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Rancire's Equal Music

Jairo Moreno & Gavin Steingo
Published online: 12 Apr 2013.
To cite this article: Jairo Moreno & Gavin Steingo (2012) Rancire's Equal Music, Contemporary
Music Review, 31:5-6, 487-505, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2012.759415
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Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 31, Nos. 56, OctoberDecember 2012, pp. 487505
Rancires Equal Music

Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo
Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 22:44 24 October 2014
This article addresses the position of music (and art more generally) in the thought of
Jacques Rancire. For Rancire, all societies and communities are partitioned first and
foremost on the level of sense perception. Both music and politics are therefore aesthetic
in the Kantian sense, as the organization of forms that determine what is able to appear
to the senses. As such, music has no special powersit is neither transcendental nor
ineffableand can only offer emancipatory projects what it shares with them, that is,
certain re-distributions or parceling outs of the sensible (i.e. the visible and invisible,
the audible and inaudible). Political music, then, is radically equal to any other action.
Furthermore, any challenge to a given societys sensible distribution is based on the
axiom of equality. Music, finally, becomes equal to politics when it renounces its alleged
singularity and asserts the fundamental equality of human intelligence and intelligibility.
Keywords: Jacques Rancire; Dissensus; Equality; Intelligibility; Aesthetics; Politics
In The philosopher and his poor, Jacques Rancire recounts the experiments of Miguel
ngel Estrella, who in the early 1970s took classical music to peasants and workers in
his native Argentina, performing free concerts in their villages and factories ([1983]
2004a, p. 185 ff.). Upon hearing Debussy, people maintained a distance; Mozart
brought them closer to Estrellas piano; Bach, Rancire relates, was adopted as the
son of the people by the village community ([1983] 2004a, p. 185 ff.). Pierre Bourdieu,
Rancire continues, would explain the social pliability of music in Estrellas experiment
as the consequence of its muteness (or abstractness): music does not speak its habitus.
It is the art of denegation of the social world (2004a, p. 186, citing Bourdieu, [1979]
1984, p. 19), confounding the anthropological and sociological principle of legitimate
cultural property that Bourdieu valorized in the communities of his fieldwork. Indeed,
to assess the social mobility of music (or rather its immobility), Bourdieu conducted a
poll asking French people from various social strata to choosewithout hearing
three favorite pieces out of a set of 14 titles. Those in the lower strata claimed that
classical music was not for them. In contrast, people in higher strata, who identified
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.759415
488 J. Moreno and G. Steingo
with The well-tempered clavier, declared, all music of quality interests me (Bourdieu,
1984, pp. 362363). Music, he concluded, might not speak its habitus, but people
certainly do.
By demonstrating the relation of social class to taste, Bourdieu sought to disprove
Kants arguments for disinterested aesthetic judgment and an autonomous sensorium.
The notion of pure taste, he argued, was contingent upon the bourgeois allocation of
an experience of space and time (i.e. an aesthetic) allegedly unconstrained by necessity
and abstracted from social relations. All other aesthetic proclivities and competences,
and particularly those of the working class or peasantry, mapped directly onto social
groups. Rancire disagrees with Bourdieus methodology and the results derived
from it. For him, Estrellas informal experiments with music were dissensual. They
assumed the fundamental equality of all people to engage music. No competence

was presupposed other than a capacity for sensorial and intellectual redistribution.
Dissensus occurred when someone acted on that presupposition. The sociologist, by
contrast, armed with the names of music and the structure of prior knowledge acqui-
sition that they entailknowledge of music historycould only prove what he already
knew: that societies everywhere seize upon the sensorium to relentlessly classify intern-
ally and in relation to other societies.
This interpretation of Estrella is based on several fundamental notions in Rancires
thought: the (re)distribution of the sensible, the relationship between politics and aes-
thetics, the axiom of equality, and the contestation over intelligibility. These are all
novel and very precise notions, for which we now offer a schematic outline. Distri-
bution ([or] partition) of the sensible (le partage du sensible) is defined as the
system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the exist-
ence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts
and positions within it (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 12). According to this definition,
prior to cultural proclivities and aesthetic competences, any formation (community,
culture, society) has the sensorial as its common. As he puts it, what is commonly dis-
tributed is what presents itself to sense experience (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 13). At
the same time, distribution operates under a logic of exclusion, designated under the
rubric of delimitations. These mark necessary stipulations of what is visible, audible,
and sayable within a given formation, and they regulate the allocations of people to
functions within this field of stipulations. As it configures the field of available and
possible sense experience (aesthetics), the distribution of the sensible is an operator
of division that both orders and makes a collective unity possible. The logic of this
inclusive exclusion is reflected in the dual sense of partition and partaking in the
word partage. All told, any formation is divided from itself in advance and is done
so in sensorial terms. This carries political consequences.
Rancire defines politics in aesthetic terms. Politics is not the exercise of, or struggle
for, power, he declares, but is instead the configuration of a specific space, the framing
of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to
a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and
putting forward arguments about them ([2004] 2009, p. 24).1 On the one hand, the
Contemporary Music Review 489
distribution of the sensible implies that the sensorial is constituted in radical equality
before any configuration takes place. On the other hand, because of that radical equal-
ity, any and all distributions are susceptible to re-distribution. Rancire conceives this
re-distribution, called dissensus, as an action taken by people declaring their capacity
to alter the calculus of inclusion and exclusion that constitutes the formation to which
they belong. Equality is the presupposition for distribution and for the existence of the
common, as well as the reason that formations have historically been ordered in accord-
ance with the logic of inclusive exclusion. As Rancire states, in every formation there is
a part with no part which nonetheless is an equal to the whole within which it is
uncounted: there is order in society because some people command and some
people obey, but in order to obey at least two things are required: you must understand
the order and you must understand that you must obey. And to do that, you must
already be the equal of the person who is ordering you (Rancire, [1995] 1999,
p. 16). By understanding, those who obey illustrate their equality to those who order.
But those who obey only understand so that they can obey; as such, the nature of
their inequality is predicated on equality. Equality, then, is a question of intelligibility
and of intelligence that it expresses. Nothing is more fundamental than this presupposi-
tion. Our problem isnt proving that all intelligence is equal, he says. Its seeing what
can be done under that presupposition. And for this, its enough for us that the opinion
be possiblethat is, that no opposing truth be proved ([1981] 1991, p. 46).
Art and aesthetics are historically marked distributions of the sensible. For instance,
as anthropologists John Leavitt and Lynn M. Hart put it, there are sensorial pro-
longations and elaborations operating in the arts, and societies everywhere engage
in a prodigious aesthetic elaboration of certain sensorial practices (1990, pp. 83,
85; in Porcello, Meintjes, Ochoa, & Samuels, 2010, p. 57). Rancire studies that elab-
oration under the notion of regimes of art.
The Anti-Politics of Music

