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Global Aesthetics and Its DiscontentsBruno BosteelsPublished online: 22 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Bruno Bosteels (2014) Global Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Parallax, 20:4,384-395, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.957554

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Global Aesthetics and Its Discontents

Bruno Bosteels

(Received 27 February 2014; accepted 15 May 2014)

The four cardinal points are three: South and North.Vicente Huidobro, Altazor.

Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on anM1 Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top volume.

It’s the tourist lost on the Mongolian plains, mocked by all,who clutches his credit card as his only lifeline. It’s the

CEO who swears by the game Go. . . . It’s the art lover whowants us to be awestruck before the ‘modern genius’ of acentury of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism,

all competing to see who could best spit in the face ofcivilization.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection.

In ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes’, first published in New Left Review,Jacques Ranciere summarizes much of his ongoing work on the relationship betweenart and politics by highlighting the different ‘scenarios’, or ‘emplotments’ as he alsocalls them, for imagining how in the modern age life might become subsumed intoart or, conversely, how art might be dissolved back into life: ‘The whole history ofart forms and of the politics of aesthetics in the aesthetic regime of art could be stagedas the clash of these two formulæ: a new life needs a new art; the new life does notneed art’.1

According to Ranciere, however, the true site of the so-called aesthetic revolutionlies in the space in between these two sides of the dialectic. His understanding of therevolution in the realm of the aesthetic, in other words, relies neither on the critiqueof alienated or damaged life in the name of art’s autonomy, which alone would holdthe promise of happiness, nor on the critique of the institution of art in the name of arevolution of everyday life. Instead, at a more fundamental level, the revolution inquestion presupposes a blurring of the very distinction between art and non-art.As we can also read in Aesthetics and Its Discontents: ‘The property of being art refersback not to a distinction between modes of doing, but to a distinction between modes

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

parallax, 2014Vol. 20, No. 4, 384–395, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.957554

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of being. This is what “aesthetic” means: in the aesthetic regime of art the propertyof being art is no longer given by the criteria of technical perfection but is assigned toa specific form of sensory apprehension’.2 For Ranciere, this assignation and theconcomitant indistinction between art and non-art are crucially tied to a veritableupheaval in the realm of the sensible, the aesthetic revolution properly speaking,which dates back to the late eighteenth century and reaches a climax in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Here and elsewhere, as in the article for New Left Review, Ranciere is fond ofillustrating the effects of this process with a reference to the bazar de curiosites from theopening pages of Honore de Balzac’s 1831 novel The Wild Ass’s Skin [La Peau de

chagrin ]. In the showrooms on the different floors of this curiosity shop, all kinds ofobjects, gadgets, booklets and other commodities from around the world are put ondisplay, mingled with works of art, relics, old statues and various paintings bothfamous and unknown. For Ranciere, this motley confusion is suggestive of the factthat henceforth, as a result of the aesthetic revolution that breaks with the ethicaland representational canons for the distribution of genres and styles, any objectwhatsoever can cross the border between art and non-art, and cross back:

The old curiosity shop makes the museum of fine arts and the

ethnographic museum equivalent. It dismisses the argument of

prosaic use or commodification. If the end of art is to become a

commodity, the end of a commodity is to become art. By becoming

obsolete, unavailable for everyday consumption, any commodity or

familiar article becomes available for art, as a body ciphering history

and an object of ‘disinterested pleasure’. It is re-aestheticized in a new

way. The ‘heterogeneous sensible’ is everywhere. The prose of

everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem. Any object can cross

the border and re-populate the realm of aesthetic experience.3

Balzac’s curiosity shop, however, blurs not just the distinctions between art and non-art, but those between prose and poetry, the fantastic and the everyday, the useful andthe obsolete. The lines that are crossed are spatial as well as temporal. Balzac’s bazar,in other words, is not just the equivalent of an archaeological site with deep layers ofartifacts from different periods (‘Each of these objects is like a fossil, wearing on itsbody the history of an era or a civilization’), it is also rife with geopolitical tensions –wars, conquests, lootings – that virtually spread across the globe.

