The Aesthetic Fable: Cinema in Jacques Rancière’s “Aesthetic

Politics”1
Alison Ross

SubStance, Issue 118 (Volume 38, Number 1), 2009, pp. 128-150 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: 10.1353/sub.0.0029

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128 Alison Ross

The Aesthetic Fable: Cinema in

Jacques Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics”1
Alison Ross

1. The Politics of Aesthetics

Politics resembles art in one essential point. Like art, politics also
cuts into that great metaphor where words and images are
continuously sliding in and out of each other to produce the sensory
evidence of a world in order. And, like art, it constructs novel
combinations of words and actions, it shows words borne by bodies
in movement to make them audible, to produce another articulation
of the visible and the sayable. (Rancière, Film Fables, 152)

The connection between Jacques Rancière’s political theory and his

writing on art pivots on a conception of the contingency of patterns of
social meaning and order. In his major work on politics, Dis-agreement:
Politics and Philosophy, Rancière holds that events able to disturb a
prevailing distribution of order may be understood as instituting new
conventions of meaning, and thus must have first negotiated and altered
a sensory field in which they did not previously exist. Altering prevailing
patterns of meaning is possible, he argues, because such patterns have
“no basis other than the sheer contingency of any social order” (25);
nonetheless these patterns have force and significance because they exist
at the level of the partitioning of a field of sensory perception. He explains
these ideas by means of a reference to theatre:
Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage
and over the existence and status of those present on it. It must first
be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who
can’t see it and who can’t see it for good reason because it doesn’t
exist. (26-27)
Rancière’s use of a theatrical conception of displacement aims to stress
the elements of artifice involved in the staging of such political scenes.
His examples of political disagreement concern the struggle for
comprehension in which the very questions of what is at issue in a dispute
and who is speaking are themselves at stake. There needs to be a re-
distribution of social roles and functions for the disagreement to be

128 © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2009

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 129

visible. In particular, this understanding of politics makes it clear that

any social order is an imposition of incapacities. The modality of social
order thus understood is primarily one of an imposed, tendentious
differentiation of capabilities that becomes legible in the processes and
means of particular acts of contestation.2 The artifice of the theatrical
scene shares with politics the displacement of “natural” relations
between bodies and places. Acting in a role is one way that such “natural”
relations are altered. Rancière wants to extend this theatrical principle
into a general way of thinking through the implications of the artifice
and thus the ungrounded nature of any “natural” hierarchy, but also of
all roles. Rather than a defense of “identity politics” then, his attachment
to the axiom of “displacement” forms part of a view of political action as
provisional and prospective; it does so by drawing on the role of artifice
in theatrical works to explain and contest “natural” hierarchies.
His references to literature may also be considered in terms of their
import for this reflection on political topics and themes. The excess of
words to what they name (things) or mean (ideas) supports the political
significance of dis-incorporation that he terms “literarity.” In Dis-agreement
he defines literarity in more precise terms as a threefold excess of words
1) to what they name, 2) to the requirements for the production of the
necessities of life, and 3) to the modes of communication, which legitimate
and reinforce a given social order. In a reformulation of Aristotle’s dictum
regarding “man’s” status as an animal with the additional capacity for
politics, Rancière writes that “The modern political animal is first a
literary animal, caught in the circuit of a literariness that undoes the
relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies that
determine the place of each.”(Dis-agreement, 37). His understanding of
words as able to effect “a disidentification” from “the naturalness of a
place” (36) supports a perspective on politics that takes “words” in the
expansive sense of apportioning and shaping places and sites of
intelligibility. It is because of this pragmatic efficacy of words in concrete
political acts that Rancière avoids a semantic approach to politics, which
would assume a preestablished context of agreement regarding meaning
and devote itself to the clarification of aspects of communication thus
understood, and asks instead how the network of relations in which
bodies are placed renders what they say meaningful. Political
disagreement occurs not when the objects at stake and the participants
to the disagreement are identifiable givens, but when the party who
claims a wrong understands this wrong in ways unintelligible within a
prevailing order of sensible distribution. So, in order to articulate their

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130 Alison Ross

sense of the situation this party needs to use words to redistribute and
redraw the sensible map, to make it possible to communicate a new way
of experiencing the world.
The crucial role Rancière gives to the dis-incorporation of meaning
in politics leads him to criticize Deleuze who, according to him, shuts
down the prospect of words redistributing meanings by virtue of his
utopian view that meanings are somehow embodied in particular literary
operations. Deleuze, Rancière argues, leaves himself open to the charge
that the ontology he describes is “only” words precisely because he fails
to consider the ways literary meanings may be reshaped and redirected.3
The guiding idea of dis-incorporation is also the theoretical underpinning
for his general analyses of the complex connections to political themes
inherent in the “aesthetic” form of modern literature. In particular, we
may mention his conception of the emergence in literature of the
“aesthetic regime of the arts,” in which, starting with writers like Flaubert,
“mute” things come to speak and aesthetic significance can be found in
anything, as Hegel’s analysis of the dissolution of romanticism had
foretold. This regime is an “aesthetic model” for the democratic operation
that disregards the order of relations between bodies and places; the
literary paradigm of this disregard is Flaubert’s attempt to extend the
idea that anything may be written well, including the mediocre love
affairs of a farm girl.4 Thus, instead of “politics in literature” addressing
the political commitments of writers, in Rancière’s thinking the literary
is political inasmuch as it concerns the practice of the division of the
sensible, like, for instance, Flaubert’s disregard for the hierarchical
relations which, in the so-called representative regime of the arts, allocate
appropriate styles for the treatment of particular subjects and themes.5
From this brief discussion of his general approach to the intersection
of politics and art, I would like to formulate what I take to be the two
crucial perspectives that Rancière adopts in his “aesthetic politics.” First,
from the evidence of the operation of dis-incorporated constellations of
meaning in art, he argues that these constellations are able to mould
political discourses. Second, he shows that the redistribution of sensible
patterns of meaning is the primary dimension of politics [le politique]. If,
as he contends, his perspective is simultaneously aesthetic and political,
we need to ask whether it makes sense to talk about the “redistribution
of the sensible” as effectively coordinating these two elements at the
same time. To my mind, the coordination between these elements can
only make sense if we add the additional claim that the fact and processes
of dis-incorporation of meaning (which he describes in theatre and