Music results from a double count: it is both a model of the political community as a
wholea model of division and representationand the musicians lot within that
model (Rancire, 2002, p. 23). Politics throws this dual distribution into question:
Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the exist-
ence and status of those present on it (Rancire, [1995] 1999, p. 26). To work around
this conflict, philosophers of music propose three different solutions: ethical, poetic,
and aesthetic. It is no coincidence that these solutions (from which Rancire derives
his three regimes of art) correspond to the three anti-political philosophies he outlines:
archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics.
Ethical Music
The weight of ethics influence on the history of music is expressible in a single word:
harmony. Harmony is the mathematical and ethical essence of music that animates not
only the Platonic republic, but also the Pythagoric cult. The latter embodies the har-
monious submission of the multiple to the law of unity in its purest, most extreme
form:
[T]he whole Pythagoric school produced by certain appropriate songs what they
called exartysis or adaptation, synarmoge or elegance of manners, and epaphe or
contact, usefully conducting the dispositions of the soul to passions contrary to
those which it before possessed. For when they went to bed they purified the reasoning
power from the perturbations and noises to which it had been exposed during the day,
by certain odes and peculiar songs, and by this means procured for themselves tran-
quil sleep, and few and good dreams. But when they rose from bed, they again liber-
ated themselves from the torpor and heaviness of sleep, by songs of another kind.
Sometimes, also, by musical sounds alone, unaccompanied with words, they healed
the passions of the soul and certain diseases, enchanting, as they say, in reality.
After this manner, therefore, Pythagoras through music produced the most beneficial
correction of human manners and lives. (Taylor, [1818] 1986, p. 61)
The Pythagorean cult deploys harmony as its model and instrument. The Pythagoreans
use songs and sound to bind their reason to their health, actions, and desires, and by
doing so form the coherent whole of their dwelling. For Rancire, it is precisely this
binding that defines ethics. As a community, the Pythagoreans leave no space or
time for democratic disturbance, and therefore embody the anti-political strategy
that Rancire calls archipolitics. Archipolitics is the total becoming-sensible of
the law of the community. There can be no time off, no empty space in the fabric
of the community [It] reveals in all its radicality the project of a community
based on the complete realization of the arkh of community, on its integral sensibi-
lization, replacing the democratic configuration of politics with nothing left over
(Rancire, [1995] 1999, pp. 68, 65; trans. modified after Bosteels, 2010, p. 83). The
republic is that community in which nature (phusis) is the law (nomos) and in
which that law exists as living logos: as the essential ethos (morality, ways of being,
character) of the community and of each of its members; as the occupation of the
workers; as the tune playing in everyones heads and the movement spontaneously ani-
mating their bodies; as the spiritual nourishment (troph) that automatically turns
their minds toward a certain cast (tropos) of behavior and thought. Unsurprisingly,
Platos ethical music was central to the Greek paideia, or pedagogy of virtuosity.
Platos exacting choreographic music is limited to that which is faithful to the
essence of the idea in this case, harmonious unity and proportionality. Music in
which the sonic and the visual coalesce via mimesis, says Rancire, introduces a dis-
turbing multiplicity into the essential harmonious unity of the community. In this
sense, mimetic music is without origin (an-archic) and must be disavowed. Rancires
differs from the standard account of proper and improper music given in Platos pre-
scriptions of certain tonal configurations (e.g. the Dorian mode calms warriors; the
Lydian mode does not). He regards the force of these widely known admonishments
as an effect of a more fundamental ordering: the authority to safeguard the spaces and
times, the places and roles that define the community in its harmonious unity
(Rancire, 2002, p. 23). Music qua sounding phenomena is ethical only so long as
sensory material, practice, and thought remain in their prescribed space and time.
More than any other regime, ethical music delimits the ways of doing and making
that constitute artistic practice as highly specific spatio-temporal distributions of
the general distributions of doing and making. This is so because ethical music dis-
closes for the community the relationship between being in its essence, on the one
hand, and specific forms of visibility and audibility that always need to be kept
apart without any mimetic link, on the other. All told, ethical music prohibits its
makers from being in charge of anything that is truly common to the community:
the exclusive inclusion that constitutes it as such and that Rancire calls the wrong.
Rancire suggests a radical apportioning of labor and time in which those who
make cannot be somewhere else because work cannot wait ([2000] 2004c, 12).
Ethical musicians have as their predetermined task to render audible the sound
proper to the community. But they can only do this by establishing a partition of
the audible that paradoxically excludes them from any other form of community par-
ticipation. They count in so far as they contribute to the common, by willingly accept-
ing the allotment the community gives themno emancipation, resistance, or
subversion here.
Like many theorists, Rancire anchors his analyses on classical texts. He emphasizes,
however, that the ethical regime of art is operative across vast swaths of time and place
and can be found anywhere that ethics is called upon to do the kind of political work
articulated by Plato. There is thus an ethical dimension to music making in the absence
of harmony, too, even if that absence is marshaled in the name of emancipation.
Noise, literally and figuratively, is a good example. As an admittedly thinly treated
illustration, take for instance the heterogeneous experimental approach through
which the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) asserts
the capacity for self-determination of the African-American creative community.
George E. Lewis, the Associations leading historian, identifies this project under the
rubric of noise,2 namely, the sound-based disruption of contemporary economies
of repetition (Lewis, 2008, p. xxxiii, after Attali) that constrain particular groups,
times, and places to specific expressive practices or else cordon them off from
others. Overcoming the narrow boundaries of the economy of repetition, Lewis
writes that the musical influence of the AACM has extended across borders of
genre, race, geography, and musical practice, and must be confronted in any non-
racialized account of experimental music (Lewis, 2008, p. x).3 Indeed, as he later
remarks, African American artists of the current generation are free to assimilate
sounds from all over the world, even as they situate their work in a complexly articu-
lated African American intellectual, social, and sonic matrix (Lewis, 2008, p. 447).
This matrix serves as an avatar for both the ethos out of which musical creativity
and social agency emanate (this is the practice of assimilation) as well as the origin
and foundation for that ethos (because it is always situated within that matrix). In
its Latin rendering as principium, arche is both origin and guiding principle. The
matrix, in short, constitutes the principium to which musicians of the Association
must remain faithful and collectively return if the project is to continue to exert