What Ranciere’s seductive paraphrase of The Wild Ass’s Skin seems to downplay, ifnot leave out of the picture altogether, is precisely the global dimension of thisaesthetic revolution that allows such constant border-crossings between art and non-art. In fact, major difficulties would emerge as soon as we tried to imagine such athing as a global aesthetic revolution along the lines of Ranciere’s argument.We might even say that the global and the aesthetic, in this precise sense, areprofoundly and systematically at odds, each notion being internally divided andseparated from the other by sharp antagonisms, which gives the illusion of boundlessflow and availability that is supposed to undergird both of them.

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What is at stake in raising these issues is not just a matter to be solved with thekneejerk reaction of demanding the inclusion of more regions, different examples orother references from beyond the confines of Western Europe. To be sure, by andlarge the account in question is indeed limited to France and Germany, withexamples drawn from Balzac to Stephane Mallarme to Marcel Duchamp, and thephilosophical framework from Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno to Jean-Franc�ois Lyotard. But at the same time, the idea seems to be that this argument for aso-called aesthetic regime in the distribution of the sensible, a distribution in whichart and non-art constantly collide and exchange roles, could easily be extended andtransposed as is onto other regions or areas, perhaps even including the ThirdWorld. However, I would argue that such a transposition may not be feasiblewithout troubling the entire conceptual scaffolding that supports the idea of anaesthetic revolution with its seemingly intrinsic emancipatory valence. Indeed, thelogic of the aesthetic revolution itself must undergo substantial changes as soon as weinclude the global dynamics of center and periphery, empire and colony, North andSouth. More so than the corrective of tokenism, then, what would be needed is aqualitative shift in our understanding of the politics of aesthetics in the age ofglobalization.

To illustrate the nature of this shift, let me leap forward in time and take a closerlook at another motley collection of objects and artifacts, this time taken from AlejoCarpentier’s 1949 novella The Kingdom of This World [El reino de este mundo ]. I amreferring to a scene from the opening chapter, titled ‘Las cabezas de cera’ (‘WaxHeads’), in which the slave Ti Noel lets his gaze fall on the wax heads on the shelfstanding at the entrance of the barber’s shop where his master is receiving a cleanmorning shave:

While his master was being shaved, Ti Noel could gaze his fill at the

four wax heads that adorned the counter by the door. The curls of the

wigs, opening into a pool of ringlets on the red baize, framed

expressionless faces. Those heads seemed as real—although their fixed

stare was so dead—as the talking head an itinerant mountebank had

brought to the Cap years before to promote the sale of an elixir for

curing toothache and rheumatism.

Immediately after this first description, our reader’s gaze is pulled sideways –together with Ti Noel’s – toward the objects on display at the butcher shop nextdoor, separated from the wax heads at the barber’s only by a thin wooden panel,easily crossed by the old slave’s wandering imagination:

By an amusing coincidence, in the window of the tripe-shop next door

there were calves’ heads, skinned and each with a sprig of parsley

across the tongue, which possessed the same waxy quality.

They seemed asleep among the pickled oxtails, calf’s-foot jelly, and

pots of tripe a la mode de Caen. Only a wooden wall separated the two

counters, and it amused Ti Noel to think that alongside the pale

calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth.

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Just as fowl for a banquet are adorned with their feathers, so some

experienced, macabre cook might have trimmed the heads with their

best wigs. All that was lacking was a border of lettuce leaves or

radishes cut in the shape of lilies. Moreover, the jars of gum arabic,

the bottles of lavender water, the boxes of rice powder, close

neighbors to the kettles of tripe and the platters of kidneys, completed,

with this coincidence of flasks and cruets, that picture of an

abominable feast.