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 131

literature) engage a redefinition of the sensible sharing of values and

positions in a politically relevant way. Such dis-incorporation, in other
words, must propose a new way of relating to the world and to others in
such a way that it allows new voices to come forward and to have their
views articulated. What is crucial is that the claims of these voices are
articulable in a way that gives them a claim on other people’s attention
to the point of being meaningful for them. But also—and more important,
I think—this process of articulation must turn them themselves into
political subjects or actors—it must make of them a force to be reckoned
with in political processes.6 In this respect dis-incorporated constellations
of meaning are both “aesthetic” and “political.” They are “aesthetic”
because they provide the settings for a sensible incorporation of new
meanings; and they are “political” because they engage a point of dispute
for engagement of different forces on the basis of these new meanings;
and each through the other.
Rancière’s discussion of the case of the secession of the Roman
plebeians on Aventine Hill provides an example of this type of
coordination between the “aesthetic” and the “political.”7 The plebs set
up another “partition of the perceptible” in which they constitute
themselves as “speaking beings sharing the same properties as those
who deny them these” (Dis-agreement, 24). The consul Menenius goes to
Aventine Hill where he sees the spectacle of the plebs carrying out a
“series of speech acts linking the life of their bodies to words and word
use” (ibid., 25). What he “sees” leads his fellow patricians to consider
him “a victim of sensory illusion”; nonetheless when Menenius returns
to the plebs to deliver his apologia, it is delivered to equals. Rancière
concludes that Menenius presupposes a capacity for understanding that
the content of his apologia denies, and thus his apologia becomes, despite
his intentions, a revelatory staging of equality:
From the moment the plebs could understand Menenius’s apologia –
the apologia of the necessary inequality between the vital patrician
principle and the plebeian members carrying it out – they were
already, just as necessarily equals. The apologia implies an
inegalitarian partition of the perceptible. The sense necessary to
understand this division presupposes an egalitarian division that puts
paid to the former, but only the deployment of a specific scene of
revelation gives this equality any effectiveness. (ibid.)
Thus it is not the mere fact of their use of words that is important,
but the “specific scene” in which their equality is staged; that is, a scene of
self-staging occurs that forces by its power of projection a reconfiguration
of its sensible environment in which what could not previously be heard
or seen becomes “meaningful” to others.8

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The idea that the literary word has a transformative power (through
communication of meaning) can also be found in the literature on aesthetic
experience. Albrecht Wellmer has argued that reading has this social
dimension, insofar as it allows a certain meaning to take root.9 In contrast,
Karl Heinz Bohrer has argued that art provides something like a private
satisfaction in meaning, a fulfilled present, which cannot be generalized
beyond individual experience. In these cases, however, it seems that the
meaning-constellations that art provides are not able to forge a basis for
a contestation with others that would have the dimension of force
required by Rancière’s politics. This is clear in Bohrer’s case because he
explicitly criticizes the attempt to extend the aesthetic significance to be
found in art beyond private pleasure. For thinkers like Wellmer and
Hans-Robert Jauss the way an aesthetic experience alters one’s horizon
by bringing it into relation with an alien horizon is a transformation, in
Rancière’s terms, of prevailing patterns of sense. It is not clear, on the
other hand, that these have the same agency that Rancière must ascribe
to politics as a “redistribution of the sensible” that engages new forces
and delimits fields of political contestation against prevailing patterns of
sense.10 At the same time, this comparison with hermeneutics allows us
to sharpen the terms of Rancière’s “aesthetic politics” insofar as its
relations to the arts are concerned. As noted previously, the structuring
references to theatre and literature are important resources for showing
the shaping role of aesthetic elements in the communication of values
and beliefs. The comparisons with Wellmer and Bohrer suggest, however,
the importance of asking whether the modern arts, in addition to their
capacity for redescribing meanings, also carry the capacity for an effective
contestation of such values and beliefs themselves. Aesthetic experience
shows the possibility of communicating new meanings, but do these
meanings also practice the shaping role entailed in Rancière’s sense of
“aesthetic politics”?
The coordination between the “aesthetic” and the “political” in which
communication of meanings and contestation of forces overlap can be
taken to be the general perspective of Rancière’s “aesthetic politics.” I
would now like to use this general perspective to see how it fits with
what he says about the cinema in Film Fables, and to ask about the
significance that may be attributed to possible discrepancies between
what he says about the cinema and this more general perspective. Does
Rancière’s treatment of cinema call into question his attribution to art of
a role in the communication and shaping of new meanings?

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2. Cinema in Rancière’s Aesthetic Politics

I would like to start this consideration of the place of cinema in
Rancière’s thought by outlining the main ways or perhaps moods in
which Rancière discusses film. As a comportment towards the arts, the
first one has a long tradition in philosophy. In this vein, Rancière looks at
films with a view to finding confirmation of some of the axioms of his
political thought. His essay “A Child Kills Himself” in Short Voyages to the
Land of the People, may be cited here. This essay locates in the path taken to
the asylum by Ingrid Bergman’s character in Rossellini’s film Europa 51
the techniques and effects of the dislocation of bodies from places that
Rancière’s writing on politics attributes to theatrical staging in general.11
It is clear that this film falls short of the theses of Rancière’s politics.
Although it depicts elements of his idea of displacement, the indefinite
institutionalization of the character Irene played by Bergman that ends
the film means that Rossellini’s depiction of wastelands and of a character
drawn away from the coordinates of her bourgeois life and near to those
who suffer and experience joy does not effect the communicable symbolic
meaning required by Rancière’s aesthetic politics.12 Rather, the narrative
arc of the film depicts Irene’s displacement as an incomprehensible
response to private grief, which is met by the punitive motives of
institutional forces. Her failure to either inhabit (or adopt out of pragmatic
motives) the frameworks of meaning used by institutional forces (the
priest, the psychiatrist and the police, as well as the schemas and
expectations of the familial sphere, represented by her husband and
mother), or to successfully communicate her own, is, in the general terms
I defined above, also a failure to communicate dis-incorporated meanings
as a shaping force for political discourse.
The reasons for this failure may be clarified if we contrast it with
Rancière’s view that theatre models displacement in general on account
of its reliance on artifice. The ways Europa 51 depicts the strategies of the
social authorization of meaning are shock (used as a technique of control
in the asylum and the factory) and interpretation (used as a device to
reinforce causal explanations of social interactions and events by the
psychiatrist, the Marxist and the family).13 Against such strategies, Irene’s
modelling of a spiritual, reflective life is ineffective in producing new
meaning-bearing practices precisely because the meaning of her practices
is not communicable. Displacement occurs in the story staged in Europa
51, but rather than leading to new forms of communication, it leads to
incomprehension. Meaning, we might say on the evidence of this film,
needs to be socially authorized in order to be liveable. Let me be clear: I

