A Breathing Space for Aesthetics and Politics: An Introduction to Jacques Rancière

The Status of the Image

Rancière has stated that the aim of his book The Politics of Aesthetics (Rancière, 2004b) had been to challenge the long history of aesthetics that repeats a stigmatic hierarchy between the image and truth, and thereby create some ‘breathing space’ – an intermediary zone that enables an affirmative engagement with the way art can modify the realm of the ‘visible, sayable and possible’ (Rancière, 2007a: 259). Rancière’s approach is a break with contemporary theorists and artists such as Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu, who he claims repeat the ‘Platonic disparagement of the mimetic image’ (Rancière, 2007b: 274) as they set up visuality, spectacle and spectatorship as an inherent source of deception, superficiality and alienation. He utterly rejects the assumption that the image invariably imposes an ideological distance between reality and interpretation, and that the subject, by being trapped in the abyss of images, is separated from the essence of his or her real humanity. Rancière also disputes the radicality of ‘formalist’ innovations that seek to empower the viewer to decode or embody the artwork’s intended political message, because he claims that they reinscribe the presumption that the primary position of the audience is passivity (Rancière, 2007b: 279).

From his analysis of modern visual techniques such as fragmentation and montage, Rancière outlined three basic modes of visual representation: naked images that serve as a depiction of the original; ostensive images that transform themselves as they react against the original referent; and metaphoric images that play on the ‘ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances’ (Rancière, 2007c: 24–5). It is the capacity of metaphoric images to go beyond mere reflection and mystification, and their potential to reconfigure the possible, that lead Rancière to assert that the status of the image is not just a mask that hides truth, or even a foil that can displace our grasp on reality, but the ‘supplement that divides it’ (Rancière, 2004a: 224–7).

The transformative potential that emerges from the ambiguity of metaphoric images is explored by Rancière through his twin concepts of the redistribution of the sensible and dissensus. However, it is also worth noting that underpinning both of these concepts is a perduring sense of contingency and an element of what, in his later writing, he calls mystery (Rancière, 2011a). For instance, even in his most polemical essays on the relation between art and domination he nevertheless concludes that the image retains an unpredictable capacity to reshape its own political horizons (Rancière, 2009a: 60). With Brecht in mind he cautions: ‘If politics coincides with an act of constructing political dissensus, there is something that the art in question does not control’ (Rancière, 2004b). Rancière’s claim that metaphoric images cannot anticipate and calculate their own effect is in opposition to the Habermasian view of aesthetic experience that is structured by the norms of communicative action (Rancière, 1999: 47). Neither the artist nor the philosopher has sovereign control over the destiny of metaphoric images. Such images contain a complex mixture of political awareness and aesthetic form. They do not just promote uncertainty, doubt and openness, but also present a shift of emphasis, a change of relations and a dispute over the place in which things belong. It is the displacement effect caused by the combination of previously unrelated elements that dislodges the existing categories of perception. It is this shift in perspective that allows for new modes of addressing an object and representing social relations.

For Rancière, art is the sensory awareness of the world through which the identity of things and the image of the people is formed (Rancière, 2009c: 57). He argues that the function of the image is not only to mimic the object or to reflect the existent voices in the community, it is also the means by which a new understanding of things or the identity of the community articulates its emergence. These new meanings come into being by dis-identifying from the categories by which they were previously constituted and wresting open a new language. Mystery and contingency are intrinsic features of aesthetics and politics because the contestation between subjection and emancipation is not a linear process that can be measured in terms of neat causes and effects. The point at which an image goes beyond the naked and ostensive modalities, and assumes a metaphoric status can never be simply pre-determined. Rancière defines the distinctive force of metaphoric images by their capacity to entwine contrary elements and reconfigure the form of subjectivities. However, while the sphere of meaning is open, Rancière also argues that this mode of intepretation is embedded in what he calls an ‘aesthetic regime’. We perceive the image through our sensory faculties but our sensory awareness of the image cannot exist on its own, it provokes and depends on a system for organizing aesthetic expressions.

