Rancière on Critical Thought and Its Misadventures Balloons from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home by Martha Rosler, c. 1967-72, via MoMA An aesthetic community is a community of sense, a sense which ties them together to the fabric of society. Separation and aloneness cannot escape this communal sensibility, in our own fracture, we experience connection. In The Emancipated Spectator, a key concern is the equality of intelligence. What Rancière offers is equality amongst onlookers. In this particular event, at this particular depicted moment, each and every person is observing the same thing equally; it is a democracy of looking, creating a unique number of specific versions of engagement. After the diagnosis he gives his prescription: "The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense - that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings." p.102. Well enough but most artists would think they are doing this. In fact even the episode of Dr Who that I watched recently could fit that description.

What does this mean? I take it to mean that we should focus on a collectivising praxis to make the best of our capacities and resources rather than hoping people will sign up to a single tightly formulated ideology. I would see this as elemental as our basic human abilities.

What Is Semantic Scholar?

Perhaps because he foregrounds the traction of symbolic transformation on material change, Rancière’s work has been most readily absorbed into contemporary art discourse." Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 'From The Cult of the People, to the Cult of Ranciere', Mute vol 3 n.3, 2012 Devoted & Disgruntled Online 2022: What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts? (19-21 March) The systems mechanistic functioning is obvious to all even if it cannot be articulated in the terms of critique. In the politics he proposes: So while the historian will still want to figure out what happened (or probably didn’t) in the darkened Munich porno theater where Export’s Action Pants was supposedly staged, the invisibility—or even unlikeliness—of the event itself does not invalidate its history as a performative. What the recent explosion of live art makes clear is that art’s contemporaneity has always relied on a capacity to mobilize ongoing and subtle performatives: things and thoughts made in the present by audiences confronting something in the past. Any artwork, no matter how fleeting, perforce comes from the past (even Sehgal’s situations have their rehearsals) and must speak to us in the present if they are art at all. Contemporaneity can consist of nothing else, whether we are dealing with the ongoing liveness of Raft of the Medusa or of This Progress. Maria S. H. M. (left) and Abigail Levine reenacting Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, New York, spring 2010. Photo: Scott Rudd. It is easy to interpret the onlookers at the wedding as the ‘audience’ (or a co-audience, along with us, the viewers), surrounding the ‘performers’, Strongbow and Aoife.

Although Ranciere critiques class while rarely mentioning the word, he stops short of any insight into the affective dimension of class, by which I understand as the emotional toll exacted by class oppression. He does not go into that kind of knowledge or the way that trauma can be a barrier to knowledge. Affects that impact on people fundamentally tend to happen at an impressionable age - and the false idea of an inequality of intelligence and status fostered by the school system is one of the most poisonous. I recently heard this described by a middle class woman as a daily pencilling of the lines that separate, until the division was etched into her being. Ranciere manages to jiggle my thinking but as an analysis there are too many variables. I feel there is also something missing.The current scepticism is the result of a surfeit of faith. It was generated by the disappointed belief in a straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action…" "The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated. p.103 Aesthetic Separation and Community “Bathers in Asnières”, 1884, retouched 1887, painting by Georges Pierre Seurat, via National Gallery, London. gördüklerini ve gördüklerinden ne anladıklarını söylemelerini, bunu teyit etmelerini ve teyit ettirmelerini ister. Cahil hocanın bilmediği, kabul etmediği şey, zekâların eşitsizliğidir. Her mesafe olgusal bir mesafedir ve her entelektüel edim cehalet ile bilgi arasında katedilen bir yoldur -bütün o sınırlarıyla birlikte her türden sabitliği ve konumlar hiyerarşisini hiç durmaksızın ortadan kaldıran bir yol."