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

Disciplines delineate their territory by cutting through the common fabric of language and thought. They thereby draw a line of partition between what the joiner, for example, says and what his phrases mean, between their raw materiality and the materiality of the social conditions that
they express.

They engage in a war against aesthetic ignorance, which means aesthetic disjunction. In other words, they must engage in a war against the war that the worker is himself fighting. They want the bodies that compose society to have the ethos—the perceptions, sensations, and thoughts that correspond to their ethos—proper to their situation and occupation.

The point is that this correspondence is perpetually disturbed. There are words and discourses that freely circulate, without a master, and divert bodies from their destinations. For the joiner and his brothers those words may be the people, liberty, or equality.

They may be passion, felicity, or ecstasy for their distant sister Emma Bovary. There are spectacles that disassociate the gaze from the hand and transform the worker into an aesthete.

Disciplinary thought must ceaselessly stop this hemorrhage in order to establish stable relations between bodily states and the modes of perception and signification that correspond to them. It must ceaselessly pursue war but pursue it as a pacifying operation.

To speak of an aesthetics of knowledge thus is not an occasion to get closer to the sensuous experience. It is an instance to speak of that silent battle, to restage the context of the war—what Foucault called the “distant roar of the battle.”

In order to do so, an aesthetics of knowledge must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries in order to restore their status as weapons in a struggle. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner out of their normal context, that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path; these phrases do not describe a lived situation but reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought that are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative (re´cit) is a myth in the Platonic sense; it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counterstory of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The countermyth of the joiner breaks the circle. In order to create the textual and signifying space for which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable, we must initiate a form of “indisciplinary” thinking. We must create a space without boundaries that is also a space of equality, in which the narrative of the joiner’s life enters into dialogue with the philosophical narrative of the organized distribution of competencies and destinies.

This implies another practice—an indisciplinary practice— of philosophy and its relation to the social sciences. Classically, philosophy has been considered a sort of superdiscipline that reflects on the methods of the social sciences or provides them with their foundation. Of course these sciences can object to this status, treat it as an illusion, and pose themselves as the true bearers of knowledge about philosophical illusion. This is another hierarchy, another way of putting discourses in their place. But there is a third way of proceeding that seizes the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration, in the egalitarian language of the narrative, of the arbitrary nature of this order.

This is what I have tried to do by connecting the narrative of the joiner with the Platonic myth. The specificity of the Platonic myth is constituted by the way in which it inverts the reasons of knowledge (savoir) with the purely arbitrary insistence on the story (conte).

While the historian and the sociologist show us how a certain life produces a certain thought expressing a life, the myth of the philosopher refers this necessity to an arbitrary, beautiful lie that, at the same time, is the reality of life for the greatest number of people.

This identity of necessity and contingency—the reality of the lie—cannot be rationalized in the form of a discourse that separates truth from illusion. It can only be recounted, that is, stated in a discursive form that suspends the distinction and the hierarchy of discourse.

It is here, Plato claims in Phaedrus, that we must speak the truth (vrai), there where we speak of truth (ve´rite´). It is here also that he has recourse to the most radical story, that of the plain of truth, of the divine charioteer, and of the fall that transforms some into men of silver and others into gymnasts, artisans, or poets.

In other words, taking things the other way around, at the moment when he most implacably states the organized distribution of conditions, Plato has recourse to what most radically denies this distribution: the power of the story and the common language that abolishes the hierarchy of discourse and the hierarchies that this underwrites. The foundation of the foundation is a story, an aesthetic affair.

From this we can imagine a practice of philosophy that points to the story that is implied in each of the methods that define how a certain ethos produces a certain form of thinking. The point is not to claim that the disciplines are false sciences or that what they actually do is in fact a form of literature. Nor is it to annul them from the point of view of some figure of the other or the outside: the traumatic revelation of the real, the shock of the event, the horizon of the messianic promise, and so on.

The point is neither to reverse the order of dependence inside the ethical consensus nor to refer to the subversive power of the wholly Other. If an aesthetic practice of philosophy means something, it means the subversion of those distributions.

