beyond the politics of reception: jacques rancière and the politics of art

Beyond the Politics of Reception:

Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art

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ABSTRACT: Jacques Rancière’s work has become a major reference point for discussions of

art and politics. However, while Rancière’s negative theses (about what “political art” is

not) are becoming widespread and well understood, his positive thesis is still poorly

understood, owing partly to Rancière’s own formulation of the issue. I first clarify

Rancière’s account of the links between politics and art. I then explore a gap in this

account; Rancière has stuck too closely to a politics of art’s reception. I argue for a

politics of art production, which would expand the possible engagement between

politics and art.

KEYWORDS: Rancière, Jacques / aesthetics / politics / political art

1. Introduction

Jacques Rancière’s account of the relationship between politics and aesthetics—and, a fortiori, the

relationship between politics and art—is complicated, at best; one might go even further and say that it

is downright confusing, even intentionally so. Take, for example, the two turns of phrase that we find

throughout Rancière’s work: “the politics of aesthetics” and “the aesthetics of politics.” It would seem

that these turns of phrase are specifically formulated to suggest a direct relationship between two

concepts: “politics” and “aesthetics.” But Rancière warns us in several places throughout his corpus that

Final publication available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s11007-016-9369-1

2 | Matthew Lampert L a m p M 4 1 4 @ n e w s c h o o l . e d u

“aesthetics has its own politics, just as politics has its own aesthetics.”1 In fact, it will turn out that one of

the complicating factors here is the rather unfortunate choice of terminology: By “politics” and

“aesthetics,” Rancière means very different things in each expression. The word “aesthetics” in the

phrase “the aesthetics of politics” refers to αἴσθησις, the way in which politics works on fundamental

divisions of what is seen and heard; while in the “politics of aesthetics,” aesthetics refers to the

“aesthetic regime of art,” the contemporary understanding of art as an autonomous field, rooted far

more directly in the German Ästhetik and only indirectly in αἰσθητικός. Likewise, “the aesthetics of

politics” references Rancière’s more typical sense of “politics,” the interruption and displacement of a

distribution of the sensible by the construction of a new political subjectivation. The term “politics” in

the phrase “the politics of aesthetics,” however, is almost intentionally misleading; “The politics of

aesthetics would more accurately be named as a metapolitics,” Rancière writes in a recent footnote,

adding that he chose the phrase “the politics of aesthetics” “for the sake of commodity.”2 It makes for a

snappier turn of phrase, to be sure; but those familiar with Rancière’s term “metapolitics” should

immediately see how misleading it is to label such a thing “politics.” I will return to metapolitics in more

detail below, but in short: Metapolitics is not really “politics” at all for Rancière, but is instead a

disavowal or avoidance of politics!

The clearer we are about what Rancière means, in other words, the more it would seem that his

thought is actually dismissive of any direct relationship between politics and art, the so-called “politics”

of aesthetics rather being a mode of disavowing or avoiding real politics. Indeed, as Oliver Davis notes,

Rancière’s “account of the politics of art is more modest about art’s capacity to intervene politically than

perhaps many artists and critics would have hoped.”3 Compared to the dramatic politics of “committed

literature” or the lofty claims made on behalf of modernist painting, Rancière’s account of the politics of

1 Rancière (2009c, p. 285).

2 Rancière (2009c, p. 326n. 8).

3 Davis (2010, p. 157).



art is downright deflationary—and rightly so. If Rancière’s account of the politics of art serves to force us

to rethink some of our uncritical assumptions, then it is all around for the better. However, we might ask

if Rancière ultimately bends the stick a little too far in the opposite direction. In this essay, I will attempt

to show that Rancière limits the political importance of artworks solely to an aleatory process of their

reception and appropriation. He seems to suggest that there cannot be anything necessarily political

about any particular work of art before (or outside of) the effects it might happen to produce in an

unintended spectator or reader. By contrast, I will argue that the politics of art need not be limited to

the (unpredictable) effects of its consumption. In this matter, it is Rancière whose critique shares the

same assumption as the position he’s criticizing: that for an artwork to have political efficacy, it must

move the spectator in some way. But this is a politics of art’s reception, and not a politics of art itself. In

the final two sections of this essay, I will therefore tentatively explore the possibility of a politics of art

production.

2. Terminology

It seems important that we get Rancière’s arguments right before attempting to move to accept,

dismiss, or amend them. I will therefore spend the bulk of this essay simply trying to pin down

Rancière’s thought vis-à-vis a couple of questions: What is at stake in attempting to link politics and art?

Is art ever political? If so, when and how—what does it mean to speak of “political” or “politicized” art?

For the sake of clarity—and also for the benefit of readers who may be less familiar with Rancière’s work

(though such readers in the English-speaking world grow fewer each day)—I will begin by laying out

some vocabulary, addressing the rather specialized (and multiple) meanings Rancière gives to seemingly

familiar terms. I will then examine some passages from Rancière’s work closely, in an attempt to sketch

out the basic structure of his argument(s) with respect to the politics of art. This, in turn, will finally lead

me, near the end of this article, to lay out some criticisms of the way Rancière has handled the question

of political art.



The definition of “politics” for which Rancière is best known is framed in opposition to what

Rancière calls “the police.” The police—not to be confused with law-enforcement officials—is a

conjunction of ways of acting and ways of understanding action, a combination of what is done with the

justification for those ways of doing things. The police, for Rancière, is the “political” form taken of what

he calls the “distribution of the sensible”: a logic (and implicit set of rules) governing what is seen and

heard, what makes sense, things taken for granted, etc.4 What makes the police a “political” discourse of

the sensible is that it is the logic governing social roles, the “proper” place of each person or body in the

community, as well as the definition of “public goods” and the parceling out thereof. Politics, in the

proper sense, is a disruption of this police logic; it is thus not some stable and independent thing, but is

instead always parasitic in some sense upon the police logic it disrupts. The activity of politics takes the

form of “political subjectivation”: the creation of a collective identity around a “wrong”—I place this

word in quotes because it is not defined as wrong or an injustice within the police logic—that places the

“equality” and “justice” of the community in dispute. This political subjectivation takes a peculiar form:

it is the linking together of “those who have no part” with the whole of the community. As every

distribution of the sensible—every logic of the police—rests upon particular forms of recognition,

recognizing some on the basis of not recognizing others, there can be no police logic that is de jure

legitimate for Rancière. Every police logic is merely de facto legitimate on the basis of an enforced

exclusion. It is this tension between de facto legitimacy and de jure illegitimacy that is exploited by

politics.

