An interview with Jacques Rancière- Cinematographic image, democracy, and the “splendor of the...

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An interview with JacquesRancire: Cinematographicimage, democracy, and thesplendor of the insignificantSolange Gunoun aa Associate Professor of French , The University ofConnecticutPublished online: 25 Apr 2008.

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The Journal of Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies revue d'tudesfranais, 4:2, 249-258

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Interview w ith Jacques Rancire:

Cinematographic Image,Democracy, and the Splendor

of the Insignificant

Solange Gunoun

Despite the fact tha t, asearly as 197 4 Jacques Rancire, whohad co-authored Lire le Capital (Maspe-ro, 1965) with Louis Althusser, had criti-cized scientism in La leon d'Althusser(Paris: Gallimard, 1974), his namenonetheless remains associated withthat of the schoolmaster of the EcoleNorm ale Suprieure on the rue d'U lm .Thus in Christian Delacam pagne's re-cently published La philosoph ie politiqueaujourd'hui (Seuil, 20 00 ), Rancire onlyappears as an interpreter of M arx; andin Marc Sadoun's collection La d-mocratie en France (Gallima rd, 2 000),the sole work of Rancire's to be includ-ed is his 1981 La nuit des proltaires.Archives du rve ouvrier (Fayard, 1981 )(The Nights of Labor: The W orker'sDream in Nineteenth-century France[Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1989, trans. John Drury]).Yet the question of politics and demo-cracy has always been at the heart ofRancire's investigations. For him, there

can be no politics without democracy, ademocracy he defines as a governmentmade up of equals, of people who haveno official authority to gove rn, whoare nam eless, without a pa rt. Heclearly distinguishes this kind of politics[la politique-politique], which has ema n-cipation as its goal, from police poli-tics [la politique-police], which hedefines as government that relies on thehierarchical distribution of offices andfunctions, and on the determining ofwhat he calls the partition of the sensi-ble [le partage du sensible] (Le pa rtagedu sensible: esthtique et politique, LaFabrique Editions, 2000.)Rancire breaks with the consensuallogic in which the terms politics, de -mocracy, and equality a r e rnired,and demonstrates a rigorous cohesionbetween object and method in his work ,superbly ign oring the lines that separatedisciplines. As a result, he remains un -classifiable and continually finds him-self in a rela tion of transgression to the

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various languages and areas of knowl-edge to which he appeals. This ap -proach has cost him his standingam ong philosophers of the far left (atleast if we are to believe Philippe Ray-naud, who does not even allude to Ran-cire in his article Les nouvellesradicalits (Le Debar 105, May-August1999). It has also kept him from beingincluded in the category of politicalphilosophers (indeed, Rancire himselfhas raised serious doubts about the sub-division of philosophy known as po liti-cal philosophy ).

The flawless itinerary of this ex-studentof the Ecole Normale Suprieure andex-Fellow of the Fondation Thiers sug-gests not the slightest hint of heresy:Rancire has taught since 1969 in thePhilosophy Department of the Universitde Paris VIII, occupying the Cha ir of Pro-fessor of Esthetics and Politics since1990. He was the driving force behindthe journal Rvoltes logiques from 1975to 1986, and Director of Programs atthe International College of Philosophyfrom 1986 to 199 2. And yet, this itine-rary, profoundly solitary and solidary,secretes his theory: a liberating impa-tience with the delimiting and the fron-tiers of fields of knowledge throughwhich competencies a nd incompeten-cies are defined. He demonstrates, allthe while trying to thwart it, a certain partition of the sensible ; that is, that

system of sensible evidences that revealsboth the existence of a comm unality andthe divisions that define in it respectivelyassigned places and parts ( Interview,in Le partage du sensible). In the w akeof Foucault, Rancire retraces the es-thetics of politics, a politics that bearson what one sees and what one can

say about it, on who has the competen-cy necessary to see and the quality tosay; on the properties of spaces and thepossibilities of tim e.Having antagonized several touchy his-torians with his book Les noms de l'his-toire. ssai de potique du savoir (Paris:Seuil, 1992; The Names of History: Onthe Poetics of Knowledge [Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1994],trans. Hassan Melehy), and then havingirritated a few pernickety poeticists withhis Mallarm. La politique de la sirne(Paris: Hachette, 1996), he is now utterlybaffling certain literary figures, withhis most recent works, La parole m uette. ssai sur les contrad ictions de la littra-ture (Paris: Hachette, 1998) ; and Lachair des m ots. Politiques de l'criture