pressure on racial prejudices about black musical creativity in the USA and, by impli-
cation, abroad. As such, the noise that Lewis designates can only be noisy up until a
certain point, after which time it must be brought back under the auspices of the
matrix that produced it in the first place: US national racial classification. The
AACM does not define African-American musical praxis in terms of particular rhyth-
mic or formal aspects. Its aim, in fact, is to refute any such associations. The Associ-
ation, then, is not characterized by content or form but is instead ordered through a
particular distribution of music making. In Rancires framework, the contingent
nature of ethical music becomes evident: its internal imperatives and constraints
appear directly alongside its dissensual capacity for redistributing the sensible. From
his perspective the verification of equality is a punctual action (Deranty, 2003,
para. 7): in its aftermath and despite its political accomplishments it folds back into
an assertion of difference, which is a form of inequality. Here, politics begets its
own anti-politics. Rancire would therefore say that the AACMs declassification can
only result in a re-classification.4 As an ethical injunction affirming the creative open-
ness of African-American musicians within a society (i.e. USA) deeply plagued by
structural inequality and various forms of covert and overt racial violence, things
could not be otherwise. The re-classification or return we have described is, therefore,
no failure. It is, instead, an inevitable result of any redistribution of the sensible.
Our argument, then, is not that music might otherwise and in a different context be
universal, or without matrix. Like all modalities of harnessing the sensible, music is
the result of an originary distribution and as such is susceptible to redistribution
through the various regimes of art. Following Rancires axiomatic assertion of equal-
ity, if there is a distribution, there is a corollary practice of inequality. Music is no
exception. Before music becomes part of the arts, it is part of a distribution of the
sensible. Typically, Rancire resorts to Greek thought and mythology. Music, of
course, is the concern of the Muses before being of the instrumentalists. Which is as
much as to say that before being an art, music is a form of sharing the sensitive, con-
ferring space and meaning on the distribution of the bodies and the images, voices and
instruments in a given time and spacewhich makes music homologous of a certain
disposition of the community (2002, p. 23). Music is, as we have said, a double count,
a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive sharing, and the Muses were their first
laborers. From that point on, the history of musical art is a series of redistributions
he calls metamorphoses. After Platos influential ethical music, it is Aristotle who
effectively redistributes the audible, now in a complex relationship with the visible.
In the thought of Platos student, music becomes an art.
Poetic Music
Aristotle does not refuse his masters prescriptions for musics role in the community.
Music remains for him the generic name for the education that shapes noble souls and
bodies, subject to divine proportion (Rancire, 2002, p. 23). But in the hierarchy of the
Poetics, music partakes of a new distribution, a regime Rancire calls poetic or repre-
sentative. It now lies in between the poem and the elaboration of discourse, on the
one hand, and the incidental and lowliest domain of spectacle, on the other. The dis-
positive of partage is in full effect, establishing a common from which some things are
excluded: song, not mere sound or what we might call instrumental music, rises
within the new regime by virtue of its link with speech. Why? Because Aristotelian
speech, the logos, is not simply the capacity to articulate thought to sound (phone
semantike); it is the capacity to address and express the just (and not merely the plea-
surable, painful, or harmful). For living forms, speech is the constitutive expression of
their suitability for political life. In other words, the Aristotelian metamorphosis of the
Muses does not consist in the discovery or disclosure of the power of words in song.
It is not melody that lends power to words. (Unlike Plato, who censors Homers
mousike and valorizes melos, the melodic rendering of words, Aristotle understands
logos as speech (Cavarero, 2005).) Rather, the establishment of speech as the index
and final horizon of political determination makes this metamorphosis possible.
Speech lends power to melody, not the other way around.
Within the poetic regime, mimesis begins to exert force. A gap between life and its
artistic depictionthat is to say, mimesisopens up a space for the logic of represen-
tation. Music might seem to benefit from the mimetic imperative. Bereft of the ethical
essence to which it must correspond, music no longer operates under the control of
times and spaces of its production or under constraints for its use. But although
music is no longer required to constitute the proper ethical essence of the community
and does not contain a truth, it nonetheless finds in the logic of mimesis a constitutive
limit. Now music must contend with the fact that it is too close to speech to be its proper
analogue (analogon). With no sufficient gap in which to gain a foothold in the operations
of correspondence, music is demoted. Horaces ut pictura poesis captures the logic of
this demotion, or in Rancires words, [t]he matrix couple of the poem that depicts and
the painting that recounts, which commands in the representative regime the corre-
spondence of the arts, thus accuses music of mutism (2002, p. 23).5 From this per-
spective, wordless music can neither mean nor give an account, being an object of
pleasure, an object of sensation, nothing more and nothing less.
If ethical music obeyed the legislative command of unity, poetic music does not. But
if poetic music stages a gap between its depiction of life and life itself, its actual matter
(harmony) does not change. Poetic music too is a new fold in the distribution of ways
of doing and making that renders it audible and visible as an autonomous practice vis-
-vis Platonic harmonious unity. This, however, is not the autonomy of what will be
known as Absolute Music. The arts remain tethered via analogy to the social order
from which they derive their force, even as they help constitute that order. According
to Rancire, the logic of representation enters into a relationship of global analogy
with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations. The representative
primacy of action over characters or of narration over description, the hierarchy of
genres according to the dignity of their subject matter, and the very primacy of the
art of speaking, of speech in actuality, all these elements figure into an analogy with
a fully hierarchical vision of the community (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, 22). On the one
hand, ethical music like poetic music remains closely regulated within the structures of
the Greek polisthe vituperations against music in Politics are not much different
from Platos. On the other hand, music now belongs to a domain of doing, making,
and perceiving distinguishable from other ways of doing, making, and perceiving. It
is precisely because of the gap between it and life that contemplation is now possible
and indeed part of the political aesthetics of the city. In the end, poetic music forms
part of the institutionalization of the arts and partakes of the stability that empowers
the arts to do political work in the polis under the logic of mimesis: to represent life as
it could be.
Parapolitics is what Rancire calls the Aristotelian police order in which poetic music
operates. Unlike archipolitics, there is no return to a proper foundation. Instead, by