Finally, and although even for a distracted reader this explicit addition may alreadyturn out to be unnecessary and overly didactic, a third exhibit of heads – alsoperhaps about to be severed – comes to us in the guise of a series of prints recentlyarrived from Paris:

The morning was rampant with heads, for next to the tripe-shop the

bookseller had hung on a wire with clothespins the latest prints

received from Paris. At least four of them displayed the face of the

King of France in a border of suns, swords, and laurel. But there were

many other bewigged heads, probably those of high court dignitaries.

The warriors could be identified by their air of setting out for battle;

the judges, by their menacing frowns; the wits, by their smiles, above

two crossed pens at the head of verses that meant nothing to Ti Noel,

for the slaves were unable to read. [ . . . ] But Ti Noel’s attention was

attracted at that moment by a copper engraving, the last of the series,

which differed from the others in subject and treatment.

It represented a kind of French admiral or ambassador being

received by a Negro framed by feather fans and seated upon a throne

adorned with figures of monkeys and lizards.

‘What kind of people are those?’ he boldly inquired of the bookseller,

who was lighting a long clay pipe in the doorway of his shop.

‘That is a king of your country.’4

Everything in a sense is here as Ranciere’s hypothesis of an aesthetic revolutionwould have us believe: first, the mixing of art and non-art, the high and the low;then, the thresholds and thin walls which are unable to contain or control the flow ofcommodities; and, finally, even the desacralizing emancipatory effect of the sheerjuxtaposition of this heterogeneous sensible, which threatens to bring down kingsand masters, hang or decapitate the nobility and render visible the empty place ofpower waiting to be occupied by the so-called Black Jacobins in a slave revolt whichin the final instance is the central topic of Carpentier’s novella about Haiti. And yet,at the same time, one cannot avoid the impression that so much more is visible in thedistribution of the sensible according to The Kingdom of This World than in thecuriosity shop of The Wild Ass’s Skin where Balzac’s hero Raphael, who at this pointis still referred to only as ‘the unknown one’, will eventually purchase his shrinkingwild ass’s skin. To be precise, much more is visible in the treatment that bothCarpentier and Balzac give to these opening scenes than in the way the curiosity

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shop from The Wild Ass’s Skin – trumped in this regard only by Schiller’s reading ofthe statue of Juno Ludovisi – repeatedly comes to serve as the quintessentialillustration of the aesthetic revolution in the work of Ranciere.

Thus, if we look back from the colonial periphery to the aesthetic revolution that issaid to take place in the metropolis, we cannot avoid seeing signs of discontent thatgnaw away at the narrative presented to us with such persuasive force from withinthe confines of Western Europe. For all its emancipatory promise, what thisnarrative seems to leave unremarked, if not openly disavowed, is the violence ofprimitive accumulation and colonial expropriation, without which the aestheticrevolution would not even have been possible in the first place. The question,therefore, is not so much whether we can imagine a global aesthetic revolution thatwould do for other parts of the world what Balzac’s curiosity shop reveals sobrilliantly for Europe. Rather, the more pertinent question is whether we canpossibly continue to imagine an aesthetic revolution without taking into account thepractices of colonial and imperialist expansion that enable it and quite possibly eventhreaten it with collapse.

If at this point I may be allowed to put Ranciere in the company of an even strangerbedfellow than Carpentier, much can still be learned about the geopolitics of the so-called aesthetic revolution by turning to the brutally clairvoyant final works of CarlSchmitt. In The Nomos of the Earth especially, Schmitt gives us a most realisticaccount of the constitution of the first truly global world order as the result of theappropriations of land in the Americas: ‘The new global image, resulting from thecircumnavigation of the earth and the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, required a new spatial order. Thus began the epoch of moderninternational law that lasted until the twentieth century’.5 According to Schmitt, infact, no properly global order exists before this era, which marks a 400-year period ofEuropean international law, the so-called jus publicum Europaeum:

All pre-global orders were essentially terrestrial, even if they

encompassed sea powers and thalassocracies. The originally terrestrial

world was altered in the Age of Discovery, when the earth first was

encompassed and measured by the global consciousness of European

peoples. This resulted in the first nomos of the earth. It was based on a

particular relation between the spatial order of firm land and the

spatial order of free sea, and for 400 years it supported a Eurocentric

international law: the jus publicum Europaeum.6

The notion of the global, therefore, cannot be imagined outside the centuries-longdevelopment of such a world order established by the Great Powers of WesternEurope:

It began with the discovery of a ‘new world’ and the start of the

‘modern age’, and kept pace with the development of geographical

maps and of the globe itself. The word global captures the

encompassing and planetary, as well as the external and superficial

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character of this type of thinking, based on the equation of land and

sea surfaces.7

For Schmitt, finally, this global order starts to unravel around 1890, with the CongoConference (held in 1885 in Berlin under Bismarck) marking the beginning of theend of legitimacy claims for the colonial enterprise of Western European nations.The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 signal theemergence of Japan as a new, East Asian Great Power, marking another Grossraumor ‘great space’ and the transition to a world order that is no longer Eurocentric;and, similarly, the Spanish-American war of 1898 marks the beginning of theUnited States’ world dominance.

Without in any way subscribing to the obscure ideological operation at work in The

Nomos of the Earth, two aspects in particular are worth noting in Schmitt’s account ofglobalization.8 The first concerns what he calls ‘global linear thinking’, that is, thedistribution of order and chaos according to several types of lines running across theglobe. For Schmitt, there are three types of lines: first, the so-called rayas or ‘strokes’established under the Pope’s authority in bulls or treaties such as the ones fromTordesillas (1494) and Saragossa (1526) to separate the territorial claims of Spainand Portugal; second, the French and English tradition of ‘amity lines’, for example,the one established by a secret clause in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (1559),separating Catholic land-appropriating powers and Protestant sea-powers from thenon-Christian ‘free zones’ where the Hobbesian state of nature reigned and man wasa wolf to other men; and third, in what for Schmitt is already the beginning of theend, the line separating the so-called Western Hemisphere, above all the UnitedStates, not from Asia or the East but from the Old West, that is, from WesternEurope.

According to the argument that runs through The Nomos of the Earth, what theglobal order drawn up along these lines enables above all is a bracketing of war andconflict within the borders of Europe. While the law of the strongest ruled ‘beyondthe line’, for example, religious and other civil wars could be avoided ‘on this side ofthe line’, as war among European states became juridically formalized andcontained as an inter-European war among sovereign states who recognized eachother as sovereign powers precisely in opposition to the state of nature located on theother side. For Schmitt, this is a major, almost miraculous accomplishment ofEurocentric international law: ‘A rationalization, humanization, and legalization –a bracketing – of war was achieved against this background of global lines. At leastwith respect to continental land war in European international law, this wasachieved by limiting war to a military relation between states’.9 It is in this light, forexample, that we can read the meaning of the French and English notion of amitylines:

The significance of amity lines in sixteenth and seventeenth-century

international law was that great areas of freedom were designated as

conflict zones in the struggle over the distribution of a new world. As a

practical justification, one could argue that the designation of a

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conflict zone at once freed the area on this side of the line–a sphere of

peace and order ruled by European public law–from the immediate

threat of those events ‘beyond the line,’ which would not have been

the case had there been no such zone. The designation of a conflict

zone outside Europe contributed also to the bracketing of European

wars, which is its meaning and its justification in international law.10

Should we not reflect upon the consequences of the necessary concomitance of these

practices – the drawing of lines that simultaneously produces a bracketing of war on

this side of them and a flaring up of agonistic conflict and destruction on the other

side – for the thinking of global aesthetics? Could we not argue that Ranciere’s

notion of the aesthetic revolution, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

begins to blur the distinction of art and non-art, happens only on this side of the

various rayas and amity lines that separate Western Europe from the so-called free

zones ‘beyond the line’, ready to be appropriated and colonized?

