of Birds, Indian Still Target, Mono print, ink on rag paper, 2016. (Photo: Ted West.)

2Dread Scott, What is the proper way to display a US flag?, exhibited as part of the installation American Newspeak… Please Feel Free, Chicago, 1989. (Photo: Dread Scott.)

3Dread Scott, What is the proper way to display a US flag?, detail. (Photo: Dread Scott.)

4Safdar Hashmi in a performance of Machine with Moloyashree Hashmi and Lalit Ratan Girdhar, 1 May 1988. (Photo: Eugene Van Erven. Courtesy Jana Natya Manch.)

5Milo Rau, Hate Radio, 2012. (Photo: Daniel Seiffert.)

6Milo Rau, The Congo Tribunal, 2014. (Photo: Daniel Seiffert.)

Acknowledgements

The essays that comprise this book derive from over a decade of work, in which many friends, colleagues, and sometimes complete strangers played a significant role in shaping the thinking that led to them. To acknowledge the influence of interlocutors is to recognise a fundamental truth, of course – that no work arrives fully formed but is always bound by a debt owed to the knowledge, wisdom, and insight of others. To begin with the foremost of these ‘debts’, I would like to first acknowledge Janelle Reinelt, without whom this book would not have been written. It was only until (fairly) recently that our paths crossed – a fact that both of us found strange, given our mutual interests and political affinities. When they did, however, it sparked for me the kind of productive discussion that bears, as it were, the ripest fruit of disagreement, grown in the fertile soil of engagement with the opposing viewpoint. There is barely a word written in this book that was not prompted by that encounter. The second debt is to my close collaborator and Central colleague, Tom Six, who accompanied me along the haphazard path that led to the writing of this book, meticulously reading and responding to each draft I produced, providing invaluable criticism and, above all else, the kind of solidarity without which such an endeavour would simply not be possible. Eric Fromm once observed: ‘Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual’ – something similar might be said of the unfolding task of writing.

To think the conjuncture, as this book seeks to do, is essentially a collective task. Those who also engage in this work, and who have generously contributed their own expertise, experience, time, patience, and discernment in helping my own efforts, include colleagues in India: Komita Dhanda, Bishnupriya Dutt, and Aparna Mahiyaria. I am extremely grateful to all three; each read drafts of the chapter on the Indian street theatre, suggesting key readings, correcting my blunders on Indian politics and history, and introducing me to a world of exemplary scholarship of which I have so far only been able to scratch the surface.

The chapter on the aesthetic exception benefitted from being read by friends – Louise Owen, whose feedback was as shrewd as her criticisms were perceptive, and Kélina Gotman, whose support and insights, as always, I greatly value. Joe Kelleher offered astute advice on an early plan for the book that enabled me to take up the slack and tighten its focus. Shanna Leigh Ketchum-Heap of Birds helped with the introduction. Conversations with Janelle, and Bishnupriya, and with Silvija Jestrovic, Liz Tomlin, Elaine Aston, Trish Read, Chantal Mouffe, and Nick Ridout, during our time together in Venice at the conference ‘Cultures of the Left in the Age of Right-wing Populism’, all helped shape the chapter on the communicative turn in art. This text was subsequently published in Spanish thanks to Wenceslao Garcia Puchades, as ‘Arte Político después del Giro Comunicativo’ in Escritura e Imagen 16, 2020: 285–305. The version printed here is a substantial reworking of that essay.