Framing Art and Politics

The productive force of the image is not derived from its own internal formations but, as Rancière argues, it is embedded in a particular conception of aesthetics. Rancière challenges many of the orthodox views on aesthetics that define it as a discipline for either appreciating the formal properties of a given artistic object or articulating the affect that comes from an encounter with art. He argues that it is in this discourse that artistic practices, sensible affects and intellectual thought are constituted and knotted together. Aesthetic experience is always constituted through a system of identification that he calls a regime. He claims that there are three regimes for representing aesthetic experience. First, there is the Platonic model – or what he called the ethical regime – that bound the meaning of an image to its capacity to reflect the ‘ethos’ of community. This is followed by the Aristotelian model – the representative regime – that established the meaning of art through its capacity to define its own rules for organizing its mimetic and evaluative functions. Third, there is the aesthetic regime that, Rancière tells us in the interview for this special issue, only came into existence in the ‘last two centuries’.

In the context of modernity he claims that the three regimes coexist with each other. This coexistence is defined in both antagonistic and positive terms. The aesthetic regime challenges both the priority given to ethical considerations and the presumption of representational autonomy. As Gabriel Rockhill notes in his translator’s introduction to The Politics of Aesthetics: ‘The aesthetic regime puts this entire system of norms into question by abolishing the dichotomous structure of mimesis in the contradictory identification between logos and pathos’ (in Rancière, 2004b: 4). Rockhill also asserts that: ‘the emergence of literature in the nineteenth century as distinct from les belles-lettres was a central catalyst in the development of the aesthetic regime of art’ (in Rancière, 2004b: 5). However, Rockhill also observes that in Rancière’s writing on film there is an acknowledgement of a positive contradiction in the coexistence between the representative and aesthetic regimes of art. In literature, and later in visual art and film, Rancière argued that there was a ‘union of conscious and unconscious processes’, as well as the abolition of ‘the hierarchies that privileged genres, codes and conventions of representation’ (Rancière, 2004b: 5). Hence, the realization of the aesthetic regime is also related to the invention of new visual and literary techniques that were used by the avant-garde to create new relationships between the visible and the invisible (Rancière, 2007c: 5), and that the aesthetic regime was allied to the political demands for democracy and equality (Rancière, 2009d: 36). The aesthetic regime is evident in the way that artists and writers began to see art in situations and make art out of materials that were previously considered to be outside the boundaries of aesthetics. Art, in the aesthetic regime, is therefore defined by the extent to which it has highlighted new spheres of artistic expression, expanded the frontiers of artistic interaction and thereby stimulated new modes of consciousness. The parallels between art in the aesthetic regime and the discourse of equality after the French Revolution can be seen in the analogy between the rejection of the hierarchical vision of society that confined the will of the people or the form of art to either a natural order or a pre-determined place.

The concept of the aesthetic regime has been a useful framework for mapping the emergence and coexistence of contested forms of aesthetic practice. Sven Lütticken uses this concept to tease out the rival perspectives on autonomy. The common association of autonomy in activist circles is with the Italian political movement of the 1960s. However, in art theory it dates back to Kantian philosophy and then splits in the divergent interpretations offered by Greenberg and Adorno. Lütticken has set out to both separate these perspectives and then critique the tendency in the debates on artistic activism to combine and at times conflate these ideas. Lütticken remains sceptical of the view that any system is capable of developing in line with its own internal logic and also disputes that the modern moral subject is free to act in a disinterested manner. Like Rancière, he rejects the centrality of the concept of aesthetic autonomy in the definition of modern art.