In making the case that “the police” is a political form of distribution of the sensible, I have of

course already indicated the lines along which a second, more general understanding of “politics” will

4 Samuel Chambers (2013, p. 184n. 7) suggests that the concept of the distribution of the sensible actually

“supplants” the concept of the police in Rancière’s writings after the mid-90s, “capturing the idea of a police order

but on a broader level.” This claim, if right (and it seems correct to me) would simply be the flipside of what I say

here: that “the police” is a special or restricted version of “the distribution of the sensible.”



emerge within Rancière’s thought. This second definition of politics—to the consternation of readers

like Gabriel Rockhill—is both broad and suspiciously familiar:

Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective

wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas. . . . What really deserves the

name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common

world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of

experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows

(or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some

specific subjects to designate them and speak about them.5

Rancière opens this passage with his familiar warning that our common understanding of “politics”—

voting, enacting and enforcing laws, etc.—is merely something that happens within a particular

distribution of the sensible. However, he then goes on to define politics “proper,” not as an activity of

subjectivation that disrupts this distribution of the sensible, but as this distribution itself. In other words,

Rockhill is absolutely correct in complaining that “politics” in this passage corresponds precisely with

what Rancière had already taken to calling “the police.”6 If Rancière had previously warned us that the

logic of the police “is generally confused with politics,”7 he has in his more recent work taken the rather

unexpected step of making this confusion himself. The collapse, however, is perfectly explainable. The

problem is that Rancière seems only concerned with recognizing successful instances of politics-proper,

rather than analyzing the creation and development of political subjectivities. The result of this is that

politics, for Rancière, becomes not any (attempted) disruption of the logic of the police, but only those

disruptions which successfully lead to a redistribution of the sensible. As a re-distribution, politics is thus

5 Rancière (2010, p. 152).

6 Rockhill (2009, p. 199).

7 Rancière (1999, p. 28).



a (form of) distribution, effectively collapsing the distinction between “politics” and “police.” Politics

begins to merely look like the activity whereby one police logic is replaced by another.

It is this collapse of the opposition between politics and police that has, I believe, prompted the

increasing reliance on a new term in Rancière’s more recent work: democracy. If every redistribution of

the sensible—that is, every successful instance of “politics” in the primary sense—is simultaneously a

new distribution of the sensible, then an opposition between “politics” and “the police” cannot be

maintained; every instance of politics is the founding of a new police. But note that this collapse does

not affect democracy in quite the same way; if we restrict, as Rancière does, the meaning of

“democracy” to challenges to the police logic in the name of equality, then it becomes clear that

“democracy” does not describe any stable state of affairs or replacement police logic, but only the

transitory process of political subjectivation and challenge. A “democratization” will often (always?)

result in the collapse into a new distribution of the sensible—but this newly-instituted state of affairs

cannot for that reason claim the name of “democracy.” Democracy, for Rancière, is a process, not a

state of being. While there are a number of senses in which art (and aesthetics) can be said to be

“political,” the question of whether and to what extent art can be democratic will be a different—and

far more narrow—question.

Having laid out the broad strokes of Rancière’s “political” vocabulary, let me now turn briefly to

the aesthetic side of his lexicon. Rancière’s thinking on art and aesthetics begins with the familiar idea

that “art” is not some ahistorical essence, to be found in various forms across human cultures

throughout history, but is instead a specific way of grouping and understanding a set of practices, and

that said categorization and interpretation only makes sense within specific socio-historical contexts. A

familiar way of telling this story would go something like this: What we call “art” has its origins in the

rituals and artifacts of ancient religion. It is only as such practices and objects have come to be detached

from their religious contexts that we have been able to identify them as distinct practices and objects.



Art only finally becomes art when, sometime within the past 500 years (Rancière himself sets the date

around 18008) it becomes a set of autonomous practices.

Rancière draws our attention to another important shift during this same period: As the notion

of “art” comes to be dissociated from specific media and methods, “art” becomes a distinct genus,

something that works as diverse as symphonies, sculptures, poems, and charcoal drawings all have in

common. This, notes Rancière, is a shift from an older grouping of “fine arts,” where the term “arts” is

always plural: “Fine arts,” “representational arts,” or “decorative arts” are all ways of grouping together

distinct (and defined) practices and media, a way of holding them in common without reducing their

products and practices to examples of “the same thing.” The arts—ways of making and doing, and to be

distinguished (if at all) from other ways of making and doing by virtue of their purpose (imitation,

decoration, representation)—are defended by Aristotle against Plato’s charges of falseness and

dangerous emotional manipulation, and this defense amounts to a hierarchization of method and

content. Art, by contrast, emerges as a unified concept via a radical leveling: the overturning of

hierarchies of subject-matter (a painting of a king is not necessarily a better painting than one of

peasant’s shoes), purpose (art need not even be beautiful, representational, or decorative), and media

(the opening of sculpture to found objects, painting to collage, and music to non-instruments, etc.). Art,

as we have said, gains its definition negatively, via reference to what it is not, need not be, is not

beholden to. Art is not functional; art need not be beautiful; art need not communicate anything; art is

not beholden to the laws of ethics, politics, or religion. The emergence of this understanding of art is, for

Rancière, the result of “the aesthetic revolution”; that is to say, it’s a shift in attitudes, practices, and

self-understanding that results in what Rancière will call “the aesthetic regime of art.”

The aesthetic regime of art is a kind of Foucauldian “historic a priori”: It’s a way of dividing up

and understanding cultural practices that makes notions like “art” (in the singular) understandable.

8 See, e.g., the preface to Aisthesis (Ranciere 2013, p. ix): “Art as a notion designating a form of specific experience

had only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century.”