I thank Peter Boenisch for putting me in touch with the Schaubühne; and Chris Balme for our many conversations on German theatre, and much else besides! I am also profoundly appreciative of the support I’ve received from Maria Delgado, who has proven a steadfast and brilliant mentor to me over the past seven years. Indeed, it was on a trip to Manchester with Maria, which concluded in a meeting with Matthew Frost of Manchester University Press, that I was first able to pitch the nascent idea of the book to him. I am grateful to Matthew for his enthusiasm for the project both then, which kick-started everything, and now, as it finally reaches its conclusion. Thanks are also due to Radka Kunderova for the opportunity she gave me to present some of the research on the theatre of the conjuncture to her conference ‘Redefining Theatre: Theatre and Society in Transition’ at the Freie University in Berlin in 2021. My gratitude goes also to Nadine Deller and Natasha Bonnelame for putting up with my occasional forays into the topic of this book as I was researching it during our many conversations over the past few years; and to Barry Campbell for his help in constructing the book’s index. I am also appreciative of the support I received from the Research Office at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, when completing the book.

Finally, the labour of researching and writing this book was only made possible because of the unfaltering encouragement and support of my partner and compadre, Amanda Stuart Fisher, who held the world together for me, even in those darkest moments when everything seemed to totter on the brink of the abyss. Some debts cannot be repaid…

Introduction: The horizon of the aesthetic

Apropos this book

The question of the relation between art and politics may seem an inauspicious place to begin a book. ‘Can art be political?’ has become the most exasperating of questions. Its tiresomeness can be measured by the sheer volume of discourse it has generated over the decades. This is not to say these debates are without value or interest, but only that in circulating the same arguments and objections no-one can feign surprise if the same predictable results are obtained. Such threadbare outcomes would seem to confirm the indefatigability of the law of diminishing returns, and little else. All the same, if the circumstances behind the writing of a book are relevant to its meaning, informing the choice of its material and the disposition of its argument – in short, its positioning and its motivation – they may have some bearing on how that question should be understood here. Writing in 2022, in the midst of a deep political winter has meant that the question, to my mind at least, attains a degree of urgency that not only transforms it but for that very reason compels us to return to it once more in the hope of discovering new answers. Far from being otiose, it is precisely this question that must be posed for the simple reason that art itself cannot avoid it. That winter has been long and hard and, for far too many, particularly bitter. With mounting challenges on all fronts – not least escalating inequality due to climate breakdown, compounded by the devastating effects of a worldwide pandemic, and the deepening entrenchment of the ‘neoliberal’ hegemon (or rather its transformation through a naked power grab since 2011 into a global oligarchy¹) – it is unlikely to abate any time soon. As humanity’s collective horizon grows ever darker, any glimpse of future progressive possibility seems to be obscured by the ideological barriers erected by contemporary reality in relation to which, to coin a phrase, there appears to be ‘no alternative’ (or so goes the lie we are endlessly sold). But if this leads to the affirmation that pessimism is the only reasonable attitude that the intellect can strike today, then it is art that promises to promote a different outlook in which optimism of the spirit refuses to be subdued or dampened. From art, and particularly when it comes to the topic of this book, political art, more should be expected than mere consolation, or accounts of the present that underwrite despair. Equally, more can be demanded of it than measly promissory notes for some future but obscurely framed happiness. And this is precisely what this book expects and demands: that art offers both a means of understanding and confronting the present predicament and may even indicate directions of travel out of it. Let me state the central proposition of this book as unequivocally as is possible, then, for the avoidance of all doubt: ‘political art is political art period’. Of course, the question this raises should already be forming on the reader’s lips: what is the meaning of this tautology?

To address this further question will require working through the tangled jumble of concepts that comprise the book’s lexicology. It is a book that speaks of limits, borders, the crossing of thresholds, and the projection of horizons; of movements, transgressions, and traversals; and also, of terms cast on less metaphorical terrain: of aesthetic (and, yes, art’s political) effects, and relatedly of autonomy and heteronomy in art practices. But it also deploys ideas drawn from elsewhere, from political philosophy and cultural theory. It speaks of conjunctures, mediations, of organicity and tendencies, and of the overdetermined structuration of the social formation within which art necessarily yet contingently appears. Above all, it is a book that treats the relation of art and politics not as an indeterminate but as a determinate relation, where, simply put, political context determines art’s political possibilities. Determination cannot be thought univocally, however. It is not a one-way street (politics is not the master of art). Were that the case, then art would be propaganda pure and simple. The determining relation is instead thought as operating in both directions simultaneously, but above all as a relation that is highly conditional and that is forged whenever and wherever art becomes an articulatory practice. What I mean by this I shall come to shortly, but essentially it indicates an aesthetic operation that produces a specific political effect: radical art determines (in that it comprehends) the ‘determinations’ of the social structure. In one way or another, radical art exposes society’s mediating forms in critical ways such that it permits a possible rearticulation of the subject of politics.