(Paris: Galile, 1998). But at long lastthe journal Critique came, and con-quered those who had been the most re-calcitrant, with a remarkable specialvolume devoted to Rancire that paidhomage to the

philosopher of the poo r, and to hisdemanding, austere, and wholly un-compromising thought (Critique 5 3 /601-602 [June-July 1997]). With hisconcerted indifference to the readers ofhis work whom he supposes, dem o-cratically, to be as intelligent as he is Rancire seems to enjoy the aleatory na -ture of the democratic letter, writing tha tis addressed to whomever and to what-ever; he persists in using a difficult, unu-sual language, and assumes theposition of the ignora nt schoolmaster,much like Joseph Jacotot, to whom hedevoted his work Le matre ignorant.Cinq leons sur l'mancipation intellec-tuelle (Fayard, 1987; The IgnorantSchoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford Uni-

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versity Press, 1 9 9 1 , trans . Kristin Ross).Jacotot was a strange figure, fromwhom Rancire borrowed the concept ofequality as a presupposition, and thecalling into question of the division be-tween intellectual equality and social in-equality, allowing him to dismantle thelogic of the schoolmaster, of the personwho guarantees his power by control-ling the very gap he claims to fill, be-tween the ignoran t one and

knowledge. (On this subject, see the in-terview with Rancire, conducted byJames H. Kavanagh and myself, on18 April 1999 in New York, on politics,esthetics, democracy, and literature,forthcoming in Substance).It is easy to understand, in the fo llowinginterview, which deals primarily with cin-

ema, how the words fiction, litera-ture, esthetics, art, and ima ge ,necessarily take on a polemical value:they are made unrecognizable, relievedof their consensual weight, and havebeen returned unsullied to the tribe.They are thus po litica l words, the busi-ness of the subject, as Rancire says;

they offer a new enunciative potential,which certain people imagine, wrongly,to be a kind of shop talk (philosophi-cal in this instance, for which Pierre Lep-ape criticizes him in Le Monde of 27November 1998). For this potential be-longs to a logic of m isunders tanding, toa polemical and democratic dissensus

that perturbs police-politics as partitionof the sensible, rendering visible andaud ible the conflict between the personwho says white an d the person who sayswhite but means something entirely dif-ferent or doesn't understand that theother is saying the same th ing using thewo rd 'whiteness' (Lo msenienfe. Poli

tique et philosophie [Paris: Galile,1995, 12]; D/sagreemenf: Politics andPhilosophy [Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 19 98 , trans . JulieRose]).

Let us now listen to what Rancire has tosay, to his words caught between an un-settling impatience and an engagingtactfulness, and the liberating power ofwhich can be measured by the intenseactivity of though t and speech they de-mand and mobilize.

Solange Gunoun - First let methank you for having granted us this in-terview, and for having given us accessto your most recent articles on cinema,which are as yet not easy to find on thisside of the Atlantic.

Cinema is your most recent field of in-quiry , after history, literature, and es-thetics, as dem onstrated, for example,by your regular contributions to the Ca-hiers du cinm a since 199 8. While yourinterest in the cinem a goes back to the1970s, it has only recently become anobject of inquiry for yo u, as you continueto explore your notion of the par titionof the sensible and to reflect on the his-torical regime of the arts. Here ag ain ,even if we take into account the changeof fields, the transgressive shift from one

art form to another, the problematic re-mains the same. In order to understandwhat is new about cinem a, we must ineffect return to your notion of estheticsas a notion specific to a particular con-ceptualizing of the arts that was im-posed to the de triment of poetics, apoetics more in accordance with the

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representative status of art. So whereason the one han d you write that cinema by combining two esthetics and in asense acting as a surrogate for classicalpoets is the modern art par excel-lence, you at the same time claim thatthe cinematographic image comes un-der the Romantic principle of indeter-minate insignificance. 1 According toyou, then, is the cinema, which is the es-thetic art par excellence, Romantic or

modern?

