Kaleidoscope 1.

1 (2007), Botha, Book Review

Interdisciplinarity in Aesthetics
Marc Botha
Jacques Rancire, The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2007) vii + 147 pp., 14.99.

The remarkable capacity of Rancires writing to expose extremities of depth and scope in relation to his topic conceptualizations and operations of the image, and particularly the fragmentation of traditional views of the image that accompanies his expansive take on the subject is richly illustrated in the collection of essays which comprises The Future of the Image. Such is the magisterial ease of his movement across the history and discursive vocabularies of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, that it becomes appropriately inappropriate to separate these spheres. As Rancire asks, are we in fact referring to a simple, univocal reality? (1). This question is well-answered as the text elaborates an appealing equivocity each voice of the discussion maintaining its distinctiveness while still contributing to an consistent and appealingly interdisciplinary whole. It is difficult to resist coining new terms for Rancires manoevres in an attempt to hold them momentarily and unambiguously still. On account of the density of the essays, providing anything like an adequate summative review is equally tricky. There is little material that is not sufficiently nuanced to warrant some degree of elaboration, rather than simplification or condensation. Compelled, nonetheless, to identify some sort of broad thesis, Rancires arguments revolve around an urgency, in the current discourse of the image and its relationship to various regimes of representation, to take account of a radical sense of disjunction. Although it finds various and divergent expressions, a paradoxical sense of making discontinuous elements follow one another is constant. These do not simply repeat nave and trendy theoretical post-positions however, but unfold as a compelling alternative

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formulation of the tentative situatedness of contemporary existence, opening not only a radicalized aesthetic sphere, but a significant political space as well. Rancires opening and title essay, The Future of the Image, exposes the essential ambiguity and otherness that both resides in the cinematic image, and is also brought to it from the outside. This might be thought as the image which exceeds the anticipated boundaries of resemblance of the world-out-there a certain alteration of resemblance a certain system of relations between the sayable and the visible, between the visible and the invisible (12). In so doing, Rancire points to a new regime of the image which, in one sense, continues the modern project of aestheticisation begun in the eighteenth century. But in another sense, he also inaugurates an important ethical move (which is expanded particularly in the final essay of the collection) towards a new mode of bearing witness in the world, which begins as silent witness of a condition inscribed directly [in the visible aspects of the image in which we are] possessors of a secret we shall never know, a secret veiled by the very image that delivers them to us (15). This play between presence and absence, between showing and indicating, is developed through the proposition of three types of image: the naked image, which is an image of pure presence that does not constitute art; the ostensive image, which claims a similar presence without intricate association, but in the service of art; the metaphorical image, which situates itself in the complex tensions of signification (following the vocabulary of structuralism) and presence, between the artistic, social and political spheres. Film provides the central imagery of much of Rancires thinking on the image, particularly the disjunctive and fragmented images o f Bressons Au hazard Balthazar in the first essay, and Goddards Historie(s) du cinema in the second (entitled Sentence, Image, History). One is tempted to recall, with regard to the way

Kaleidoscope 1.1 (2007), Botha, Book Review

that fragmentation is associated here with continuity, the mode of demonstrating fragmentation as a continuous form which was inaugurated by the Jena romantics and which has been the focus of influential essays by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, as well as Blanchot. It is not surprising, though, that Rancire alludes to an aesthetic age frequently while still largely avoiding the particular history of early German romanticism. Its evocation of autopoiesis in short, the notion that a work of arts form can generate its content and vice-versa and the independence of the literary force, seems to proscribe the singularity of the image, even as it functions analogously to it. Instead, fragmentation finds an altogether different course in the second piece, which draws on the idea of a parataxis. This concept develops the possibility that a specifically involving, effective and evocative mode of meaning construction can be reached by juxtaposing starkly contrasting ideas. This is used to reconsider the notions of discontinuity that seem to reside in the contemporary image, which paradoxically institute new possibilities of aesthetic inter-connectivity,

interdisciplinarity and community. These possibilities are housed in Rancires term, the sentence-image, which inaugurates a mode of continuous phrasing (58). This phrasing all ows fragmented images to be juxtaposed, co-existing thus in a continuum that reinvests within the progress of history a sense of community rather than opposition between, on the one hand a simple synthesis of opposing problems through dialectic reasoning, and on the other, a straightforward pattern of the essential incommensurability that lies within a symbolic projection. What this reveals is a significant concealed element of representation a world whose writ runs behind its anodyne or glorious appearances (57) that is essentially also concealed through the traditions of representation, especially in