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134 Alison Ross

do not want to suggest that the test of the film is the ability of the main
character to institute meaning-forming practices for others; my point is
rather that the narrative arc of the film does not so much confirm as
dispute Rancière’s thesis on meaning-displacement. Specifically, it fails
the test he sets in Dis-agreement that in order to be effective speech needs a
scene able to dramatize its emancipatory content. Despite the fact that
there is a representation of the nascent processes of meaning-formation
in the film, shown in Irene’s discovery of different worlds and the ways
these shape in her a new spiritual comportment, these remain at the
level of individual experience.14 Further, these processes also have the
effect of isolating her both from her previous milieu and from the world
she longs to be part of, but to which she has to remain a stranger. Her
incarceration is a concretization, in some sense, of the fact that she cannot
share the view of the world of those with whom she wants to fraternize.
Still, it is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn from this film
regarding the prospects for the dis-incorporation of meaning in the
medium of film per se, even if in Short Voyages Rancière seems to
contemplate this possibility (107-08). Specifically, Rancière’s discussion
of Europa 51 does not show how, in the field of cinematic representation,
techniques able to communicate new meanings would parallel the artifice
of theatre and the dis-incorporated nature of words in his account of
literarity.
There are also the discussions of particular films in recent works
such as Malaise dans l’ésthetique in which he cites films as vehicles for the
elaboration and verification of aspects of our prevailing cultural
imaginary. For instance, he discusses how the idea of a “common world”
in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River or Lars von Triers’s Dogville strikes a
chord with the erroneous conception of ethics as a type of comportment
elicited by the “factual” content of life, rather than the reflection on the
rules governing how people treat each other.15 These films are perhaps
insightful representations of prevailing cultural and intellectual codes,
but because they are readily assimilable by these codes rather than
critical sites for reflection on them, neither the shock effects of Dogville
nor the tragedy of Mystic River are able to be converted into perspectives
of dis-incorporated meaning. Instead, Rancière sees in them aesthetic
practices that propose meanings that are in seamless continuity with
prevailing cultural ideas (151). As in his discussion of Europa 51 there is
no attempt in these treatments of film to identify and describe the
cinematic techniques able to communicate new meanings. These
discussions of film do not deal with the question of how film might

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 135

reshape cultural meanings; rather, they focus on how cinematic

representations reflect and confirm given meanings. In this respect the
question of how to address the aesthetic elements of this medium as a
vehicle of communication is not addressed as such.
Finally, there is the critical discussion of conceptions of film as “fables”
of the medium. This perspective receives its most sustained treatment in
Film Fables, but is also taken up in Rancière’s various critical commentaries
on the topic of modernism.16 I think that this is the most promising
perspective for our topic because it treats “film” as a medium and thus
promises to provide a systematic consideration of the modes and
elements involved in the cinematic production and communication of
meaning. However, because the main axis for this consideration of film is
critical comment on the “fable” of film as the medium of “moving images”
and the correlate idea of some type of continuity between the “techniques”
of the medium and its “form,” the explicit terms that Rancière uses to
describe the communication of meanings in the cases of literature and
theatre do not orient this treatment of film. This point can be seen by
comparing Rancière’s discussion of the topic of style in the cases of film
and literature. He argues against the early cinema-enthusiasts, such as
Jean Epstein, that the medium is indifferent to “what” it films: it can just
as easily film Soviet kinoks as sentimental love stories. He pursues the
same theme in his discussion in the literary context of the “aesthetic”
mode of the relation between “what” is fitting subject matter for Flaubert
and “how” he writes it. But here, his treatment of the elevation of style to
an absolute in Flaubert resonates with the general political perspective
that identifies and criticizes the hierarchies that govern the relations
between places and bodies (which he finds as well in the aesthetic
hierarchy that governs “what” and “how” things are represented in the
representative regime of the arts). In the case of literature, aesthetic
indifference to what is being represented is put in a positive relation to
democratic politics.17 When it comes to film, on the other hand, the
positives and negatives of such indifference become more complicated.
These complications are of two interrelated kinds. First, he
complicates the terms in which aesthetic indifference may be related to
political themes; and second, he alters the scope and implications of this
indifference in the case of film, so that film-style earns an instructive
value for understanding the status of style in the other arts. He argues
that cinema treats aesthetic indifference in a way that belies the very
distinction between an aesthetic and representative regime of the arts.
Rancière contends that the presence of narrative elements are so

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136 Alison Ross

important to the medium of film that the apparatus of cinema “restores

piece by piece” the elements of the representative regime of the arts that
its advocates credit it with having dismantled (Film Fables, 10). This regime
aligns forms of expression to the subjects represented according to a
hierarchical principle of appropriateness, and is therefore removed from
the democratic operation of aesthetic value that defines the aesthetic
regime. He contests the utopian view that the apparatus of film realizes
the aspiration of modern art for a passive, self-effacing technique. His
general point is that cinema shows the false ideal that drives similar
aspirations in painting, literature and music; cinema thus supports a
pointedly critical reflection on the features of the aesthetic regime. 18
Film, for instance, shows the paradox of the Flaubertian passive voice
of micro-narrations in which scenes might be described, before the fact,
as if they were “film stills.” And it does so because despite its purist
advocates, film is not the realization of a purely passive technique. Rather,
as Rancière puts it, “the camera cannot be made passive because it is
passive already, because it is of necessity at the service of the intelligence
that manipulates it (Fables, 9). As in Flaubert’s writing, hitherto mute
things speak in film in the sense that they have aesthetic significance,
and they do so in both film and literature through the narrative agency
of their aesthetic arrangement.
Rancière argues that the way film presents meaning-constellations
is a consequence of this interaction between narrative and technique.
This can lead to an ambivalent effect. On one side film, it seems, offers the
prospect of a pure documentation of a field of events; but, on the other,
this documentation is always the effect of the active input of montage to
create meaning. Thus, he states that the works of Scorsese and Cimino
may be read as delivering politically indifferent poetic depictions of the
minutiae of social life, or as critical commentaries on the1970s (Politics of
Aesthetics, 62).
It is important to recall here that as in the case of his discussion of
Flaubert, Rancière does not consider political commentary to amount to
“politics.” Whereas literarity has indeterminate semantic ends, allowing
for the circulation and shaping effects on political discourse of words’
meanings, the question that is sidestepped by his approach to film as a
cipher of the fable of modern art is precisely what would parallel the
aesthetic efficacity of words in the medium of film. Rancière is reluctant
to credit any technical feature of film with this capacity—a fact that can
be seen in his description of montage as the inheritance of symbolist
poetics (Fables, 26-27). Thus, the important point is not so much the

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 137

equal claims of those interpretative positions on Scorsese and Cimino

films, but the fact that in neither case do they work with figures able to
institute transferable patterns of meaning.19
I will argue below that his treatment of film does not locate in film a
meaning-context in which forces of contestation are engaged and defined
as his general conception of “aesthetic politics” would require. Further,
it seems to me that the case of film also tends to undermine this attribution
of “aesthetic politics” to other artistic practices.
For the sake of brevity I will focus on 1) his use of film to criticize
modernist conceptions of the arts and 2) the comparative analyses
Rancière undertakes of words in film and words in literary or theatrical
contexts. In both cases he subjects the “purity” of the medium of film to
critical scrutiny, although the arguments he uses in each case against it
nuance the topic of this “purity” differently. Indeed, I would like to signal
the importance for the discussion below of the fact that Rancière’s
discussion of the category of the “visual arts” undergoes subtle alterations
in these two cases.

