Ranciere @

“Mouchette”Etcetera

Mouchette // Dissensus

“A Bresson Film is always the mise-en-scene of a trap and a hunt”

Deleuze’s Mouchette

Festival of the Opsis / the Fable of cinema

De-FigurationVersus Deleuze’s anti-representational conceptualization of Bresson’s cinematography, for Ranciere:

“Opsis, or the Deleuzian pure visual situations, and muthos, or narrative, play off each other in a tense struggle between control and resistance”1

1 Mai, Joseph. ‘New(er) Stories’: De-figuration in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967): 32

Mouchette is forced to sing the correct note as played on the piano by the teacher

What is Cinema?Ranciere objects to a conceptualization and analysis of art as expressing the formal essence of its medium

Rather: art must be analyzed according to the functional operations and ambivalences that construct a mode of community, identity and difference, a specific sensorium, a set of relations between images, words, (in)visibility, etc.:

Chasing and being chased

Ranciere: Art, History, ContextARGUES AGAINST:

1. Status quo >> transformations of ‘modern’ art as historical necessary evolution of three main stages:

•Realism: natural representations of everyday life, vs. artificial style

•modernism:

grand political project of liberation (dada/surrealism) / essential discovery of its own medium (Greenberg / McLuhan)

•Postmodernism: free play, ironic comments, let’s go idea of emancipation through form

2. False opposition between art pour l’art and politically or socially engaged art

The Aesthetic Regime of Art I

T h e S c h i s m o f A r t

Apparent antinomy: Art =/= Life, Art == life: art is life in the mode of not being it.Art in the Aesthetic Regime is the expression of this dialectical tension

Two logics at work which require each other:

1. logic of the resistant form: Adorno’s autonomy of form & Lyotard’s sublime Other

2. Logic of the self-aufhebung of art: (Lukacs, Benjamin) >> art must becomes life, desolves into the social fabric of a new humanity

The Aesthetic Regime of Art II“A contrast is formed between (1) a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and (2) a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms

of political intervention”2

The contrast between a modest art of behaviors and relations and a sublime art of forms

(1) Christian Nold - Bijlmer euro (2) Arthur Ganson, Machine with 22 scraps of Paper

2 Ranciere, Jacques. Aesthetics as Politics: 40

The Aesthetic Regime of Art III

Another example of (1)

Wilfried Houjebek

The Politics of Aesthetics II

(2) “The social function of Art is to not have one” (Adorno)

Rothko painting Schoenberg

So, What is the P in A?Two definitions of ‘politics’ / competing structurations of the community

Art & Politics are both aesthetic interventions in a given distribution of the sensible and a partition of a community and proposes a specific one (Schiller):

-Logic of the police

strictly not politics: logic of separate competence (Plato / liberalism) / an oligarchic attempt to erase the political stage (role of mass-media), functions only by suppressing it

- Logic of politics proper: meta-politics / the politics of aesthetics not about the relations of power but about the framing of the sensory world based on equal competence

in this case: “there is no conflict between the purity of art and its politicization”

Artists vs. TerroristsGrimonprez: “Art doesn’t change the world: terrorists do”

How can the terms ‘art’ and ‘terrorism’ end up in one discourse and be meaningfully related? Ranciere’s framework can explain this.

Some guy that comes up in a Google search query for “terrorist’ Gordon Matta Clark-Mohammed Atta

The Revolution of Revolution?

Terrorism ‘plays along’ with the politics of police, a deadly game

Art leaves open the possibility of another play altogether:

Thus:

“Art is going elsewhere. And Politics has to catch it. The problem is not what artists have to do to become political; the question has to be reversed: what do political

subjects have to do with art?”3

as long as the ‘logic of the police’ defines politics: only terrorists will change the world!

3 Ranciere in: Dasgupta, Sudeep. Art is going elsewhere. And Politics has to catch it: an interview with Jacques Ranciere: 75

Hard versus Soft Bullets (or no bullets)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjPNIJJPNY