The Paradoxical Aesthetic Regime 

Jacques Rancière begins "Aesthetics as Politics" by questioning the many artists and philosophers singing a euphoric dirge to commemorate the death of a 'utopian' emancipatory artistic movement. In the wake of utopia's death, artists and philosophers moved on to what Rancière identifies as two distinctly new conceptions, or attitudes, of art. The first conception identifies art's potential to identify and exult a communal space by emphasizing the inseparability of art and being in the world. The second conception extricates art from the immediacy of the context in order to reorient perspectives toward the collective environment. As Rancière points out, both of these attitudes emerge from a divorce between art and politics; in other words, the dissolution of Aesthetics. Undoubtedly, this dissolution followed from fears about propaganda, realized in the manifestation of mass conformity, which resulted in mass death. However, Rancière wants to show that this dissolution stems from a faulty premise; namely, that there can be art without it being political: "there is no art without a specific form of visibility and discursivity which identifies it as such. There is no art without a specific distribution of the sensible tying it to a certain form of politics" (715).  Furthermore, the belief that art can avoid being political only liberates the viewer from responsibility of reflection, placing her in a dangerously vulnerable position to be swept inadvertently away by the politics of a piece. Optimistically, though, Rancière claims that there is nothing intrinsically pestilent about the relationship between art and politics. Fundamentally, there requires a reorientation of expectation for aesthetics. First off, art and politics perform the same task: they create a space in which certain individuals have the right to speak and be listened to. Good political art elevates those who have traditionally been denied recognition to a platform on which they can be heard. Second, there must be a consideration for what emancipation actually entails. For a long time, revolution simply meant an inversion of those out of power and those in power. The consequences of this inversion is clear: an abusive of power by the new hegemony towards the old. Result: same inherent problems of exclusion and denial of recognition--the victim simply gets revenge and replicates the same violent abuses inflicted upon them. Rancière offers an alternative analogous to a Marxist revolution. Rather than continuing the hold the State and Populace  at a distance, just as theory and practice are held at a distance, why not focuses on the concrete nature of existence? In art, you find these dichotomies represented: “As a sensory form, it is heterogeneous to the ordinary forms of sensory experience that these dualities inform. It is given in a specific experience which suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and sensibility” (708). A specific art piece has the potential to alter a particular sensorium while that sensorium simultaneously affirms the piece as art. These reflexive relationships highlight the ambiguity, contingency, and antimony present in Aesthetics. It is in these contradictions, too, that one finds the political potential of art.