3. Words and images on screen: Rancière’s “Film Fables”

1) The critique of modernism is one of the important topics in Rancière’s
writing. He sees in it the counterpart in art theory to those theoretical
approaches to politics that identify and defend a sphere of political
engagement that is distinct from other spheres and types of activity. Just
as he emphasizes the “impurity” entailed in politics on account of its
engagement in the partition of the perceptible, so too his writing on art
stresses the political signification it has because of this same “impurity.”
More specifically, Rancière criticizes the “dogma” of modern art as the
art of autonomy, which understands artistic media as technical fields
that their practitioners expose and perfect. He distrusts the false teleology
this introduces into the evaluation of art forms:
Each individual art would thus assert the pure potential of art by
exploring the capabilities of its specific medium. Poetic or literary
modernity would explore the capabilities of a language diverted
from its communicational uses. Pictorial modernity would bring
painting back to its distinctive feature: coloured pigment and a two-
dimensional surface. Musical modernity would be identified with
the language of twelve sounds set free from any analogy with
expressive language, etc. (Politics of Aesthetics, 26)
His criticisms of the teleology of the modernist framework as well as
the way its purist political orientation deals art out of a role in the
partition of the perceptible explain his emphasis on literature and theatre

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138 Alison Ross

as “mixed” arts.20 In Le destin des images he describes the importance theatre

has for him as the art form that shows most clearly the “impurity” of art
(Le destin des images, 101). Theatre is not primarily a spectacle, as Michael
Fried has argued. Rather, it is a space in which the problematic relations
between what is said and what is seen are staged. It is less the fact of the
composite of sensory elements that concerns him than the significance
he ascribes to the displacements of “natural” relations between bodies
and places that occur through the artifice of the theatrical scene. Similarly,
modern literature forms a complex network of relations with other arts
in the shaping of new relations of perceptibility. This role makes the
distinction between different arts on the basis of their specific media a
false exercise. Thus he cites “the flat surface of the page, … the change in
how literature’s ‘images’ function or the change in the discourse on
painting, but also …the ways in which typography, posters, and the
decorative arts became interlaced” as the ground from which painting’s
“anti-representative revolution” took shape (Politics of Aesthetics, 16).
The type of painting that is poorly named abstract, and which is
supposedly brought back to its own proper medium, is implicated in
an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new structures,
surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of
pages, posters and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface.
Moreover, its anti-representative “purity” is inscribed in a context
where pure art and decorative art are intertwined, a context that
straight away gives it a political signification. (ibid.)

The main themes of this critique of modernism place his position on

film in a new light. If we look at his theory of film in relation to this
critique, some ambiguities in his treatment of film can be placed in relief.
On the one hand, he is critical of the idea of film as a “visual” art whose
medium can be contained to the territory of “moving images.” On the
other, the substance of his position is not simply that cinema is an impure
art, but also that cinema is the art that seems “expressly designed to
thwart a simple teleology of artistic modernity” (Fables, 10). It is
significant, I think, that the general connection to politics of his discussion
of the impurity in the other arts is muted in the case of cinema.
In Film Fables, Rancière targets the high value early writing on film
places on cinema as a new language of moving, visual images. In the case
of Jean Epstein, for instance, the utopia of film as a “visual language,”
more perfect than the language of words, depends on the thesis that
cinematic history is the staging of an ideal continuity between technique
and form (167). Rancière’s position on this utopia is telling insofar as it
calls into question the settings given for the “idea” of the cinematic art,

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rather than its “technical” specifications. Cinema, he writes, is more

than “a mode of producing images. An art is more than the expressive
use of a material medium and a determinate means of expression—an
art is an idea of art” (24). He proceeds from the historical claim that the
“idea” of cinema predates cinema as a technical means and a distinct art
to the thesis that it is because cinema is part of an aesthetic moment that
predates it that the “meaning” of cinema is a feature of the ideas of other
arts as much as it is anything specifically cinematic (6).
He goes even further: he claims that if there is any specific value to
cinema it is the peculiar way it demonstrates the lie of continuity
between technique and form. His view that the “great figures” of “pure
cinema” such as Bresson and Rossellini show that the “means” of cinema
are only intelligible to itself “through the games of exchange and inversion
it plays with the literary fable, the plastic form, and the theatrical voice”
is set against cinema purists (Fables, 15). Thus it seems his historical
perspective and claim are impervious to the mode of questioning that
tries to establish the specificity of film by asking how the techniques of
cinema alter and transform its relations to the older arts.21
Rancière takes issue with those prominent contemporary theoretical
conceptions of cinema that articulate its significance in terms of the
trajectory of concepts such as the “time-image” in cinema history
(Deleuze), or with those who see in the machinery of cinema the prospect
of a true recording of the elements of material life (Epstein or Godard).22
He emphasizes that these ideas of cinema are the inheritance of debates
in theatre that “predated the cinema as a technical means and distinctive
art” (Fables, 6). In particular, Rancière criticizes the conception or fable of
film that understands the technical limitation on cinema as the
realization of a “passive technique” in which the elements of materiality
may come to speak free from the shaping force of a narrative structure.
The opposition between the “tragedy in suspense” that reveals the
intimate texture of things and the conventions of “dramatic action”
[was]….first played out in the time of Maeterlinck and Gordon Craig,
Appia and Meyerhold. These playwrights and stage directors had
already countered Aristotle’s arrangement of incidents with the
intimate suspense of the world. They were also the ones who taught
the cinema to extract the tragedy in suspense from the body of old
plots. (ibid.)

