This article was downloaded by: [Yeditepe Universitesi] On: 03 February 2014, At: 04:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa

Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-Century/ Contemporary French Studies revue d'tudes franais
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gsit19

An interview with Jacques Rancire: Cinematographic image, democracy, and the splendor of the insignificant
Solange Gunoun
a a

Associate Professor of French , The University of Connecticut Published online: 25 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Solange Gunoun (2000) An interview with Jacques Rancire: Cinematographic image, democracy, and the splendor of the insignificant, Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies revue d'tudes franais, 4:2, 249-258 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10260210008456030

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be

independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

Interview with Jacques Rancire: Cinematographic Image, Democracy, and the "Splendor of the Insignificant"
Solange Gunoun
Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

Despite the fact that, as early as 1974 Jacques Rancire, who had co-authored Lire le Capital (Maspero, 1965) with Louis Althusser, had criticized "scientism" in La leon d'Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), his name nonetheless remains associated with that of the "schoolmaster" of the Ecole Normale Suprieure on the rue d'Ulm. Thus in Christian Delacampagne's recently published La philosophie politique aujourd'hui (Seuil, 2000), Rancire only appears as an interpreter of Marx; and in Marc Sadoun's collection La dmocratie en France (Gallimard, 2000), the sole work of Rancire's to be included is his 1981 La nuit des proltaires. Archives du rve ouvrier (Fayard, 1981 ) (The Nights of Labor: The Worker's Dream in Nineteenth-century France [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, trans. John Drury]). Yet the question of politics and democracy has always been at the heart of Rancire's investigations. For him, there

can be no politics without democracy, a democracy he defines as a government made up of equals, of people who have no "official authority" to govern, who are "nameless," "without a part." He clearly distinguishes this kind of politics [la politique-politique], which has emancipation as its goal, from "police politics" [la politique-police], which he defines as government that relies on the hierarchical distribution of offices and functions, and on the determining of what he calls "the partition of the sensible" [le partage du sensible] (Le partage du sensible: esthtique et politique, La Fabrique Editions, 2000.) Rancire breaks with the consensual logic in which the terms "politics," "democracy," and "equality" a r e rnired, and demonstrates a rigorous cohesion between object and method in his work, superbly ignoring the lines that separate disciplines. As a result, he remains "unclassifiable" and continually finds himself in a relation of transgression to the

249

Cinematographic bringe

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

various languages and areas of knowledge to which he appeals. This approach has cost him his standing among philosophers of the "far left" (at least if we are to believe Philippe Raynaud, who does not even allude to Rancire in his article "Les nouvelles radicalits" (Le Debar 105, May-August 1999). It has also kept him from being included in the category of "political philosophers" (indeed, Rancire himself has raised serious doubts about the subdivision of philosophy known as "political philosophy"). The flawless itinerary of this ex-student of the Ecole Normale Suprieure and ex-Fellow of the Fondation Thiers suggests not the slightest hint of heresy: Rancire has taught since 1969 in the Philosophy Department of the Universit de Paris VIII, occupying the Chair of Professor of Esthetics and Politics since 1990. He was the driving force behind the journal Rvoltes logiques from 1975 to 1986, and Director of Programs at the International College of Philosophy from 1986 to 1992. And yet, this itinerary, profoundly solitary and solidary, secretes his theory: a liberating impatience with the delimiting and the frontiers of fields of knowledge through which competencies and incompetencies are defined. He demonstrates, all the while trying to thwart it, a certain "partition of the sensible"; that is, "that system of sensible evidences that reveals both the existence of a communality and the divisions that define in it respectively assigned places and parts" ("Interview," in Le partage du sensible). In the wake of Foucault, Rancire retraces the "esthetics" of politics, a politics that bears on "what one sees and what one can

say about it, on who has the competency necessary to see and the quality to say; on the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time." Having antagonized several touchy historians with his book Les noms de l'histoire. Essai de potique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992; The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], trans. Hassan Melehy), and then having irritated a few pernickety poeticists with his Mallarm. La politique de la sirne (Paris: Hachette, 1996), he is now utterly baffling certain "literary figures," with his most recent works, La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littrature (Paris: Hachette, 1998); and La chair des mots. Politiques de l'criture (Paris: Galile, 1998). But at long last the journal Critique came, and conquered those who had been the most recalcitrant, with a remarkable special volume devoted to Rancire that paid homage to the "philosopher of the poor," and to his demanding, austere, and wholly uncompromising thought (Critique 53/ 601-602 [June-July 1997]). With his concerted indifference to the readers of his work whom he supposes, democratically, to be as intelligent as he is Rancire seems to enjoy the aleatory nature of the democratic letter, writing that is addressed to whomever and to whatever; he persists in using a difficult, unusual language, and assumes the position of the "ignorant schoolmaster," much like Joseph Jacotot, to whom he devoted his work Le matre ignorant. Cinq leons sur l'mancipation intellectuelle (Fayard, 1987; The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford Uni-