All territories are topoi predicated on a singular form of the distribution of the sensible. A topography of the thinkable is always the topography of a theater of operations. There is no specific territory of thought. Thought is everywhere. Its space has no periphery, and its inner divisions are always provisory forms of the distribution of the thinkable. A topography of the thinkable is a topography of singular combinations of sense and sense, of provisory knots and gaps.

An aesthetics of knowledge creates forms of supplementation that allow us to redistribute the configuration of the topoi, the places of the same and the different, the balance of knowledge and ignorance. It implies a practice of discourse that reinscribes the force of descriptions and arguments in the war of discourses in which no definite border separates the voice of the object of science from the logos of the science that takes it as its object. It means that it reinscribes them in the equality of a common language and the common capacity to invent objects, stories, and arguments.

If this practice is named philosophy, this means that philosophy is not the name of a discipline or a territory. It is the name of a practice; it is a performance that sends the specificities of the territories back to the common sharing of the capacity of thinking. In this sense the aesthetic practice of philosophy can also be called a method of equality.

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

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. [...] 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.

[...]

Lyotard dismisses the heterotopy of the beautiful in favor of the heteronomy of the sublime. The result of this operation is the same as that of the sociological critique, though it is made from a very different angle; in both cases the political potential of the heterotopy is boiled down to a sheer illusion that conceals the reality of a subjection.

[...]

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.

[...]

Aesthetic ignorance thus neutralizes the ethical distribution insofar as it splits up the simple alternative laid down by the sociologist that claims you are either ignorant and subjugated or have knowledge and are free. This alternative remains trapped in the Platonic circle, the ethical circle according to which those who have the sensible equipment suitable for the work that does not wait are unable to gain the knowledge of the social machine.

The break away from this circle can only be aesthetic. It consists in the disjunction between sensible equipment and the ends that it must serve. The joiner agrees with Kant on a decisive point: the singularity of the aesthetic experience is the singularity of an as if. The aesthetic judgment acts as if the palace were not an object of possession and domination. The joiner acts as if he possessed the perspective. This as if is no illusion. It is a redistribution of the sensible, a redistribution of the parts supposedly played by the higher and the lower faculties, the higher and the lower classes. 

As such it is the answer to another as if: the ethical order of the city, according to Plato, must be viewed as if God had put gold in the souls of the men who were destined to rule and iron in the souls of those who were destined to work and be ruled. It was a matter of belief. Obviously Plato did not demand that the workers acquire the inner conviction that a deity truly mixed iron in their souls and gold in the souls of the rulers. It was enough that they sensed it, that is, that they used their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if this were true. And they did so even more as this lie about fitting actually fit the reality of their condition. The ethical ordering of social occupations ultimately occurs in the mode of an as if. The aesthetic rupture breaks this order by constructing another as if.

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

What I call the aesthetic dimension is this: the count of a supplement to the parts that cannot be described as a part itself. It is another kind of relation between sense and sense, a supplement that both reveals and neutralizes the division at the heart of the sensible. Let us call it a dissensus. A dissensus is not a conflict; it is a perturbation of the normal relation between sense and sense. The normal relation, in Platonic terms, is the domination of the better over the worse. Within the game it is the distribution of two complementary and opposite powers in such a way that the only possible perturbation is the struggle of the worse against the better—for instance, the rebellion of the democratic class of desire against the aristocratic class of intelligence. In this case there is no dissensus, no perturbation of the game. There is a dissensus only when the opposition itself is neutralized.

This means that neutralization is not at all tantamount to pacification. On the contrary, the neutralization of the opposition between the faculties, the parts of the soul, or the classes of the population is the staging of an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the conflict.

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

Let us summarize the three points. First, a distribution of the sensible means a certain configuration of the given. Second, this configuration of the given entails a certain relation of sense and sense. That may be conjunctive or disjunctive. The relation is conjunctive when it obeys a certain order of subordination between faculties, a certain manner of playing the game according to established rules. It is disjunctive when the relationship between faculties has no rule. Third, the conjunction or disjunction is also a matter of hierarchy. Either there is a hierarchy between the faculties, which may be overturned, or there is no hierarchy, in which case there is a faculty whose proper power stems from the rejection of the hierarchical relation.