In all these respects Rancière disputes the meaning given to the name
of “cinema” in theoretical debate. His position tells how the marks of
modernist teleology are transferred to cinema when it is held up as a
specific field of art able to realize the distinctive possibilities of its form

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140 Alison Ross

(as, for instance, passive mechanism or time-image).23 He contends that

these “distinctive possibilities” are themselves only legible through a
series of oppositions inherited from debates in theatre. It is true in cinema,
as in the case of the other arts: “There is no straight line running from
cinema’s technical nature to its artistic vocation” (Fables, 11).24
Alongside his remarks concerning the genesis of ideas of film from
theatre and literature,25 Rancière’s evidence for the claim that cinema
thwarts the modernist framework is drawn from his contention that
those cinematic techniques held up as specifically cinematic in fact derive
from other arts. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin’s burlesque
automatons originate in theatre (ibid., 11); the montage of Eisenstein’s
films has its sources in Japanese art and particularly the ideogram (ibid.,
24-25); not only are the words and concepts Godard uses to explain the
specificity of film drawn from Elie Fauré’s art-historical discussion of
Rembrandt’s painting (ibid., 176), but even Deleuze’s crystal metaphor is
taken over from Maeterlinck’s theory of symbolist drama (ibid., 7). It
may be objected that historically informed discussions of cinema note
these derivations but also understand that in each case these techniques
and discursive elaborations undergo a decisive transformation in their
cinematic treatment. In making such comparisons, Rancière’s rationale
seems to be that cinema was never and will never be a “pure” art. We
need to ask, however, whether in making this point (which writings on
the historico-technical genesis of cinema, such as those by Erwin
Panofsky readily concede) he does not overlook the problem of explaining
the particular genesis and adaptations of the technical apparatus of film.
This question is of particular significance given his concessions in
respect to describing and praising the features of “literarity” and the
artifice of “scenes” in the other arts of literature and theatre. After all, it
is possible to find just these features in his description of the documentary
and of Rossellini’s film, Rome: Open City. The role of narrative construction
in documentary films shows how meaning can be found (as his discussion
of literarity contends) in anything; the staging elements in Pina’s ability
to break free from the police line that should easily have been able to
hold her in Rome: Open City has the attributes of an “artifice,” as this term
is understood in his analysis of theatrical contexts.26
The question of the technical aspects of film is also important from
the perspective of his political theory. The parameters chosen for his
critique of modernism need to be qualified in this respect. It would be fair
to claim that the emphasis given to the technical features of a medium is
problematic when it sustains the modernist view of the specificity of a

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 141

medium and understands the medium’s “development” in relation to

the refinement and realization of its specific techniques. This does not
mean, as his comments on the political import of theatre and literature
aver, that any examination of artistic techniques tolerates or confirms
the problematic aspects of modernist teleologies of the arts.27
Indeed, we may ask why it is that, given the settings in which he
praises theatre’s artifice of scene-making and the modes of dis-
incorporation particular to words, his position on film leaves cinema
short of the status theatre enjoys as the most “mixed” art with an
instructive value for “politics.” Crucially, whereas in the cases of theatre
and literature politics is shown to be at stake in their partitions of the
perceptible, just this theme is muted in his discussions of film.

2) Rancière’s reluctance to confirm in cinema a unique language of

visual moving images seems, however, at odds with the manner in which
he addresses the communicability of meaning in film. His treatment of
words on screen often points to the comparable malleability of meaning
in theatrical or literary contexts, as opposed to film. In this regard, the
following commentary on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is telling:
It may just be that this is the most intimate meaning of the famous
“Print the legend” on which the film closes: not the banal idea that
people prefer pretty lies to the naked truth, but the much more
troubling observation that the image, unlike language, is incapable of
transforming another image. (Fables, 35, my emphasis)

The process of disclosure that the film takes to reveal the real killer of
Liberty Valance is cited as evidence for this limitation in visual language.
Similarly, his discussion of Marnau’s film version of Tartuffe develops the
thesis that words bear an ambiguity that allows dis-incorporations of
meaning-constellations, whereas images need complex sequences to
depict ideas like duplicity. His essay on Tartuffe focuses on the way that
this very difference between image and word communication alters the
stage play in its transition to film. Speeches on stage can communicate a
double meaning and show thereby the duplicity of the character; film
scenes, on the other hand, not only require supplementary scenes to
show the same idea, but also are unable to transform other images. This
point would be misunderstood were it interpreted as a statement
regarding the respective features of visual and literary media. After all,
Rancière repeatedly emphasizes that these media are mixed and that it
is only as an inheritance of the idea of modernism that they may be
considered pure. Rather, I think his point here needs to be understood as

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identifying a communicative rigidity in film that does not operate in

literature or theatre.
It is significant that Rancière arrives at these points by a comparative
style of analysis. It is not that he does not consider the prospects for
shaping meaning anew in cinema; rather, he identifies blockages here
that do not operate in the same way in either theatre or literature. For
Rancière, the ability of meaning-constellations to forge new contexts of
sense and support practices of contestation is not indigenous to cinema
in the same way it is to literature and theatre.
Rancière does not think media-specific techniques provide an
adequate frame of analysis for either art forms or artworks.28 This has to
do with the communicability of meaning across the boundaries of art
forms. The confinement of modernist art criticism within the parameters
of analysis of techniques is seen by him as hermeneutically abortive and
as undermining the political extension of the meaning contexts that
artworks make available. This, it seems to me, is the crux of Rancière’s
point against considering art forms from the perspective of techniques
(alone). It is perhaps a salutary corrective. Nonetheless, it carries the risk
of overlooking the relevance of technical features for questioning the
conditions of communicating meaning. As Rancière’s own comments on
the limitations of cinema concede in the case of Liberty Valance, the factors
and processes involved in ascertaining meaning in “images,” on the one
hand, and those involved in understanding the meaning of literary
“words,” on the other, do not completely overlap. In the case of cinema,
in particular, it is possible to show how the dependence of communication
on the semantically underdetermined images requires that we form
different expectations about the apprehension of meaning. Really present
visual images (and thus the demand to decode them) have much greater
weight in film than they do in theatre in the process of understanding.
By their nature, words are closer to communicative meaning than are
images. Thus greater effort is needed to frame images in meaningful
(verbal) communication. From this perspective, images are much more
unstable and semantically context-dependent.
Similarly, the temporal dimension of apprehension is weighted
differently in cinema, as a visual medium, than in the arts of the literary
word. Visual perception is instantaneous in the sense that it is at each
moment total or complete. Only other perceptions can displace the earlier
ones. To this extent cinema images are discrete. Modification of earlier
perceptions take place in the sequence of displacements by way of
memory. In the language of images, the notion of ascertaining the