250

Cinematographic Image

versity Press, 1991, trans. Kristin Ross). Jacotot was a strange figure, from whom Rancire borrowed the concept of equality as a presupposition, and the calling into question of the division between intellectual equality and social inequality, allowing him to dismantle the logic of the schoolmaster, of the person who "guarantees his power by controlling the very gap he claims to fill, between the ignorant one and knowledge." (On this subject, see the interview with Rancire, conducted by James H. Kavanagh and myself, on 18 April 1999 in New York, on politics, esthetics, democracy, and literature, forthcoming in Substance). It is easy to understand, in the following interview, which deals primarily with cinema, how the words "fiction," "literature," "esthetics," "art," and "image," necessarily take on a polemical value: they are made unrecognizable, relieved of their consensual weight, and have been returned unsullied to the tribe. They are thus "political" words, the business of the subject, as Rancire says; they offer a new enunciative potential, which certain people imagine, wrongly, to be a kind of "shop talk" (philosophical in this instance, for which Pierre Lepape criticizes him in Le Monde of 27 November 1998). For this potential belongs to a logic of misunderstanding, to a polemical and democratic dissensus that perturbs police-politics as partition of the sensible, rendering visible and audible the "conflict between the person who says white and the person who says white but means something entirely different or doesn't understand that the other is saying the same thing using the word 'whiteness'" (Lo msenienfe. Poli-

tique et philosophie [Paris: Galile, 1995, 12]; D/sagreemenf: Politics and Philosophy [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, trans. Julie Rose]). Let us now listen to what Rancire has to say, to his words caught between an unsettling impatience and an engaging tactfulness, and the liberating power of which can be measured by the intense activity of thought and speech they demand and mobilize.

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

Solange Gunoun - First let me thank you for having granted us this interview, and for having given us access to your most recent articles on cinema, which are as yet not easy to find on this side of the Atlantic. Cinema is your most recent field of inquiry, after history, literature, and esthetics, as demonstrated, for example, by your regular contributions to the Cahiers du cinma since 1998. While your interest in the cinema goes back to the 1970s, it has only recently become an object of inquiry for you, as you continue to explore your notion of the "partition of the sensible" and to reflect on the historical regime of the arts. Here again, even if we take into account the change of fields, the transgressive shift from one art form to another, the problematic remains the same. In order to understand what is new about cinema, we must in effect return to your notion of esthetics as a notion specific to a particular conceptualizing of the arts that was imposed to the detriment of poetics, a poetics more in accordance with the

251

Cinematographic Image

But this esthetic purity is illusory, as is any notion that claims to make an esthetic vocation coincide with the materiality of a specific medium. Cinema is not only a visual art, suited to support the idea of a pure language of sensation. It is also an art of fiction and, as a young art of fiction, it bestowed a new youth upon genres, types, codes, verisimilitudes, and conventions of representative Jacques Rancire- There are several levels to consider. On the most general, fiction that literature had overthrown. So it is an art that very rapidly became incinema materially realizes the definition of art, first elaborated in Schelling's Sys- volved in the contradiction between the tem of Transcendental Idealism, as a un- esthetic regime of images that "speak by themselves" and the representative traion of conscious and unconscious dition of the fitting together of fictional processes. In cinema, there is the eye of actions and typologies. Its vitality no the machine, and it sees differently from doubt is connected to the obligation it the eye of the artist; it sees different had to link contradictory poetics. Andr things. Thus cinema could lend itself to carrying out the vast utopia that pervad- Bazin made "impurity" a positive property of cinema. But it was the esthetic reed the esthetic regime of the arts: the gime of art that originally connected the idea of a language proper to the sensipurity and the impurity of art. ble, which is the language of sensation that we still find in Deleuze. In the early days of cinema, this utopia was based SG - According to you, it was literature on the idea that matter faded into lumi- that paved the way for the revolutions in nous energy. Around 1900, the theme photography and cinematography, a litof the "language of light" traced a erature defined as "the determined rebroad arc that united the poetics of Mal- gime of the art of writing" that no longer larm or Proust, the dance of Loie Fullrecognizes the rules of art as it did under er, Appia's scenography, Joachim the previous regime of Belles Lettres. Gaquet's interviews of Czanne, the dy- This esthetic revolution, which belongs namism of the futurist painters, and the to writers, and which transformed "orditheoreticization of the seventh art by nary and anonymous" subjects into art, Canudo. This theme guaranteed contiwas what allowed their photographic or nuity between the seemingly antagonispictorial recording to also be art. So it tic esthetics of symbolism and futurism, was not technical innovation that govbetween decadent ecstasies and Soviet erned artistic innovation, as is generally urgencies. Cinema was the art that was believed, but the contrary. You define