Under this “regime,” certain things make sense—are even intuitively obvious—while others cannot be

seen or understood. The aesthetic regime—like the art it makes possible—is largely defined negatively,

against the previous “regimes”: the ethical regime of images, and the representational regime of the

arts. It is important to note that the aesthetic regime does not replace these older regimes; they

continue to shape our understanding of the arts. However, it is clear that, when Rancière engages with

these older regimes, he regards them as passed or outmoded; even if they once were “true,” Rancière

does not seem to think that we can still treat them as such. When, in The Emancipated Spectator, he

turns to the subject of the Platonic critique of art and images, and the Aristotelian defense of the

same—the examples par excellence of the understanding of “art” within the ethical regime of images

and the representational regime of the arts, respectively—he addresses them not as challenges or

objections to be overcome, but rather as outdated understandings. Both Plato’s critique and Aristotle’s

defense of art rest on a common assumption: that there is a “correspondence between poiesis and

aisthesis,” or in other words that the artistic “cause” and the ethical “effect” can be reliably linked.9 By

contrast, says Rancière, it is precisely this reliable connection between cause and effect that we can no

longer take for granted. Whereas the “ethical regime of images” (clearly seen at work in Plato’s critique

of mimesis) divided ways of making and doing up according to their effects, and the representational

regime of the arts (seen in Aristotle’s defense of mimesis) accorded a morally-formative power to

certain representational works, our understanding of “art” begins—says Rancière—with the reflective

gap between works and their reception that we call “aesthetic.” “‘Aesthetics’,” he writes, “above all

means that very collapse; in the first instance, it means the rupture of the harmony that enabled

correspondence between the texture of the work and its efficacy.”10

Nobody any longer believes that

“the exhibition of virtues and vices on the stage can correct human behavior,” Rancière says; and if

there are still some who believe “that the reproduction in resin of a commercial idol will make us resist

9 Rancière (2009b, pp. 60-1).

10 Rancière (2009b, p. 62).



the empire of the ‘spectacle’ or that the photography of some atrocity will mobilize us against injustice,”

then Rancière seeks to make it very clear in his work that such beliefs are anachronisms, holdovers from

older ways of thinking about the relationship between images and viewers—and, most importantly, that

these beliefs are indicative of certain patronizing assumptions about the passivity and lesser intelligence

of “spectators.”11

Not only can an artist not guarantee that what s/he puts into a work will be

“discovered” there by the viewer, nor are spectators mere passive receivers; the reflective gap of the

aesthetic regime means that a viewer must “translate” the work of art for him- or herself, reflecting

upon it. The fact that an object or work is treated as a work of art automatically then presupposes an

active relationship between the spectator and the artwork. This is not a matter of us having changed our

minds about art; rather, it is that the conditions of possibility for thinking about art have evolved. We

cannot understand the relationship between spectator and artwork in the way that we used to.

It is due to the detachment or severing at the base of the aesthetic relation that “the politics of

aesthetics” is, more accurately, a metapolitics. As he defines the term in Disagreement, metapolitics is

one of three strategies or forms through which theorists have attempted “to achieve politics by

eliminating politics.”12

These three figures amount to strategies of avoiding or overcoming politics,

“either by substituting an equivalent role for it, or by creating a simulacrum of it, by performing an

imitation of politics in negating it.”13

Metapolitics in particular is a strategy that locates “the truth of

politics” in a projected realm “behind or beneath it, in what it [politics] conceals and exists only to

conceal.”14

Metapolitics is thus the dismissal of real-world politics as a mere “symptom” of the “real”

politics, happening “behind our backs,” as it were.

11

Rancière (2009b, p. 61) 12

Rancière (1999, p. 63). 13

Rancière (1999, p. 65). 14

Rancière (1999, p. 82).



3. What Political Art is Not

Most discussions of “the politics of art,” then, are for Rancière a form of motivated mistake; in

attempting to “do” politics within art as a replacement for the real (and messy) work of real politics,

those interested in “the politics of art” are able to dodge or cover over the real issues of disagreement

and wrong. A large part of the rest of what passes for discussions of political art are anachronistic

mistakes, the result of applying older (outdated and currently untenable) models of artist-artwork-

spectator relations, and drawing on understandings of so-called “art” that are in truth drawn from the

pre-art models of “ethical images” or “representational arts.” Any discussion of Rancière’s account of

the relationship between politics and aesthetics, then, will have to negotiate between these two

“traps.” Let me therefore spend a few paragraphs talking about what the politics of art is not, what for

Rancière it cannot be.

As I have indicated, most of Rancière’s ostensible discussions of “political art” are actually

critical accounts of metapolitical art. The aesthetic rupture between form and content of a work of art

means that there are two major forms that this mistake will take: One can either look to the content of

an artwork for a political commitment, or one can look to the form of an artwork for political inspiration.

Political commitment is a relatively straightforward sort of political content, whereas political inspiration

can come in either of two major forms, which we will (loosely following Rancière) call the utopian and

critical versions. Thus, we will find in Rancière’s writings three major categories of metapolitical art,

three types of political art falsely-so-called.

Looking to the content of art for political importance is what ties together Sartre’s “committed

literature,” various forms of “agit-prop,” and the explicit politics of pop music (the 1940s folk revival, the

1960s counterculture rock scene, etc.). First and foremost, it is clear that the roots of this type of

“political engagement” lie in the representational regime of the arts, the idea that there can be some

sort of clear cause-and-effect relationship between an artistic representation of a theme or issue and an



ethical (or political) effect in the audience. On this point, as we have already seen, Rancière is

categorically dismissive. “As a matter of fact,” he tells Gabriel Rockhill in The Politics of Aesthetics,