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literature and the visual arts. In other words, an apparent incommensurability merely reveals new measurements between these elements of art. This constant reinnovation and discovery of new modes of connectivity implies a fascinating political radicalisation of the aesthetic. This includes a strong discussion of the symbolist aesthetic, the reaction in nineteenth century arts to the dominance of Realism and Naturalism and which is transported to the present. This initially reactive aesthetic Rancire describes in terms of an idea of a machine of mystery [which] is a machine for making something common, not to contrast worlds, but to present, in the most unexpected ways a co-belonging, developed in the poetry of Mallarm and reflected by Godards cinematic methods. Continuing the line of unexpected equivalences, Rancires explication of the complicity of the articulation between words and visual f orms that defines a regime of art (70) gains political momentum in the third offering of this volume, Painting in the Text. Here we encounter the authors rare ability to integrate seamlessly the political with the aesthetic. Rancires conclusion, tha t aesthetic history is best conceived in terms of a regime of equivalence (74), rests, firstly, on an understanding of mimesis (in brief, the modes of representing nature, or the existent) that is not an external constraint that weighed on the arts and imprisoned them in resemblance. It is the fold in the order of ways of making and social occupations that rendered them visible and thinkable, the disjunction that made them exist (73); and, secondly, on a continued imperative of disjunction in presentation. What we discover emphasised, albeit subtly, is something not entirely different from the post-structuralist focus on the reality-making properties of language: [p]resence and representation are two regimes of the painting of words and forms. The regime of visibility of the immediacies of presence is still configured

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through the mediation of words (79). Of course, the emphasis here falls on a very physical, transformatory gesture underpinning the concept of mediation, from which space Rancire frees himself to offer (arguably an overly) speculative reading of the manner in which language and the visible renovate one another. He explains this in terms of a de-figuration that converts figures of representation into tropes of expression (77). An example Rancire uses is that of flatness in formalist art, where this flatness is deduced from the presentation in one instance, but is only deduced inasmuch as it is also a function of the discourse which determines what flatness is, how it should be represented, and, indeed, how it might be projected in the future (the as yet unrealized possibilities of painting in the present work (83)). This conclusion is admittedly allowed by an extrinsic reading of what others might argue are intrinsic qualities of the media in question. Nonetheless, it as an interesting and seductive postulation. The fourth essay further develops the sense of community and of a renewed politics Rancire extracts from the anti-mimetic turn of the earlier essays, by suggesting further equivocations between the world of design and literature. Particularly, he examines the relationship between the studied distillation of Mallarms symbolism and the functional reductionism of Behrens pioneering industrial design for the AEG company, suggesting a new texture of communal existence (97). Once again, Rancires arguments rest on the notion that the equivalence of the graphic and the visual creates the link between the poets types and the engineers. It visualizes the idea which haunts bot h of them that of a common physical surface where signs, forms and acts become equal (99). Although the argumentation is thorough, and the suggestions regarding the shared capacities of symbolism and design are intriguing, there are certain rapid

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elisions here regarding the tired old question of the unity of form and content, form following function, and so forth that could be disputed. For example, it is possible to argue that the symbolist search for this unity relies heavily on the proposition of autopoeitic, self-productive procedures in language: in other words, that such a text produces the reality to which it refers. At times, it seems that Rancires focus is squarely on the notion of a shared conceptual core, an external reality then, which is subsequently fleshed out from his particular ideological position, through which we are reminded of Rancires leftist leanings. The community of principle between sign and form, between the form of art and the form of the everyday object, given concrete expression by the graphic design of the early twentieth century, might lead us to reassess the dominant paradigms of the modernist autonomy of art and of the relationship between art forms and life forms , suggests Rancire. This is indeed a very promising proposition, but one which seems simultaneously to exclude the possibility of a more porous sense of community and of causality in assessing the birth of aesthetic modernity and which seems open to hyperbolic critical application, although this may not be Rancires aim. Should this happen, it would present an ironic undoing of the tensed political promise of some of Rancieres writing on the position of design within the complexity of the image exposed throughout the book. The final essay presents an intricately forceful coda to the work, an impressive glimpse of the philosopher in full intellectual flight. The evocative but near dizzying rhetoric of the first two essays, followed by the more measured political unfolding of these claims in the subsequent two, gives way here to an incisive attention to detail that discloses an authoritative interdisciplinarity, moving with genuine ease between politics, aesthetics, ethics and philosophy, and across and along the history of Western thought. The essence of the argument here is that by attending to the problematic