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

representative status of art. So whereas on the one hand you write that cinema by combining two esthetics and in a sense acting as a surrogate for classical poets is the modern art par excellence, you at the same time claim that the cinematographic image comes under "the Romantic principle of indeterminate insignificance."1 According to you, then, is the cinema, which is the esthetic art par excellence, Romantic or modern?

materially predestined to withstand the deployment of a certain poetics, of which Jean Epstein is the exemplary representative.

252

Cinematographic Image

the avant-garde from this esthetic revolution: by inventing sensible forms that foreshadow the forms of the community to come, the avant-garde is an esthetic and political foreshadowing of the future. JR - What I am arguing against here is a mode of analysis that considers revolutions in the arts to have their origins in technical innovation, in particular the Benjaminian notion of an art of the age of mechanical reproduction. Against this type of analysis, which conveniently allows historical materialism, the idea of the specificity of the medium, and the Heideggeriean essence of technique to overlap, I have argued that the availability of a specific technique does not necessarily lead to a specific art. According to the logic of the esthetic regime of art, in order for photography or the cinema to belong to art, their subjects first had to belong to art. Everything that could be taken in by a glance had to have been already susceptible to being something artistic; the insignificant had in itself to be potentially art. The rupture of the system of representation was first brought about by what was so ineptly called "realism"; this "realism" held that not only was everything that was represented equal, but also that there was an inherent splendor to the insignificant. First there had to be the Flaubertian focusing on an ordinary scene viewed through a window by someone who was bored in order for the new techniques of reproduction of any old thing to then take on the esthetic potential of this any old thing. SG - Just as you posit the need of cinema which is both a visual art and an

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

art of fiction to bring together contradictory poetics, you inscribe it in different eras: the era of history (as a category of a common destiny) and the era of the esthetic.2 In addition, cinema opens out, according to you, on something beyond art, on "the beyond of art." How is one to understand both the historicity of cinema as a specific mode of the sensible and its opening on to something beyond art? Since I am aware of your justified objections to the notions of crisis and the end of art, I wonder what you mean when you speak of a "beyond of art"? JR - The esthetic regime of art tore down the fence that separated the sphere of imitations, to make life forms from art forms. And this caused two opposing ideas that of the autonomy of art as a living form that refers exclusively to its own laws, and that of art as a form of common experience to have to come into contact. Modernist ideology attempted to erect a barrier between the two by means of ad hoc concepts: the critique of representation, the autonomy of art, the theory of a specific medium. It constructed a history of art ordered entirely on the concept of an irreversible rupture between representative and antirepresentative art. It ceaselessly pointed to the diabolic powers that contradicted this edifying history: the politicization of art, the law of commerce, the empire of communication, the appropriation of art by the discourse on art, etc. But modernist ideology does not recognize this simple fact: the principles that support the autonomy of art and those that support its becoming-life-form are the same. The abstract "purity" of Ma-

253

Cinematographic Image

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

levitch or Kandinsky arose in the context of a desire to construct new life forms, the structures and furnishings of a new life. Cinema asserted itself both as a pure language of images or light and as an element in the construction of a new life, etc. The "crisis" or the "end" of art is merely the crisis of the modernist paradigm, constructed around the simplistic notion of the autonomy of painting; it is, in other words, the crisis of an ideology of painting. SG - Let us now move to the relation between painting and cinema, between image and word. Your ideas on this subject are at times provocative; they are elliptical and complex. In your reading of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, for example, you suggest turning around Adorno's famous pronouncement that art after Auschwitz is impossible. You wrote, "It is the opposite that is true: after Auschwitz, in order to show Auschwitz, only art is possible, because art is always the presence of an absence, because it is art's very task to reveal what is invisible, by the regulated power of words and images, joined or disjoined, because only art is able to make the inhuman sensible [rendre sensible l'inhumain]." How are we to understand this appeal to the power of art's ability to represent, this appeal to mythos, while we are, according to you, under the literary-esthetic-historical democratic regime of the undifferenciation of subjects, of indeterminate insignificance, which is supposed to have broken with the representative? JR - We must first agree on what we mean by "to show" and "to represent." If

