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"A smart and timely consideration of the work of Jacques Ranciere in the context of contemporary art."--Stephen Melville, co-editor of "Vision and Textuality"

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Communities of Sense

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................1Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics JACQUES RANCIRE.................................................................................31The Romantic Work of Art ALEXANDER POTTS.........................................................................................................51From Classical to Postclassical Beauty: Institutional Critique and Aesthetic Enigma in Louise Lawler's Photography TONI ROSS.....................79Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification RANJANA KHANNA.....................................................................111Dada's Event: Paris, 1921 T. J. DEMOS............................................................................................................135Citizen Cursor DAVID JOSELIT.....................................................................................................................153Mass Customization: Corporate Architecture and the "End" of Politics REINHOLD MARTIN.............................................................172Experimental Communities CARLOS BASUALDO AND REINALDO LADDAGA....................................................................................197Prcarit, Autorit, Autonomie RACHEL HAIDU......................................................................................................215Neo-Dada 1951-54: Between the Aesthetics of Persecution and the Politics of Identity SETH MCCORMICK..............................................238Post-Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills YATES MCKEE...........................................................................................267Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject EMILY APTER................................................................................294INTERVIEW with tienne Balibar....................................................................................................................317Bibliography......................................................................................................................................337Contributors......................................................................................................................................355Index.............................................................................................................................................359

Chapter One

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics

I do not take the phrase "community of sense" to mean a collectivity shaped by some common feeling. I understand it as a frame of visibility and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same meaning, which shapes thereby a certain sense of community. A community of sense is a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility. I call this cutting out and this linkage a partition of the sensible.

There is art insofar as the products of a number of techniques, such as painting, performing, dancing, playing music, and so on are grasped in a specific form of visibility that puts them in common and frames, out of their linkage, a specific sense of community. Humanity has known sculptors, dancers, or musicians for thousands of years. It has only known Art as such-in the singular and with a capital-for two centuries. It has known it as a certain partitioning of space. First off, Art is not made of paintings, poems, or melodies. Above all, it is made of some spatial setting, such as the theater, the monument, or the museum. Discussions on contemporary art are not about the comparative value of works. They are all about matters of spatialization: about having video monitors standing in for sculptures or motley collections of items scattered on the floor instead of having paintings hanging on the wall. They are about the sense of presence conveyed by the pictorial frame and the sense of absence conveyed by the screen that takes its place. This discussion deals with distributions of things on a wall or on a floor, in a frame or on a screen. It deals with the sense of the common that is at stake in those shifts between one spatial setting and another, or between presence and absence.

A material partition is always at the same time a symbolic partition. The theater or the museum shapes forms of coexistence and compatibility between something that is given and something that is not given. They shape forms of community between the visible and the intelligible or between presences and absences that are also forms of community, between the inside and the outside, and also between the sense of community built in their space and other senses of community framed in other spheres of experience. The relationship between art and politics is a relationship between two communities of sense. This means that art and politics are not two permanent realities about which we would have to discuss whether they must be interconnected or not. Art and politics, in fact, are contingent configurations of the common that may or may not exist. Just as there is not always art (though there is always music, sculpture, dance, and so on), there is not always politics (though there are always forms of power and consent). Politics exists in specific communities of sense. It exists as a dissensual supplement to the other forms of human gathering, as a polemical redistribution of objects and subjects, places and identities, spaces and times, visibilities and meanings. In this respect we can call it an "aesthetic activity" in a sense that has nothing to do with that incorporation of state power into a collective work of art, which Walter Benjamin named the aestheticization of politics.

Therefore, a relation between art and politics is a relation between two partitions of the sensible. It supposes that both terms are identified as such. In order to exist as such, art must be identified within a specific regime of identification binding together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility. The regime of identification under which art exists for us has a name. For two centuries it has been called aesthetics. The relationship between art and politics is more precisely a relationship between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. How can we understand this notion of the politics of aesthetics? This question hinges on a previous one: what do we understand by the name aesthetics? What kind of community of sense does this term define?

There is a well-known master narrative on this topic. According to that master narrative, known as the modernist paradigm, aesthetics means the constitution of a sphere of autonomy. It means that works of art are isolated in a world of their own, heterogeneous to the other spheres of experience. In this world, they are evaluated by inner norms of validity: through criteria of form, beauty, or truth to medium. From this, various conclusions could be drawn about the politicalness of art. First, artworks shape a world of pure beauty, which has no political relevance. Second, they...