Jacques Rancire- T he re are severallevels to cons ider. On the most gene ral,cinema ma terially realizes the definitionof ar t, first elaborated in Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism, as a u n-ion of conscious and unconsciousprocesses. In cinema, there is the eye ofthe machine, and it sees differently fromthe eye of the artist; it sees differentthings. Thus cinema could lend itself tocarrying out the vast utopia that pervad-ed the esthetic regime of the arts: theidea of a language proper to the sensi-ble, which is the language of sensation

that we still find in Deleuze. In the earlydays of cinema, this utopia was basedon the idea that matter faded into lumi-nous energy. Around 19 00 , the themeof the language of light traced abroa d arc that united the poetics of Ma l-larm or Proust, the dance of Loie Full-er, Appia's scenography, Joachim

Gaquet's interviews of Czanne, the dy-namism of the futurist painters, and thetheoreticization of the seventh art byCanudo. This theme guaranteed conti-nuity between the seemingly antagonis-tic esthetics of symbolism and futurism ,between decadent ecstasies and Sovieturgencies. Cinema was the art that was

materially predestined to withstand thedeployment of a certain poetics, ofwhich Jean Epstein is the exemplary rep-resentative.But this esthetic purity is illusory, as isany no tion that claims to make an es-thetic vocation coincide with the materi-ality of a specific medium. Cinema is notonly a visual a rt, suited to support theidea of a pure language of sensation. Itis also an a rt of fiction an d, as a youngart of fiction, it bestowed a new youthupon genres, types, codes, veris imili-tudes, and conventions of representativefiction that literature h ad overthrow n. Soit is an art that very rapidly became in -volved in the contradiction between theesthetic regime of images that speak bythemselves and the representative tra -dition of the fitting together of fictionalactions and typologies. Its vitality nodoubt is connected to the obligation ithad to link contradictory poetics. AndrBazin made imp urity a positive prop -erty of cinema. But it was the esthetic re-gime o f art that originally connected thepurity and the impurity of art.

SG - According to yo u, it was literaturethat paved the way for the revolutions inphotography and cinematography, a lit-erature defined as the determined re-gime of the art of writing that no longerrecognizes the rules of a rt as it did underthe previous regime of Belles Lettres.

This esthetic revo lution, which belongsto writers, and which transformed ordi-nary and anonymous subjects into art,was what allowed their photographic orpictorial recording to also be art. So itwas not technical innovation that gov-erned artistic innovation, as is generallybelieved, but the contrary. You define

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the avant-garde from this esthetic revo-lution: by inventing sensible forms thatforeshadow the forms of the communityto com e, the avant-garde is an estheticand political foreshadowing of the future.

JR - What I am argu ing against here isa mode of analysis that considers revo-lutions in the arts to have their origins intechnical innovation, in particular theBenjaminian notion of an art of the ageof mechanical rep roduc tion. Against thistype of analysis, which conveniently al-lows historical materialism, the idea ofthe specificity o f the medium , an d theHeideggeriean essence of technique tooverlap, I have argued that the availa-bility of a specific technique does notnecessarily lead to a specific art. Ac-cording to the logic of the esthetic re-gime of a rt, in order for photography orthe cinema to belong to art, their sub-jects first had to belong to art. Every-thing that could be taken in by a glancehad to have been already susceptible tobeing something artistic; the insign ifi-cant had in itself to be potentially art.

The rupture of the system of representa-tion was first brought about by wha t wasso ineptly called reali sm ; this real-ism held that not only was everythingthat was represented e qual, but alsothat there was an inherent splendor tothe insignificant. First there had to bethe Flaubertian focusing on an ordinary

scene viewed through a window bysomeone who was bored in order forthe new techniques of reproduction ofany o ld thing to then take on the estheticpotential of this any old thing.

SG - Just as you posit the need of cine-ma which is both a visual art and an

art of fiction to b ring together contra-dictory poetics, you inscribe it in differ-ent eras: the era of history (as acategory of a common destiny) and theera of the esthetic. 2 In addition , cinemaopens out, according to you, on some-thing beyond art, on the beyond ofart. How is one to understand both thehistoricity of cinema as a specific modeof the sensible and its open ing on tosomething beyond art? Since I amaware of your justified objections to thenotions of crisis and the end of a rt, Iwonder what you m ean when you speakof a beyond of art ?