we mean to render, by means of images, a process of a double disappearance the extermination and the erasure of traces , the discrepancy between the words of a former official of the national railroad company explaining the problems of moving the convoys, and the image of peaceful glades that have no memory, creates a fiction from the esthetic era that is more likely to make us understand that process than a representative fiction that shows us by what chain of circumstances we become either victim or executioner. The underdetermination of narrative series of events, of psychological processes, and of descriptive scenes that characterize the fiction of the esthetic era, especially in the line of Flaubert, is more able to account for inhumanity than a display of corpses that arouses pity or terror. SG - Are we to understand what you have written about the film Drancy avenir along the same lines? According to you, the images of the film "confer upon the inhumanity of extermination its only acceptable equivalent, the inhumanity of beauty"? What do you mean by "images" here? JR - One has first to make allowances for the polemical aspect of such a statement. The beauty alluded to here is not that of lovely illustrations. The power of this film that summons forth the concentration camp at Drancy using its contemporary "reality" a low-cost housing complex obviously comes from the way the images of a present without memory cause the words of witnesses to the past to reverberate. It's the Flaubertian splendor of the ordinary

254

Cinematographic Image

haunted by words that describes, in a simple way, horror. "Image" is not simply a category of the visual. "Image" designates a relation between presence and absence, sense and non-sense that the cinema inherited from literature. SG - And video art? What are your thoughts on that?

tacle," I am sensitive to the way video art can lend itself to celebrating once again the image and to fulfilling the Romantic vision of art. SG - In the continuing quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, between "those who are nostalgic for lost art [and] songsters of modernity," you remind us that "there is nothing inherent in any art, in any modernity. There are political and esthetic strategies of interface that combine in various ways. These figures of interface move from one space to another, from the flatness of the page to the grain of the photograph or to the cinematographic apparition. How do you see this circulation among different supports? JR - It seems to me that one has to understand that a "support" never designates a simple material or technical reality. A support is always an esthetic idea, an idea of the function-support as artistic function. For example, the "ndexical" nature of the photograph as if the photograph were the imprint of the body fixed in silver salts has been amply theorized. But we don't see any such thing on the photograph we hold in our hands. This esthetic of the imprint is not the result of the materiality of the process of photographic recording. It arose from the Romantic theory that conceives of the work as the trace of its process of formation, and then from the processes of developing, exposing, and printing by which photographers and especially pictorialists attempted to impart photography with that immaterial materiality that Symbolist esthetic lauded. Recently, the filmmaker Alexan-

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

JR - Video art doesn't seem to me to be the harbinger of a new age of art or of the partition of the sensible. Rather, I am struck by the way in which it reactivates the ideas and the utopias that accompanied the conferring of the status of art onto cinema. Many contemporary video installations inscribe themselves in a neo-Symbolist esthetic in which the goal is to create a kind of spiritual environment, to render perceptible an originary sensorium made up of pure light, fleecy matter, time suspended in pure repetition, microevents of matter/light in flux. Electronic scanning lends itself better than the film of the past to carrying out the Symbolist idea of the art of light. A filmmaker like Godard knew how to use the resources of video editing to rewrite the history of cinema according to a phenomenological vision that, for example, transforms Hitchock's fragments of Aristotelian fiction into cons of the originary presence of things. Video art thus reproduces, after literature and cinema, the great tension of the Romantic esthetic between the absolute freedom of the creator manipulating words, images, and stories and the power of art inscribed in the sensible of "nonmanipulated things" (Rossellini). Unlike the prophets of the end of the image, of the reign of communication or of the "spec-

255

Cinematographic Image

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

der Sokhourov claimed to reaffirm the pictorial nature of cinema by positing the two-dimensionality of the cinematographic mage. But his effects of flattened perspective are in fact the results of an artistic intention that has nothing to do with what is natural to the medium. And the pictoriality of his images also avails itself of the colorizing and textural effects of pictorialist photography. The "supports" are imaginary as well as material, invented as well as utilized. In spite of modernist interdictions, the arts have continued to intermingle, and to exchange their "supports." SG - All art, all modernity, you say, comes down to "political and esthetic strategies of interface that combine in various ways." Is the latest technological interface of multimedia combining screen, sound, words, movies, etc. inscribed in these same strategies, and if so, how? JR - The entire 20 century saw the mixing of arts, supports, and techniques, from cubist collages and the borrowings by the theater of sets from the circus, gymnastics, or the cinema, to contemporary forms of video installations and multimedia shows. Here again we must distinguish among several levels: there are technical innovations that can be used for purely decorative effect, as is sometimes done in the theater; there are assemblage devices (fragmentation, collage, harmony or dissonance) that put the resources of one technique or one art at the disposal of another. And there are strategies of assemblage that will use these devices to different ends. From Meyerhold's mises en scne

