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    Ranciere On Deleuze 1

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    Being and Evert, Alain Badiow ‘Alain Badiou Thought, Alain Badiou of Worlds, Alain Badiou Writings, Alain Badiou ‘heory ofthe Subject, Alain Badion Seeing the bnvisble, Michel Henry “Afr Finitude, Quentin Meilass0ux. ‘Time for Revolution, Antonio Nest xcques Ranciére 's ascon, Jacques Ranciére s Jacques Rancitre ‘of Consensual Times, Jacques Ranclere DISSENSUS On Politics and Aesthetics Jacques Rancitre ede See SSSeEE Levee eee eseeeEeS eee ‘Bdited and Translated by Steven Coreorsn DIssensUS. literature’ that is much more that a matter of writers may help us to understand this ambiguity and some of its consequences. The political explained through soci simply to propose a closer look at their intertwinings. CHAPTER TWELVE The Monument and Its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art’s Capacity of ‘Resistance’ Artis readily ascribed a virtue of resistance. In the world of o assertion is deemed unproblematic. This world readily accepts that art aspect, the consistency of the work resists the wearing effect of time; in another, the act that produced it resists the determination of the co ‘Whatever resists both time and the concept is also presumed capable, ‘as a matter of course, of resisting forms of power. The cliché of the free jstzating the logic of the doxa. stance’ inbere in two proper: mymy, which makes i possible to create ‘an analogy between the passive resistance of the stone and the active ‘opposition of men; and second, in the positive connotations that the sword has retained by contrast to so many others that have fallen into disuse or become suspect) community, revolt, revolution, proletariat, classes, emancipation, ete. No longer is it seen as such a good thing to want to change the world and make it more just. But this is exactly the point, since the lexical homonymy of the word ‘resistance’ is also ambivalent on the practical level: to resist is to adopt the posture of someone who stands opposed to the order of things, but simultaneously avoids the risk involved with trying to overturn that order. And we know, in this day and age, that the heroic posture of staging ‘resistance’ against the torrent of advertising, ‘and democratic thetorie goes hand-in-hand with a willing deference to established forms ‘of domination and exploitation. DISSENSUS If we dismiss these false self-evidences of opinion, is it nevertheless possible to establish links between the idea of an activity, or domain, called ‘art’, and that of a specific virtue of resistance? What could be ‘made of the homonymy of the word ‘resistance’, which contains several ‘ideas in a single word? In fact, there are two seemingly conuadiccory senses In which artis said to resist fist, it resists as a thing that persists {nts being: and, second, as people who refuse to remain in ther situation. ‘Under what conditions is an equivalence between these two, seemingly contradictory senses of ‘resistance’ conceivable? How can the resistance of that which persists in itself simultaneously be a power of that which of that which intervenes to change the very same order that msistency"? And whomever has read Nietzsche cenot but snother question behind the question “how can we con¢ namely: ‘why ought we conceive it?” Why is there a need to at once as a power of autonomy, of s departure and of sel JT would like ro examine this problematic knot on the basis of a passage borrowed from Gilles Deleuze. In the chapter of Qu‘estce que le philosophic? devoted to art we read this: The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, embraces and rends it in st the percept from perceptions, the affect from mn from opinion ~ in view, one hopes, of the s precisely, the task of al art and, from colours and sounds, both music and painting similarly extract neve harmonies, new plastic or melodic landscapes, and new rhythmic characters that raise them up the cry of men and women: that th, becoming, 2 visual and sonorous bloc. A ‘monument {snot the commemoration, or the celebration, of something that has happened; instead it confides 10 the ear of the future the persistent sensations embodyit tantly renewed suffering of men and worn otestations, thelr con stantly resumed struggle. Will this in because sulfering is eternal and revolutions do not survive thelr victory? But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, embraces and openings it gives to men and women at the moment ofits making ‘and that composes in itself @ monurmé 1e constant process of ‘becoming, like those tumuli to which each new traveller adds a stone.! ‘THE MONUMENT AND ITS CONFIDENCES word re .e problem th form the analogy between forms of ‘resistance’ into a dynamic? In the first place, the text presents us with an analogy between tivo processes: people suffer, protest, fight and embrace for an instant, before solitary suffering re-asserts itself: the artis wists and embraces language. or tears plastic or musical percepts from sonorous and optical perceptions, in der to ralse them 10 the crles of peaples. This presents between the two processes, but there is seemingly a rift to overcome. ‘The artist works ‘in view of’ an end that this work cannot achieve by ltself: he or she works ‘in view ofa ‘stil-missing’ people. But. im