JR - The esthetic regime of art toredown the fence that separated thesphere of imitations, to make life formsfrom art forms. And this caused two op-posing ideas tha t of the autonomy ofart as a living fo rm that refers exclusivelyto its own laws, and that of art as a fo rmof common experience to have tocome into contact. Modernist ideologyattempted to erect a barrier between thetwo by means of ad hoc concepts: thecritique of representation, the autonom yof a rt, the theory of a specific medium . Itconstructed a history of art ordered en-tirely on the concept of an irreversiblerupture between representative andantirepresentative art. It ceaselesslypointed to the diabolic powers that con-tradicted this ed ifying history: the politi-cization of a rt, the law of commerce, theempire of com munication, the app ropri-ation of a rt by the discourse on art, etc.But modernist ideology does not recog-nize this simple fact: the principles thatsupport the autonomy of art and thosethat support its becoming-life-form arethe same. The abstract pu rity of Ma-

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levitch or Kandinsky arose in the contextof a desire to construct new life forms,the structures and furnishings of a newlife. Cinema asserted itself both as apure language of images or light and asan element in the construction of a newlife, etc. The crisis or the end of art ismerely the crisis of the modernist pa ra-digm, constructed around the simplisticnotion of the autonomy of pa inting ; it is,in other words, the crisis of an ideology

of painting.

SG - Let us now move to the relationbetween painting and cinema, betweenimage and wo rd. Your ideas on thissubject are at times provocative; theyare elliptical and complex. In your read-ing of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah,for example, you suggest turningaround Ado rno's famous pronounce-ment that art after Auschwitz is impossi-ble. You wro te, It is the opposite that istrue: after Auschwitz, in order to showAuschwitz, only art is possible, becauseart is always the presence of an ab-sence, because it is art's very task to re-

veal what is invisible, by the regulatedpower of words and images, joined ordisjoined, because only art is able tomake the inhuman sensible [rendre sen-sible l'inhumain]. How are we to under-stand this appeal to the pow er of a rt'sability to represent, this appeal to my-thos, while we are, according to yo u,

under the literary-esthetic-historicaldemocratic regime of the undifferencia-tion of subjects, of indeterminate ins ig-nificance , which is supposed to havebroken with the representative?

JR - We must first agree on what wemean by to show and to represent. If

we mean to render, by means of im ag -es, a process of a double disappear-ance the extermination and theerasure of traces , the discrepancy be-tween the words of a former official ofthe national railroad company explain-ing the problems of moving the convoys,and the image of peaceful glades thathave no m emory, creates a fiction fromthe esthetic era that is more likely tomake us understand that process than a

representative fiction that shows us bywhat chain o f circumstances we becomeeither victim or executioner. The under-determination of narrative series ofevents, of psychological processes, andof descriptive scenes that characterizethe fiction of the esthetic era, especiallyin the line of F laubert, is more ab le to

account for inhumanity than a display ofcorpses that arouses pity or terror.

SG - Are we to understand what youhave written about the film Drancy ave-nir along the same lines? According toyou, the images of the film confer uponthe inhumanity of extermination its only

acceptable equivalent, the inhumanityof beauty ? What do you mean by im -ages here?

JR - One has first to m ake allowancesfor the polemical aspect of such a state-ment. The beauty a lluded to here is notthat of lovely illustrations. The power of

this film tha t summons forth the concen-tration camp at Drancy using its con-temporary reality a low-costhousing complex obviously comesfrom the way the images of a presentwithout mem ory cause the words of wit-nesses to the past to reverbera te. It's theFlaubertian splendor of the ordinary

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haunted by words that describes, in asimple way, horror. Image is not sim-ply a category of the visual. Im ag edesignates a relation between presenceand absence, sense and non-sense thatthe cinema inherited from literature.

SG - And video art? What are yourthoughts on that?