recognizing the fundamentally political character of man and the conflictive nature
of the polis, it elaborates the system of arithmetical distribution that will, by allocating
resources according to pre-determined virtues and entitlements of various competing
groups, set up a stable system of governance. This stability results from, first, defining
the people as the (dispossessed) possessors of something called freedom, and second,
determining freedom to be the common to the community as a whole, the oligarchy
and the aristocracy included.
By setting up politics as a particular domain of social life, apart from economics and
morality, and by conceiving it as a particular human aptitude, Aristotle bequeaths the
West, so-called, the democratic model of governance, or proper politics in their
essence as a potential struggle over the power to count and be counted. Aristotle
managed to propose the realization of a natural order of politics as a constitutional
order by the very inclusion of what blocked such realization: the demos, either as the
form of exposure of the war between the rich and the poor, or in the ultimate form
of the effectiveness of an egalitarian anarchy (Rancire, [1995] 1999, p. 72). Parapo-
litics, then, constitutes the most forceful expression of the Rancirian wrong.
Addressing the longevity of Aristotles model, Rancire designates as modern parapo-
litics the analysis, initiated by Hobbes and refined by Rousseau, in which the natural pol-
itical aptitude of man is rendered as an explicit liability in need of a regulating force. In
fact, for Hobbes the Aristotelian aptitude towards politics of man is already an effect of a
fundamental compulsion to wage a war of all against all. The constitution of power
cannot any longer be given in a set of virtuous entitlements; rather, a new figure
emerges in whom the absolute capacity and power to govern dwells: the individual.
Modern parapolitics consists in the regulation of this individual capacity and power
through the mechanism of sovereignty. Rancires assessment is fulminating.
[Hobbes] shifts Aristotles reasoning from the level of the parties to the level of indi-
viduals, from a theory of government to a theory about the origins of power, adding that,
[T]his also means that sovereignty is no longer domination of one party over
another. It is the radical dismissal of the case of the parties and of what their inter-
play gives rise to: the effectiveness of the part of those who have no part. The
problematization of the origins of power and the terms in which it is framed the
social contract, alienation, and sovereigntydeclare first that there is no part of
those who have no part. There are only individuals and the power of the state
[Modern parapolitics] begins by initially braking down the people into individuals,
which, in one go, exorcises the class war of which politics consists, in the war of all
against all. (1999, p. 78; trans. rev. after Bosteels, 2010, p. 89)
Modern parapolitics replaces the distance of the people from itself with a distance
of man from himself, now conceptualized as the gap between man and citizen
(Bosteels, 2010, p. 90). It is possible to see how modern parapolitics helps frame con-
temporary liberal politics of recognition with particular force in societies where the
individual is the sacrosanct unit for action and transformation. Consider the case of
Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenn (b. 1976). In 2008, he received the prestigious
MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award. The Foundation proclaimed:
Zenn demonstrates an astonishing mastery of old and new jazz idioms, from
Afro-Caribbean and Latin American rhythmical concepts to free and avant-garde
jazz The result [of Jbaro, a 2005 release] is a complex yet accessible sound that
is overflowing with feeling and passion and maintains the integrity of the islands
music. This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cul-
tural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the
21st century (MacArthur Foundation, 2008). This captures the modern parapolitical
spirit to the letter. An individual is ascribed a role in the renovation of a national tra-
dition even though that individual is constitutively split from the nation. Why? Because
as member of the Associate Free State of Puerto Rico, Zenn is not a citizen like the
rest, having conditional status before US democratic institutions. Just as the Aristote-
lian equality of logos conceals the political tear of wrong, here music is mobilized to
close a gap it cannot bridge between the Hobbesian individual and the democratic
citizen. That music operates in plain view of modern parapolitical wrong should
give us pause. True, this episode could be taken as a routine superstructural work,
and the award does not seek to render democratic citizenship as such. The Rancirian
argument, however, would be that by virtue of his creative acts, Zenn is verified in his
equalitythis is what is political here. In its encounter with the police order, however,
those same acts leave him as a democratically unequal individual.
The incommensurability between an institution of the police order (the Foun-
dation) and the presupposition of equality is staged on the terrain of aesthetic creativ-
ity and on behalf of a potential politics of national reinvention. The transference of
actual political struggle to a surrogate terrain enables the emergence of metapolitics.
Against action, which takes place in the present, metapolitics regards radical equality
on an ever-receding horizon, neutralizing its force as the presupposition for politics.
Aesthetic Music
Finally, the aesthetic regime of art breaks the mimetic bond that had guaranteed the
proper functioning of the poetic regime and had linked ways of doing to the task of
artistic representation. Without mimesis as a mediating principle, the hierarchy of the
fine arts dissipates, along with the material and technical norms that had kept the arts
distinct from each other and from ways of doing and making in general. If Rancire
identifies ethics with Plato and poetics with Aristotle, he associates aesthetics with
Kant. For Rancire, the aesthetic regime is coeval with a number of upheavals in eight-
eenth century Europemost notably, the French Revolution although it is not
reducible to any of them. Does the inauguration of the aesthetic regime imply the sub-
sequent impossibility of ethical or poetic music? On this point, Rancire is unequivo-
cal. Departing from Foucault, he insists that the concept of regime does not require
that something is unthinkable beyond a certain point, that each new epoch marks