“political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an

‘awareness’ of the state of the world.”15

One might, of course, protest that Rancière is too sweepingly

dismissive of this possibility, especially with respect to such narrative artforms as the novel, the film, and

even the protest song. Can’t literature, for example, serve as “a form of meaningful spectacle that would

lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world”? This seems to have been precisely Sartre’s point in

distinguishing the committed, political content of literature from its “poetic” use of language-as-

language. Dismissing the poetic aspects of a novel, isn’t literature (and, again, possibly film and also

music) capable of doing exactly that which Rancière says that it cannot? Here, however, we must pause

to consider what it is that we mean by “capable.” If by “capable” we mean that art can, for some people,

serve as the efficient cause of political inspiration and conversion, then Rancière would answer: of

course. Such things happen all the time; but not only is this process aleatory (it cannot be relied upon,

but happens in each case almost as if by chance), it also needn’t be restricted to so-called “committed”

art, nor to narrative; I can, for example, have a sudden moment of political conversion while looking at a

landscape or even an abstract expressionist painting. “Such breaks can happen anywhere and at any

time,” writes Rancière; “But they cannot be calculated.”16

And so, if by “capable” we mean that it is

possible to create “committed” art that reliably serves to lead one’s audience to an awareness of the

state of the world, we must of course answer in the negative. Think, for example, about Upton Sinclair’s

The Jungle. One of the finest examples of American committed literature, Sinclair wrote the book as a

way of getting his audience to open their eyes to the inhumane misery of wage slavery under the

conditions of industrial capitalism. To Sinclair’s great surprise, of course, we all know the book for the

political movement it actually sparked: the movement to reform food safety (and which eventually led

15

Rancière (2004, p. 62). 16

Rancière (2009b, p. 75).



to the creation of the FDA). Even putting the case charitably, it must be admitted that the kind of direct

moral or psychological causality needed for an adequate defense of “political art” on content grounds

simply doesn’t exist. Rancière is thus correct to sweepingly dismiss it.

Flipping the coin, so to speak, Rancière rejects any attempt to identify aesthetic form with

political action by showing that the contrast of form and content can always be motivated to provide

competing—even opposite—political readings. But rather than asserting a causal effect between the

artistic presentation of a situation and the awareness of that situation created in the audience—the

basic, flawed premise upon which we were lead to reject the politics of content—the argument for a

politics of form will look to the form of the artwork as either (or both) a critique of society or an

inspiration for a society-yet-to-come. These two positions (Rancière sees them as two formulations of

the same basic metapolitics) can be summarized as follows: Either art and society must merge, or they

must remain separate.

The idea that art and society must merge is the idea of aesthetic form (and artwork) as utopian

inspiration: Life must become like a work of art. The artwork—and the process of the artist—project a

possible, utopian future, “a new sensory community, where art and labor, production and public life,

will be one single process of shaping forms of life.”17

This is the idea that, by looking to the work of art

for an “aesthetic education,” we come to understand freedom (the experience of aesthetic autonomy),

and find ourselves in a “community of sense” with others who share the same experiences. The work of

art creates a “we,” a community of free and equal spectators—it offers a vision of a community of free

and equal citizens.18

In this way, art serves as a model for a utopian future; one in which labor is

disalienated, and we freely create ourselves as works of art.

17

Rancière (2009c, p. 285). 18

Rancière (2010, p. 119).



Rancière points out, however, that the artwork is powerless to actually bring about such a

utopian future community. Art “is not concerned with the setting up of a we,” he warns;19

the radical

disjunction that marks the aesthetic means that the consumption of artworks does not create

community, but instead separateness. The same rupture between cause and effect (and between

aisthesis and ethos) that makes art free also renders it powerless to create a new unified community of

sense, a new “we.” This is why “an aesthetic community is a community structured by disconnection.”20

Thus art sets up a utopian promise which it is powerless to fulfill; the artwork must remain an empty

promise of a possible utopian future. As such, it can inspire—but, as we said above with respect to

“committed” art, this inspiration cannot be predicted nor instrumentalized.

And so—a flip side to the politics of form that would see art and society merge—there is the

idea that art and society must remain separate: The artwork “must stay in its solitude as both the

visibility of the separation between art and labor and the promise of reconcilement.”21

Rancière points

to Adorno’s expression that “art’s social function is not to have one” as the perfect summary of this

idea: a paradoxical idea of the “resistance of art.”22

Again, the resistance an artwork can muster to the

inhuman realities of society must take the form of an infinite deferral; a refusal of any possible

reconciliation between artwork and society, between the freedom of a possible future and the

unfreedom of now.

Rancière’s central point seems to be this: Every attempt to identify “the politics of an artwork”

will fall into an aesthetic trap in either or both of two places. First, where we can identify political effects

of a particular artwork, these effects are aleatory, thanks to the reflective distance of the aesthetic

relation; the political effects of a work therefore cannot be attributed to the artwork itself. And when

19

Rancière (2009c, p. 284). 20

Rancière (2009b, p. 59). 21

Rancière (2009c, p. 285). 22

Rancière (2010, p. 178). Rancière is probably paraphrasing Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1997, p. 227): “Insofar as

a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness.”



we want to get “behind” the political effects of an artwork, to attribute a politics to it based on content,

then we fall into the second aesthetic trap: The opposition of form and content within every artwork

means that one must ultimately be motivated over and against the other in order to identify “the real

politics” of the work. “An artist can be committed,” Rancière says to Rockhill at one point, “but what

does it mean to say that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean

that art is apolitical. It means that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics.”23

Art enacts a

metapolitics, and has political stakes and importance, but Rancière is always quick to warn that this is

not the same as an artwork being political, for “neither art in books nor art in life is synonymous with

democracy as a form of constructing dissensus over ‘the given’ of public life.”24

4. Political Aesthetics, Politicized Art

On closer inspection, then, it would begin to look like Rancière is ruling out any direct connection

between politics and art—and, a fortiori, that he is arguing that there is no such thing as a “political

artwork.” It is certainly true that Rancière repeatedly warns against overly-hasty conjunctions of art and

politics. Furthermore, to the extent that even a metapolitics shows that there is something “political” at

stake, notice now that Rancière’s phrase is “the politics of aesthetics,” and not “the politics of art.”