the second place, this work itself is presented as a bridging of the gap that separates the artistic embrace from the revolutionary embrace. Vibra~ ons and embraces assume a consistent figure in the solidity of the ‘monument. And the solidity of the monument is simultaneously 2 language, the movement of a transmission: the monument ‘confides to the ear of the future’ the persistent sensations that embody suffering struggle. These sensat Jbrations and the in-becoming, ‘A monument which speaks to the future and a future that has eats ~ that is really a litte too much for ears so accustomed to hearing that the re is the alpha and omega of Deleuzian thought. appearances metaphior refgns inthis passage and ft oes so in lis full function: here metaphor is not a simple ornament of language, but instead ~ as its etymology indicates ~ a passage or @ transport. In order to go from the vibration extracted by the artist to the revolutionary vibration, tt is necessary to have a monument that makes a language ssages, Several conce} torsion of sensations to the struggle of men, it has to ensure an equivalence betiveen the dynamic of the vibration and the static of the monument. It is necessary that, n the immobility of the monument, the vibration appeals to another, speaks to another. But the trans of the effort, or of ‘resistance’, of people, and it is the transmission of what resists human- ity, the transmission of the forces of chaos, the forces harnessed on it and incessantly re-captured by it. Chaos has to become a resistant form: the Dissensus form must again become a resistant chaos, The monument must become the revolution and the revolution again become a monument. ‘Through the play of metaphor, the gap between the present of the work and the future of the people turns out to be a constitutive link. The ‘a people. This people is part of the very ‘condition of art’ ‘resistance’, that isto say the union of contraries which defines i at once as an embrace of fighters set in a monument and as a ‘monument in a process of becoming and struggle. The resistance of the For this to be the case, however, there must be an identity between two languages of the monument: the human language of those monuments, about which Schiller said that they have the ability to transmit to people ff the future the intact grandeur of long-vanished free cities; and the inbuman language of romantic stones whose silent speech belles the chattering and agitation of men, fart is to be ar, it must be politics; iF is to be politics, the monument must speak twice-over: as @ résumé of human elfort and as @ résumé of, to examine this axgume: tion seems to me to involve t show that Deleuze’ thesis Is not the singular invention of one, or two, authors, but instead the particular form of a more original knot between an idea of art, an idea of the sensible and an idea of the human future; fn the other hand, I would like to analyse the particular place that it ‘occupies: al knot. ‘The work and the sensible element tom from the sensible, in the in-form form of the vibration and the embrace; the instantaneousness of the vibration or of the embrace as the persistent monument of art; as singular as they appear in ‘own invention. They were already long established. Moreover. this provenance itself is spit nto wo. Theze is the most immediate Hliation: the vibration and the embrace come directly from the pages that Proust ‘devotes to the music of Vinteuil, and the theme of the sensible cleaved. from the sensible forms the core thesis of Temps retrouvé. But this Proustian thesis and description are themselves poss of a much more general form of vi ‘THE MONUMENT AND ITS.CONFIDENCES experience, a form that defines an entize regime of the identification of ar. ‘The {dea of a sensible element torn from the sensible, of a disensuat sensible element, is a specific characteristic ofthe thinking implied by the modem regime of at, which I have proposed to call the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. What in fact characterizes this regime i the idea of a specific form of sensory experience, disconnected from the normal forms of sensory ‘experience. When Deleuze speaks tous of the work that tears the percept from perception and the affect from affection, he is expressing, in his ‘own particular way, the original formula of aesthetic discourse, that is, that encapsulated by the Kantian analytic of the beautiful experience is of a sensory weave (ut sensibie) that is its disconnected, It is disconnected with respect to 18, which subordinates sensory perception to its own categories, and also with respect to the law of desire, which subordinates our affections to the search for a good. The form apprehended by aesthetic judgement ner that of an object of knowledge nor that of an object of desir. It is this neither... nor. that defines the experience of the beautiful asthe experience of a kind of resistance. The beautiful is that which resists both ‘conceptual determination and the lure of consumable goods. ‘This is the initial formula of aesthetic dissensus or resistance which, in ‘Kant's time, separated out the aesthetic regime of art from its representa: tive regime. This dissensus came about because the classical regime, the representative regime of art, was governed precisely by the concordance between a form of il decerminatlon and a form