an irreversible threshold beyond which the past is essentially unknowable. We do
not simply jump from one system to another in such a way that the possibility of
the new system coincides with the impossibility of the former system, Rancire
([2000] 2004c, p. 50) tells us. At any point in history, several regimes coexist and
intermingle (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 50).
Aesthetics, of course, is a very broad category for Rancire. Most fundamentally, aes-
thetics simply means the organization of forms that determine what is able to appear to
the senses. As such, all music is aesthetic music. However, the aesthetic regimewhich
designates a historically particular phenomenon and not the a priori organization of
sense perceptionis more specific. It is marked by a series of deregulations, the
most important of which is a freeing up of the norms of representation and the estab-
lishment of an autonomous community of sensible apprehension (Rancire, [1995]
1999, p. 58). It is easy to see why Rancire refers to this as the aesthetic regime. As
he notes, the notion of autonomous art was articulated most clearly by Kant, in his cri-
tique of aesthetic judgment. But Rancire differs with Kant on one fundamental point.
Whereas the latter conceptualizes autonomous art in terms of the formal characteristics
of the artwork, Rancire is interested in autonomous sensoria. Kant, it is well known,
was ambivalent towards music, an art he derided for its lack of form, and thereby for-
feiting the capacity for judgment. Because Rancire shifts the focus to sensoria,
however, the question of form need not concern him (2002, pp. 24, 30 nn. 3).
Rancire (2010b, p. 115) is conscious of the inevitable criticism that the idea of
autonomous art is simply a ruse to mask class domination or, worse still, a means
to depoliticize all art in the name of art itself. On this point, it is interesting to note
that his notion of the aesthetic regime developed out of his research on laborers.
Already in Nights of Labor, he derides the worker who is always ready to exalt the
music of his plane. In contrast to this, he celebrates the authentic joiner Gauny,
who already mistrusted the spiritedness of Saint-Simonian choirs, [who] does not
find satisfaction or recompense in this industrious music (Rancire, [1981] 1989,
p. 76). A few pages later, Rancire quotes a passage from Gaunys notebook that he
will continue to quote throughout his career:
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 neighboring
residences ([1981] 1989, p. 81).
In 1981, Rancire is satisfied to simply present Gaunys words without much commen-
tary. He only asks: But dont these possessions presented to the workers gaze call to
mind those palaces of ideas built, says Feuerbach, by philosophers living in thatched
cottages? Of course, for Rancire they do not: against Feuerbachs vulgar materialism,
Rancire proposes the political efficacy of deregulating the correspondence between
ways of being, doing, and seeing. However, Kant and aesthetics are not mentioned
in Nights of Labor. The theorization of Gaunys gaze will have to wait for a new
interpretation in The Philosopher and His Poor. There, Rancire quotes the same
passage, but this time he introduces it with the following words: Strangely enough,
the carpenter Gauny seems to be commenting on the Critique of Judgment when,
from the room in which he lays a parquet floor, he offers the gaze of an aesthete on
the dcor of his servitude ([1983] 2004a, p. 199). In 1983, Rancire relates the
anticipation of the perceptible equality to come explicitly with Kant, but also with
Schiller who developed the utopian content of Kantian aesthetics ([1983] 2004a,
pp. 198199). He suggests, moreover, that in the aesthetic regime of arts communities
are difficult, if not impossible, to establish because of the indeterminate relation
between autonomous sensoria of art and the allocation of jobs and lots. As remarked
in the Bourdieu vignette, because music is the art that resists most resolutely the
empire of commentary, it does not signal for which habitus it is suitable (Rancire,
[1983] 2004a, p. 185).
Over the next three decades, Rancire will return incessantly to Gaunys gaze. In his
essay Thinking Between Disciplines, he presents the passage from Gaunys notebook
and then emphasizes the as if (the Kantian als ob of aesthetic judgment) of the joiners
gaze. In the Paradoxes of Political Art (Rancire, 2010b), he mobilizes the same
passage to elucidate his concept of dissensus. Put simply, the fact that Gaunys gaze
is not determined by the work of his body illustrates a dissensual re-configuration
of the common experience of the sensible (Rancire, 2010b, p. 140).
In every case, Rancire insists on an autonomous realm of sense experience. For his-
torians of modernisma term Rancire does not care forautonomous art is ident-
ified with anti-mimesis, in which pure form is valorized at the same time as the
exploration of specific artistic media. From this perspective, musical modernity
would be identified with formalism and the language of twelve sounds, set free
from any analogy with expressive language (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 26). For Ran-
cire, as we have seen, the aesthetic regime has less to do with autonomous form than
an autonomous sensorium.
The assumption of such a sensorium provides some important theoretical and his-
toriographical insights. It is a truism in much (ethno) musicological research that
social groups perform themselves. This notion generally falls under the rubric of iden-
tity formation, and is easily discernable from the titles of a number of recent
monographs and collections, for example, Music and identity (Akrofi, Smit, & Thorsn,
2007), Identity and everyday life (Berger, 2004), and Ethnicity, identity, and music
(Stokes, 1994). Other titles more explicitly foreground the performative construction
of identity, for example, Performing the nation: Swahili music and cultural politics in
Tanzania (Askew, 2002) and Performing democracy: Bulgarian music and musicians
in transition (Buchanan, 2006). The fact that almost all of these scholars are anti-
essentialist is of no import. Whether the link is natural or not, music is always con-
sidered of a particular social group.
Few scholars writing today believe that the music of a particular group is necess-
arily produced by and for that group. One the contrary, musical works (or texts)
created by one particular social group are liable to appropriation or poaching by
unintended addressees. Meaning is not immanent in a text. Instead, all textsto

