Jacques Rancière (b. 1940, Algeria)
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1987
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 2010
Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, 2013
The Future of the Image, 2019

Once upon the time I was proposing to my anthropology professor a fieldwork project in an art school. ‘But there is nothing to study there, it’s all Rancière nowadays’, he said, effectively killing my idea. Later, during my years in the art schools, I have only heard that name once – in relation to the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, by that not saying that his ideas were not otherwise prevalent, as I barely knew what they were. I had only read something by him on ‘distribution of the sensible’ and found it overly ideological and not helpful in any of my own endeavours, so I’ve ‘archived’ all that away.

But now I’ve been coming across odd references that seem to reflect my own thinking. Bishop refers to him saying that ‘aesthetics is … the ability to think contradiction’ (Bishop 2006, 183). Voorhies suggests that his ideas ‘produce confusion in their defiance of categorisation and by doing so apprehend the spectator’ (Voorhies 2017, 16). Both authors then slide, of course, into consideration of art’s efficacy for social change, which I find a very tedious perspective or goal, always risking to reduce art to ideological instrument. I mean, art is separated from the world only discursively-imaginarily, it is always part of the world and by formulating various propositions is certainly affecting the world. Thus, it is not isolated or inconsequential, but I see more potential harm than use in any attempt to sharpen and weaponise it. However, if I close my eyes on those passages, maybe there is something useful to be gained from reading Rancière after all – as contradiction, confusion, defiance of categories are all my melodies… Books are on their way…

References

Bishop, Clair. 2006. ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its discontents’ in Artforum 44, no. 6.
Voorhies, James. Beyond Objecthood. Cambridge (MA) / London: The MIT Press.