of sensory ‘appropriation. In one respect, art was defined as the work of form, as that which imposes its law on matter. In another, the rules of art, as defined by the subjugation of matter to form, were deemed to corre- spond to the laws of sensory nature. The pleasure exper 8a verification of the adequation of the rule. Aris exactly that: an agreement between a productive nature ~ a poiesis— aod a nature. Aesthetic experience was w anda humanity, which i also to say between two natures or wo human- ities. The whole problem will chen be to know how to determine this DISSENSUS relation without relation ~ in the name of which nature and which humanity? This is the precise problem that runs through all Delewze’s texts on art: from one humanity to another, the path can only be forged by inhumanity. But before coming to this point, we must examine one ‘or two other consequences of the dissensus constitutive of the aesthetic regime of art, The first consequence is simply pur: if the beautiful is artis the implementation of ideas that transform ows that the beautiful and art stand in a disjunctive (0 one another. The ends that art sets itself stand in contradiction to the finality without end that characterizes the experience of the beautiful. To cross the gull, a specific power is required. For Kant this power is that of the g¢ tone who fs observant of the rules of nature, but nature itselt in its productive power, But the gentus must, for this, share in the unconscious of nature. The genius cannot know the law under which he or she operates. If the aesthetic experience of ‘the beautiful isto be identical to the experience of art, then art must be ‘marked by a double difference: it must be the manifestation of a thought thatis unaware of itself in a sensible element that is torn from the ordinary conditions of sensory experience. No doubt this disjunction received its clearest experience in He; aesthetics. The anti-Hegetian phobia characterizing Deleuze’s thougl well known. However vibration, composition and line of flight are helt to the great Hegelian ternary of symbolic art, classical art and romantic art, Hegel isthe one who fixed the paradoxical formula of the artwork under the aesthetic regime of art: the work is the material inscription of thought's difference 1 itself. This begins with the sublime vibration of thought secking vainly its sojourn in the stones of the pyramid; it continues with ‘embrace of matter by a thought that only manages to accomplish itself at the price of its own weakness ~ indeed, It Is because Greek religion is ‘devoid of inteviorty that it can ideally be expressed in the perfection of the statue of God: finally, iis the line of ffght of the Gothic spire striving for an maccessible lcaven and thereby announcing the end where, thought having finally reached art will have ceased to be a site ight. To say that ar ‘thus means that its a perpetual game of hide-and-seek between the power of sensible manifestation of works and their power of signification. Now, this game of hide-and-seek between thought and art has a paradoxical consequence: artis att, that THE MONUMENT AND ITS CONFIDENCES and its fetes. In Deleuze’s w this relation, a phrase from Le Clé2io: ‘one day, we will perhaps come to know that it was not art, but merely medicine’. ‘These two formulas are not opposed in their principle: the Greek statue 4s the health of a people, and Deleuzian medicine the figure of Dionysus. Apollo and [Nietzsche's persanae. If Nietzsche was able to use their bipolarity to theo- ize tragedy, its because this bipolarity already structured the aesthetic regime of art It marks the double way the gap between artand itself is expressed, the tension of th defines it, Apollo emblematizes the moment when the union of thought ‘and the unthought become fixed in a harmonious figure. This is the figure of a humanity in which culture is not distinguished from natu of the city: Dionys jught, of the suffering and Dionysus: between the happy figure of an annulled dissensus, issimulated in the anthropomorphic figure of the beautiful god made of stone and re-opened dissensus, exacerbated by Dionysiae fury or com plaint: in Achab’s will to nothingness or Bartleby’s nothingness these two witnesses of primary nature, of ‘inhuman’ nature. ‘This is the point at which artistic ‘dissensuality’ tes in with the theme of the people to come. To understand this knot, we must return to that the classical representative order. in this order, active form was limposed on passive matter via the rules of art. And the pleasure experienced was taken as verification that the rule of artistic poiesis corresponded to the laws of sensibility. It was taken as verification, by those whose senses could be taken as veridical witnesses: men of taste, men of a refined v6 Dissexsus. nature as distinct from those of an uncultured nature. That Is to say, the representative order involved @ twofold hierarchy: the command= ment of form over matter, and a distinction between coarse sensible nature and a refined sensible nature: “The man of taste’, said Vol ‘has different eyes, different ears, a different sense of tact to that of the The aesthede revolution revokes that twolold hierarchy. Aesthetic experience suspends the commandment of form over matter, of active understanding over passive sensibility. Aesthetic ‘dssensuality’, then, is