use an old post-structuralist coinage are polysemic, which is to say they are open
to multiple meanings and interpretations. Writing about Beethoven and German poli-
tics between 1870 and 1989, Dennis (1996, p. 19) suggests that the abstract nature of
music itself makes music particularly susceptible to contradictory appropriations.
Rancire, as we have seen, also insists that music does not signal a habitus that is
proper to it. Nonetheless, a crucial difference remains: in contrast to the argument
that various, even competing, social groups vie for the music of a composer as their
own, Rancire insists on an experience of art that is completely unmoored from
social position. This is the disinterested judgment that Kant spoke of, but it is also
the gaze of the builder, Gauny, and not, strictly speaking, a matter of the non-signifying
nature of musical sound, or what Dennis calls musics abstract nature.
In the aesthetic regime music is autonomous, yesbut there is more to the story. As
Schiller tells us in On the aesthetic education of man (1794), aesthetic experience bears
on the autonomous art of the beautiful and on the art of living. Aesthetics, then, is both
autonomous and heteronomous. The entire question of the politics of aesthetics
in other words, of the aesthetic regime of artturns on this short conjunction (Ran-
cire, 2010a, p. 116). According to Rancire, every aesthetic theory is an attempt to
come to terms with this and, which essentially allows for three possibilities: art
becomes life, life becomes art, or art and life exchange their properties (2010a,
p. 119). Rancire is able to provide many historical examples for each of these scen-
arios. For example, one major effort of the 1920s artistic avant-garde was to construct
new forms of life based on aesthetic experience (see also Brger, 1984). Thus, although
art suspends its relationship to ordinary forms of experience, it nonetheless takes on
the role of educator: As self-education art is the formation of a new sensorium
one which signifies, in actuality, a new ethos (Rancire, 2010a, p. 119). As such, the
becoming life of art reverts back to the ethical regime. Rancire makes the intriguing
point that revolutionary Marxism, which advocates the material realization of the Idea
of Communism, converges with the revolutionary artistic avant-garde at precisely this
point.
On the other hand, the becoming art of life is seen most explicitly in the museum
context, which Rancire calls the curiosity shop. Here, religious artifacts and
ethnographic specimens are aestheticized as objects of disinterested pleasure. We
know what came out of this shop, writes Rancire (2010a, p. 126): collages, Pop
Art, and jumbled commodities. But when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the
extraordinary also becomes ordinary. In the end, we are left with the ubiquity and per-
vasiveness of ordinary objects that have been thoroughly aestheticized. In short, we are
left with a Debordian society of the spectacle.
A series of inversions (life and art, or properties of either) criss-cross endlessly. This
scrambling of the opposition between art and non-art (Rancire, 2002, p. 27) has
several surprising consequences. For one, there is a seeming identity between non-
corresponding pairs, an equivalence between consciousness and unconsciousness,
the voluntary and the involuntary, activity and passivity (Rancire, 2002, p. 24,
2010a, p. 121). The arts of space and the arts of time permeate one another. There
is an interchangeability of modes of production, a boundless and anonymous
murmur of life and/or machines (Rancire, 2002, p. 27). On the other hand, there
is an infinite multiplication of commodities and useable things (Rancire, 2002,
p. 27). In the end, aesthetic art is a matter of staging (Rancire, 2002, p. 26). The curi-
osity shop is simply one name for a space in which everything can metamorphize
beyond anything Aristotles poetic metamorphosis of the muses ever imagined.
Rancire emphasizes that these characteristics are not specific to so-called post-
modern art. On the contrary, they are the logical outcome of Romanticism, and
more generally of the aesthetic regime. Stated otherwise, the aesthetic regime is
highly susceptible to an entropy resulting from the permeability of art and life
which constituted in the first place as a sensible mode of being specific to artistic pro-
ducts in which the sensible is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhab-
ited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought that has become foreign
to itself (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, pp. 2223). Note well: the aesthetic regime is first
and foremost a mode of being, not, as earlier regimes, ways of doing and making.
Doing and making are still operative, of course, but they are now part of the apparatus
of explanation and understanding of new sciences dedicated to account for what makes
art and what art makes. With this transformation, arts heterogeneous power may be
marshaled for other means. Rancire goes to the long eighteenth century in search of
evidence: Vico renders Homer as a poet despite himself who unknowingly bears
witness to the image-laden language and thought of ancient times; Hegel determines
the true subject of Dutch painting to be the display of a nations freedom in the
play of light, not the depiction of room interiors; Mendelssohn restages Bachs
St. Matthew Passion as the truth of a sonorous theology; etc. ([2000] 2004c, 25). By
the protean logic of the aesthetic regime, a product is identical with something not
produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos,
the intention of the unintentional, etc (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 23). If art is
engaged by the world, it is in a sense radically empirical and realist; but if it cannot
fully think this empiricism and realism, then it must be equally shot through by trans-
cendentalism. All told, Rancires aesthetic regime replicates the structure of the
Kantian notion of the empirical-transcendental as the duplet art-life.6 This means,
among other things, that the aesthetic experience, which is none other than the hyphen
between art and life, could be harnessed for political life.
In the poetic regime, the critic could identify each art positively, by virtue of its par-
ticular means and medium, of its hierarchies of genres. In the aesthetic regime,
however, the arts come into tension with art in the singulara category of experience
and mode of being unique to the artistic products which, paradoxically, can only be
identified negatively, through the manifestation of an unbridgeable gap between con-
scious efforts and unconscious effect:
The end of mimesis is not the end of figuration. It is the end of the mimetic legis-
lation whereby a productive nature and a sensible nature were made to fit. With
this end, the muses cede their place to music, that is, to a relation without mediation
between the calculus of the work and the pure sensible affect, which is also an
immediate relation between the technical device and the song of inner life.
Poiesis and aisthesis stand henceforth in immediate relation to each other. But
they relate to one another through the very gap of their ground. (Rancire, [2004]
2009, p. 7)
The aesthetic regime of art thus functions insofar as it is dysfunctional: although it

