Tina Chanter - Art, Politics and Rancière: Broken Perceptions

Art, Politics and Rancire

Also available from Bloomsbury

Dissensus , Jacques Rancire

Jacques Rancire and the Contemporary Scene , edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross

The Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

Reading Rancire , edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp

Art, Politics and Rancire

Broken Perceptions

Tina Chanter

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Perceptions acquire a rigidity that comes to light only when they break into pieces, only when they shatter. We just do not realize, most of the time, how hemmed in we are by them, these ways in which the world presents itself to us. And then, one day, as Chinua Achebe, following William Butler Yeats, puts it, things fall apart. With such dislocations, the knowledge that, as it turns out, this fluff, this cotton wool, this unspecifiable environment, this atmosphere, held together, comes tumbling down. Who would have known that it was so important? This all too vague, ineffable, gauze, this finely woven, all but transparent, fabric of the world. It glues together the things we think we know, but is not itself knowledge. It is implicit, assumed, tacitly agreed upon. It facilitates knowledge; it feeds into the background that allows knowledge to have settled where it has. Malleable, but all too susceptible to fixity, having settled into undisturbed grooves along which our thoughts travel, into habits that structure perceptual patterns, into psychic and discursive tics that replay themselves over and over, repeating and refining themselves perhaps, but adhering more or less to the same scenario. There is something important about this fabric of the world not quite being knowledge, yet having something to do with knowledge. In being misaligned with what it is we think we know, it can turn into a site of resistance to knowledge.

What is the difference between failing to notice a pile of stones in an idyllic landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as a roadblock, preventing the access of Palestinians to goods vital to their survival? It is the difference between allowing ones gaze to pass over a pile of stones as an unobtrusive part of the landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as preventing people who live on their native land from going to their place of work, from seeing their families, as a roadblock that interferes with their freedom of movement, with their way of life.difference between the pathological, and the so-called normal? Almost nothing. And yet there is all the difference in the world. A nuance, an inflection, the way a voice rises or a pair of eyes dip down, looking away from you, how a smug smile appears on a face in the morning, and how these gestures appear to fit into a pattern, or fail to do so.

Every now and then, a break occurs. A fissure, a rupture, a fault appears. Things shift. New objects become visible, things arrange themselves in different patterns, in new ways. We see things in a completely different light. How this happens is uncertain, and it cannot be foretold, prescribed or predicted. A historically sedimented environment, riven with affects, is just there. Until, all of a sudden, it isnt. It undergoes a shift, and precisely as it does so, we can sometimes catch sight of it, just a glimpse at first, but slowly we can begin to record, classify, unpick, analyse, adumbrate its features. We can begin to put them together in a different way, discard some of them, refigure others, let them fall into new patterns, reimagine them. This might be done more or less consciously, more or less deliberately. With each slight shift, new possibilities can occur, new perspectives can open up as old ones close down.

This play back and forth, between objects in the world and our conceptual, imaginative and affective grasping of them is what Immanuel Kant considers in terms of the faculties of understanding, judgement and reason, and the knowledge of nature, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and the principles of morality that the faculties provide. We might say this play is what Kant refers to in The Critique of Judgment as cognition in general.

For quite a long while now, I have been thinking about how things become visible, while other things remain invisible, about what it takes for something to be seen, and why it eludes visibility, about the way in which politics is shaped by forces that are irreducible to concepts or intellect, about how there is something aesthetic, in the broadest sense, in this shaping, about how things arrange themselves, present themselves, are noticed or ignored, are read or remain insignificant, how they obtrude, or fade into the background t o the point of becoming not just negligible, but invisible, unavailable, unseen, non-existent: how they do not count.

A flick of a switch is all it takes. After which, nothing will ever be quite the same again. And yet, even if it is not the same as before, it too will become habitual, it will come to constitute part of the commonsensical way of seeing things. None of us is immune. Ive seen it happen. Ive been part of it. Ive been assimilated into the police order. So have you. The police order is how we think, how we make sense of the world, what constitutes itself as common sense. Take feminism, for example. First there was sexism. Then there was feminism. Feminism became part of the police order, insofar as it started policing who could, and who could not, count as a woman. Then there was the transgender movement, and as feminists, we found ourselves having to rethink why certain body parts had somehow become essential to what it had come to mean to be a woman, and who had the right to determine which body parts qualified, and how some feminisms policing of bodies reflected in highly problematic ways the very order of thought it was trying to escape.

How we see things limits, or opens up, the possibilities for thought, and the meanings we attach to what we see. Shifts in perception are bound up with shifts in thinking, shifts in what seems possible or impossible. While changes in the perceptible are not related to changes in the possibility of that which can be thought by causal necessity, there is nonetheless an intricate relationship between on the one hand, what we see and what we do not see, between visibility and invisibility, between what we hear and what we do not hear or cannot hear, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, and on the other hand, the significance that assumes salience and legitimacy, circulates as knowledge and becomes sanctioned. There is, in other words, a relationship between what we see, hear or perceive more specifically what it is possible to see and the meanings that become prevalent, accepted or dominant, and which, as such, constitute, determine and govern the limits of both perception and understanding. The possibilities of comprehension are circumscribed by implicit political assumptions (and, I would add, psychological habits) that define the borders of communities, and as such, determine the contours and limits of comprehension. Things arrange themselves according to narratives that take on a certain self-evidence, and then they come to appear to us as the way things are, yet this very appearance, the very possibility of appearance, is already circumscribed by

The efficacy of political or aesthetic dissensus is unpredictable and contingent. It erupts without warning. When it does so, things begin to line up differently in a new order of the perceptible, they settle into new places, occupy new functions, and the way things line up distributes people in new roles. There is a redistribution of the sensible. Sometimes art effects a shift in perception. There is no telling when, or whether, it will do this. There is no causal necessity, there is nothing inherent about the impact a work will have on a viewer, or the effect a film will have on the spectator. There is no direct line of transmission from artist to audience, no guarantee that what the author intends is that which the reader will understand. And this is as it should be. Otherwise, the work would be didactic; it would fall into the trap of telling us what to think, and we would become passive recipients of ideas that are communicated to us. The artist would reveal a hidden truth, the artwork would be revelatory, and the spectator would remain an empty vessel, ready to be filled with whatever the one who knows the truth intends to communicate. The artist would be the one who knows, and the spectator would be the one who is ignorant, in whom knowledge is deposited, as if a passive repository. Enlightenment would be granted.