Aesthetics, Poetics and Techno-Aesthetics

That artworks intervene politically is doubtful; when it does happen, most often it is peripheral to the work, if they strive for it, they usually succumb to their own terms.

— Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

This chapter attempts to outline a few approaches to art in order to demonstrate not only the diversity and the richness of art criticism and philosophy of art but also to present some of the main influences at work in this book. We would like to begin by borrowing Jacques Rancière's useful cartography of art as 'three major regimes of identification', that are, but cannot be reduced to, historical periods within history of art. These modes of identification are established by distinguishing different ways of linking the production of works of arts to their specific forms of visibility. First, in the 'ethical regime of arts', the images are judged according to their truth and their origin, and are conditioned by religion and law. Rancière here refers to Plato and his polemics against false images (simulacra), and therefore the ban on poetry and theatre. Indeed, this dichotomy between the real and the copy, the genuine and the artificial, has dominated the practice and theory of art till rather recently, where though the terms of the debate have changed, the frisson of the authentic continues to play itself out in different ways.

The second regime is the 'poetic or representative regime of arts' that is associated with Aristotle, due to his conceptualisation of the logical structure of narratives as consisting of a beginning, a middle and an end. The work of art in this regime expresses a particular shape, for the artist gives deliberate form to the raw material; this Aristotelian theory is also called 'hylomorphism'. Rancière notes that there is a hierarchy at work in this regime: the action and the narration prevail over the characters or the descriptions. It is the content and the meaning rather than the form that count. Interestingly, Rancière equates this representative regime of arts to the 'poetic' regime of arts in order to also include the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European academies of fine arts and their hierarchies of genres. We want to draw attention to Rancière's own understanding of poetics here, since there are other conceptions of poetics that can be mobilised to revitalise art and political criticism today.

The major contribution of Rancière to art theory is his renewal and displacement of 'aesthetics' as the third regime of identification. For him, aesthetics is no longer this science of feeling and taste that comes into play when one is brought face to face with an artwork. It is about the 'ways of sensible being' rather than 'ways of doing'. It is also in this regime of art that the logical and causal schemas of the representative regime of art (inherited from Aristotle) are abandoned, for instance in nineteenth-century novels. He diverges here from aesthetics in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, which was too philosophical, for they did not really refer to the great artists of their time in their aesthetic writings. For Baumgarten who first used this word in its modern sense in 1750, aesthetica meant the faculty of an inferior knowledge, produced by the contemplation of an artwork and the sensibilities it arouses rather than emerging from the intellect. Aesthetics was then imagined as a discipline of its own in which the domain of sensibility itself becomes an object of knowledge. The rationalist foundation of this discipline has little to do with what Rancière understands by aesthetics, even though he refers to the work of Friedrich Schiller who was a contemporary of and commentator on Kant and Hegel.

While Jimenez is right to insist that 'we can, without fear of an anachronism, speak of a ''Platonic aesthetic''' if we account for Plato's considerations on the essence of beauty, his definition of mimesis and the role of art in the city-state, Rancière himself follows from Deleuze and Lyotard's aesthetic theories, which are further supplemented by his re-activation of Schiller's 1794 work, Aesthetic Letters. Rancière attempts to democratise aesthetic enjoyment by removing the class bias associated with this attitude. Since the realm of the sensible does not match the realm of the intelligible — as Kant explained, the faculty of imagination deregulates the faculty of reason — it is precisely there that the aesthetic experience can announce or even materialise a new distribution of politics. The immanent and democratic order of aesthetics redistributes the roles and hierarchies in place in society. For Rancière, aesthetic experience rests on this idea of sharing: he uses the French word partage, often translated as 'distribution' in English. The aesthetic experience then works at creating the community, and everyone participates in the experience of the sensible.

FROM AESTHETICS TO POETICS

We begin our study from the same diagnosis as Rancière about the difficult relationship between art and politics, with philosophy as a mediator. While surrealists in the 1930s and situationists in the 1960s demonstrated the possibility of moving from the artistic realm of the avant-garde to a radical critique of politics, such a movement from the aesthetic to the political stopped in the 1970s and the 1980s. Instead, aesthetics became a refuge from the tumult of politics for some critical theorists and philosophers: Deleuze's books on cinema in the 1980s were first interpreted through this lens, as were some of Lyotard's works on the sublime in Kant, but it is Herbert Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension that is probably the best example of this retreat.

For Rancière, what art gives to politics is not projects of subordination or emancipation but what it already shares with politics: 'bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible'. Rancière does not think that aesthetic experience is a 'method' for emancipation; this would be too logical and belong to the Aristotlean representative regime of art. There is no royal road from art to politics, but 'scenes of dissensus'. This dissensus reorganises the sensible: 'it brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world'. It is a moment of rupture, suspension and play that lies potentially in every situation, when the capacities and the incapacities are re-distributed to produce new senses and meanings. In sum, what is crucial for Rancière is the already-existing true equality in the aesthetic attitude: 'it is the employment of the capacity of anyone whatsoever, of the quality of human beings without...