Of course, for a long time we have known about the leveling effects of capitalist

expansion, capable of bringing down all the walls of China according to a famous

passage fromThe Communist Manifesto. ‘WhatMarx brings to the fore is especially the

end of the sacred figures of the bond’, as Alain Badiou comments in his Manifesto for

Philosophy. ‘It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it

exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation: it denounces every effect

of One as a simple, precarious configuration: it dismisses the symbolic

representations in which the bond found a semblance of being’.11 As Ranciere

confirms, the aesthetic realm is no exception in this regard – even if part of the

definition of the aesthetic traditionally has been geared toward safeguarding such an

exceptional status for the arts, which are then called ‘liberal’ precisely in opposition

to ‘mere’ commerce and monetary exchange. However, the fact that old hierarchies

are broken and that the heterogeneous multiplicity of things, objects and artifacts is

revealed should not make us forget the violence of capitalist expansion in which such

breakdowns and revelations can happen in the first place.

Capitalist accumulation may bring down many sacred barriers and established

hierarchies, but only on this side of the line, once enough wealth has been amassed as

Western European nation-states take turns in the role of dominant world power and

colonizer. Within Western Europe, a boundless freedom seems to reign to cross all

kinds of lines and boundaries, including the high and the low, art and non-art; but

this freedom itself is necessarily bound up with the drawing of lines that by contrast

cannot be crossed – first and foremost among which, of course, is the line separating

the West from the rest.

What are we as critics, art historians or theorists supposed to do in the face of this

situation? Obviously, the answer cannot be limited to repeating the ominous

reminder that art happens – even in the aesthetic regime – at a high cost of

inequality. The problem is further compounded by the fact that inequality itself is

disguised ideologically as a form of freedom – including freedom from those same

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material conditions and constraints that an analysis of the geopolitics of the aesthetic

revolution brings to light.

To grasp this further problem, let us briefly focus on the period at the end of the

nineteenth century when, on the one hand, the aesthetic revolution reaches a peak in

the sphere of fin-de-siecle decadence and aestheticism while, on the other hand, the

Eurocentric nomos of the earth, which, after having known a period of ‘optimism’

between 1870 and 1890, begins to crumble in the wake of the 1885 Congo

Conference. The difficulty of the task of the critic lies precisely in the fact that art

and literature from this period only rarely, if ever, give us a glimpse of the violent

process of drawing amity lines, without which no aesthetic revolution could ever

have occurred in the first place.

By way of a literary image, we could invoke a late-nineteenth-century pendant to

Balzac’s curiosity shop. Indeed, before providing the goods that will come to

populate the public dream world of the arcades so famously studied in the twentieth

century by Walter Benjamin, the impulse behind Balzac’s curiosity shop in a way

reaches a grand summa in the private abode of Des Esseintes, the decadent hero of

Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against Nature [A rebours ]. Even in this most

artificial of paradises, however, the sound of daily labor in and around the house

constantly threatens to interrupt the phantasmagoric accumulation of decadent art,

liquor and literature. Therefore, when Des Esseintes decides to invite the two old

servants – husband and wife – who had looked after his mother until she died to

come and work for him in his secluded villa in Fontenay-aux-Roses in the suburbs of

Paris, he has to insist on a series of stratagems to ensure that to the best of their

ability they make themselves not just invisible but also inaudible:

The husband’s duty was to clean the rooms and go marketing; the

wife’s to do all the cooking. Des Esseintes gave up the first floor of

the house to them; but he made them wear thick felt slippers, had the

doors fitted with tambours and their hinges well oiled, and covered

the floors with long-pile carpeting, to make sure that he never heard

the sound of their footsteps overhead.12

When it comes to understanding the aesthetic revolution from a global perspective,

all I am asking is that we literary critics, art historians or critical theorists do not in

turn put on thick felt slippers or fit the doors to our studios with tambours and well-

oiled hinges. Instead, we should try to hear the creaking of the doors when all of a

sudden and for a brief while they open onto the outside, or even become unhinged;

and attune our ears to listen to the muffled sound of footsteps, not just above our

heads but also next door and on the other side of the amity lines that only seem to

bracket war and conflict within the confines of Western Europe. In fact, today we

should rather be surprised that anyone can still present an account of processes such

as the aesthetic revolution without taking into account the violent and unequal

legacy of colonial expansion.

