From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

My paragraphs / emphases / etc.

The political potential of the aesthetic heterotopy can be illustrated by an example. During the French Revolution of 1848, there was a brief blossoming of workers’ newspapers. One of those newspapers, Le Tocsin des travailleurs (The Workers’ Tocsin), published a series of articles in which a joiner describes a fellow joiner’s day at work, either in the workshop or in the house where he is laying the floor. He presents it as a kind of diary. For us, however, it appears more akin to a personalized paraphrase of Critique of Judgment and more peculiarly of the second paragraph that spells out the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment.

Kant documented disinterestedness with the example of the palace that must be looked at and appreciated without considering its social use and signification. This is how the joiner translates it in his own narration: “Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences.”

This text seems to depict exactly what Bourdieu describes as the aesthetic illusion. And the joiner himself acknowledges this when he speaks of belief and imagination and opposes their enjoyment to the reality of possessions. But it is not by accident that this text appears in a revolutionary workers’ newspaper, where aesthetic belief or imagination means something very precise: the disconnection between the activity of the hands and that of the gaze.

The perspectival gaze has long been associated with mastery and majesty. But in this case it is reappropriated as a means of disrupting the adequation of a body and an ethos. This is what disinterestedness or indifference entails: the dismantling of a certain body of experience that was deemed appropriate to a specific ethos, the ethos of the artisan who knows that work does not wait and whose senses are geared to this lack of time. Ignoring to whom the palace actually belongs, the vanity of the nobles, and the sweat of the people incorporated in the palace are the conditions of aesthetic judgment.

This ignorance is by no means the illusion that conceals the reality of possession. Rather, it is the means for building a new sensible world, which is a world of equality within the world of possession and inequality. This aesthetic description is in its proper place in a revolutionary newspaper because this dismantling of the worker’s body of experience is the condition for a worker’s political voice.

[...]

In order to underscore the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, a certain kind of discourse has to be set to work, a kind of discourse that implies an aesthetics of knowledge. What does this expression mean? First it is a discursive practice that gives its full signification to the apparently innocuous definition of the aesthetic judgment as elaborated by Kant, namely, that aesthetic judgment implies a certain ignorance; we must ignore the way in which the palace has been built and the ends that it serves in order to appreciate it aesthetically. As I have argued, such ignorance or suspension is not a mere omission. In fact it is a division of both knowledge and ignorance. The ignorance of the possession and destination of a building produces the disjunction between two types of knowledge for the joiner: the know-how of his job and the social awareness of his condition as the condition shared with those who don’t care for the pleasures of perspective. It produces a new belief. A belief is not an illusion in opposition to knowledge. It is the articulation between two knowledges, the form of balance between those forms of knowledge and the forms of ignorance they are coupled with.

As Plato claimed, articulation or balance has to be believed. The economy of knowledge has to be predicated on a story. This does not mean an illusion or a lie. It means it is predicated on an operation that weaves the fabric within which the articulation of the knowledges can be believed, within which it can operate. From the Platonic point of view, technical knowledge has to be submitted to a knowledge of ends.

Unfortunately this science, which provides a foundation for the distribution of knowledges and positions, is itself without a demonstrable foundation. It must be presupposed, and in order to do so a story must be recounted and believed. Knowledge requires stories because it is, in fact, always double. Once more there are two ways of dealing with this necessity: an ethical one and an aesthetic one.

Everything revolves around the status of the as if. Plato formulated it in a provocative way: ethical necessity is a fiction. A fiction is not an illusion; it is the operation that creates a topos, a space and a rule for the relation between sense and sense. Modern “human” and social sciences refuse this provocation. They affirm that science cannot admit fiction. Nevertheless they want to reap its benefits; they want to keep the topography of the distribution of the souls, as in the form of a distinction between those who are destined to know and those who are destined to provide the objects of knowledge.

I mentioned Bourdieu’s sociology earlier because it is the purest form of disavowed or hidden Platonism that animates modern social knowledge. His polemic against the aesthetic illusion is not the idea of one particular sociologist. It is structural. Aesthetics means that the eyes of the worker can be disconnected from his hands, that his belief can be disconnected from his condition. This is what must be ruled out if sociology is to exist. 