Which is to say that, for Rancière, the principle political issue here is the aesthetic regime of art, which

involves a lot more than just a work of art, or even art as a whole. Rancière has said that “the aesthetic

mode of thought is much more than a way of thinking about art. It is an idea of thought, linked to an

idea of the distribution of the sensible.”25

To the extent that art (and in particular, at least for Rancière,

literature) provides a major impetus for the working of this aesthetic mode of thought, it is the fact of

art as a whole, the fact of literature as a whole, and not any particular work, that has political

23

Rancière (2004, p. 60). 24

Rancière (2004, p. 56). 25

Rancière (2004, p. 45).



ramifications.26

The aesthetic mode of thought is linked to a very specific form of political efficacy for

Rancière, and he calls this form “emancipation.”27

Art and literature trigger passions through their consumption, and these passions can be used to

fuel claims for equality—one reads a novel, and it inspires one to dream of a better life or better

circumstances. But the more important point is that these effects cannot be targeted or controlled. The

letter, as it were, can always arrive at an unexpected destination. The “aesthetic” mode is thus a

democratic mode inasmuch as it treats all audiences equally. To swipe a formulation from Andy Warhol:

It doesn’t matter who you are; you and the Queen of England both get the same Madame Bovary, The

Brothers Karamazov, or Fifty Shades of Grey.28

The only requirement for “equality” in this sense is

literacy—which is exactly why the focus of emancipation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster is on the

teaching and learning of literacy. Art and literature work to undo any control over “proper” audiences;

one can consume and enjoy a piece of music or literature that is “not meant for her” and, in doing so,

readily demonstrate to herself her own equality with her so-called “betters.” Beyond the simple dreams

of a better life that such a work might inspire, this aesthetic verification of equality also destroys any

argument justifying the privilege of such a life for only the chosen few.

26

Rancière (2004, p. 39). We therefore must distinguish between the question I ask in this essay—What would it

mean to say that a work of art is political?—from the question of the politics of art as such. This latter question is

the one taken up by Malik and Phillips in their thought-provoking essay, “The Wrong of Contemporary Art” (2011).

Thus Malik and Phillips will refer to “aesthetics-art” rather than just “art,” and locate the political efficacy of

“aesthetics-art” in the split (and free play) between poiesis and aisthesis. 27

Rancière (2009c, p. 277). 28

Andy Warhol, (1977, p. 101) writes:

Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have

something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have

more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the

same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a

sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as

revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.

The reference to the Queen of England is actually from a paragraph earlier, but the passage I have just quoted

gives the best summary of Warhol’s idea. Warhol is specifically thinking about the equality of fungible

commodities, of course, but I take it that the same notion of “equality” is at work in Rancière’s understanding of

the politics of aesthetics.



Rancière stresses that, while art and literature in this way can contribute to the formation of

political subjects, they do so through what he has called “literary disincorporation.”29

The experience of

art and literature is not one of organizing movements or even building “communities of sense,” but

rather lays the foundation for such organizing and building by first throwing the individual radically back

upon him- or herself. But this is to say that art and literature do not build communities, but rather work

primarily by taking them apart.

If the aesthetic regime—and, at a second level, art and literature as a whole—is what is of

political importance, this is therefore obviously not to say that particular artworks are apolitical. But due

to the very processes laid out above—the aleatory effects of aesthetic reflection and

desubjectivization—particular artworks will gain or lose their political importance through an

unpredictable (and, for the artist, uncontrollable) process of reception and political appropriation. This,

finally, is Rancière’s only direct account of so-called “political art.” “It is up to the various forms of

politics,” he says, “to appropriate, for their own proper use, the modes of presentation or the means of

establishing explanatory sequences produced by artistic practices rather than the other way around.”30

As a group of “disincorporated” spectators come to find that they share experiences with the same

works—and the same aesthetic awareness of their own equality—particular artworks can come to form

the basis of new communities of sense, new political subjectivizations. They can help form, says

Rancière, “uncertain communities that contribute to the formation of enunciative collectives that call

into question the distribution of roles, territories, and languages. In short, they contribute to the

formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible.”31

It would be going

too far to call such artworks the raw material of politics, but the works at least in this sense can be

considered a potential terrain or site for political organization and struggle; Gabriel Rockhill is thus not

29

Rancière (2004, p. 40). 30

Rancière (2004, p. 65). 31

Rancière (2004, p. 40).



altogether wrong to suggest that, for Rancière, there is “political art,” not in the sense that art “does

politics” (la politique), but in the sense that art is (or at least can be) cosubstantial with “the political” (le

politique), “a potential meeting ground between a configuration of the sensible world and possible

reconfigurations thereof.”32

Samuel Chambers has rightly (I think) argued that “the political” (le

politique) as a separate ontological category does not exist for Rancière—and while Chambers’s

argument is primarily aimed at the work of Jean-Philippe Deranty and Todd May, it is worth bearing in

mind with respect to Rockhill’s work as well. But as even Chambers acknowledges, “in one sense

Deranty was right all along: le politique provides a ground for politics” in Rancière’s work, but only in the

sense that “the political . . . comes about because of the irruption of politics within a police order.”33

Le

politique emerges from the politicization of some established part of the police; this is both why

Chambers insists (again, rightly I think) that all politics for Rancière must be impure, and—another way

of saying the same thing—why Rancière “uses the word political . . . as an adjective,” and not “as a

fundamental, ontological category that makes politics possible.”34

Rockhill therefore strictly follows

Rancière when he makes a distinction between “the politics of art” and “the politicization of art,”

arguing that the former—understood as a political meaning “ontologically inscribed in works of art”—is

a mistake (Rockhill calls this “the ontological illusion”).35

“Works of art have no political being,” he

writes; “there are only sociohistorical struggles over the political dimensions of artwork.”36

32

Rockhill (2009, p. 200). 33

Chambers (2013, p. 60). 34

Chambers (2013, p. 60). This “impurity” of politics that Chambers demonstrates in Rancière’s work is therefore

absolutely in line with Rockhill’s (2009) argument, despite the latter’s worrisome use of “le politique.” Art is not

some a priori political battleground, waiting for the police to clash forces with the demos; rather, the politicization

of art is what it means for “politics” to happen in and over art. Art is in this sense a potential battleground, rather

than a playing field: Like all battlegrounds, this is simply an ex post facto way of describing a place where a battle

has been fought, which can of course happen anywhere at all. 35

Rockhill (2009, p. 206). 36

As I have hopefully made very clear, this idea is in complete agreement with Rancière; I am unsure why Rockhill

himself seems to take this as a point of contention between the two of them. More confusingly still, after he has

spent several pages arguing that the meaning of a work of art is socially produced (in its reception and

appropriation) rather than ontologically inscribed—and, furthermore, acting like any of this would be news to

