Papastergiadis on Ranciere

In ‘Aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles’ Nikos Papastergiadis compares the ideas of theorists Jacques Ranciere and Gerald Raunig as they relate to the relationship between art and politics. Papastergiadis believes that the question of whether or not art is enmeshed in the everyday is irrelevant, but the nature of this entanglement is what is of importance. He writes

The point is not if art is entangled with social, political, and economic structures, but how it weaves itself into these scenarios, and whether or nor it can retain a critical force.

Focusing on Ranciere, Papastergiadis asserts that it is aesthetics that defines the relationship between art and politics. He cites as a key text, Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics, which he says defines aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the perceptual order through the recoding of everyday objects and relations. This Ranciere argues, leads to the creation of new modes of political subjectivity. Papastergiadis asserts that the affirmative link that Ranciere identifies between aesthetics and political transformation is indicative of the terms in which politics exist within art. Ranciere defines a ‘distribution of the sensible’, as an alternative to philosophies and authoritarian practices that limit the capacity of individuals to be active in acts of governance. Ranciere argues that aesthetics and politics both address this process, and each do so within the operations of their own systems. He states that aesthetics and politics, as they may operate to promote the ‘distribution of the sensible’ do so in opposition to any order of aesthetics and politics that constrains democratic dialogue. Aesthetics is said by Ranciere to be capable of overturning existing hierarchies of signs to contrive new narratives and forms that link individual affect to a social existence.