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significance of a perception has different meaning, procedures and

standards than that of the literary word. One has to “see” it, literally.
And so it preserves to some extent the quality of “revelation” in the
apprehension of truth. The image is much more semantically intransigent
than is the word. It resists narrative enclosure and reduction. But this
does not mean that images are incapable of presenting temporally
unfolding and more or less coherent units of meaning (i.e., stories). In this
context images are able to modify one another and, through time, to
transform each other.
There are two important ways that time is inherently present in
visual perception: 1) it is present as the condition for coherent and
experientially meaningful unification of the manifold sense-data; and 2)
it is the horizon of present perception—i.e., what gives it significance:
what is perceived at this moment, and how it is perceived, has the “look”
that it has because of the (past) experiences and (future) expectations
that form its horizon. It is possible in cases of visual perception (as in
film) to control the formation of this horizon to greater or lesser degrees.
The points Rancière makes concerning film do not adequately take
these factors into consideration. Rancière implies that time is not a
relevant factor in cinematographic representation, and thereby overlooks
the role of time in transforming cinematic images. In the scene in Liberty
Valance that reveals the real shooter, time can be seen to alter images. The
motion of the images obviously needs time, but time also has an image-
immanent role: it undermines the self-identity of each image. In every
apprehension of an image time is implied. Or, to put it another way: the
perception of images is not passive but participates productively in their
reception, since time opens each one up backward (memory) and forward
(expectation) to all the others, thanks to the horizon that it brings into
play. Thus, contrary to what Rancière argues, time effects a real
transformation of images, and not just a cinematic sequencing. Time is
there in the first image of the shooter who did not shoot Liberty Valance,
but is foreshortened and needs reflection to be brought out.29 From the
perspective of technique, this scene is seminal. It shows that the way to
look at scenes such as this is not as images shut in on themselves, but as
viewpoints that can be staged by virtue of the technical-directorial
apparatus of the cinema.
It seems to me that the focus on the supposed limitations of visual
language vis-à-vis the “word” is in tension with the main theme in
Rancière’s critique of modernism, in which he contests the semantic
cogency of a conception of purely visual media. On the other hand, we

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might ask whether his lack of attention to the themes and problems of
communicability of meaning in the case of film (which in the case of
theatre and literature orient his approach) are the result of his
understanding of visual language.

4. The Aesthetic Fable of Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics”

It is possible to find references to the communicability of political
meanings in Rancière’s writing on film. These references take the form of
questioning how new meanings are able to shape voices capable of
exerting force in political processes. After his essay in Short Voyages on
Rossellini’s Europa 51, Rancière’s discussion of Godard’s 1967 film La
Chinoise comes closest to the themes of his general orientation on political
topics. La Chinoise is a self-reflexive work that documents how films tell
stories at the same time as it tells the story of a cell of Maoist student
radicals who plot terrorist acts and despair at the corrupting influence
of educational institutions. Godard uses his characters to reflect on the
relation between acting a role and believing in political causes. Further,
as Rancière notes in his discussion of this film, there is a consistent analogy
between love relations as a form of dramatic habitation of a role and the
prosecution of political causes and beliefs. The main character needs the
props of music, a full mise-en-scène, to understand the words “I don’t love
you anymore” spoken to him by his girlfriend. Similarly, the emotional
content of the expulsion from the group of one of its members for
“revisionism” is reinforced by his now ex-girlfriend’s rejection of him as
she mouths “re-vis-ion-ist” to the scansion of “I don’t love you.”30 In this
light, Rancière interprets La Chinoise as a film that deals with the question
of how to render things visible, how to bring new and unwelcome
meanings into existence. It is significant that the film answers this
question in terms of its treatment of the theatrical mise-en-scène—the props
and acting skills needed to bring about an altered habitat. With its long
takes of actors reading texts to camera about acting, this film might be
taken to endorse Rancière’s preference for the way political questions
may be posed in theatrical and literary contexts. This film does not make
available new meanings for communication so much as it reflects on the
salience of analogies to theatre for understanding how such meanings
orient and render intelligible new dispositions and perspectives. In other
words, it makes available new perspectives for reflection on art forms
that are not extendable to political praxis. In this respect, it leaves intact
the separation between art and politics that Rancière’s general
perspective on aesthetic politics needs to show as working effectively in
concert to alter the “distribution of the sensible.”

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Europa 51 furnishes Rancière with a vivid presentation of critical

perspectives on place and knowing. Like the example of the Aventine Hill
secession, Europa 51 presents the important elements of his political
theory in a forceful and convincing way. Thus the film exemplifies ideas
that would be difficult to grasp in merely discursive terms. According to
Rancière, Irene sees the relations between what can be seen and said not
in terms of a natural order whose rules and causes need to be understood
upstream from their hold in “reality,” but downstream in terms of the
nascent sensory elements that they compose and articulate into fixed
social relations. She is, in Rancière’s reading, excluded from the certitude
of a place as much as she is dissatisfied with the explanations of her
cousin who presumes to know the reasons behind social order. The terms
of her dissatisfaction mirror precisely Rancière’s account of politics as
the dissolution of the naturalness of places and the superior claims of
knowledge. Although the struggles of this character elucidate certain
axioms of Rancière’s political philosophy, they do not bring them into a
field of effective praxis. Instead the narrative arc of this film, revealing
the incommunicability of Irene’s experience of the dissolution of place
and of the hold of knowledge claims, raises as a question the
communicability of new meanings.
Stepping back from the terms of Rancière’s treatment of these films
and looking at them from the general perspective of his aesthetic politics,
we might say that La Chinoise asks how a literary work or a piece of
theatre or a film can have the force of contestation able to involve others
in a project of redefinition of meaning. In my view, the film tends to
answer this question by pointing to the intimacy between a disposition
or motivation (whose own sources are inscrutable) for political
commitment and the credibility of such projects. Europa 51, on the other
hand, shows that the experience of the new meanings cogent enough to
persuade someone to a particular course of action are still not sufficient
to reconfigure such meanings to an effective—that is to say socially—
authorized position. Even though neither film can be cited in support of
Rancière’s “aesthetic politics,” these films nonetheless develop engaging
and critical perspectives on the question of how to shape and
communicate new, socially efficacious meanings.
Rancière holds that the principles of social order are tendentious.31
He builds from this insight the claim that new ways of being, doing and
acting are the chief goal for political action. This starting point determines
an important general role for the arts as a resource able to offer new
perspectives on the order that segments and defines social systems as
aesthetic systems of perception. The case of film, I have argued, shows

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the difficulties this general model faces given that it also expects from the
aesthetic shaping of perception the emergence of perspectives that could
carry new meanings with political force. Furthermore, it is because
Rancière’s discussion of film downplays those features of cinema relevant
to the analysis of its distinctive modes of apprehension and shaping of
meaning that he imparts to his study of cinema a series of limitations on
the topic of its communicative force. The limitations he imposes on the
visual language of film are at odds with his general position on aesthetic
systems of perception. I have argued here that this discrepancy follows
from the comparative style of analysis by means of which Rancière finds
the modes of apprehension of meaning in cinema faulty in relation to the
standards and requirements of meaning in the case of the literary word.
Monash University, Australia

