Reviews

Aesthetics: Art and

Non-Art
Dan Karlholm
Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of
Art by Jacques Rancire, trans. Zakir Paul, London
and New York: Verso, 2013, 304 pp., 20.00

The translation into English of philosopher Jacques

Rancires magnum opus on aesthetics, which first
appeared in French in 2011, is a major event. For
more than a decade now, the author has been one of
the key theorists of art, due, in particular I suppose,
to his proposal on historically unfolding regimes of
art, from an ethic regime in Western antiquity, to a
representational regime predominant throughout the
classic age (Foucaults term) to an aesthetic regime of
the arts from around 1800 continuing uninterrupted
into our times (although the latter extension is not
covered in the present publication).
There have been historical references, names,
quotations and examples attached to Rancires
arguments on this reconceptualization of artistic
modernity in his previously published texts, in
particular The Politics of Aesthetics (2000; 2004), but also
The Future of the Image (2003; 2007), and The Emancipated
Spectator (2008; 2009). But if these texts have been
primarily demanding, for an art historian or nonphilosopher, on an intellectual level, his latest
book reverses the relation between information
and conceptualization, facts and philosophy. What
comes across as demanding in Aisthesis: Scenes from the
Aesthetic Regime of Art is the plethora of empirical detail,
although the book is elegantly written, and, as far
as I can tell, superbly translated. This amassment of
historical circumstance, contingencies and minutiae is
not to be deplored, as such; only it appears to reverse
the typical procedure, whereby an archival research
phase is followed by a conclusion or summary.
Rancire, however, professed his conclusions years
ago, and what we are offered here is the argument
belatedly fleshed out through the archival bodies of
modern art and culture.
The text is composed of fourteen case study-like
chapters or successive scenes from 1764 to 1941,
or from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to James
Agee and Walker Evans (and Clement Greenberg).
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While each scene is arranged to reveal a version of

the authors rather familiar argument, the reader
receives new knowledge about both well-known
and obscure details of the last centuries, along with
fresh aspects of the gradually unfolding aesthetic
theme. Through a clip from a lecture by Ralph
Waldo Emerson entitled The Poet, we are introduced
into the intellectual circles of Boston in 1841, where,
according to the author, before Paris, London or
Moscow, for example, the modernist ideal in
all its radicalism the ideal of a new poetry of
new man, was fi rst put into words (56). The idea
is presented that a Hegelian contemporaneity of
thought and world is what modernity refutes.
Instead, the modern world is characterized by a
gap between temporalities (63). This interesting
remark resembles the following from The Politics of
Aesthetics: the temporality specific to the aesthetic
regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous
temporalities,1 which links modernity to the
aesthetic regime, despite the authors current claim
to offering something like a counter-history of
artistic modernity (xiii). Whatever it is called,
this book is a most fruitful rereading of artistic
modernity, where the crux of modernism (versus
postmodernism) is put to rest, since no longer
deemed a viable, descriptive concept. I fi nd this
persuasive and well-argued regarding the period
covered here, which comes to a halt before the
Second World War, and thus bypasses the problems
of our supposedly contemporary era.
We are guided, instead, through pantomime as
anti-theatre (80), serpentine dance as an abstract,
pure display of forms (100), theatre without action
(113), sculpture as deliberately created bodies lacking
heads and limbs (160), a cinema of the fact (228),
to name a few of the books adventures. One of the
best scenes is devoted to Charlie Chaplin via Viktor
Shklovskys critical judgment of 1923. The legendary
figure of Charlot is entirely assimilated into the
unfolding potentialities of cinematic art but also,
according to Rancire, relegated to the margins of
this art, identified with a performance, which cinema
is merely the means of recording (192). Chaplins
movements on film are no longer expressive or
representative, but a way of inscribing signs on a
white surface (193). The coverage of examples thus
ranges from the sphere of fine art to popular culture,
from painting and sculpture to photography, film,
dance, theatre, performance, and several cross Association of Art Historians 2014