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And yet, and yet . . . Even this call for a new comparativist approach to the question

of global aesthetics opens itself up to a familiar set of objections. Am I not in fact

limiting myself to a critical operation of confronting literature and aesthetics with

the discomforting truth or the guilty conscience of the material conditions that

constitute their outside? Worse, am I not thereby losing sight of the very essence of

the so-called aesthetic function? In the end, and no matter how politically valid or

urgent it may well be, does not such an external approach fail to appreciate the

opacity and negativity that would be inherent in art and aesthetics?

Ranciere, in any case, cannot exactly be accused of having all of us put on thick felt

slippers. His strategy in the case of the argument for a revolution in the aesthetic

regime of art is actually far more complex, and preemptively addresses many of the

objections that could be raised against such an argument. In fact, he folds any notion

of the material (colonial, capitalist, aristocratic or even democratic) conditions

behind the aesthetic revolution back into the artworks of this revolution itself. This is

the final move that needs to be addressed, since it appears preemptively to void the

questions about the conditions of global unevenness in which the aesthetic

revolution takes place, by locating unevenness as a structural element – freedom

inscribed in the gap of the structure – within art under the aesthetic regime. Even as

seemingly elitist and obscure an artist as Stephane Mallarme, a thinker’s poet if ever

there was one, in this sense can be read as an expression of the aesthetic revolution.

This is the tour de force that is pulled off in that little gem of a book that is Ranciere’s

Mallarme: The Politics of the Siren.

Ranciere himself in fact begins this book with a forceful rebuttal of previously

existing readings of Mallarme’s œuvre in terms of some obscure secret or spiritual

adventure witnessed by the poet in the dark night of reason. Nothing in Mallarme’s

poems is secret or obscure, Ranciere states forthrightly; nor shouldMallarme be seen

as the witness to anything whatsoever outside of his poetry. Instead, we are invited to

adopt a rule proffered by the poet himself: ‘What remains, above all, is the

fundamental rule of Mallarmean poetry: that the poem has value only on condition

that it holds within itself both its light and its night’.13 Using a clever stratagem,

Ranciere’s reading thus promises to inscribe the question of the poem’s material

historicity back into the poem itself: ‘So what the siren metaphorizes, what the poem

carries out, is very specifically the event and calculated risk of the poem in an era

and a ‘mental milieu’ which are not yet ready to welcome it’.14 In other words, in

Ranciere’s approach a poem by Mallarme becomes itself an articulation or set of

hypotheses about the uneven link between the poetic act or aesthetic event that it

stages and the era in which such an act or event takes place – either to vanish into

the flow of everyday opinion and universal reportage, or else to withdraw itself, in a

slight but significant deviation, from the expectations of its own time and place.

Not only is there no need to remind the reader of the historical background of inter-

imperialist warfare against which Mallarme’s revolution in poetic language takes

place, but by thus diverting attention away from this poetic language itself to its

external conditions we are warned that we might be losing sight of their

revolutionizing.