Rancière—Rockhill (2009, pp. 206-7) goes on to attempt to demonstrate the consequences of his “disagreement”



5. Beyond the Politics of Reception

But can there truly be nothing political about an artwork outside of the (aleatory, even unintended)

effects it produces among spectators? Must we limit—as Rancière seems to—the politics of art to the

unpredictable effects of its consumption? What I believe that Rancière has so far presented us with is a

politics of art’s reception, and in this he has accepted an essential premise of the position he attacks:

that for art to be political, it must affect the spectator in some way. For the remainder of this essay, I

would like to tentatively explore another possibility: that of the politics of art production.

An artwork itself can enact political claims in one or both of two ways. First, it can be the form

taken by the claim made by those who have no part. Second, it can be the process or result of a

reconfiguring of the distribution of the sensible. In addition to the artwork itself (the product) working in

these modes of political action, the art process (the production) can also take either or both of these

forms. Art production can also be a process of emancipation, inasmuch as it can be carried out by those

who “have no place making art.” Just as the appreciation of art can, under certain circumstances, invoke

the passions that demonstrate a fundamental equality of all, so too can the production of art.

At its heart, politics for Rancière is an activity whereby those who have “no right” to be seen or

heard make themselves seen and heard in the voicing of a claim; this claim defines a wrong and

demands a share of the common good in the name of the whole community. By making themselves

seen and heard, the political subjects transform a previously depoliticized space of “circulation” or

“moving-along” into a political space, “a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers,

the citizens.” This transformation, says Rancière, “consists in refiguring a space, that is, in what is to be

done, to be seen and to be named in it.”37

The transformation and reconfiguration of a space which

allows for the appearance of a new subject is, of course, one way of thinking about theater, installation

with Rancière by reading a political meaning off of the form and content of three films. In other words, Rockhill

finds a different meaning “ontologically inscribed” in three films, and seems to take this as proof that he is

approaching the issue differently from Rancière. 37

Rancière (2010, p. 37).



art, and performance art. As Peter Hallward notes, “Before it is a matter of representative institutions,

legal procedures, or militant organizations, politics [in Rancière’s specific sense] is a matter of building a

stage and sustaining a spectacle or show.”38

Though, as Hallward points out, Rancière tends to use

theater as a metaphor for politics, many of his claims are made in a way that leaves us no firm grounds

for ruling out a priori more literal forms; and as Rancière has said on at least one occasion, “politics

always takes the form, more or less, of the establishment of a theater.”39

We might go so far as to say, then, that political claims can take the form of art—which is to say

that an artwork can be the material form of a political claim. The important and relevant distinction

here, it would seem, is not whether the claim is politics or art, but whether or not the spectacle in

question fits the other requirements of a political claim: the reconfiguring of a space; the appearance of

a political subject; the claim, in the name of the whole community, made by those who have no part.

Many—even most—artworks will therefore fail to be “political” by failing to meet at least one of these

criteria. Installation art often reconfigures a space, transforming a space of circulation into a space of

congregation, or a space of wilderness into a space of culture; this is one of the fundamental modes of

installation art. But works like The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or Spiral Jetty by Robert

Smithson, do not involve the setting up and appearing of new political subjects, let alone make claims

on behalf of the whole in the name of a wrong done to such subjects. On the other hand, it is interesting

to think about some of the installations in and around New York’s Zuccotti Park as political installation

art. The 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park, which rechristened the park “Liberty Park,” was not only a

form of protest by the political group “Occupy Wall Street,” it can also be thought of as the action that

formed the group; in other words, we do not have an installation put on by a pre-existing political

subject, but rather the constitution of a political subject through the act of performing a theatrical

38

Hallward (2009, p. 142). 39

The quote—from “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Dissonance 1 (2004)—is quoted and translated by Hallward

(2009, 142).



takeover of the park. Furthermore, the political claim of the takeover was made in the name of “The

99%,” a political subject meant to bridge citizens and illegal immigrants, workers and students, men and

women, and people of all races and faiths.

Though Rancière seems to recognize the fact that politics often takes a theatrical form, his focus

on the reception of art leads him to reject the idea that theater—and, by extension, art—can be directly

political. He therefore seems to try and keep the metaphorical instances of theater (as a set of terms

used to describe politics) and the literal instances of theater separate. While this distinction must

ultimately fail—theater, as a form taken by art under the aesthetic regime of art, has no authentic

method or criteria by which we could ultimately distinguish between “true” theater and its “illegitimate”

metaphorical extension—it yet serves as a helpful reminder that genuinely political theater is rare.

There is nothing directly political about, say, an off-Broadway revival of Brecht or Lysistrata; such

“critical” artistic responses to real-world events fall right back into the logic so rightly criticized by

Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator.

One of the reasons, I think, that Rancière overlooks a possible politics of production is that his

examples of art are all drawn from well-respected examples of it: the novels of Flaubert, the poetry of

Mallarmé, the films of Godard. Gabriel Rockhill carries the point even further, drawing our attention to

“Rancière’s tendency—with the notable exception of workers’ literature—to privilege the analysis of de

jure equality within works of art over the examination of de facto institutional inequality inherent in

their social inscription (such as the hierarchy separating the great works of authors such as Flaubert

from the n’importe quoi of cartoons, pornography, etc.).”40

For Rockhill, this problem is symptomatic of

the abstract way Rancière defines aesthetics; at the very least, however, we can say that Rancière’s

failure to examine the institutional forms of aesthetic practices is part and parcel of his failure to

consider a politics of production. Rancière thinks about art by looking at recognized artists—that is,

40

Rockhill (2011, p. 34n. 10).



people who “have a right” to claim the title of “artist,” and who therefore also “know their place” in

society and play their roles. It may seem that this is beginning to change: in a recent interview, Foreman

and Seguín suggest Rancière’s choices of examples in Aisthesis are “intentionaly non-canonical,” but

Rancière responds that the notion of “canonical” is ambiguous, and that his examples would mostly

have been seen as canonical in their own times.41

And while others (like Ben Highmore42

) have taken up

Rancière’s concepts for thinking about “non-professional” artists, we get no such examples in Rancière’s

own work on art. The practice of talking about art by reference to its greatest works is, of course,

standard practice among philosophers of art and aesthetics; but such status leads Rancière to rule out in

advance the idea that art might be made in a way that challenges not only art itself (such challenges are

actually quite standard within the recognized bounds of art), but the conditions of art’s production and

reception.