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understanding of representation and mimesis, we come to appreciate that the affiliation of the unrepresentable and anti-representational is at best problematic. This Rancire accomplishes by ranging across the history of mimesis: from its birth in the literary proto-genre of tragedy and the attempts by the seventeenth century French dramatist, Corneille, to administer structural repairs to the representational gaps that seemed to emerge from this genre; through to the excessive modes of visuality inaugurated first of all in modern literature, and continued in the progressive abstraction of twentieth century painting and recent cinema such as the representation of the holocaust in Lanzmanns nine-hour epic, Shoah. We are occasioned in this process to consider what precisely is meant by notions of anti-representation, and by the unsayable and unrepresentable. Rancire provides a nuanced discussion of the ways in which the aesthetic realm projects itself through a constitutive paradox: to paraphrase briefly and a little simplistically in relation to the sophistication of the philosophers presentation, that aspect of art which would establish it as autonomous simultaneously abolishes the necessary mimetic connections to a world out there on the basis of which such a judgment could be made in the first place. From here, Rancire asks what substance and meaning might the unrepresentable possess? We must pay close attention to Rancires use of the term appropriate when he says that [t]here is not appropriate language for witnessing, for in the absence of appropriateness we are forced to rely on the disjunctive fragmentation which can be seen and felt running through the book as a whole. The place of witnessing in the example invoked here, it is a question of the impossibility of adequately bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust retrospectively the place of its language, is therefore situated in the disjunctive tension between the purely aesthetic and the perfectly representational. There is no longer one appropriate

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way to give account, to present or represent a subject: [a]nti -representative art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things. There are no longer any inherent limits to representation, to its possibilities. This boundlessness also means that there is no longer a language or form which is appropriate to a subject, whatever it might be (137). As he concludes, the logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it. If this is indeed the case, then it is a potent interdisciplinarity that is exposed here, for it is one that no longer is muted by the awe of possessing no tools for representation, but is enlivened by the necessity of its paratactic regime (recalling the definition of parataxis offered above), of contradiction and of conflict between regimes of representation. Arguably, the intensity of Rancires argumentation fluctuates from essay to essay, making them a little of an awkward fit. As with many collections of essays which are revisions of earlier works, one gets the impression occasionally that much of the pace is less organic than it is an artful insertion. Nonetheless, there is certainly a progressive logic, but the middle essays, Painting in the Text and The Surface Design seem to lack a little in both stylistic and argumentative intensity, coming off perhaps as accompanying pieces rather than indispensable parts of an argument. This, however, is probably more an effect of the compelling sense of urgency that emerges from the other pieces. Having said that, it is possible that the tremendous weight of the ideas posited in the concluding essay would have been intensified even further by a less pronounced acceleration than the one which takes place over the latter part of the discussion, particularly in Rancires rather rapid assessment of the failure of the philosopher Lyotards version of sublimity to reach its goal, essentially to expose the unthinkable which must underpin the ethical relation of art to politics a relationship

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that Rancire ultimately seems to stress as a much more pragmatic one than this, and perhaps necessarily so. There can be little question, ultimately, that Rancieres work is not dir ected to novices in the field/s of interdisciplinary aesthetics, but this does not detract from its excellence. It will strike chords with many different readers, but to appreciate it in the breadth in which it is intended will require some sustained concentration. Some might argue that there is considerable repetition in the essays. But undoubtedly, much like a musical composition, such repetition is balanced by new material and development. The concepts do not become tedious, or even easier through this repetition. If anything they pick up momentum in the final cadence of the book! While the work is deeply informative in one sense, it also takes for granted in its conceptual and rhetorical structures some sort of pre-existent support in the idea of the informed reader. This is not in itself problematic, however, since it presents sufficient challenges and moments of transparency for both types of reader. Its assimilation by the former might just take a little more effort. Approaching such a study necessarily presents us with a difficult read if it is to have value. After all, the imperative subtext of this work suggest that the reanimation of a meaningful contemporary leftist discourse is underpinned precisely by a necessarily disruptive interdisciplinarity a passage to a viable brand of community, and the reinvigoration of our personal and political relations made possible by the multiple and contradictory positions occupied by the image.

Kaleidoscope 1.1 (2007), Botha, Book Review

Marc Botha, Department of English Studies, Durham University. kinesis111@yahoo.co.uk Marc Botha is a postgraduate in the Durham University Department of English Studies. His research explores minimalist aesthetics and its philosophical implications, particularly in relation to the sublime.