mediations between these. The latter, of course,

form part of the argument, namely that the previous
representational regime, as well as a stereotypical
definition of modernism, had built its historical case
on the autonomy of the individual arts, whereas,
this author argues, a generalized concept of Art was
born, along with art history, in the mid-eighteenth
century. While this particular claim is not original,
the corollary is, namely that the development of
modern art was rather the opposite of a purported
purification or separation of the individual arts: the
movement belonging to the aesthetic regime, which
supported the dream of artistic novelty and fusion
between art and life subsumed under the idea of
modernity, tends to erase the specificities of the arts
and to blur the boundaries that separate them from
each other and from ordinary experience (xii).
This is an important and central clarification,
which indicates, in my reading, a few of the problems
I have with this argument as a whole. Certainly, the
old model of relative specificity between the arts,
within an established hierarchy of academic art
in the West, gave way to a more relaxed one with
the emergence of the aesthetic regime. But were
boundaries between the arts and the domain of nonart really both blurred as well? The fi rst verb here
erase is hard and defi nitive, seemingly pointing
to an irreversible reduction, but the second verb
blur is, apart from being a staple of postmodernist
discourse, soft and difficult to determine. Are we
to understand that a blurred boundary simply
presents an unfocused view, aesthetically speaking,
or that the boundary has become theoretically
impossible to draw? Did a public staging of a
dance performance, for example, using modernist
backdrops and following an atonal musical score,
blur the boundaries between these arts? I am not
sure it did, but if so, boundaries within the domains
of dance, painting and music, respectively, were
still vital, if also, perhaps, increasingly difficult to
see or to draw. If blurring was indeed an aesthetic
interest, this would have required the maintenance
of boundaries. Ever since Romanticism, a tendency
can be detected, for sure, towards intermingling,
cross-mediation, and total works of art (Wagner),
but this is also balanced with other trajectories, other
strong tendencies throughout this period. Clement
Greenberg pointed to one important trend within
the confi nes of Western, modernist painting,2
but the very strength of his well-known critical
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interpretation has paradoxically backfi red and come

to threaten its general validity, and has since been
unduly extended, paraphrased and misrepresented
by so many of those who have wanted to nail down
modernism as monolithic, formal, rigid, over,
etcetera. Such generalized Modernism is, arguably,
literally a postmodern phenomenon, that is: a term
of retrospective (xiii) value as Rancire seems
to imply by picking that word as a determinant
to modernism used not during the period of
modernism but from around the event of its
gradual dissolution around the 1960s onwards, with
reference to abstract art and the lessening of mimetic
impulses.3
Now, what about blurring the boundary between
the arts and ordinary experience? Certainly, the arts
in question during this era many times did their best to
overcome, transgress or deny the boundary between
art and life, but the perpetuation of such blurring
activities, I would say, is essential for avant-gardism as
such. The avant-garde hardly desired to break through
to, and remain on, the other side of art. Borders to blur
must by all means remain. My problem with this part
of the argument, I realize, has to do with the authors
most general formulation, here and in earlier texts, of
what aesthetics means. These are the opening sentences
of the book:
This book deals with the same topic in fourteen
scenes. This topic is announced by its very
title: Aisthesis. For two centuries in the West,
aesthetics has been the name for the category
designating the sensible fabric and intelligible
form of what we call Art. (ix)
He adds that this Greek term denotes the mode of
experience, according to which, for two centuries,
we perceive very diverse things, whether in their
techniques of production or their destination, as all
belonging to art (x). Previously, the formulation
was even sharper: the word aesthetics refers to
the specific mode of being of whatever falls within
the domain of art.4 When he testifies, furthermore,
to his reliance on Immanuel Kant for his theory of
the aesthetic regime, the identification between
aesthetics and art becomes even more puzzling.
Kant famously subsumes fi ne art to what could be
called an aesthetic universe of form (and relative
formlessness), where it co-habits with flowers,
birds, sea shells and the like.5 Rancires emphasis
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on sensible experience explains his preoccupation

with aesthetics, and all of the arts, but it bypasses
completely the fact that aesthetic experience
transgresses, potentially, the realm of art. The
differentiation between ordinary experience and
experiences of art may indeed be blurry, aesthetically
speaking, without impacting the ontological
difference of the objects of the equation. It may
be hard to differentiate, for example, the intense
blue of an Yves Klein monochrome from that of
an equally visually striking blue shirt it may be
equally pleasurable, or the reverse. Characteristic of
art during and after modernism, however, is that the
art coefficient, so to speak, cannot be discerned or
identified with an aesthetic point of view only.
The structure of the book is modelled on Erich
Auerbachs classic text Mimesis: The Representation of
Reality in Western Literature (1953). This explains the
composition, where each chapter begins with a
longer quotation from some archival source, whether
a literary work of art, a review, article, etcetera. The
ensuing essays work to unpack the implications of
the somewhat arbitrary selection from the period
under investigation. I will return to Auerbach in
my conclusion, despite, or rather because of, the
fact that he is not dealt with in the text, although
acknowledged in the Prelude, and referred to
once. But first, I would like to comment on the first
selection: a textual fragment from Winckelmanns
History of Ancient Art (1764), dealing with the famous
fragmented marble sculpture of Hercules known as
the Belvedere Torso. This part is followed by the section
from G. W. F. Hegels Aesthetics (1828) that deals
with beggar boys depicted in Murillos seventeenthcentury paintings. These two scenes are odd in the
mix in that they illustrate responses to historical art
as opposed to all of the following examples, which
are devoted to then current artistic achievements in
some shape or form, from Stendhals novel Red and Black
(1830) to Agee and Evans photo documentary Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The bulk of the examples
in Aisthesis, conforming to materializing the aesthetic
regime of the arts, is thus also dealt with by Auerbach,
who studies the same novel by Stendhal and ends
with Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927). There
would be opportunities, one would think, to both
acknowledge and take issue with this predecessor in
the text, but the author never argues directly with
named opponents. Whenever he is critical of others,
these are lumped together as nameless ignorants:
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some argue that, others disagree, it is readily said