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Questions about the material conditioning and historical situatedness of poetry are

thus folded back into the poem itself. And so, even though the poet is not supposed to

be a witness to anything outside of his poetry, whether in terms of history, biography

or philosophy, it is nevertheless possible to speak in terms of eras, times, epochs or

ages. In Ranciere’s book on Mallarme alone, we find descriptions of the ‘age of

Hegel’, the ‘age of the Flaubertian novel’, the ‘time of Vigny,’ the ‘time of Hugo’,

and of course there is the ‘time’ or ‘age’ of Mallarme himself, which is already

described in terms of the aesthetic revolution, as opposed to the time of

representation in which symbols and allegories are referred back to stable histories

and fixed characters. Here is one such example of the shift introduced into the

regime of representation by the aesthetic revolution of Mallarme’s time, as seen in

the famous long poem A Dice Throw:

The setting it depicts is one with which we are already familiar: the

course of the poetic ship on the seas of the times. In Vigny’s era, one

threw bottles onto the seas, in alexandrines, bottles of poetic messages

intended for posterity, charged with the task that is identical to all of

posterity: hosting the heritage of the ideal that was misrecognized in

its time. In Mallarme’s epoch, one had ‘forgotten the manoeuvre’,

lost with the ancient bar of the alexandrine, which had been

sabotaged by the adepts of uneven verse and then that of free verse,

before being carried to its tomb by the Hugolian ogre.15

Clearly, this is neither a simple argument for art’s autonomy, nor are we condemned

to dwell in the night of language’s intransitive negativity in the tradition of Maurice

Blanchot. Instead, poetry stages so to speak a second-degree relation to its very own

materiality and historicity: ‘We ought to understand the politics of the dice throw –

and the ultimate meaning of the fable of the boat and the siren – as follows: the

conditions do not yet exist for the union of poet and crowd in “the hymn of spiritual

hearts”. The “extraordinary hour” has not arrived, nor has the “prodigious

auditorium”, which is identical to the stage’.16

The paradoxical inscription of history into the poem’s self-emblematization is

rendered even more convoluted if we address the issue of a second relation, namely,

the relation of the poem to the act of thinking that takes place within the poem.

Here, the presupposition of immanence seems to be at its strongest: ‘Mallarme bids

farewell to the art of representation and to the idea-as-model, but maintains a

mimetic status for the poem’, except that ‘the poem does not imitate any model, but

traces perceptibly the movement of the idea, the idea as the movement of its own

breaking forth’.17 There is thus strictly speaking no separation between the poem

and the thinking of the poem: ‘It remains that if there is a “thought of the poem”, it

lies in the fluttering movement that gathers all these possibilities in a single fold, that

“fold of somber lace which retains the infinite”, which encapsulates them in one and

the same act and turns this act of doubt and hyperbole into a ritual and the very

emblem pertaining to the consecration of human play’.18

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The key category in the articulation of this relation between poetry and thought isthat of the aesthetic or poetic act. Of course, we are all supposed to be familiar withMallarme’s own definitions of the act, definitions such as this one from ‘Crisis ofVerse’:

[ . . . ] the poetic act consists in seeing that an idea can be broken

up into a certain number of motifs that are equal in some way, and of

grouping them; they rhyme; as an external seal, the final words are

proof of their common measure.19

Or this one, from ‘Music and Letters’, also in Divagations:

Nature has taken place; it can’t be added to, except for cities or

railroads or other inventions where we change the form, but not the

fact, of our material.

The one available act, forever and alone, is to understand the

relations, in the meantime, few or many: according to some interior

state that one wishes to extend, in order to simplify the world.20

In Ranciere’s hands, however, the notion of the act serves above all to render theoperations of thought immanent to the poem’s own operations. More importantly,the whole aim of this reading seems to consist in confirming the paradoxicalhypothesis of an aesthetic revolution in which Mallarme, that purest of poets, cansimultaneously appear as the epitome of art’s emancipatory promise. ‘EvenMallarme, the pure poet par excellence, assigned to poetry the task of organizing adifferent topography of common relations, of preparing the “festivals of the future”’,Ranciere also writes in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, before indicating a surprisingproximity in this regard between the author of A Dice Throw and the ‘Arts andCrafts’ movements in the USA or the industrial origins of Bauhaus or theWerkbund: ‘Notwithstanding their differences, the “pure” poet Mallarme and theengineers of the Werkbund share the idea of an art which, by suppressing its ownsingularity, is able to produce the concrete forms of a community that has finallydispensed with the appearances of democratic formalism’.21