not simply the spliting of the old human ‘nature’. Its also a revocation of the type of ‘humanity’ that it implied: a humanity str distinction between the men of coarse senses and those of the men of active in this already encapsulated which identifies aesthetic universality as the mediator of @ new sentiment ‘of humanity, as the principle of a form of ‘communication’ that exceeds the opposition between the refinement of the cultivated classes and the simple nature of the uncultured classes. Behind Deleuze’s nt ‘which speaks to the future’, we have to hear the primary music of that Kantian ‘communication’, Furthermore, we ought to recall that the Kritik der Urtelstraft is comtemporary with the French Revolution. One thor drew all the consequences of that contemporancousness. In his Uber die asthetische Brcieiuang des Menschen, Schiller Isolates the political signification of aesthetle ‘resistance’ or “dissensus’. aesthetic free play Involves the abolition of the opposition between form and matter, between activity and passivity, This is also the abolition between 2 full humanity and a sub-humanity. Aesthetic free play and the universality liberty and of equality, jonary government had tried to Impose under the form of the law: a kind of liberty and equality that was no longer abstract but sensible, Aesthetic experience is that of an unprecedented sensorium in which the hferarchles are abolished that structured sen isis why the promise (of a ‘new art of living’ of individuals and the community, the promise of anew humanity So, the resistance of art defined a specific ‘politics’ whose claim it was that it i better suited than politics proper to promote a new human ‘community, united no longer by the abstract forms of the law but by the Dears wi ‘THE MONUMENT AND ITS CONFIDENCES bonds of lived expetience. tt thereby bears within it the promise of a | people to come whose liberty and equality are elfective and lived and imply represented. B marked by the paradox of nce. Art two contradictory ways: it | tone respect, art promises by virtue ofthe resistance which constitutes i ‘owing tots distance with regard tothe other forms of sensible experience. Jn the fifteenth leer of Uber aie desthetickeErzeihunyg des Menschen, right | after having assured us that aesthetic free play is founding of a new art, Schiller puts us in imagination in front ofa Greek statue known as the Jno Ludavsi. The Goddess, he says, is closed in on herself, idle, tree of all concern and of all end, She neither commands nor resists anything, We understand that the Goddess’ “absence of resistance’ | defines the resistance of the statue, its exteriority with respect to the | normal forms of sensory experience. Because she does not want any thing, because she is exterior to the world of thought and the will which commands, because she sn a nutshell, inhuman’, the statue can sad to be free and to pre-figure a humanity that is similarly delivered from oppressive will. Because she is silent. because she does not speak 10 us and is not interested in our humanity, the statue can ‘confide tothe ears oft sanity. The parado without resistance s purly. The re artwork, representing the goddess who does not resist, | people 10 come. But it calls this people forh to the very persissin its distance, || resistance promises a future to people wh te reversal of perspective, also presents the paradox in an inverse form: art bears a promise to the very extent that it is the result of something which was not art for those who made it, What makes the resistant liber expression of. The statue's s of the people who is expressed fn it. Now, a free’ people, in this view of things, isa people that does not experience art as a separate reality, who has not lived in a tine when collective experience is separated into distinct forms called art, politics or religion. What the statue promises, then, isa fucure in which, once again, the forms of art will no longer be distinguished from t wr DISSENSUS nor from the forms of common experience and belle. Art's ‘resistance’ ‘own suppres- forms of a common sensory om to the time of the Soviet Revolution, che aesthetic revolution signified this self-realization and this self-suppression of art in the construction of a new life in which art, politics, economy or culture would dissolve into one and the seme form of coletive lie. to how it had been conceived. In 2, It was swallowed up by a Soviet regime that was interested solely in making artists nto the constructors of lfe forms and that only wanted artists who illustrated its n way of constructing the new that shapes the forms of dai ife was accomplished ironical commodity aestheticzation and the daily life of capitalism, This twofold ie of the project of making art life gave rise, by the destiny, tragic and co: ‘way of reaction, to the other great form of aesthetic metapy promises a afi it tasks of pe life. This is summed up by Adorno’s expression: ‘art's soctal function Is not te have one’. On this view, art does not resist purely by ensuring its distance, It resists but its closure itself shows itself to be untenable, because it occupies the site of an impassable contradiction. For Adomo, the solitude of art does not cease to present lis autonomous appearance and the reality of the division of labour,

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