may long for a lost community (as the early Romantics did in their construction of
Classical art) or the community to come (as a number of avant-garde utopians have
proposed and the MacArthur Foundation presages), it can never reinstitute the
unified humanity that contradicts its basic premise. As he puts it, the aesthetic
regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any prag-
matic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the auton-
omy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself
(Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 23). Without a fixed boundary between art and life, this
regime solicits political intervention through artistic products.
Autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, and life and art
are all enigmatically reversible pairs, and create two major variants in the discourse of
modernity. First, the autonomy of art made it possible for each form to exploit its
specific medium: language would not need to communicate and would be instantiated
only as word-islands released from forms of presentation of phenomena and from
the connections between phenomena that define the world of representation (Ran-
cire, [1998] 2004b, p. 148); painting would return to two-dimensional surfaces and
pigmentation; music would become emancipated from language or be set free, in
dodecaphony, from any analogy with expressive language (Rancire, [2000] 2004c,
p. 26). This autonomous dimension does not, on its own, overcome the problem of
the unthought at the heart of the aesthetic regime. In fact, because of that problematic,
autonomous art is susceptible to the clamors of revolutionary radicality as well as to the
murmurs of good republican government (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 26). Second,
forms become also identified with the task of fulfilling the telos of modernity.
Rancire calls this modernatism, identifying Schiller as its main ideologue. According
to Schiller, the French Revolution could have fully succeeded had it seized the free
play and appearance of aesthetic experience as an opportunity to realize the latent
equality of man. True freedom can be achieved only if the activity of thought and
the passivity of sensible matter achieved a neutral state: the aesthetic state. That is, if
the aesthetic is free, then it belongs to anyone who has undergone an aesthetic
education. This is the region of free play and appearance which Gauny inhabited, at
the brief moment in which the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans
of forms for a new way of life coincided (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 27). By this
logic, and at roughly the same time, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie shared,
albeit for different reasons, in their enthusiasm for Beethoven (Taruskin, 2005,
pp. 641689).
Tragically, all such moments are short-lived. The convergence of art and life often
loses momentum. Even worse, however, is when it goes too far. Rancire alludes to the
Frankfurt School and Surrealism as expressions of the discontent with modernatism,
and for unmasking, although in opposite ways, the degeneration intrinsic to the project
of modernity. Modernatism would become a fatal destiny, as revealed by Heideggers
critique of technology, or by Adornos horror at the alienation of administered society
and the machinations of the culture industry. Rancire alludes to this fatal destiny in a
cryptic remark about the original sin of human beings, forgetful of the debt to the
Other and of their submission to the heterogeneous powers of the sensible (Taruskin,
2005, p. 28). Is this Other the Other of psychoanalysis, of the sciences of anthropology
and sociology, or of Lyotards sublime placing anew a ban on representation, what
Rancire calls the grand threnody of the unrepresentable? Or, is this Other the stub-
born unthought at the heart of the aesthetic, that is, the fact that the aesthetic regime
could and can never solve the question of the relation of art to life and aesthetics and
politics, let alone the improbable injunction of postmodernity that art be indistinct
from life and yet retain its singularity, its distributive character? It is impossible to
tell. Perhaps the issue is that, whether as a singular domain of doing and making
that engages the world, or as a diffuse but singular domain of being, art is caught
between parapolitical hierarchies and the metapolitical commitment to the potential-
ity inherent in the innovative sensible modes of experience that anticipate a commu-
nity to come (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 30). The community to come is, of course, a
community that nevertheless has (always) yet to arrive. This forms part of what he calls
la malaise dans lesthetique, a discontent that the arts, music included, can never shake
off. And since aesthetics and politics revolve around the axis of the sensible, there is
also a coterminous malaise dans lpolitique, although Rancire does not explicitly
say so.
Equal Music
Where does this all leave music? Edward Said remarks that after Beethoven music
veered off from the social realm into the aesthetic almost completely (1991, p. 12).
Rancire proposes instead that politics are reconstituted with aesthetics as a central
dimension. Music, it should be clear, does not provide Rancire with a particular
purchase on philosophy, or more precisely, with a purchase that is inherently more
secure than that of other forms. Aesthetics may be immanent to politics in his
thought, but aesthetic forms, let alone content, are not. They are, as we have insisted,
distributions of the sensible that exclude as they include. This is certainly true of the
aesthetic regime, but also of the other regimes. In the case of ethical music, for
example, political events do sometimes make something count that was previously
uncounted, and so in doing disrupt the social order. But in the end, because archipo-
litics and the ethical regime uphold unity above all else, another ethical order always
threatens to become a permanent and thus intolerable trace of dissensus. The illus-
tration of the AACM shows how its unprecedented achievement of creative autonomy,
the radical reconfiguration of the definition of what music by African Americans could
be, and the staggering mobility across musical, educational, and economic institutions
of its members constituted a previously unimaginable redistribution of the sonically
and musically sensible. In the fraught racial environment of the USA this counts as
one of the most important political mobilizations of music in the recent past. At the
same time, the very force compelling the Associations past and ongoing accomplish-
mentsthat is, the systemic injustice that African Americans suffer on account of race
could only engender a commitment to declare blackness as a grounding principle of
their very existence. The Association is famously heterogeneous and fluid in its engage-
ment with all kinds of musicians and music making. But it needs to remain committed
to a nationally bound principle of race as the logos of its continuing existence. This
existence is not simply an identity bound by particular formal predilections. It is,
instead, an ethical commitment and an expression of ethical music. In the case of
the MacArthur Foundations recognition of Miguel Zenns creative innovations, we