Notes
1. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Power Institute at the University of
Sydney, Australia and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, which generously
sponsored the studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts during which time
the research for this paper was undertaken.
2. The emphasis he places on speaking contests the value given to silence in works by
Lyotard and others, in which there is a similar importance ascribed to art. See Lyotard’s
The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1998). For Rancière, the value given to silence in
such works forms part of the contemporary malaise in which political action geared
to the articulation of wrongs is smothered by the call for “mourning,” this latter
understood as an ethical response. See his discussion of these points in Malaise dans
l’esthétique (Galilée: Paris, 2004), 145-6 and 170.
3. Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford
University Press: Stanford, CA, 2004), 146-164. He has also shown how Deleuze
articulates and defends his ontology by the use of aesthetic resources in “Is there a
Deleuzean aesthetics?” trans. Radmila Djordjevic, Qui Parle, 14:2 (2004), 1-14.
4. We must be cautious about the parallels that could be drawn between literary roman-
ticism and the process of the dissolution of romanticism in painting. Hegel describes
in the case of painting a similar disregard for “what” is an object for art and “how” it
may be represented. See Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol.1. Trans. T.M.
Knox (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998), 81.
5. For a discussion of the distinction between the representative and aesthetic regimes
of the arts and how they each depart from the ethical regime of the arts see: The Politics
of Aesthetics, 22-26 and L’inconscient esthétique (Galilée: Paris, 2001), 14 ff. In Film
Fables, Rancière is emphatic that cinema shows the untenability of the aesthetic re-
gime of the arts. His point regarding this untenability also draws attention to the frailty
of the aesthetic regime as an analogical system to his politics. He makes this point
more explicitly in his discussion of literature when he emphasizes the paradoxes of
the Flaubertian moment. Hans Robert Jauss describes the way Flaubert’s writing
moves from an “aesthetics of representation to one of perception which arose from

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Cinema in Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics” 147

his redefinition of style as an absolute mode of seeing [manière absolue de voir les
choses].” (85).
6. On this point see Rancière’s discussion of subjectivization in Dis-agreement, 35-42
and The Politics of Aesthetics, 40: “The channels for political subjectivization are not
those of imaginary identification but those of “literary” disincorporation.”
7. Rancière refers specifically to the 19th-century French thinker Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s
restaging of the conflict in Livy’s tale between the patricians and the plebeians. In
Rancière’s words, Ballanche restages the conflict so that what is at stake “involves
finding out whether there exists a common stage where plebeians and patricians can
debate anything” (Dis-agreement, 23). Rancière, it should be noted, is also interested
here in the role of Ballanche’s narrative as a redeployment of meaning.
8. The theatrical settings of authority are still clearer in Rancière’s less-favored example
of the Scythian slaves’ revolt. The Scythians were unable to quell the revolt in their
first military assault on the rebels. They were successful when they used the props of
whips to signify their status as masters. Fighting signalled equality, but the pose of
authority was so credible that the slave rebellion collapsed. The failure of this rebel-
lion may explain why Rancière favors the Aventine Hill secession. Nonetheless it is
important because the Scythians’ blinded their slaves; the rebellion was launched by
the generation of slaves who retained their eyes because they were reared during
the long absence of the Scythian warriors on a military campaign. See Rancière’s
discussion in Dis-agreement, especially p. 12.
9. This is also the case with Jauss who criticizes the category of the avant-garde in
Adorno precisely because his focus on “ideologically manipulated adaptation,” which
ends “in the mere affirmation of existing conditions” cuts off the “norm-creating
function of aesthetic experience.” Jauss’s position falls short of the definition and
engagement of positions of contestation in political processes defined by Rancière,
but it still sees in the “refractoriness of the aesthetic experience” a “vehicle of eman-
cipation” able to compete with “philosophical thought” (preface, xxxix). See also
Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and
Postmodernism, trans. D. Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
10. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. Ruth
Crowley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 89.
11. Europa 51 arguably depicts the practice of reflection on patterns and forms of social
normalcy and individual habits as socially inefficacious, given that the heroine’s
perspective is not meaningful for others. Although this film seems to provide an
allegory for Rancière’s critical practice, its moral is at odds with it. See his comments
on reflection in Short Voyages, 121-2, and his references in the same chapter to Irene’s
advice to the young delinquent to “think about what you are doing!” 123.
12. In Film Fables, Rancière makes clear how his approach to Rossellini departs from the
high value placed on the break with the “sensory-motor schema” in Deleuze’s ac-
count of post-war film, 134.
13. Rancière describes shock and interpretation in this film thus: “In more or less gentle
or violent forms, there are two fundamental techniques of society described by the
film: shock and interpretation. On the one hand, the movement of the assembly line
and the bursts of electricity; on the other, the Rorschach blots – the nothing that you
have to say something about—to be interpreted, and the system of explanatory
attributions and inferences that make up the audible discourses of the social, that
create society. The factory, the newspaper, and the asylum weave together this
rationality. The judge and the priest order us to acquiesce in it.” Short Voyages, 125-6.
14. The film is rumored to loosely draw its inspiration from the life of Simone Weil, and
especially her time working in a factory and the unusual spiritual slant she took on
political questions. The other aspects of her life, particularly her intellectual life are

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148 Alison Ross

not depicted in the Irene character in Rossellini’s film.