That is, an ethos must define an ethos; an abode must determine a way of being that in turn determines a way of thinking. Of course this is not only the case for sociology. History, for example, has its own particular way of constructing modes of being and thinking as the expressions of different periods of time. Such is the case for disciplines in general or for what can be called disciplinary thinking. A discipline, in effect, is first of all not the exploitation of a territory and the definition of a set of methods appropriate to a certain domain or a certain type of object. It is primarily the very constitution of this object as an object of thought, the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge—in other words, a certain idea of the rapport between knowledge and a distribution of positions, a regulation of the rapport between two forms of knowledge (savoir) and two forms of ignorance. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

There are two ways of interpreting matters of consensus and dissensus, an ethical one and an aesthetic one. The ethical must be understood from the original sense of ethos. Ethos first meant abode before it meant the way of being that suits an abode. The ethical law first is the law that is predicated on a location.

An ethical relation itself can be understood in two different ways, depending on whether you consider the inner determination of the location or its relation to its outside.

[...]

But the law of the ethos can also be set up as the law of the outside. After Aristotle’s analysis of the basic human community and before his statement on the political animal in Politics, he briefly conjures up and dismisses the figure of a subject that is without polis; this is a being that is inferior or superior to man—a monster or a divinity perhaps—a being that is azux, that cannot be in relation with any being like it, which is necessary in war.

But what Aristotle briefly describes as the figure of an outsider can be turned around as the figure of the immeasurable or the unsubstitutable from which all that is measurable or substitutable, connected
according to a law of distribution, has to take its law at the risk of being cancelled by it.

As we know, such a figure has been revived over the last few decades in different forms: the law of the Other, the Thing, the sublime, and so on.

This is what I call the ethical interpretation of the matters of consensus and dissensus, the ethical interpretation of the common and its supplement.

The aesthetic dimension is another interpretation of this, an interpretation that dismisses both the inner law of distribution and the law of an immeasurable outside. The aesthetic dimension brings about a dismantling of ethical legality, that is, a dismantling of the ethical complementarity of the three terms: the rule of the common ethos, the rule of the distribution of the alternative parts, and the power of the monster that is outside of the rule.

It could also be described as the ethical distribution of the same, the different, and the Other. In opposition to that distribution, the general form of the aesthetic configuration could be described that is not the Other, the immeasurable, but rather the redistribution of the same and the different, the division of the same and the dismissal of difference.

The aesthetic configuration replays the terms of the difference in such a way as to neutralize them and to make that neutralization the staging of a conflict that is in excess of consensual distribution. Such an excess cannot be counted according to the consensual rules of distribution but nevertheless does not obey the rule of an immeasurable otherness. The difference between these two excesses is the difference between ethical heteronomy and aesthetic heterotopy.

Let me try to illustrate these statements by describing what I have called the politics of aesthetics, the aesthetics of politics, and the aesthetics of knowledge. In each of these fields it is possible to differentiate the aesthetic approach from the two forms of an ethical approach.

Let us start from what I call the politics of aesthetics, which means the way in which the aesthetic experience—as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice and reception—intervenes in the distribution of the sensible. In order to understand this, let us return to my starting point, that is, to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful as the expression of a neither/nor. The object of aesthetic judgment is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire. In the political translation made by Schiller this neither/nor was interpreted as the dismissal of the ethical opposition between the class of those who know and the class of those who desire. This way of framing a politics of aesthetics has been contested by two forms of ethical criticism.

On the one hand, there is the sociological criticism that saw an ignorance of the social law of the ethos. Pierre Bourdieu’s work epitomizes this type of criticism, namely, arguing that the view of aesthetic judgment as a judgment independent of all interest amounts to an illusion or a mystification. The disinterested aesthetic judgment is the privilege of only those who can abstract themselves—or who believe that they can abstract themselves—from the sociological law that accords to each class of society the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos, that is, to the manner of being and of feeling that their condition imposes upon them. Disinterested judgment of the formal beauty of the palace is in fact reserved for those who are neither the owners of the palace nor its builders. It is the judgment of the petit-bourgeois intellectual who, free from the worries of work or capital, indulges him- or herself by adopting the position of universal thought and disinterested taste. Their exception
therefore confirms the rule according to which judgments of taste are in fact incorporated social judgments that translate a socially determined ethos. Such judgments are also part of the mystification that hides the reality of social determinism and helps prevent victims of the system from
gaining access to the knowledge that could liberate them.