noted the impossibility of overcoming the structure of the logos through music:
music cannot possibly assist the passage of an individual into the cultural canon of
national traditions without a re-structuring of the political constitution which
denies that individual a full count in the calculus of the nation. These political
matters are not more fundamental than artistic ones. On the contrary, art and politics
abide by similar distributive logics. What matters is only the intersection between the
two terms, their ways of relating to each other. By his very creative action, Zenn rep-
resents the continuing potential of music to participate in new distributions. In this
sense, he has rendered himself intelligible. This redistribution is significant in its
own right, but it cannot ever patch over the tear of the political wrong with which
it intersects.
The malaise that affects politics and aesthetics does not appear to diminish human
enthusiasm to engage in them; on the contrary, their contradiction compels human
action. In this sense, Rancire is a thinker of action, grounding his analysis on concrete
practices where the capacity of people to act is always in ample evidence. Equality is not
a founding ontological principle but a condition that only functions when it is put into
action (Rancire, [2000] 2004c, p. 52). Music is political only when it activates the pre-
supposition of equality. Political music is, therefore, radically equal to any other action.
This equality is both its condition of possibility and its raison dtre. With this
understanding alone can music be freed from the celebratory singularitybe it
material or transcendentalthat burdens it with impossible powers. As he warns in
an early essay, citing Marx: all the mysteries which lead theory into mysticism find
their rational solution in human practice and in the understanding of that practice
(Rancire, [1969] 1974, p. 2), hence his refusal of metaphysics, transcendentalism,
and other forms of inert immaterial thoughtor, in some of these forms musical
incarnations, the refusal of pieties regarding musical charm, ineffability, or bodily
jouissance. Similarly, musics powers cannot be assessed under the enchanting spell
of radiant appearances (Wackenroders uncanny expressionGlzenden Geisterschei-
nung) that helped elevate the art of sound to the status of the unthought itself. And the
work of mourningthe critique of instrumental reason, the detuned world, or the
impossibility of art after Auschwitz cannot on its own clue us in on the gap
between the unredeemed world of human affairs and the redeemed sphere of the
(selected) modernist musical work, as in Adorno. As David Ferris notes, the negation
of the negation demanded by Adornos dialectical account of the aesthetic, that is, his
embrace of a politics of aesthetics through the denial of negation as the representation
of what it is different from finally remains unproductive with respect to the tra-
dition it would transform [T]he Frankfurt School could only arrest the dialectical
foundation of its thought (Ferris, 2009, p. 39). In short, the negative dialectic
needs the link between politics and aesthetics in order to hold on to a notion of
progressive and regressive music, a hierarchy that would be perfectly at home in the
poetic regime.
Rancire does not refuse the link we identified in the enigmatic and that renders
aesthetics immanent to politics and politics immanent to aesthetics, while simul-
taneously allowing for their specificity. Neither negative nor positiveor what is
the same, both negative and positivethis link that Rancire maintains has one
decisive outcome: art interventions qua art cannot guarantee dissensus. The arts,
writes Rancire, only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what
they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in
common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcel-
ing out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or
the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation (Rancire,
[2000] 2004c, p. 19). And so, there remains music, not as an alternative to politics
or as a form through which alternatives politics are staged. Rather, music is now
seen as a form of action whose function cannot be scripted in advance, an action
which is always already split from itself by the force of the unthought that makes
the link music and politics or music as politics possible in the first place. And to
return to an earlier point, music emerges from this analysis with its own uncommon
distribution: what it holds in common with that which it forms part (life, art, politics)
is its own distributive character. We would not go as far as saying that this is musics
wrong. But we would affirm that at its most potent, music, qua music, does not
transcend, distill, clarify, or escape political action, but instead becomes, qua action,
equal to it: an action like any other.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank Alexander Ness for allowing us use of his work on Pythagoras.
Notes
[1] Gabriel Rockhill notes two other definitions of politics in Rancire: the act of political subjec-
tivization that breaks with the police order [any form of established order] and the meeting
ground between police procedures and the process of equality (Rockhill, 2009, nn. 5, 308).
[2] The reference, here, is to Attali (see Lewis, 2008, p. 510).
[3] Co-author Jairo Moreno addresses this issue in his forthcoming work on Latin American
musical modernisms and their imbrication within US Empire.
[4] Rancire refers to the capacity of identity politics for transformation ([1995] 1999, p. 36),
although earlier he disqualified notions of relatively stable identity as political means (1992).
For Oliver Davis, Rancires critiques are troublingly consistent with the consensus of main-
stream French republican universalism, notoriously sensitive as this is to what it labels pejora-
tively as le communautarisme (Davis, 2010, p. 88) (see also Deranty, 2003; Chambers &
ORourke, 2009; May, 2009).
[5] Bourdieus analysis of musics muteness vis--vis habitus makes sense only because he frames
his interpretation within the principles of poetic music.
[6] One recognizes trademark Kantianisms here: the coming into being of a transcendental subject
which however cannot think itself; the genius unaware of the law it produces (Davis, 2010,
p. 23).
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Rancière's Equal Music PDF

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This article was downloaded by: [Stony Brook University]

On: 24 October 2014, At: 22:44

Contemporary Music Review

Rancire's Equal Music

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.759415

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Rancires Equal Music

Keywords: Jacques Rancire; Dissensus; Equality; Intelligibility; Aesthetics; Politics

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2012 Taylor & Francis

assumed the fundamental equality of all people to engage music. No competence

The Anti-Politics of Music

operates. Unlike archipolitics, there is no return to a proper foundation. Instead, by

unintended addressees. Meaning is not immanent in a text. Instead, all textsto

The aesthetic regime of art thus functions insofar as it is dysfunctional: although it

(Original work published 1969).

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