JR - Video art doesn't seem to me to bethe harbinger of a new age of art or ofthe partition of the sensible. Rather, I amstruck by the way in which it reactivatesthe ideas and the utopias that ac-com panied the conferring of the statusof art onto cinema. Many contemporaryvideo installations inscribe themselves ina neo-Symbolist esthetic in which thegoa l is to create a kind of spiritual envi-ronment, to render perceptible an origi-nary sensorium made up of pure light,fleecy matter, time suspended in purerepetition, microevents of ma tter/light influx. Electronic scanning lends itself bet-ter than the film of the past to carryingout the Symbolist idea of the art of light.A filmmaker like Godard knew how touse the resources of video editing to re-write the history of cinema according toa phenom enological vision that, for ex-ample, transforms Hitchock's fragmentsof Aristotelian fiction into cons of theorigina ry presence of things. Video artthus reproduces, after literature a nd cin-

ema, the great tension of the Romanticesthetic between the absolute freedomof the creator manipulating w ords, im-ages, and stories and the power of artinscribed in the sensible of no nm an ip-ulated things (Rossellini). Unlike theprophets of the end of the im age, of thereign of com munication or of the spec-

tacle, I am sensitive to the way video artcan lend itself to celebrating once ag ainthe image and to fulfilling the Romanticvision of art.

SG - In the continuing quarrel betweenthe ancients and the moderns, between those who are nostalgic for lost art[and] songsters of modernity, you re-mind us that there is nothing inherentin any art, in any modernity. There arepolitical and esthetic strategies of inter-face that combine in various ways.These figures of interface move fromone space to another, from the flatnessof the page to the grain of the photo-graph or to the cinematographic appa-rition. How do you see this circulationamong different supports?

JR - It seems to me that one has to un-derstand that a sup port never desig-nates a simple material or technicalreality. A support is always an estheticidea, an idea of the function-support asartistic function . For exam ple, the n-dexical nature of the ph otograph asif the photograp h were the imprint of thebody fixed in silver salts has beenamply theorized. But we do n't see anysuch thing on the photograph we ho ld inour hands. This esthetic of the imprint isnot the result of the materiality of theprocess of photographic recording. Itarose from the Romantic theory thatconceives of the work as the trace of itsprocess of formation , and then from theprocesses of developing, expos ing, andprinting by which photographers andespecially pictorialists attempted toimpart photography with that immateri-al materiality that Symbolist estheticlauded. Recently, the filmm aker Alexan-

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der Sokhourov claimed to reaffirm thepictorial nature of cinema by positingthe two-dimensionality of the cinemato-graphic mage. But his effects of flat-tened perspective are in fact the resultsof an artistic intention that has nothingto do with what is natural to the medi-um. And the pictoriality of his imagesalso avails itself of the colorizing andtextural effects of pictorialist photogra-phy. The suppo rts are imaginary aswell as ma terial, invented as well as uti-lized. In spite of modernist interdictions,the arts have continued to intermingle,and to exchange their supports.

SG - All art, all modernity, you say,comes dow n to po litical and estheticstrategies of interface that combine invarious ways. Is the latest technologicalinterface of multimedia combiningscreen, sound, words, movies, etc. in-scribed in these same strategies, and ifso, how?

JR - The entire 20 century saw themixing of a rts, supports, and tech-niques, from cubist collages and theborrowings by the theater of sets fromthe circus, gymnastics, or the cinem a, tocontemporary forms of video installa-tions and multimedia shows. Here againwe must distinguish among several lev-els: there are technical innovations tha tcan be used for purely decorative effect,as is sometimes done in the theater;there are assemblage devices (fragm en-tation, collage, harmony or dissonance)that put the resources of one techniqueor one art at the disposal of another.And there are strategies of assemblagethat will use these devices to differentends. From Meyerhold's mises en scne

and the Dadaist manifestations of the1920s, to the demonstrations of JohnCage's circle, to Nam June Paik's instal-lations and Goda rd's films of the1960s, these devices have primarilyserved the idea of a critical art that ex-plodes the boundaries of art and com -municates with an emancipatory vision.Now the mixing of arts and media hasreturned from the Constructivist andDadaist era to the Symbolic era : itserves the idea of a Gesamtswerk ratherthan that of an art that explodes theboundaries of art and politics. Multime-dia art today when it is not purely ademonstration of the marvels of tech-nology or something tacked on to atheater running out of ideas waversbetween the Wagnerian model of the

Gesamtswerk and the Symbolist modelthat thinks of interface in terms of anal-ogies.

