The "Return" To Aesthetic Experience: On Jacques Rancière’s Political Aesthetics

In contemporary aesthetics,some have returned to “aisthesis” to think about sensibility,body,perception and affect.And these together construct a scene of returning to aesthetics.The French philosopher Jacques Rancière also discusses politics and aesthetics from perspective of the sensible.Furthermore,he also focuses on the unique understanding of aisthesis which is often called aesthetic experience that emerged in the field of aesthetics from the end of the eighteenth century.It can be said that Rancière’s entire political aesthetics revolves around the interpretation of aesthetic experience.Since Baumgarten created the new discipline of aesthetics to understand aesthetics as the science of perceptual knowledge,aesthetics means both sensibility and understanding which contained in the Greek word aisthesis.When Kant understands aesthetics as a harmonious form of experience by his analysis of beauty,aesthetic experience also has two meaning and provides different relations between them.However,sensibility,body,perception and materiality are all anti-cognitive conceptions of the aesthetic.Rancière disapproves of these studies of sensibility,and returns to Kant and Schiller to examine how they separate aesthetics from sensory experience and how they deal with the relationship between sensibility and understanding.Influenced by Foucault,Rancière considers that the sensible always has its social transcendental form,which linking the sensible with social identity and culture.In Kant’s discussion of aesthetics,aesthetic experience is distinguished from other experience through disinterestedness.In Rancière’s opinion,it has the significance of aesthetic emancipation which makes people create a new sensory world beyond the existing sensory world.However,the universality of aesthetic experience that Kant speaks of is a presupposition.Bourdieu dismisses it as an illusion,and associates pure taste with social conditions.Rancière presents the aesthetic emancipation in his research on workers’ archives,and insists on and defend the emancipation possibilities of aesthetic experience.In order to understand the relationship between sensibility and understanding in aesthetic experience,Rancière returns to Schiller’s interpretation of “play”.Schiller proposed three impulses: the sense impulse,the form impulse and the play impulse.Rancière believes that Schiller has put forward and analyzed the old hierarchy between sensibility and understanding and the hierarchy between human nature corresponding to the two.He also understands Schiller’s “play” as a suspension of the opposition between sensibility and understanding.It also disturbs the harmonious relationship between sensibility and understanding in sensory experience.In this regard,aesthetic experience becomes an equal experience,which perpetuates and develops critical theory’s thinking on aesthetic utopia.For the heterogeneity of aesthetic experience,Adorno and Lyotard understand it as a heterogeneous experience opposite to real life.Not only that,Lyotard returned to the aisthesis without the dimension of understanding,which dissolved the equal promise of aesthetic experience in Rancière’s view.Rancière understands aesthetic experience as a suspension of the oppositions of sensibility and understanding,which shows how Rancière sees the distinction between aesthetic experience and the normal experience.The aesthetic experience is a“supplement” to the normal relation between sense and sense.It creates a rupture between sensibility and understanding that is called “dissensus” by Rancière.This influences Rancière’s thinking about politics.Rancière distinguishes two logics for constructing a community,in which the occurrence of politics is the coexistence of two sensory worlds,and the world of democracy coexists with the sensory world as a supplementary part.Rancière discusses politics from the sensible.This perceptual politics makes aesthetic experience itself have political implications.And the aesthetic experience also brings the possibility of political subjectivization.In addition,the equality of aesthetic experience stimulates the program of the aesthetic revolution,which based on the critique with the failure to implement equality integrally in politics.In this sense,aesthetic experience is associated with politics and meta-politics.Therefore,aesthetic experience is far beyond the field of art.It is a reconstruction of sensory experience and a problem of rearranging the possible world.Rancière believes that literature and art present the unique relationship between sensibility and understanding in aesthetic experience.The aesthetic experience which suspending sensibility and understanding provides a specific sphere of experience for art to be grasped.The rupture of sensibility and understanding does not mean that art cannot be understood,but presents a unique way of understanding or thought.This poetic thinking represents a collective form of life and means no distinctions between art and life.The aesthetic regime of art is a paradoxical one,which not only considers art as art,but also cancels the boundary between art and life.And it develops different ideas on the relationship between art and life.The aesthetic experience sparks discussions of art and politics.The concept of aesthetic experience,which began to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century,is a "historically determined" category.Rancière comprehends the artistic regimes as a question of “historicity”.The emergence of the aesthetic regime lays in the emergence of a new kind of sense of history or sense of time,that is,the history of coexistence or the temporality of coexistence.Therefore,the aesthetic regime is also a regime in which various artistic regimes coexist,and the modernity or contemporaneity of art has become a problem of harmonizing the different temporalities of modern society.In this way,Rancière responds to the modernist conception of linear time and the various “end” problems that arise from it.