In this sense (and precisely because ‘determining the determinations’ is how art assumes a political character) it makes little sense to speak of a ‘politics of the aesthetic’ in general. The aesthetic (or aesthetic regime as Jacques Rancière has described it²) has no intrinsic political meaning beyond the possibility for art’s political articulation, whether through practices or criticism (even if it might be said to contain that possibility as a potential for an egalitarian politics). Nicolas Bourriaud is right to indicate that it is not the aesthetic per se but art that ‘exposes the world’s non-definitive character’,³ even if (pace Bourriaud) I think it does more than merely ‘affirm’ the ‘transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life [and] the rules governing individual and collective behaviour’. If art intervenes in those institutions and behaviours, it does so by rearticulating them. It is owing to the determinate nature of articulatory practice that only specific aesthetic acts embodied in particular artworks relating to existing political reality will be considered in what follows. That limitation is not to be confused with the dogmatic claim that art is political only when it is responding to given political ‘facts’. But it is a limitation that I argue is entirely consistent with the book’s aim, insofar as it seeks to show how art as a material practice may claim a political existence, even if that existence is an inherently ambiguous one, since art also seeks (and as a precondition of its existence as art) to evade the laws of political gravity. That art and politics are yoked together in the form of a relationship that neither particularly wanted or desired, and which each side has, at times, had reason to resent, only highlights the problematic nature of the question that comprises the book’s starting point. But it also reveals one end of the slender thread that runs through the essays that follow, and which I invite the reader to use as a guide. If this image suggests something labyrinthine, it is only because once the proper terms of the problem are known, it becomes apparent that what they imply indicates an irresolvable paradox, and not least because the phenomenon they describe is essentially a ‘relation’ that can equally be expressed as the disavowal of any relation whatsoever.

This phenomenon is named in the first essay of this book (from which it derives its title) as the paradox of the aesthetic exception. And while other concerns may dominate the ensuing essays, it is nevertheless this paradox that provides the book with its own horizon of thought, against which those concerns become thinkable. What the aesthetic exception describes is the language game that produces the critical space of distinction within which art practices appear as both separate from other social practices but also as being related to them through the construction of a frontier that is essentially contingent. The aesthetic exception is itself the result of an articulatory practice in which the discourse and institutions of art are formed: it shows that art’s fabled autonomy rests on the provisional nature of this discourse and that it is constantly open to infiltration by so-called heteronomous influences (or ‘determinations’). Art practices do not lose their distinguished status simply for being related to wider social praxes. Even so, to the extent that the aesthetic exception comprises what Rancière terms the ‘dispositif’ of art – the regime for its identification⁴ – that exceptional status imposes discursive limits that can only be partially breached. This leads to two (im)possibilities: either art is a contingent practice that can never quite attain the full autonomy demanded of it by the logic of the aesthetic exception, or else it is an autonomous practice that seeks to redeem itself in the heteronomous world from which it is necessarily separated by the aesthetic exception. The latter is best illustrated by the transgression (of the aesthetic exception) by the historical avant-garde (examined in detail in the first essay). These, of course, are transgressions the aesthetic exception invites; what they demonstrate in practice, however, is that radical art is indeed able to rearticulate the space of art in relation to the space of the social – although not to the extent that it may disregard the threat posed by the eradication of the differential through which the radical work of art is constituted as a work of art. Were the aesthetic exception to disappear, so too would the frontier that distinguishes art as ‘art’; but more to the point, what would also disappear with it is art’s power as an articulatory practice, which this book asserts is the very basis of its political possibility. Understanding that political possibility, and its limits, is then the central task of the book. Its fundamental contention is that however much radical art may shed the requirement of aesthetic autonomy, it must nonetheless do so by navigating the exception and its discursive frontier; the very attempt places it within the space of a paradox. To extend the seafaring metaphor a little further: what the book examines are practices whose radicalism compels art to circumnavigate its space of exception – either it must attempt to cross that space or render it volatile by locating and occupying the extreme perimeter of that peculiar zone in which art’s status of exception is established and maintained. The book takes this approach not to dismiss the familiar problem of aesthetic autonomy, but to resituate it as a problem of articulation thereby establishing a different starting point, hopefully unencumbered by earlier conceptual impasses.