The aesthetic regime starts with the constitution of art in a heteronomous field. Unlike the art historians associated with the journal October, who routinely define the process of mingling between high and low art as the marker of postmodernity, Rancière prefers to see these traces as evidence of the ‘continual shifts’ in modernity (Rancière et al., 2008). He insists that art in the aesthetic regime is always formed through its capacity to mix different media and disrupt conventional categories. For Rancière, the implications of this aesthetic regime are three-fold. First, it trained the gaze to consider the boundary of what is art and non-art as a flexible and porous entity. Furthermore, the boundary was no longer seen as a limit point, but as the very starting point for defining the constitution of art. Second, it shifted the discourse of aesthetics from an account of ‘good’ taste and ‘noble’ distinctions, as it directed attention towards the processes of intelligibility. Third, it undercut the presumption that aesthetic theory invariably fails to grasp the ineffable qualities of art (Rancière, 2009a: 14).

At the centre of Rancière’s conceptualization of the juncture between aesthetics and politics is a contest for sovereignty over the forms of representation and the faculties of perception. He rejects the conception of the sublime in art that Lyotard suggested is manifested in its capacity ‘to present that there is something that is not presentable’ (Lyotard, 1991: 125). Rancière refuses to accept that art is the conduit to a category of experience that is unrepresentable, as he prefers to see the representation of Otherness as part of the struggle to give form to sensory perceptions. This contest is articulated through his key category: ‘distribution of the sensible’, which refers to a system for identifying a form that is held in common, and the terms by which its visibility is structured. It is a way of seeing that proceeds from the reorganization of the terms of inclusion and exclusion. In the specific context of art it refers to the sensory apprehension by which an artistic practice achieves its distinctive visibility, and the intervention into the institutional structures in which it belongs. Rancière claims that this process is never fixed and closed. On the contrary, it is through the ‘distribution of the sensible’ that symbolic and social transformation arises. The category of ‘distribution of the sensible’ is the central plank for explaining the process of transformation. It is the key category that is used in fields of both aesthetics and politics. Political emancipation only occurs through the active involvement of people who are normally excluded from the process of defining the rules of the everyday, and their ability to create new terms of perception and interaction. Similarly, art is art insofar as it mobilizes the distribution of the sensible. The central examples of the emergence of the aesthetic regime are drawn from the avant-gardist literary and visual techniques of juxtaposition and collage that he saw as the ‘aesthetic anticipation of the future’ (Rancière, 2004b: 29).

In an earlier work Gerald Raunig also examined the legacy of the avant-garde’s formal innovations and the significance of collective art practices. Raunig’s evaluation of the historical claims of the avant-garde to ‘fuse art with everyday life’ is far more sceptical than Rancière’s position, and his attention to the function of collective action in aesthetic transformation is much more sympathetic (Raunig, 2007: 17). In his article for this special issue Raunig extends his reflection on the constitution of time that occurs through the renunciation of the given divide between art, labour and life. Raunig begins by addressing Rancière’s critique of the division between art and activism, but then heads out to explore a range of examples that have established ‘self-forming forms of living’. From Kafka’s allegory on the paradoxical status of artistic labour, or Foucault’s exploration of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ in the life of Diogenes the Cynic, to the initiation of non-hierarchical structures of representation in the Occupy movements, Raunig finds examples of the effort to ‘streak time’ and create an other world. This approach, which starts with the critical break with the world, is different from Rancière’s conception, which privileges the invention of techniques that can break with the dominant modes of perception. For Rancière, the use of a break, or what he calls the ‘division’, is not just a formal technique but the principal means for the distribution of the sensible. The idea of the ‘break’ in Rancière’s texts is crucial both to the materiality of a collage, ‘which combines the foreignness of aesthetic experience with the becoming-art of ordinary life’, and to his rejection of art that elevates the pursuit of ethical or political goals above ‘the sensible heterogeneity which founds aesthetic promise’ (2009a: 39).