Any discussion about the social inequality and global unevenness surrounding theaesthetic revolution is hereby absorbed into a structural question pertaining to the waythe new artwork emblematically reflects upon its milieu’s lack of preparedness for it.The fundamental sign of a work of art in the age of the aesthetic regimewill thus consistof an internal split or gap.And this split or gap in turn canbeheraldedas the forerunnerfor thenew freedomthatwill havebeen established, once themilieu is capableofhostingthe ideas and innovations of the new art. The theoretical question with which I wouldlike to conclude, however, is the exact nature of this act or gesture with which artists inthe age of the aesthetic regime are supposed to be able to poeticize the everyday, all thewhile letting theworld of objects andcommodities becomeunavailabledue to the lawofplanned obsolescence. Aside from the context of colonial expansion and accumulation,could we not say that even when Mallarme, in the act of simplifying the world byunderstanding its many relations according to some mental state that one wishes to

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extend, is also describing the precisemoment of the subject’s capture by ideology? Thisquestion will have to be taken up elsewhere, but is not the act of inscribing a minimalgap,which is the gestureofdefamiliarization commonto thegazeofBalzac’shero inThe

Wild Ass’s Skin, to Brechtian theater or to modern-day installation art, no less than theact of ideology at its purest?

Notes

An early version of this paper was presented as the

keynote address for the conference on ‘GlobalAesthetics’ organized by the Society for the

Humanities at Cornell University (15 October

2010). The author wishes to thank Timothy

Murray for his invitation. The epigraphs arefrom Vicente Huidobro, Altazor or A Voyage in a

Parachute, trans. Eliot Weinberger (Middletown:

Wesleyan UP, 1988), p.5; and The InvisibleCommittee, The Coming Insurrection (Cambridge:

The MIT Press, 2009), p.82.1 Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution

and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy andHeteronomy’, New Left Review 14 (2002), pp.133–

151 (p.142).2 Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents,

trans. Steven Corcoran (Malden, MA: Polity,2009), p.29.3 Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution’,

p.144.4 Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World,

trans. Harriet de Onıs (New York: The Noonday

Press, 1957), pp.11–12.5 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the

International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum,

trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2006), p.86.6 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p.49.7 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, pp.87–88.8 For a discussion of what I mean by “obscure” in

this context, see Bruno Bosteels, ‘The Obscure

Subject: Sovereignty and Geopolitics in Carl

Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth’, South Atlantic

Quarterly 104:2 (2005), pp.295–305.9 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p.100.10 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth,

pp.97–98.11 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans.

Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999),

p.56.12 Joris-Karl Huysmans,Against Nature [A rebours ],

trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin, 2004),

p.18.13 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme: The Politics of the

Siren, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Conti-

nuum, 2011), p.xiv (trans. modified).14 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme, p.7 (trans. modi-

fied).15 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme, p.54.16 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme, pp.33–34.17 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme, p.52 (trans. modi-

fied).18 Jacques Ranciere, Mallarme, pp.24–25.19 Stephane Mallarme, ‘Crisis of Verse’, in

Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2007), p.206.20 Stephane Mallarme, ‘Music and Letters’, in

Divagations, p.187 (trans. modified).21 Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents,

pp.33 and 38–39.

Bruno Bosteels is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is theauthor of several books, including Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polemique,The Actuality of

Communism, Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America and the translator ofnumerous books by Alain Badiou, including Theory of the Subject, Wittgenstein’s

Antiphilosophy, The Adventure of French Philosophy, and Philosophy for Militants.Currently, he is preparing two new books: Philosophies of Defeat and The Mexican

Commune. Email: bosteels@cornell.edu

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