Journal of Aesthetic & Reconstructive Surgery

Description

Times have changed. In Jacques Ranciere’s opinion, this statement is an operator of domination that presupposes the idea that, what was once possible, cannot take place today. It is worth noting that, for Ranciere, this statement is not a rhetorical affirmation, but rather a distribution of the sensible, an aesthetic dimension of human experience that allows us to divide the actual and the un-actual, the present and the past. In our days, it is expected that the actual is the fact that the political is the management of the common following the mandates of capital valorization. On the other, it seems obvious that the un-actual is the resistance and disobedience of people seeking to protect themselves from the violence of the processes of capitalist accumulation.

Comparative Analysis

In accordance with this distribution of the sensible, we are no longer in the times of social mobilizations, the great strikes or the emancipations that once interrupted the valorization of the capital. Rather, we are in the times of entrepreneurship, competition, and management of market externalities. Domination is thus a distribution of the sensible, because it creates a world where prohibition is not repressive, but a configuration of sense, an aesthetic dimension of human experience. However, I would like to highlight that for Ranciere, political practice is an operator of emancipation that produces its own distribution of sense or its own rationality. This distribution of sense, unlike that of domination, seeks to show the actuality of the un-actual. In other words, political practice problematizes the progressive understanding of the time of domination through a distribution of sense whose principle is disagreement.

In this article, I am interested in articulating how Ranciere’s thought understands both domination and emancipation from the point of view of the aesthetic dimension of human experience, taking as a point of reference the critique of the notion of progress that appears in his 1995 work La mesentente. From my point of view, this work develops a critique of the conditions of possibility of domination that can be put in dialogue with perspectives such as those of L. Althusser and Walter Benjamin. In the same way, in this reflection we find a new way of understanding political practice or a politics of writing that has as its horizon a form of time that is opposed to that of progress. I will call this logic the time of interruption. To develop this hypothesis, I will consider time as the fundamental axis of these forms of aesthetic experience. While domination presupposes a progressive and homogeneous experience of time, political practice institutes a conflictive experience that is itself a conflictive experience of time. This conflictive experience is a distribution of the sensible that brings heterogeneous dimensions of time into interlocution. For this reason, Ranciere’s interest is to show that political practice does not confront the classes that dominate a society, but rather the conditions of possibility that make it possible for some to rule over others. His concern in exploring this dimension of human experience is thus to understand domination as emancipation from the point of view of its aesthetic conditions of possibility.

La Mesentente

In order to develop this argument, firstly, I focus on the aesthetic experience of the time of domination. Following the first chapter of La mesentente, I suggest that political philosophy since antiquity has attempted to justify domination in order to preserve the order of the common. I will point out that the aesthetic gesture of political philosophy is to prohibit any act that interrupts the flow of events, marking it as erratic and harmful to the order of common life. Secondly, I point out that Ranciere’s political thought allows us to make a critique of the time of progress by suggesting that there is a political and emancipatory form of time, namely, an emancipatory form of the aesthetic dimension of human experience. Finally, I explore the politics of writing that proposes as an alternative to political philosophy. In this part I argue that for political practice to emerge in our sensitive experience it is necessary to put forward an alternative political thought. I will call this thinking that makes the rationality of political practice visible the “politics of writing”.

One such project, developed by the group and supported by Primary, an artist run center in Nottingham, is telling of this. The Gallery provided a space in which women in the Azamba project could gather for an ongoing project of banner making. Banner-making, for the women in the group, particularly for those from Malawi, is a community practice that starts before children are born. It is undertaken by the mother and her friends and family in the child’s community, who weave the detail of the child’s journey onto 14, banners the first to be presented at the baby’s welcome and naming ceremony and the other 13 to be presented each year from the child’s 13th birthday. These banners are hung around the house or the child’s room to tell the tale of their journey or their history. GSU has staged making sessions of such banners for the telling of their own stories, involving others in the community, those who have and have not been on the move teachers, playmates, supporters, would-be allies, to construct narratives and practices of alternative kin relations, chosen families, extended communities both actualized and visualized in the making of banners together. The banners also figure in short stories written by group members. The logic of the banner reverses that of appearance of private lives entering into public and rather understands the public as a commons, as a group that shape and care for lives, the visual as its remnant. While the production of the work takes place in public, or group settings, its exhibition and appearance locates it in the home, where the implications of this larger sphere of people are felt and worked through. Far from the “sad story”, this story is one of common care for life, the telling of an imaginary of collective praxis.