According to Rancière, the potency of these aesthetic practices resides not in the resolution of the contradiction between freedom and alienation, art and life, but in the articulation of a break with the given political order. The often-stated goal of merging art and politics is rejected as a trap that either negates their respective functions, or subordinates one to the rule of the other. Hence, the critique of the autonomy of art is not found in the total immersion of art with life, for the loss of a border would demand a consensus that cancels politics. It would displace the critical function of seeing things differently and annul the need to express the voices that are not heard in the here and now. For Rancière the distinctive force of art is concentrated on its capacity to both destroy the dominant hierarchies of representation, and establish a new community of participants. Equality is experienced through this double action (Rancière, 2004b: 14). Hence, Rancière defines the process of transformation through the interplay between the rise of new subjects and the emergence of new forms of knowledge. By giving primacy to the distribution of the sensible, Rancière stresses that aesthetics and politics are not discernible in isolation from each other, but as two forms that are forged within their independent ‘regimes of identification’ (Rancière, 2009a: 26). Hence he proposes that aesthetics and politics are different ways, distinctive discourses, unique modes of addressing the task of the distribution of the sensible. While they operate within their own system they do not exist in separate realities. They share a common space and both have their respective capacity to suspend the normal coordinates of sensory experience and imagine new forms of life.

In short, aesthetics is engaged in the distribution of the sensible as it invents specific forms that link the realm of individual affect to a social way of being. Hence the intervention of aesthetics is always political because the ‘principle behind an art’s formal revolution is at the same time the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience’ (Rancière, 2004b: 17) However, while the principle of the distribution of the sensible underpins both aesthetics and politics, Rancière goes one step further as he claims that the aesthetic regime precedes the political (Rancière, 2004b: 34). By stressing that the ‘real must be fictionalised in order to be thought’, Rancière lays claim to aesthetics as a regime of thought that can challenge the established order of politics.

While Rancière’s work challenges the negative ideology of the image, overthrows the claim that the politics of art is neither in the mere depiction of political struggle nor buried in the splendid autonomy of form, it has thus far remained as a philosophical reflection on aesthetics. Within this mode of philosophical reflection there is nevertheless a distinctive methodology that activates his principled concept of dissensus. As I noted at the beginning of this article, Rancière has a tendency both to set up a disagreement with a prevailing orthodoxy, such as the ‘reigning post-Situationist mood’, and put forward an alternative sense of what is possible and thereby lever open another ground upon which equality is manifested.

I always try to think in terms of horizontal distributions, combinations between systems of possibilities, not in terms of surface and substratum. Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established. I have tried to conceive of a topography that does not presuppose this position of mastery. (Rancière, 2004b: 49)

This method stands in stark contradistinction to the tradition of critical thinking that proposed that the path to emancipation followed the necessary and prior learning of the structures of subjection and domination. Without the demystification of the conditions of exploitation, or the exposure of the ‘invisible hand’ of domination, it was assumed that ‘the people’ would remain duped and complicit in their unfreedom. Rancière prefers to think of emancipation as something that is already in the hands of the people, rather than a state of mind that the people might acquire after a proper education. Emancipation is a position that already exists in the present rather than a gift that at best lurks in the future.

In a recent critique of Rancière’s account of the emergence of the aesthetic, Tony Bennett (2011) observes that its distinctive authority relies ‘precisely on a gesture of diasavowal’ and that it takes its form from a ‘displaced form of Christian metaphysics’. Perhaps Bennett is over-emphasizing Rancière’s focus on the individual’s capacity for renunciation and underplaying the expression for collective inclusion. However, this critique does raise the complex question of where the aesthetic draws its power from to produce change. Does Rancière’s idea that the power of the aesthetic comes from the individual act of the imagination rely on a version of the liberal autonomous subject, or is it embedded in specific historical formations that require a closer understanding of its implication in collective and social practices?

These broader political questions are also relevant starting points for re-thinking methodological questions for contemporary aesthetics. In the context of art, the radical challenge is not confined to either deciphering deceptive images or establishing an equivalence between the visual spectacle of aesthetics and the spectacular forms of political domination. In this respect, Rancière’s approach is helpful in that it avoids the fatal assumption that the subject is already duped by the structures of domination, refuses the melancholic disposition which only sees decay in creativity, and rejects the conflation of the image with a tool of deception. Moreover, by wrestling with and against art, he re-stages the role that the artist and the theorist can play in the scene of dissensus. Despite this robust engagement, his method still holds back from a crucial dimension in contemporary visual practice.

Towards a New Methodology

The need for an alternative methodology was made apparent in the rather trenchant disputes over the status of relational art. In Aesthetics and its Discontents Rancière (2009a) dismissed relational art for being merely derisive of power and turning art in on itself. He also rejected both the aesthetic value and political force of artistic strategies that are formed in direct relationship with new social movements. In fact, he goes so far as to describe the effect of relational art as ‘undoing the alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality’ (Rancière, 2009a: 21). This rather severe judgement is not, as Nicolas Bourriaud (2009: 23) has counter-claimed, a result of either his failure to see the actual aesthetic choices or his lack of attunement towards the politics of precarity. His criticism comes directly from his proposition that the force of an aesthetic and political act follows from its function in the distribution of the sensible. Relational art is, in his view, always heading towards some point of convergence, in which the meaning is determined by the rule of ethics.

Now an ethical turn in art might not sound so objectionable. However, for Rancière ‘ethics is a kind of thinking in which an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action’ (Rancière, 2009a: 110). This implies a set of restrictions and a set of dependencies, or what Rancière calls – in his rebuttal to Lyotard’s (1991) assertion that the ethics of the Other dominates the aesthetic experience – the enslavement of the human mind (Rancière, 2009a: 104). In short, Rancière rejects the tendencies in relational art because he sees them as being subsumed by a moral imperative to achieve consensus, and as examples of a kind of regression into the Platonic model of art, in which art served as a mere reflection of the ethos of a community. If art submits to the service of pre-determined social or ethical commitment, it also suffocates its own potential to produce radical dissensus.

While the proposition that art should not be subordinated to the a priori dictates of ethical consensus may be correct, the judgement that relational art is bound to such a directive may be premature. Rancière quite rightly challenges some of the social principles upon which relational art has been justified. However, even if we deploy his own formulation that the aesthetic regime is born from the tension between the break with the categories of perception and the invention of new forms of life, then our ability to test the condition of the new forms of living will require more than a conceptual analysis. The latter may well be sufficient for discerning the techniques that constitute a break in perceptual coordinates, but how does one measure the emergence of new life forms?

Relational art is but one example in a range of contemporary visual practices that require a new critical approach. Thomas Hirschhorn’s contribution to this special issue provides a strong example of the need for a more complex engagement with the issues of duration and context. In his presentation to the symposium he recounted the project of The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival 2009, which took place in the outer suburbs of Amsterdam and where he made it clear that ‘I was present all the time, producing all the time … I asked the locals for help’, they were ‘my partners, paid workers, the first members of the audience, and my neighbors … I lived there for the duration of the project.’ Isabell Lorey, while commenting on the emergence of new modes of political representation during the early stages of the Occupy movement, made a similar observation that the significance of these claims also required a close level of engagement and participation. Lorey saw these non-identitarian modes of assembly as an exemplification of Rancière’s concept of dissensus. She recognized how these movements were seeking to break out of what Rancière calls a ‘representationist police order’, but she also notes that the process of political transformation did not follow any road map but was being tried out in the present. What Lorey describes as a ‘presentist democracy’ has close connections to Hirschhorn’s mode of including the voices and decision-making power of neighbours. Hirschhorn’s instigation of a ‘non-exclusive audience’ has parallels to Rancière’s elaboration of the political which arises from the taking part of those who previously have had no part in politics. The striking connection between Lorey’s analysis of the political movement and Hirschhorn’s reflections on his artistic project is that they proceed from the exploration of the emergent forms of self-invention and head towards the constitution of an autonomous collective.