Those impasses, of course, are not to be lightly dismissed. They appear within the book in the form of three discrete problematics. The first is the problem of the aesthetic – not the ‘politics of the aesthetic’ exactly, so much as the political limits and possibilities available to art afforded by the revolt it stages against the sequestrating logic of the aesthetic; the second is the familiar problem of art’s social and political efficacy – and the question of whether art is able to directly intervene in a political situation while maintaining what Peter Osborne terms its ‘art-character’;⁵ and the third is the problem of how art is able to articulate itself on the terrain of political struggle – that is, of art’s relation to the field of actual political practices. These problems comprise the core thematic areas of the book, against which its sections can be mapped: The first essay (‘The Aesthetic Exception’) is a philosophical exploration of the problems raised by art’s exceptional status, focusing particularly, as just indicated, on the example of the historical avant-garde. The second essay (‘Political Art after the Communicative Turn’) shifts to the cognate problem of how it is possible for art to communicate political effects given art’s status of exception (through which it is apparently separated from the social world). Here I draw on the developments of the communicative turn to offer an alternative to the dichotomies of what I have previously called the ‘efficacy debate’, where art is claimed either to produce effects unproblematically, or else is seen to be so problematic as to induce a political coma (with the denial of any such capacity at all). The final essay of the book (‘Taxonomy of the Political Theatre’) comprises its longest section and examines the problem of how art articulates itself on the actual terrain of political practices. I take theatre to offer an exemplary site for such an articulation, not least because of the manifold ways in which questions of representation as well as the relation of art to the ‘social’ are condensed within its spaces of exception. Ostensibly, the essay apprehends, through several chapters, the problem of the political theatre, understood in the genitive sense, i.e., as the problem that emerges with and belongs to the very designation ‘of the political theatre’. The problem of the political theatre is a problem of its peculiar genealogy. In other words, it does not present the reader with a history of the political theatre but rather with the history of the problem that was both announced by and incarnated in the theatre as part of its conditions of emergence as a political idiom (conditions coinciding with the theatre of the Russian Revolution of 1917). In examining this genealogy, however, I also ask what I take to be the more fundamental question: what makes the political theatre ‘political’? In answering this question, I develop two claims. The first is that no art is political that does not engage with the historical conjuncture of which it is a situated part; the second is that the politics of political theatre can only be analysed in the terms of its specific rearticulation of conjunctural elements that comprises its mode of intervention, and the extent and degree of its penetration, within a given social formation (I draw on examples including the political activism of the Indian street theatre, and in particular, Jana Natya Manch or ‘Janam’ – Peoples Theatre Front – as well as examine the ‘closure’ of the theatre of representation with the arrival of postdramatic theatre). I conclude that this articulatory practice is itself only fully realised through the projection of a political horizon, grasped as that which political theatre anticipates in the simulated form of the new or what I term a ‘futurity-to-come’. Grasping the future-to-come is not simply a matter of inflating utopian fantasies, but, I argue, a practice of simulation performed within and critically directed at the present. The example I use, and where the book concludes, is drawn from the theatre of Milo Rau. His is a theatre that articulates the problematic of a futurity-to-come, constituted against the horizon of our own conjunctural moment under conditions of globalisation: what it projects is the counter-horizon of an alternative planetary future.