(50), etcetera. There are strikingly few references to
current research within the evoked disciplines of art,
cultural history, and aesthetics, by the way, especially
considering the vast terrain covered.
The fi rst scene devoted to a section from
Winckelmanns history of ancient art would perhaps
have been better off as a kind of prologue, since
this example actually precedes the aesthetic regime
of the arts as previously defi ned, although that is
of course what the author tries to complicate here,
which is fi ne as such. The section mulling over
Winckelmann is largely compelling, especially
regarding the emergence of a theme of inactivity
or passivity that the author argues is constitutive
of the aesthetic regime as opposed to the active
programme of poeisis and mimesis, with its rules, plots,
clear beginnings and ends, characteristic of the
representational regime, and also with respect to
the history of the people, through the history of art,
that Winckelmann helps inaugurate. On the whole,
however, the author reads Winckelmanns text as if
the latter already belonged to Romanticism, and as if
Winckelmann found the mutilated state of the statue
as such a refi ned form of perfection, in the quasiwhole form of the fragment.
Here is Winckelmann: Abused and mutilated
to the utmost, and without head, arms, or legs, as
this statue is, it shows itself even now to those who
have the power to look deeply into the secrets of art
with all the splendor of its former beauty (1). The
statue is broken, brutally put, but regardless of how
it is now, those sensible and knowledgeable
enough today, like the author himself, can still enjoy
the statue as it once was, in its former beauty. The
antiquarian, whose whole history of art was written
in front of more or less fragmented bits and pieces of
antiquity, manages to see through the present state
of mutilation, although being fully sensible to its
melancholic as well as erotic allure.6 Winckelmann
manages, in his own words, to behold in
imagination the body of Hercules as such. He can
detect no veins, but indeed a belly made only to
enjoy not as a marble fragment, needless to say,
but as a well-trained male body part. He sees the
head (that is lacking), the breast and the thighs;
the bones appear covered with a fatty skin, and the
muscles are full without superfluity (12), he writes,
despite the fact that there are no bones here, no
skin or muscles, only stone. He manages to see the
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desirable, perhaps even perfect, body of an athlete,

despite the statue and its deplorable contemporary
state of ruination.
Auerbach is dismissed as too confined to an older
model of mimesis as imitation, while this is not how
Rancire defines mimesis. In a recent interview, he
clarified his position:
what constitutes mimesis as an order is
not a norm for the imitation of reality, but
the fact that imitation or representation is
included within a number of rules, within a
whole division between what is artistic and
what is not artistic, between the noble genres
and the non-noble genres, etc. I understand
mimesis as the classical order, a total order that
subjects the representation of reality not only
to a certain number of restrictive norms, but
to a certain hierarchical model. So what I
find important, and what separates me from
Auerbach, is that the question of what is called
realism is connected to the destruction of
the fundamental model of Aristotles poetics,
where the work is defined first of all by its
plot, and the plot is defined first of all as a
chain of actions.7
But when Auerbach reads Flaubert to find that
nothing happens to these mundane and ordinary
individuals,8 this short observation, at least, is fully
congruent with Rancires own contention, for
example, that [t]o have the power to do everything,
and consequently to do nothing, to head towards
nothing: this is the troubling logic laid bare by this
literature (50).
Considering, fi nally, the divide between art and
non-art, that is supposedly blurred or erased by the
aesthetic regime of the arts, much more needs to
be said about the last seventy years of art making in
the increasingly globalized West than is said here.
The author hints at the possibility of a continuation,
and I hope this is realized eventually. The fact that
Rancire has long proclaimed disinterest in art
from the 1960s onward, despite several fruitful
preoccupations with instances of contemporary
art today, and that this account ends before the
Second World War, saves him from dealing with a
situation where advanced art is more determined
by a generic form of conceptualism, rather than a
sensible aestheticism, no matter how much interest
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in aesthetics is noticeable on the current art scene.

But this very interest testifies, in my view, to a
widespread dissatisfaction with the conceptual
conditions of possibility, or post-conceptual
confi nement of contemporary art,9 rather than
mirroring or representing the supposedly aesthetic
regime of the arts today.
Notes

1
2

3
4
5
6
7
8

Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York, 2004, 26.
Clement Greenberg, Modernist painting, in Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John OBrian, Vol. IV, Chicago, IL, 1993,
8593.
Terry Smith, Modernism, The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, Vol. 21,
New York, 1996, 776.
Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York,
1974, 66 ( 16).
Cf. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History,
New Haven and London, 1994.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Kim West, Senses of the sensible:
Interview with Jacques Rancire, Site, 33, 2013, 19.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new
intro. by Edward W. Said, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2003.
Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art,
London and New York, 2013.

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