In order to gain a sense of what actually happens in these artistic projects, and the various occupations that occurred throughout the world in 2011, a critic would need to be there for a considerable length of time and be open to the cosmopolitan imaginary through which the work is constituted. These collaborative, immersive, boundless, dialogic works are often confined to a process in which there is no single object to look at and evaluate. These are works that come into existence through the life worlds of the participants. To fully engage with these site-specific, collaborative works that often unfold over a long duration and through multiple trajectories, one needs to be an active participant. In such situations Brian Holmes (2007: 290) has claimed that it is not possible to appreciate what is happening without being there and, as Grant Kester (2004) and Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty (2011) have noted, ethnographic techniques are necessary tools for an engaged form of art criticism. The influential curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has also highlighted the significance of duration and impermanence in relation to contemporary art. Drawing on a dialogue with the artist Tino Sehgal in relation to a work that Obrist curated called 12 Rooms, he reports that:

The notion of ‘art’ that was generated by sculptors and painters in the early 19th century, and was fully articulated and established by the 1960s, is detaching itself from the material origins and venturing into other realms in the 21st century. 12 Rooms embraces classical sculpture, but places a human on the pedestal. When the last visitors leave and the museum closes its doors, the sculptures will walk out as well. The show will journey to other cities for years to come and will slowly grow as, with each reincarnation, a new room will be added. (Obrist, 2012)

Art historians like David Summers (2003: 33) have conceded that the conventional art historical approaches, based on either a visual analysis of the formal resemblances between artworks or the historiography of the artist’s origin, are inadequate tools for addressing both cosmopolitan dialogues in art and the capacity of art to be a medium for ‘the first impulses in which the world is “formed” and made into a characteristic unity’. Mark Cheetham (2009) has also acknowledged that there is a need to find the ‘connective tissues that enable artists to be properly placed and appropriately mobile’. Marsha Meskimmon’s (2011: 5) attempt to track the ways artists engage ‘with the processes and practices of inhabiting a global world’, and participate ‘in a critical dialogue between ethical responsibility, locational identity and cosmopolitan imagination’, is one of the first attempts to outline a new cosmopolitan approach in art history.

Given that Rancière’s perspective on art and politics places greater emphasis on agency and expresses confidence in the emancipatory potential of social interactions, this theoretical standpoint is not antithetical to a conjunction of a new empirical approach that would seek to track the unpredictable interactions that may emerge from collaborative projects. Such innovations are not incompatible with Rancière’s key concept of the ‘equality of intelligences’. However, they do pose the challenge of situating them within a perspective that is prepared to conduct a kind of multi-sited ‘fieldwork’. George E. Marcus’s (2006) reformulation of ethnography as a mode of ‘epistemic partnership’ also has the potential to deepen our understanding of the co-production of knowledge between artists and participants when they are engaged in projects that have strong relational and robust dialogical dimensions. Marcus’s innovation in fieldwork techniques was also premised on a re-examination of the role of collaboration. Marcus acknowledged that the concept of collaboration ‘led a shadowy existence in formal discussions on method’ as it was reduced to a means by which the author established a ‘rapport’ with their subjects in order to facilitate the data collection that would be subsequently processed and incorporated within the ‘authoritative framework’ of the final report.

Marcus was also critical of the tendency towards an unethical appropriation of the knowledge provided by ethnographic subjects, and the presumed distinction between the data donated by insiders and the authoritative report generated by the anthropologist. He argued that this hierarchy was based on an untenable illusion that only the outsider possessed the necessary apparatus for the knowledge-making process. Marcus observed that in the age of global mobility, with all its attendant complex interactions, there is also a radical transformation in the agency and reflexive capacities of insiders. The insiders see outsiders coming through a jagged prism of interruption, opportunity, invasion and hospitality. He argued that members of a community no longer see themselves as stewards of a specific worldview that is rooted in a fixed territory, but as agents capable of upholding and modifying the residual forms of their cultural identity as it interacts with forces from remote and unknown parts of the world. The critical task of evaluating an idea in a field of rival concepts is no longer the provenance of the outsider. Marcus argues that the consequence of recognizing the insider’s agency in the critical knowledge-making process is that it has elevated the function of collaboration from being a mere step in establishing a ‘rapport’ for the purpose of a primary data-gathering task, to a more complex feedback process in which both insiders and outsiders are tethered as ‘epistemic partners’.