The promise of the aesthetic

But first: what exactly is the field of problematisation that is announced by the politics of the aesthetic? This formulation, as has already been noted, has become indissociably linked to the thought of Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that aesthetics names an event that sees the collapse of the early modern regime of the arts (based on ‘mimesis’) while at the same time inaugurating a radically new epoch, describing it as a ‘new and paradoxical regime for identifying what is recognisable as art … [the] aesthetic regime of the arts’.⁶ But where exactly is the radicality of art to be found insofar as it is appropriated under the regimen of the aesthetic? And in what sense should it be viewed as paradoxical? It is with the arrival of modernity, with which the aesthetic regime is essentially coterminous, that a fundamental displacement of the value regime that had governed art for the previous age occurred. What the aesthetic regime announced was a paradigm shift in which truth could no longer be ascribed to art on representationalist grounds, but rather on the grounds of aesthetic validity (the question posed is not whether the artwork is truthful, but whether it is tasteful, beautiful, sublime). The reason for this is to be found in the central problem of the newly emergent discourse of aesthetics which articulated a need to establish sensibility rather than representation as the basis of aesthetic experience. The consequence: art became entirely autonomous with respect to a concept of truth founded on ratio or representational correspondence. The issue is already present in one of the founding statements of aesthetic thought, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics, published in 1750, where a clear distinction is made between aesthetic and logical truths – a distinction that is incorporated as the basic presupposition of aesthetic discourse thereafter. The end of the aesthetic, for Baumgarten, is the perfection of sensibility, whose object is the beautiful. Aesthetics is defined by him as the ‘science of sensual cognition’,⁷ and, as such, describes a ‘third concern’ (tertia cura) of truth: ‘truth … as it is known to the sensory’.⁸

The distinction of the aesthetic achieves its most celebrated philosophical expression in Kant’s Critique of Judgement with his dictum that the beautiful is formally purposeful, yet autonomous with respect to any positive (cognitive) or practical (moral) end: ‘Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end’.⁹ I judge a flower such as a tulip¹⁰ beautiful not because my estimation of it attributes any end or purpose to it (the flower is not beautiful because I understand it to be the reproductive organ of the plant) but on the autonomous basis that I find the internal organisation of its elements delightful or pleasing. An aesthetic judgement is not a theoretical cognition. It is not concerned with concepts; it does not identify the particular as subsumed under general laws, as found in the natural sciences. Nor is it concerned with the nature of right action, with the ‘science of ethics’. The discrimination of the aesthetic as a distinct sphere of judgement set apart from cognitive and moral acts not only constitutes aesthetic discourse as the foundation for the regime that identifies that which is specific to art, however; at the same time, it ensures the complete alienation of art from truth. Aesthetic validity provides art with its internal logic and the regime for identifying art with a means to preserve art’s separation from the world of non-art. Aesthetic separation is most explicitly formulated by Kant with the claim that the aesthetic faculty of ‘discriminating and estimating … contributes nothing to knowledge’.¹¹ The consequences of this are far reaching, as the philosopher Jay Bernstein has observed: what Kant institutes is a fateful discordance between art and truth. Bernstein argues (as does Habermas in fact¹²) that this is not an accidental consequence of Kantian thought, but is fundamental to his theory of modernity: ‘the Kantian categorial differentiation between truth, moral worth and aesthetic reflection [provides the] guiding thread [of modernity]’.¹³ It describes a process of the ‘separation of spheres, the becoming autonomous of truth, beauty and goodness from one another’.¹⁴ To the extent that modernity is structured around divisions that leave aesthetics bereft of truth, the ‘experience of art as aesthetical is the experience of art as having lost or been deprived of its power to speak the truth’.¹⁵ Modernity becomes the ‘site of beauty bereaved – bereaved of truth’ while being simultaneously deformed by its reduction of truth to ‘truth-only cognition’.¹⁶