We must of course distinguish between challenging art and challenging the conditions of art’s

production and reception. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain challenged Art, inasmuch as it was greeted by the

claim, “That is not art.” The story of modernism in art can be told through the history of such claims and

their eventual defeat: Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Minimalism, Pop Art, etc., were each movements

that pressed on the boundaries of what was art. Rancière, of course, rejects the division of art’s history

into “modernist” and “postmodernist” phases—but only because he rightly sees the foundations for this

logic at the heart of the aesthetic regime (for Rancière, modernism is simply one consequence of the

aesthetic regime of art—a consequence which is then only further unpacked by so-called

“postmodernism”). “Pressing on the boundaries of art,” in this sense, is simply what it means to be art

as it has emerged under the conditions of the aesthetic regime. The history of these movements is a

history of new styles and techniques coming to acceptance within the status-quo understanding of art—

a history that can be seen on display in any fine arts museum. Rancière’s point would seem to be that

41

Foreman and Seguín (2014, p. 28). 42

Highmore (2011).



such challenges, contained within art, do not actually amount to disruptions of the reigning logic of the

distribution of the sensible. In response to the idea of “committed” literature, Rancière has asked, “The

fact that someone writes to serve a cause . . . what exactly is this going to change regarding the precise

conditions for the elaboration and reception of a work of art?”43

Is it really so cut and dry, however? The

possibility exists, I want to say, for the production of art to directly challenge the ways in which art is

produced, exhibited, and received—and that, when this challenge is a democratizing force, breaking

down the barriers between those who “are artists” and those who “are not artists,” the art and art

production in question can rightly be called political.

To take but one example, we might think about British rock music in the late 1970s. British punk

music is often thought of as more “political” than its (early) American counterpart, mostly because of

the overtly political lyrics of many songs (Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK”) and because of the

“committed” nature of some of the most famous British punks themselves (the classic example here

would be Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash); Rancière’s criticism shows us that neither aspect of

British punk would be enough to qualify the music as truly political, however, even if a lot of it was

about politics (at least in the everyday sense of the word). Beyond this, of course, there is a certain

“democratizing” aspect of punk music that we see most clearly in the influence of Sex Pistols: The

group’s raw amateurishness is said to have shown a generation of kids that anyone could call

themselves a rock musician, and it is often said that, while very few saw Sex Pistols live, everyone who

did went straight out and formed a band afterward. Such an influence clearly comes at least very close

to what Rancière means by “emancipation” (as Rancière writes in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, “it’s not a

matter of making great painters; it’s a matter of making the emancipated: people capable of saying, ‘me

too, I’m a painter’.”44

); but, as we have said above, even this effect of punk music is not enough to call

punk music itself “political.” For such effects are aleatory effects of reception, and merely refer us back

43

Rancière (2004, pp. 60-1). 44

Rancière (1991, pp. 66-7).



to what is already implicitly political about the aesthetic regime as a whole. But, while we may reject the

typical reasons for calling early British punk music “political,” there is a sense in which the title is entirely

justified. At the heart of the British punk scene was the DIY movement. Buzzcocks released their debut

EP, Spiral Scratch, on their own record label in early 1977, and other groups were quick to follow suit.

These self-made, self-released records were more than simply an emancipatory aesthetic; more than

simply inspiring others to call themselves rock stars, British punks organized themselves and their scene

outside of the major labels and the standard business institutions of rock‘n’roll. In other words, British

DIY punk is not simply “committed” music, but goes further, challenging the material conditions for the

creation and dissemination of rock music.

The example of punk music is helpful, because it allows me to make two further points, by

raising two objections to my use of the term “political.” The first objection, as I see it, would run roughly

thus: I am trying to make a case that we have political artworks, here, where in fact there is only art

made by politically-committed musicians. The musicians—who are people, after all, and capable of

doing more than simply making music—take it upon themselves to organize, create oppositional

institutions, challenge the industry status quo, and attempt to change the material conditions for the

production of popular music. Meanwhile, the art they make—their songs—are just that, songs. While

these songs may be the product of a politically-reorganized process, and may furthermore inspire others

to do likewise, the songs themselves are not “political.” Now, this objection would seem to stand, if you

think that a song is some sort of Platonic idea (of which we can find “copies” on records, in live concerts,

etc.). But we never actually encounter such Platonic songs—all we encounter are specific recordings,

performances, and instances of these songs. We cannot draw a firm line between Spiral Scratch and the

contents of that album; nor can we draw a firm line between the shows and festivals organized by punk

musicians and their friends, and the performances at those festivals. The existence of punk songs cannot

be neatly divided from the conditions of the existence of those songs; if a democratization through



collective organization of a scene is the form of British DIY punk, the music is the matter. For the very

reason we cannot choose either aesthetic form or matter as the “true political content” of an artwork,

neither can we split a genuinely political artwork into the art and the politics.

The second objection to what I am saying, however, might go something like this: The

independent record labels launched by the British DIY scene simply served to expand the number of

record labels in the market. These indie labels did nothing to fundamentally alter the material conditions

of that market itself, let alone the material conditions for recognizing and consuming art; furthermore,

most of the labels were soon bought up by the major labels, in the end reaffirming the status quo.