In the absence of a cultural code that has a pre-determined mode of assimilating the effects of radical mobility, everyone is engaged in what Marcus calls ‘speculative investigation’ on the ‘breaking up, and morphing of things that are more anticipated or emergent, than present and explicitly conceived’. When the meaning of things is unstable and unpredictable then the status of documentation will always remain incomplete. Finding answers to the ‘problems of our time’ is not as simple as excavating and validating pre-existing forms of cultural knowledge. Marcus is pointing to a challenge in the formation of the cultural meanings that emerge from the interaction with global forces, and whose identity is yet to come. He is claiming that the anthropologist/artist can assume a collaborative role in the gestation of new social meanings. If ethnography and collaborative art projects have recognized the need to move on from documenting culture, then this shift not only heightens the ethical obligations of partnership, but also brings them closer to what Rancière called the emancipatory potential in the associational modalities of learning.

In Rancière’s and Marcus’s writing one can find a common belief that ordinary people possess the inherent capacities to create meaning from the context of their everyday life. By adopting the role of an ‘epistemic partner’ the artist is no longer in an observational position of exteriority that is somehow detached from the event, but is inserted as a co-partner whose presence will be one of the forces that shapes the process. Rancière’s analysis of art as an emancipatory practice is based on the recognition that both the artist and the public assume an active role in constructing the creative meaning. He stresses that the act of perception is always an active engagement with the conditions of spectatorship. Seeing is not a disembodied intellectual exercise that alienates the body. Seeing is on a continuum with acting. This conjunction of the sensorial process with the manifestation of action suggests that the reception of art is always pregnant with political responses. The work of art becomes an intermediary object in the ongoing production of meaning. Just as the artist is not only transmitting an idea, but is also creating a field for the transmission of ideas, the spectator no longer ‘looks at’ or ‘for’ the meaning that is in the work. Rather than art being seen as a destination point for meaning, it is seen as a station that activates the spectator’s self-awareness.

Rancière’s confidence in the equality of intelligences has nothing to do with the elevation of prior learning or the delivery of a miraculous formula for instant enlightenment. It is drawn from his belief in the inherent capacity that everyone has for learning by means of association. Metaphorical thinking – seeing similarities among dissimilarities – is the process by which he claims that everyone learns their mother tongue: ‘by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard’ (Rancière, 2007b). It is the activation of this capacity for perceiving, recognizing, relating and discovering connections that provides, for Rancière, the crucial link between aesthetic experience and political engagement. By showing a non-hierarchical relationship to knowledge, Rancière moves the understanding of collaboration from a one-sided exercise in instruction to a mutual process of problem solving.

In art criticism the sceptical and derogatory approaches towards collaboration follow from a deeply ingrained mistrust of collective production. Critical appreciation of collaboration has tended to remain within an instrumentalist paradigm – within which partners are recruited to complete specialized tasks, and the ethics of this relationship is confined to the process of attribution and remuneration for their specific contribution. Hal Foster presented an even more sceptical view of collaboration when he stressed that the humanist ideals of sharing and empathy are doomed by the reluctance of most artists to let go of their privileged authorial status. Foster (1996: 197) concluded that this failure to go beyond the position of detached observer blocked any genuine dialogue with the other. As Marcus would argue, this is not the way to do fieldwork in a global world and, as Rancière might say, a cunning manipulation of others is not a sign of intelligence in art.