This results, according to Bernstein, in the emergence of a paradox, however – one that will inform the ‘fate’ of art over the centuries that follow. No sooner is art ejected from the sphere of truth by aesthetic discourse than the autonomy to which it is consigned is reconstituted as a new and distinct scene of truth quite dissimilar from those governing the sciences and morality. From this point on, art constitutes itself as a third scene of truth, although one that stands in an equivocal and, crucially, critical relation to the way social objectivity is constructed under conditions of modernity. Relegated to the merely aesthetic, art nonetheless ‘comes to speak about the fate of truth and art in modernity’.¹⁷ And it is in relation to this idea that I think one can begin to understand the radical implications of the aesthetic as a distinct regime, as well as those contradictions that it embodies, summarised so memorably by Adorno in his striking aphorism: ‘Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.’¹⁸

To discern the proper parameters of that promise, I would like to attend more closely to Rancière, as there can be no discussion of art and its relation to politics today without contending with the challenges set by Rancièrean aesthetics. Now essential to Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime is that it stands in a homologous relation to politics understood as ‘dissensus’. Both politics and aesthetics are modes of dissensus insofar as a dissensus, in each respective case, describes an activity in which the rules and norms governing unreflected experience are suspended, and in which the ordinary conditions of experience, or what we might call the ‘common distributions of sense’, are disrupted. Art (under the aesthetic regime) and politics (grasped as dissensus) both redistribute bodies beyond their given place; each dislocates the pre-arranged positions of bodies and subjects within the fixed space of community, where everyone is assigned a role, or a specific part to play; each thus dismantles hierarchical modes of organisation and presentation. To the extent that dissensus opposes itself to hierarchy in principle, it possesses an egalitarian logic – one whose levelling effects are capable of fundamentally dissolving the terms of the social order and throwing open the sensory world to reconfigurations of the visible, the sayable and the doable. In prioritising the logic of dissensus, Rancière highlights the non-reducible character of the aesthetic and its politics, but also that of politics itself. Dissensus, although found in determinate social, political, and artistic situations, is not exhausted by the actual circumstances of dissent. It is why Rancière insists that politics is not about the struggle for ‘interests’ or for ‘power’. Lenin’s question ‘Who whom?’, or in Raymond Geuss’s less contracted form, ‘who what to whom for whose benefit’, no longer suffices as a definition of politics.¹⁹ (I think it does, but more on this later.) One reason Rancière holds this view is that wherever dissensus appears, it does so as a logic that supersedes any situation to which it can be applied: i.e., the logic of radical equality. This can be understood in the following way: radical equality is unlikely to ever be found in contexts of social struggle (hence the need for the struggle in the first place), and yet there can be no possibility for any political struggle that does not begin from the presupposition of equality. Equality is here understood as the a priori postulate of any dissensual activity whatsoever: its possibility must be assumed, even if in ‘reality’, no such equality exists. But it is also for this very reason that the assertion of an egalitarian logic enables both the suspension of what normally applies (an unequal distribution of the social) and the projection of an equal distribution where none can be found. Importantly, for Rancière, the very enactment of dissensus imposes an egalitarian logic on a situation where there is no equality. Dissensus becomes both an assertion of equality and a litigious demonstration of its absence.

But how then does this correspond to Rancière’s view that the aesthetic comprises the immanent horizon for what is possible (and impossible) when it comes to political art, constituting for the latter, as it were, an insuperable difficulty owing to the problems that arise as a consequence of Rancière’s association of aesthetics with dissensus? To fully understand this question, I begin with a comparison of the aesthetic regime and the regime that preceded it – the representational or mimetic regime (Rancière also describes a third regime, the ‘ethical regime of the image’, but because this is less important to the argument, I will pass over it here). Where the representative regime of art is concerned with the ordering of bodies and subjects, assigned to their proper roles and functions, the aesthetic regime (because it is essentially dissensual) undoes all such hierarchical orderings – releasing art from the idea that there is a proper or ‘true’ subject of art. Rancière explains this in rather hyperbolic terms:

With the triumph of the novel’s page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial and typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisan’s art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned.²⁰

What each of these moments indicates and testifies to, for Rancière, is the ‘equality of indifference’ in which what is ‘negated’ is ‘any relationship of necessity between a determined form and determined content’.²¹ It is this ‘equality of all subject matter’ that fundamentally undermines, not representation per se, but the logic of representation insofar as it institutes the precession of privileged images and preferential themes (the decision over what is fit for representation and what is unfit), the subordination of artistic technique – its modes of making (poiesis) to representational meaning (mimesis), and of artistic affect (aesthesis) to a prescribed feeling and thus fixed point of reception (an assigned means by which art can be socially valued). What each of these features of the representative regime achieves is the subordination of art to a normative conception that regulates art, but which does not properly belong to it. This is why the aesthetic regime, insofar as it makes possible the autonomous space of art, must inevitably be seen to promote, through the new modes of art it enables, an experience of autonomy that does not belong to the world of necessity (a world governed by productive forces, or the instrumentalisation of knowledge, or the rule of economic rationality). Without requiring or possessing any explicit political content, art nonetheless comes to embody a metapolitics: ‘The politics of art in the aesthetic regime of art, or rather its metapolitics, is determined by this founding paradox: in this regime, art is art insofar as it is also nonart, or is something other than art.’²²

What does it mean to say that art is more than just art, is also ‘nonart’? Under the aesthetic regime, art provides the possibility for an experience of autonomy and as such carries within it the ‘promise of emancipation’²³ beyond the world of art. But it is also precisely with this promise that art discovers its political limit. The reason is simple: the fulfilment of that promise would lead, writes Rancière, to the ‘elimination of art as a separate reality’.²⁴ What is meant by this, however, is somewhat ambiguous. There is nothing inherently paradoxical about art’s desire to fulfil its promise of emancipation unless it is a self-negating promise. This can be understood in two ways. Either art eliminates freedom in the very attempt to transcend the autonomy it possesses, or it eliminates itself when an emancipated world is established. If art were indeed able to redeem that emancipatory promise, it would be because an emancipated form of life had been actualised. And reconciled life would have no further need for art as a separate sphere of activity. Autonomous art would simply disappear. This is to say, the promise of emancipation is a paradox for art under the aesthetic regime regardless of whether an emancipated world is possible. Viewed, however, from the perspective of the world in which the aesthetic regime maintains or preserves that emancipatory promise, then the paradox becomes somewhat sharper. What it says is that it is conceivable that a world free from necessity is possible by means of art (art just is that conception), but only insofar as art appears as the form by which the world for whom its promise appears to be empirically irredeemable is negated. Art is paradoxical because its metapolitics consigns it to the undecidable zone that opens between the formal possibility that the promise of emancipation it bears might be redeemable and the practical concession to the empirical world of the impossibility of being freed from the claims of necessity. To express this, as Adorno might have done, art promises to suspend the tyrannical hold of necessity over the world by introducing into it a moment of negative freedom. Art’s promise is thus also its mode of conceding its bad faith.

To this can be added a final increment of ambiguity to Rancière’s story, which indicates the deeper insufficiency of a politics founded on the aesthetic promise. There is a politics of art, but not a politics that can take place in or by means of art. It is why Rancière, as with Adorno before him, evinces a high degree of scepticism regarding art’s supposed political effectiveness – something I will turn to shortly. Setting this issue aside, momentarily – are we not left nevertheless with a situation in which the politics of art can only be discerned from the vantage of the aesthetic – a perspective that is only available to the philosopher, who sets themselves up as the one able to fathom the secret meaning of art? There is no art work that makes a promise of emancipation – if it did, then it would immediately fall prey to the suspicion that it must be a political work of art, which Rancière rejects; and so, the promise