Therefore, the British DIY punk scene (and all of its products) cannot truly be called “political.” Now first

of all, this charge is incorrect in a small but important way. The indie label movement has not, in the

end, destroyed the major label system, it’s true; but the aftermath of the movement has certainly

changed the material structure of the music business world. The mainstream music industry in the late

1960s and early 70s was essentially a “ladder” model (or, more correctly, a pyramid), with the music

industry, as gatekeepers, granting artists and bands access to progressively higher “levels” of stardom

and international access to audiences. As Simon Frith has shown, the results of the DIY movement have

been twofold.45

On the one hand, centralized gatekeeping has been largely destroyed (a process that

has been further accelerated by the internet), leveling the playing field. On the other hand, the

decentering of the pop music universe has also fragmented “rock” or “pop”—which were, at least within

the English-speaking world, fairly coherent systems until the 1970s—leaving a diverse (and ever-

increasing) number of smaller “genres” instead. With the diversification of genres has come a

fragmenting of audiences and subcultures, both for better and for worse. (As Momus was led to observe

in 1991, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”)

45

Frith (1988).



In other words, it is incorrect to say that the punk DIY movement has not contributed to a

restructuring of culture—and thus, in some way, disrupted the previous distribution of the sensible. But

I take it that, at the heart of the objection I’ve paraphrased above, there lies the more basic objection:

How can punk have been a democratic revolution in popular music, if popular music is still structured

through corporations in a multinational culture industry? And here we must remember two caveats from

our earlier discussion of “politics” in Rancière’s thought. First, remember that “democracy” is a synonym

for “politics” in Rancière’s thought, meaning that it is an activity and not a state of affairs; furthermore,

that it is a disruptive (and, hence, fleeting) activity, rather than an ongoing activity. “Political art,” in this

sense, need not be “art that establishes a utopian culture in which all are equal,” but need merely be art

that fundamentally disrupts a given status quo, democratizing it in some way even as a new (and, hence,

hierarchical) status quo takes hold. If we can show that the artwork or production in question is a

democratic disruption of the status quo, it will be enough to call the artwork “political.” Because politics

is a fleeting activity—because a new status quo settles in so quickly—it will often be necessary to

understand a given artwork in its own time in order to see whether or not it is political in this sense (we

would not expect Spiral Scratch to still be disruptive almost 40 years later). Second, remember that I

have cautioned against Rancière’s tendency to present only “successful” instances of politics as insights

into the activity of politics. On the one hand, this restriction is a sound policy—if those who cannot be

seen or heard do not make themselves seen or heard, then politics has not actually occurred—but, on

the other hand, not all disruptions lead to lasting reorganization, and so not all political actions are

equally “successful.” We can learn just as much by studying failed revolutions as we can by looking at

successful ones. So, too, we might find that there is good reason to study political art that has eventually

been reabsorbed by the status quo.



6. Conclusion

For those already familiar with the punk and DIY movements, nothing that I have said here will sound

surprising; indeed, it has not been my intention to say anything particularly new about punk rock.

Rather, my intention here has been to explore a particular gap in Rancière’s thinking—and for that end a

fairly standard interpretation of British punk has served as but one possible example among many.

Though political art, in the proper sense, is still sure to be rare, it seems to me that a careful glance back

through history could turn up many more examples. Rancière’s thought will help us pay attention to

different aspects from the usual surveys of “political art,” and also to avoid some of the false (and

metapolitical) ascriptions of politics that are more common; but Rancière has thus far restricted himself

to considering “insider” works of art—art by those whose right to make art was never in question—and

oftentimes art that has been created by solitary figures, detached from any collective subject of

enunciation (poetry and novels, say, instead of music scenes or installation art—“Literature is not

concerned with the setting up of a we,” he says46

). And furthermore, Rancière has restricted

consideration of the question of political art to a politics of consumption. His question is always, “When

does the consumption of art have political effects on the spectator?” rather than, “When is the creation

of art a political act?” As such, he has rightly and sweepingly rejected a number of false versions of the

“politics of art.” But in doing so, he has too hastily dismissed the idea that there can ever be anything

directly political about an artwork.

There remains, perhaps, a final objection to everything that I have had to say about political art,

and it might be summarized by the question: Why art? Those who are interested in political art—artists,

critics, and even Rancière—are not just interested in politics, but are interested in the political capacities

that might be specific to art. In the end, it would seem that my argument is able to clear some space

within Rancière’s thought for artworks to be political—but only at the expense of collapsing the

46

Rancière (2009c, p. 284).



distinction between art and other forms of speech and action.47

Art, I have said, is “political” when it

does what all other Rancièrean politics does—so why produce art instead of, say, organizing strikes or

protests or sit-ins? And what are the differences in this sense between art and any other form of

speech?

I will admit that my answer to this objection is going to be less than satisfactory for some

readers: There are no political capacities specific to art, and there is ultimately no de jure way of

distinguishing art from other kinds of speech. But does this really come as a surprise? The very

conditions of art—formed within the aesthetic regime—should already lead us to suspect that there are

no principled ways of distinguishing art from other forms of speech, for there is no a priori way of

distinguishing “art” from “non-art.” As Rancière himself has said, “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 non-art, or is something other than art.”48

And while there is likewise no reason in

principle to make art instead of participating in other “political” activities, nor is there any a priori

reason to do those things rather than make art. Making art can, under certain circumstances, be one of

the forms politics takes—but the very “impurity” of Rancièrean politics means that all politics must also

take the form of some “other” activity.49

There may be no special political capacities of art as such—but

my purpose here has been to show that nor should we overlook art as a possible mode of political

action.

If my account of a possible “politics of art” is correct, then it seems to me that a much broader

category of “political artworks” is likely to emerge. This is not simply a matter of reinterpreting the

history of art. Rather, I believe that, by looking to such an alternate history, we can also begin to learn

from it. By examining how certain attempts at politics failed, or at how certain democratic movements

47

My thanks to an early, anonymous reviewer of this essay, who pressed me on this point. 48

Rancière (2009a, p. 36). 49

Chambers (2013, chap. 1).



in art were ultimately resettled into hierarchical police logics, we can begin to apply the lessons of the

past to the struggles of the present. In this way, a “politics of production” might contribute meaningfully

to a production of politics.

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