Learning to ‘be’ with others and making the time to be ‘there’ has radical methodological implications for art criticism. It would require a closer attention to the process of mediation in contemporary cultural production. Mediation usually refers to the alteration of an object as it is transferred from one context or symbolic order to another. In the 1960s, there was a tendency to assume that mediation was another step towards the alienation of the art object. Even more conspicuous was the association of the mediating function of critics and curators as mere parasites and conformists. As Joseph Kosuth declared, the radical function of conceptual art was to cut out the role of the art critic (Andreasen and Larsen, 2007). Gilles Deleuze promoted an alternative view. For him the primary aim of mediators is to keep things in flow and to encourage others to get past conventional blockages and find new routes. Following on from Deleuze (1990), we can conclude that the work of artistic mediation occurs in the indeterminate space through which people pass and construct their own narratives. If the role of mediators was fully scrutinized in the field of cultural production, this would invariably challenge the ‘idealized’ position of the artist as the sole driver of aesthetic transformation, and move it inside the processes of social production. Recognition of these positional shifts would also enable a critical understanding of the artistic ambition to be in the contemporary, rather than serve as either precursors of or belated respondents to social changes.

All of Rancière’s investigations into aesthetics are premised on a three-fold distinction in the condition of spectatorship: active, passive and emancipated. Rancière claims that while avant-gardist techniques sought to awaken the passive viewer and engage their critical faculties in the processes of imaginative identification, this practice still retained the ‘stultifying’ belief that aesthetic meaning was concealed behind formal appearances, and that the artist’s imperious message was the focal point of interpretation. The condition of the emancipated spectator involved a break from this singular construction of the sensible, as it is articulated by means of what he calls ‘dissensus’. This means that the spectator is not only actively involved in discerning the real meaning of the artwork, but rather uses the artwork as a platform to commence a process of reconfiguring their own sense of what is perceptible. By debunking the fixed correlation between image and illusion, expanding the notion of agency in critical interpretation and suggesting that this process of subjection is not just a standpoint for defining the possibilities of collectivity but the articulation of the ‘collectivization of capacities’, Rancière (2009c: 49) makes significant strides in breaking open the terms of spectatorship.

However, the limitation of Rancière’s approach follows from the assumption that the condition of contemporary spectatorship is a continuation of classical linear perspective. Rancière’s commentary on art commences from the classical position of the viewer who stands before a stage, a screen or an artwork. Yet the terms of spectatorship in contemporary art are, as I have argued, entangled in the nexus of mobility and mediation. Where does one stand when you are amidst multiple screens? What is the ideal vantage point of projects that break out towards divergent trajectories and develop over extensive periods? Who can claim to have seen an artwork that has no defined beginning or end? Rancière is not totally blind to this question. His analysis of the French collective Urban Encampment constantly hovers around the problem of connecting the ‘mobility of the gaze’ with the ‘shimmering forest’ of signs (Rancière, 2009c: 53). These situations would require not only a capacity to adopt multi-perspectival viewpoints, and an ability to translate across unprecedented cultural and formal differences, but they also prompt the recognition of a more perplexing phenomenon, a mode of spectatorship that is formed through what I call ‘ambient perspective’. Rancière is correct to claim that the challenge of collaborative and socially engaged art practices is not confined to a dispute between political utility and aesthetic purity. However, his conception of the emancipated spectator must also be exposed to the tests of mediation in a world of mobile cultures and ambient significations.

In a context in which the artwork is formed in the process of encountering others, making your own multi-media narratives, assembling meaning from found fragments, then the debate between aesthetics and politics also requires a critical examination of how the experience of mobility not only multiplies the positions and perspectives from which perception occurs but also how it transforms the conditions of spectatorship. This presents unprecedented challenges for grasping the relationship through which the subject and the collective are mutually apprehended, and the interplay between the aesthetic forms of representation and the techniques of communicative feedback. How are the concepts and experience of self, community, narrative, image and context constituted when the tasks of verifying one interpretation against another, or comparing observations, is potentially overwhelmed by the teeming signs and competing systems that now jostle for space in the zone of the public imaginary? The broadest aim of this special section is to see how Rancière’s work has both enabled some breathing space in the old political debates and stimulated movement towards some new horizons in aesthetics.