This rejection of the hierarchical relation between the faculties that make sense involves a certain neutralization of the social hierarchy. This is suggested in the second section of Critique of Judgment through the example of the palace. It is underlined later in the sixtieth section, which attributes to the aesthetic sensus communis a power of reconciliation between principles and classes.

It is also spelled out a few years later in Schiller’s political interpretation of the aesthetic experience as the neutralization of the opposition between the formal drive and the sensible drive. By translating the play between the faculties into a tension between drives, Schiller reminds Kant’s readers of what is at stake. Before becoming faculties that cooperate to form judgments, understanding and sensibility designated parts of the soul, the better part, the leading part of intelligence that has the power to measure, and the subordinated or rebellious part of sensibility that knows only the shock of sensation and the stimuli of desire. As Plato emphasized, the partitioning of the individual soul was a partition of the collective soul, which also was a partition of the classes in the city; there was the class of intelligence and measure that was destined to rule and the class of sensation, desire, and unlimitedness that is naturally rebellious toward the order of intelligence that it must be subjected to. The aesthetic experience is a supplementation of this partition—a third term that cannot be described as a part but as an activity of redistribution, an activity that takes the form of a neutralization.

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

The normal relation, in Platonic terms, is the domination of the better over the worse. Within the game it is the distribution of two complementary and opposite powers in such a way that the only possible perturbation is the struggle of the worse against the better—for instance, the rebellion of the democratic class of desire against the aristocratic class of intelligence. In this case there is no dissensus, no perturbation of the game. There is a dissensus only when the opposition itself is neutralized.

This means that neutralization is not at all tantamount to pacification. On the contrary, the neutralization of the opposition between the faculties, the parts of the soul, or the classes of the population is the staging of an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the
conflict.

But there are two ways of understanding this excess.

Just as there are two ways to think of matters of conflict—a consensual one and a dissensual
one—there are also two ways of thinking the nature of dissensus and the relationship between consensus and dissensus.

This point is decisive.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.

Let us start from the inside. The law of the inside is doubled. Ethical in the first instance means that you interpret a sphere of experience as the sphere of the exercise of a property or a faculty possessed in common by all those who belong to a location.

There is poetry, Aristotle tells us, because men differ from animals by their higher sense of imitation; all men are able to imitate and take pleasure in imitation. In the same way, there is politics because men not only share the animal property of the voice that expresses pleasure or pain but also the specific power of the logos that allows them to reveal and discuss what is useful and what is harmful and thus also what is just and what is unjust.

As is well known, it soon is made apparent that this common property is not shared by everyone; there are human beings who are not entirely human beings. For instance, Aristotle says, the slaves have the aisthesis of language (the passive capacity of understanding words), but they don’t have the hexis of language (the active power of stating and discussing what is just or unjust).

More generally, it is always debatable whether a sequence of sounds produced by a mouth is articulated speech or the animalistic expression of pleasure or pain.

In such a way, the ethical universal is usually doubled by an ethical principle of discrimination. The common location includes in its topography different locations that entail different ways of being; the workplace, according to Plato, is a place where work does not wait, which means that the artisan has no time to be elsewhere. Since he has no place to be elsewhere, he has no capacity to understand the relation between the different places that make up a community, which means that he has no political intelligence.

This relation can be turned around; insofar as the artisan is a man of need and desire he has no sense of the common measure and therefore cannot be anywhere other than the place where the objects of desire and consumption are produced.

This is the ethical circle that ties together a location, an occupation, and the aptitude—the sensory equipment—that is geared toward them. The ethical law thus is a law of differentiation between the class of sensation and the class of intelligence.

To summarize, the ethical law, considered as the law of the inside, is a distribution of the sensible that combines—according to different forms of proportionality—the sharing of a common capacity and the distribution of alternative capacities.

But the law of the ethos can also be set up as the law of the outside [...]