Ranciere: Critical Art and Dissensus

The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, describes politics as “the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together'”.¹ In this manner, he conceives politics in strongly aesthetic terms; it involves the redistribution of socially-configured sensible experience. Ranciere argues that possibilities for social change appear through moments of “dissensus” – conflicts “between two regimes of sense, two sensory worlds”.² Dissensual aesthetic experience “is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible”.³

Yet, however fundamentally political in its implication, dissensus, as an aesthetic phenomenon, cannot be reduced to a straightforward political means. Aesthetics, in Ranciere’s view, necessarily withdraws from direct political efficacy: “‘Aesthetic efficacy’ means a paradoxical kind of efficacy that is produced by the very rupturing of any determinate link between cause and effect”.⁴ In a similar way that German cultural critic, Theodor Adorno, criticises instrumentally geared political art, insisting that art highlights social contradictions rather than realising straightforward political goals⁵, Ranciere argues for a disjunction between art and programs of explicit social change. Art has the capacity to manifest dissensus, which is the primary medium of political change, but, once again, “this political effect occurs under the condition of an original disjunction, an original effect, which is the suspension of any direct relationship between cause and effect”.⁶

In order to clarify Ranciere’s paradoxical conception of the relation between politics and aesthetics, it is worth considering his critique of the Critical art tradition.⁷ Critical art, he argues, tends to both over and under value the political potential of art. On the one hand, it regards art as a means of enlightenment and emancipation – with the capacity to estrange ordinary perception and experience, so that underlying truths and scope for genuine freedom can be revealed. On the other hand, in failing to directly produce the desired emancipated community, it comes to lament its feeble socially transformative powers; leading significant strands of critical art, for instance, to turn their back altogether on the mediating image (traditional art forms) in an effort to manifest community directly via forms of ‘un-mediated’ social practice. The first mistake of over-valuing the political potential of art not only patronises the audience for art (reinforcing existing power relations) but also fails to recognise that the aesthetic represents a layer of mediation suspending dimensions of direct instrumental consequence. The second mistake (undervaluation) ignores how the dissensus of art can shape novel social possibilities within the context of an awkward, differentiated, never coherently realised space. As British art theorist, Claire Bishop, suggests, “art and the social are not to be reconciled or collapsed, but sustained in continual tension.”⁸

[My interest, however, is particularly in the notion of dissensus and its relation to the notion of disruption, making strange and interference. Dissensus suggests a similar motion of clashing forces – of juxtapostion – yet it also has positive implication, shaping new ‘distributions of the sensible’. Is a less adversarial position possible? Can we imagine devious bases of tension? More needed!]