15. This is a recurring topic of complaint in Rancière’s thinking. Other places where it is
mentioned include the final chapter of Dis-agreement. Here he refers to Badiou’s
Ethics, which is an obvious source for the critical reflection on this topos.
16. Le destin des images and The Politics of Aesthetics both mention film in relation to
modernist conceptions of the arts.
17. For a discussion of literature in these terms see Rancière’s “The Politics of Literature”
SubStance #103 33.1 (2004).
18. The art of the aesthetic age
is an art that comes afterwards and undoes the links of representative
art, either by thwarting the logic of arranged incidents through the
becoming-passive of writing, or by refiguring old poems and
paintings. This work presupposes all past art to be available and
open to being reread, reviewed, repainted or rewritten at will. It
presupposes also that anything and everything in the world is
available to art. Banal objects, a flake peeling from a wall, an illustration
from an ad campaign, are all available to art in their double resource:
as hieroglyphs ciphering an age of the world, a society, a history,
and, inversely, as pure presences, as naked realities brought to light
by the new-found splendor of the insignificant. The properties of this
regime of art—identity of active and passive, elevation of everything
to the dignity of art, work of de-figuration that extracts the tragedy in
suspense from the dramatic action—are the properties Jean Epstein
attributes to cinema. (Film Fables, 9)
19.This point can be seen clearly in the often politically aware and motivated genre of
the documentary, which Rancière approaches in terms of its place within the aesthetic
regime of the arts. See Film Fables, 17-8.
20. It is true that Rancière is critical of the consecration of specific art forms as the fields
of particular techniques. It may be objected, then, that the heuristic distinction pro-
posed here between the stance he takes respectively toward theatre, literature and
cinema misconstrues the general orientation he has toward the arts. However, the
import and reach of this general orientation needs to be distinguished from 1) the way
that artistic fields may be characterized according to certain distinctive features; and
2) Rancière’s own explicit references to such features (e.g., staging and acting [the-
atre] and the dis-incorporation of words [literary arts]) when he discusses the topic of
“aesthetic politics.” I discuss the importance of the theme of the “impurity” and
“mixity” of the arts for his treatment of cinema later in this section.
21. He may be compared on this point to Erwin Panofsky. See especially Panofsky’s
discussion of the adaptations made to dialogue in film versions of stage plays in his
“Style and Medium in the the Motion Pcitures,” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving
Lavin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 91-129, 100.
22. And he argues this even though in Godard’s case, as he notes, cinema is indicted for
failing its vocation. Rancière, Film Fables, 171.
23. Rancière argues that the presence of narrative elements are so important to the
medium of film that the apparatus of cinema “restores piece by piece” the elements of
the representative regime of the arts that its advocates credit it with having dis-
mantled. This regime aligns forms of expression to the subjects represented accord-
ing to a hierarchical principle of appropriateness; thus it is removed from the demo-
cratic operation of aesthetic value that defines the aesthetic regime. The precepts of
the aesthetic regime underpin the possibility of identifying in cinema such unifying
themes as the Deleuzean “time-image.”
24. Rancière, Film Fables, 11. Rancière reads film in two directions: backwards as the

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inheritor of ideas from other arts that form the very idea of film as an art, but also
forwards as the form of art that undoes the coherence of the idea of art’s autonomy in
the aesthetic age.
Cinema, in the double power of the conscious eye of the director
and the unconscious eye of the camera, is the perfect embodiment
of Schelling’s and Hegel’s argument that the identity of conscious
and unconscious is the very principle of art. It is easy, then, to see
how one may be tempted to conclude, with Epstein and others, that
cinema is the dream come true of this regime of art. … Cinema
seems to accomplish naturally the writing of opsis that reverses
Aristotle’s privileging of muthos. The conclusion, however, is false,
for the very simple reason that cinema, being by nature what the arts
of the aesthetic age had to strive to be, invariably reverts their
movement. Flaubert’s frames are the work of a way of writing that
contradicts narrative plausibility and expectation by reaching for the
dreamlike stasis of paintings. Painters and novelists had to work to
make themselves the instruments of their becoming-passive; the
mechanical apparatus, conversely, suppresses the active work
involved in this becoming-passive. The camera cannot be made
passive because it is passive already, because it is of necessity at the
service of the intelligence that manipulates it. (Film Fables, 9).
Film breaks down the coherence of some of the core modernist distinctions,
such as the opposition between “pure art” and “politically committed art.” The limit
case for this thesis is the genre of documentary film. For exponents of the fable of
cinema as the art of passive technique, this genre offers the possibility of the passive
recording of events. Whereas Aristotle had defended poetry against Plato’s critique
by pointing out the advantages its speculative ability gives it over history, Rancière
thinks the significance history is able to find and describe in anything and the selec-
tion of scenes and their ordering in the genre of the documentary are both ways of
organizing a field of information that would otherwise be meaningless. Each practice
needs to be understood according to the lineaments of productive fiction and thus as
poetic. Meaning, we might say, is the ways or modes in which information is ar-
ranged and conveyed, and neither the position that sees a truth free of the distortions
of its mode of presentation, nor the position that reduces truth to these modes is able
to account for the active processes that invest “facts” with “significance.”
25.One recent example would be Michael Winterbottom’s film Tristram Shandy: A Cock
and Bull Story, which in reflecting on the making of a film within a film is not
“postmodern” but simply transferring the self- reflective elements of Laurence Stern’s
Tristram Shandy to the screen.
26.See Rancière’s discussion of the documentary as a genre of fiction in Film Fables, 157-
170 and Rome: Open City in Film Fables, 126.
27. Admittedly, there are places in Film Fables where Rancière refers to cinematographic
technique in relation to the alteration it makes to theatrical or literary precedents. It is
important to note, however, the topics that he considers in these terms. In the main
they document restrictions in visual art. His discussion of Tartuffe, for instance, may
be cited in this regard (Film Fables, 33-43).
28. For a recent critique of the limitations of the concept of artistic media in visual art see
Rancière’s analysis of photography in “Ce que ‘medium’ peut vouloir dire: l’exemple
de la photographie,” Revue Appareil, Online journal, No.1, 2008, pp: 1-11 (accessed
18/02/08, URL: http://revues.mshparisnord.org/appareil/index.php?id+135).
29. Although Rancière thinks theatre is the most impure of the arts, cinema also necessar-
ily brings in other media (the effects of music, narrative, constructions of visual

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150 Alison Ross

scenes, temporal effects of montage) in its construction of meaning. Moreover,

through the interaction of these elements cinema shows how images can transform
other images. Eric Alliez has argued that Rancière submits film to a “re-
theatricalization,” by which he means that Rancière treats film non-cinematically. See
Alliez, “Y-a-t-il une esthétique rancierienne?” La philosophie déplacée: Autour de Jacques
Rancière (Paris: Horlieu, 2006) 271-291. With the question of aesthetic politics in
view, I think we can phrase the problem of Rancière’s writing on film slightly differ-
ently: how is it different from theatre? What elements differentiate it, in his view, from
those that recommend theatre as a vehicle for thinking politics? And finally, what
effect does Rancière’s treatment of film have on the position of theatre within his
“aesthetic politics”?
30. See Rancière’s discussion on these points in Film Fables, 151.
31. See, for example, Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (Verso: London
and New York, 1995), 90.

Works Cited
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Trans. Michael Shaw.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Rancière, Jacques. Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique, 2003.
——.Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999). [La mésentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée,1995].
——. Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2006. [La fable
cinématographique. Paris: Seuil, 2001].
——. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004. [La chair des mots. Politiques de l’écriture. Paris: Galilée,
1998].
——. L’inconscient esthétique. Paris: Galilée, 2001.
——. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Galilée, 2004.
——. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York & London: Con-
tinuum, 2004. [Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique, 2000].
——. Short Voyages to the Land of the People. Trans. James B. Swenson. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003. [Courts voyages au pays du peuple. Paris: Seuil, 1990].

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