and the Dadaist manifestations of the 1920s, to the demonstrations of John Cage's circle, to Nam June Paik's installations and Godard's films of the 1960s, these devices have primarily served the idea of a critical art that explodes the boundaries of art and communicates with an emancipatory vision. Now the mixing of arts and media has returned from the Constructivist and Dadaist era to the Symbolic era: it serves the idea of a Gesamtswerk rather than that of an art that explodes the boundaries of art and politics. Multimedia art today when it is not purely a demonstration of the marvels of technology or something tacked on to a theater running out of ideas wavers between the Wagnerian model of the Gesamtswerk and the Symbolist model that thinks of interface in terms of analogies. SG - You have written that "the sound and the fury of art stems from its 'idiocy,' from its particular way of suspending the procedures and rhythms by which life ordinarily proves its meaning or mocks its non-meaning. Whereas I could pretend to understand what you mean by "idiocy," I prefer not to, and rather you clarify the term. JR - I wrote those words in reference to Kusturica's Black Cat, White Cat, and, more broadly, in reference to a certain postmodern esthetics of derision that basely exploits Shakespeare's "tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury." This esthetics merely serves to increase the forms of derision and "relaxation" that today belong to the dominant imaginary and to the ordinary discourse of the me-

256

Cinematographic Image

dia and advertising. I wanted to counter these formulas for nonsense with the procedures of rarefaction or suspension of meaning that are specific to art. "Masterpieces are stupid," said Flaubert; that is, they suspend the ordinary procedures of the course of actions, of the probability of images, of the manifestations of sense and non-sense.

political tradition of the objection to data. The future of this confusion seems in no way predictable to me, even if today it allows more room for art than for politics. SG - It so happens that I share Jean Borreil's notion that "all great philosophy is merely the persistence, the return of a single intuition..."5 So, what's next, after cinema, for you? In what other area will you explore the constant object of your research? JR - What interests me at the moment is the systematic exploration of the historical regime of the arts, of which cinema and literature are two exemplary figures. This can be formulated as a genealogical question: to what relations of the sensible, the sayable, and the thinkable do our ways of characterizing what is specific to art refer? How are these relations made and unmade? But behind the question of genealogy there is always the question of distribution. What interests me is crossing, transgressing boundaries, and calling into question the paradigm of the "specificity" of the arts and of their "medium." What interests me is how the word makes one see without making one see and the way the image speaks while withdrawing from the visible; how words make one see and live, how images compose the world, and how this world manages to speak itself. It is the matter of equality and inequality that is at stake in these questions of boundaries and passages.

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014

SG - With the new information technologies, can one imagine that there is a new partition of the sensible in the works? And what would you call it? JR - I don't think I'm in a position to give it a name, and even less so to conceive it. I don't believe in joyous prophecies of a world of communicational democracy, borne on the wings of the Internet, nor in dark prophecies of the end of the image, of the experience of the visible, nor in widespread simulation and virtualization. New methods of producing or extracting sensible data do not necessarily lead to a new partition of the sensible. It is obvious, nevertheless, thatthey blur certain boundaries around which esthetic experience and the esthetics of politics were formed. Traditional procedures of the political reconfiguration of sensible data challenged the supposed "objectivity" of these data. Today this political function of objecting to data is blurred by a certain confusion affecting the content of sensible experience. Experience is not "dead," nor has it become undeterminable. But a certain suspense about what it offers to the world is interposed between the official affirmation of the objective inevitability of data and the

Translated by Alyson Waters

257

Cinematographic Image

N o t e s

3. "Le cinma comme la peinture?", Cahiers du cinma, janvier 1999. 4. Dans "De la difficult d'tre un personnage de cinma", Cahiers du cinma, novembre 1998. 5. Voir Jean Borreil, La raison nomade, textes tablis par Christine Buci-Glucksman, Genevive Fraisse, et Jacques Rancire; prface de Jacques Rancire (Payot, 1993).

1. "L'inoubliable", in Jacques Rancire et Jean-Louis Comolli, Arrt sur histoire (Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). 2. "L'historicit du cinma", Antoine de Baecque et Christian Delage (d.), De l'histoire au cinma (Edition Complexe, 1998).

Downloaded by [Yeditepe Universitesi] at 04:44 03 February 2014