SG - You have written that the soundand the fury of art stems from its 'idio-cy,' from its particular way of suspend-ing the procedures and rhythms bywhich life ordinarily proves its meaningor mocks its non-m eaning . Whereas Icould pretend to understand what youmean by idiocy , I prefer not to, andrather you clarify the term .

JR - I wrote those words in reference toKusturica's B lack Cat, White Cat, and ,more broadly, in reference to a certainpostmodern esthetics of derision thatbasely exploits Shakespeare's tale toldby an idiot full of sound and fury. Thisesthetics merely serves to increase theforms of derision and relaxation thattoday belong to the dominant imaginaryand to the ordinary discourse of the me-

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dia and advertising. I wanted to counterthese formulas for nonsense with theprocedures of rarefaction or suspensionof meaning that are specific to a rt. Masterpieces are stup id, said Flau-bert; that is, they suspend the ordinaryprocedures of the course of actions, ofthe probability of images, of the ma ni-festations of sense and non-sense.

SG - With the new information technol-ogies, can one im agine that there is anew partition of the sensible in theworks? And what would you call it?

JR - I don't think I'm in a position togive it a nam e, and even less so to con -ceive it. I do n't believe in joyous pro ph-ecies of a wo rld of comm unicational

democracy, borne on the wings of theInternet, nor in dark prophecies of theend of the image, of the experience ofthe visible, nor in widespread simulationand virtualization. New methods of pro-ducing or extracting sensible data donot necessarily lead to a new partition ofthe sensible. It is obvious, nevertheless,

thatthey blur certain boundaries aroundwhich esthetic experience and the es-thetics of politics were form ed . Tradi-tional procedures of the politicalreconfiguration of sensible data chal-lenged the supposed objectivity ofthese data . Today this political functionof objecting to data is blurred by a cer-

tain confusion affecting the content ofsensible experience. Experience is not dead, nor has it become undetermi-nable. But a certain suspense aboutwhat it offers to the world is interposedbetween the official a ffirmation of theobjective inevitability of data and the

political tradition of the objection to da-ta. The future of this confusion seems inno way predictable to m e, even if todayit allows m ore room for art than for pol-itics.

SG - It so happens tha t I share JeanBorreil's notion that all great philoso-phy is merely the persistence, the returnof a single intu ition ... 5 So, what's next,

after cinema, for you? In what otherarea w ill you explore the constant objectof your research?

JR - What interests me at the moment isthe systematic exploration of the histori-cal regime of the arts, of which cinemaand literature are two exemplary fig-

ures. This can be formulated as a gene-alogical question: to what relations ofthe sensible, the sayable, and the think-able do our ways of characterizing whatis specific to a rt refer? How are these re-lations made and unmade? But behindthe question of genealogy there is a l-ways the question of distribution. What

interests me is crossing , transgressingboundaries, and calling into questionthe paradigm of the specificity of thearts and of their m ed ium . What inter-ests me is how the wo rd makes one seewithout making one see and the way theimage speaks while withdrawing fromthe visible; how words make one seeand live, how images compose theworld, and how this world manages tospeak itself. It is the matter of equalityand inequality that is at stake in thesequestions of boundaries and passages.

Translated by Alyson Waters

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inem togr phic mage

N o t e s

1. L'in ou blia ble , in Jacques Rancireet Jean-Louis Co m olli, Arrt sur histoire(Editions du Centre Georges P ompidou,1997).

2. L'historicit du cin ma , Antoine deBaecque et Christian Delage (d.), De

l'histoire au cinm a (Edition Complexe,1998).

3. Le cinma comm e la peinture? ,Cahiers du cinma, janvier 199 9.

4. Dans De la difficult d'tre un per-sonnage de cinm a , Cah iers du cin-ma, novembre 1998.

5. Voir Jean Borreil, La raison nomade,textes tablis par Christine Buci-Glucks-man, Genevive Fraisse, et Jacques

Rancire; prface de Jacques Rancire(Payot, 1993).

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An interview with Jacques Rancière- Cinematographic image, democracy, and the “splendor of the...

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