Rancière\'s Equal Music

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Rancière's Equal Music Jairo Moreno & Gavin Steingo

To cite this article: Jairo Moreno & Gavin Steingo (2012): Rancière's Equal Music, Contemporary Music Review, 31:5-6, 487-505 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.759415

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Contemporary Music Review Vol. 31, Nos. 5–6, October–December 2012, pp. 487–505

Rancière’s Equal Music

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Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo

This article addresses the position of music (and art more generally) in the thought of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, all societies and communities are partitioned first and foremost on the level of sense perception. Both music and politics are therefore aesthetic in the Kantian sense, as the organization of forms that determine what is able to appear to the senses. As such, music has no special powers—it is neither transcendental nor ineffable—and can only offer emancipatory projects what it shares with them, that is, certain ‘re-distributions’ or ‘parceling outs’ of the sensible (i.e. the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible). Political music, then, is radically equal to any other action. Furthermore, any challenge to a given society’s sensible distribution is based on the axiom of equality. Music, finally, becomes equal to politics when it renounces its alleged singularity and asserts the fundamental equality of human intelligence and intelligibility. Keywords: Jacques Rancière; Dissensus; Equality; Intelligibility; Aesthetics; Politics

In The philosopher and his poor, Jacques Rancière recounts the experiments of Miguel Ángel Estrella, who in the early 1970s took classical music to peasants and workers in his native Argentina, performing free concerts in their villages and factories ([1983] 2004a, p. 185 ff.). Upon hearing Debussy, people maintained a distance; Mozart brought them closer to Estrella’s piano; Bach, Rancière relates, was ‘adopted as the son of the people by the village community’ ([1983] 2004a, p. 185 ff.). Pierre Bourdieu, Rancière continues, would explain the social pliability of music in Estrella’s experiment as the consequence of its muteness (or abstractness): music does not speak its habitus. It is the art of ‘denegation of the social world’ (2004a, p. 186, citing Bourdieu, [1979] 1984, p. 19), confounding the anthropological and sociological principle of ‘legitimate cultural property’ that Bourdieu valorized in the communities of his fieldwork. Indeed, to assess the social mobility of music (or rather its immobility), Bourdieu conducted a poll asking French people from various social strata to choose—without hearing— three favorite pieces out of a set of 14 titles. Those in the lower strata claimed that classical music was not for them. In contrast, people in higher strata, who identified ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) © 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.759415

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with The well-tempered clavier, declared, ‘all music of quality interests me’ (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 362–363). Music, he concluded, might not speak its habitus, but people certainly do. By demonstrating the relation of social class to taste, Bourdieu sought to disprove Kant’s arguments for disinterested aesthetic judgment and an autonomous sensorium. The notion of pure taste, he argued, was contingent upon the bourgeois allocation of an experience of space and time (i.e. an aesthetic) allegedly unconstrained by necessity and abstracted from social relations. All other aesthetic proclivities and competences, and particularly those of the working class or peasantry, mapped directly onto social groups. Rancière disagrees with Bourdieu’s methodology and the results derived from it. For him, Estrella’s informal experiments with music were ‘dissensual’. They assumed the fundamental equality of all people to engage music. No competence was presupposed other than a capacity for sensorial and intellectual redistribution. Dissensus occurred when someone acted on that presupposition. The sociologist, by contrast, armed with the names of music and the structure of prior knowledge acquisition that they entail—knowledge of music history—could only prove what he already knew: that societies everywhere seize upon the sensorium to relentlessly classify internally and in relation to other societies. This interpretation of Estrella is based on several fundamental notions in Rancière’s thought: the (re)distribution of the sensible, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the axiom of equality, and the contestation over intelligibility. These are all novel and very precise notions, for which we now offer a schematic outline. ‘Distribution ([or] partition) of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible) is defined as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 12). According to this definition, prior to cultural proclivities and aesthetic competences, any formation (community, culture, society) has the sensorial as its common. As he puts it, ‘what is commonly distributed is what presents itself to sense experience’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 13). At the same time, distribution operates under a logic of exclusion, designated under the rubric of ‘delimitations’. These mark necessary stipulations of what is visible, audible, and sayable within a given formation, and they regulate the allocations of people to functions within this field of stipulations. As it configures the field of available and possible sense experience (aesthetics), the distribution of the sensible is an operator of division that both orders and makes a collective unity possible. The logic of this inclusive exclusion is reflected in the dual sense of partition and partaking in the word partage. All told, any formation is divided from itself in advance and is done so in sensorial terms. This carries political consequences. Rancière defines politics in aesthetic terms. ‘Politics is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power’, he declares, but is instead ‘the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them’ ([2004] 2009, p. 24).1 On the one hand, the

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distribution of the sensible implies that the sensorial is constituted in radical equality before any configuration takes place. On the other hand, because of that radical equality, any and all distributions are susceptible to re-distribution. Rancière conceives this re-distribution, called dissensus, as an action taken by people declaring their capacity to alter the calculus of inclusion and exclusion that constitutes the formation to which they belong. Equality is the presupposition for distribution and for the existence of the common, as well as the reason that formations have historically been ordered in accordance with the logic of inclusive exclusion. As Rancière states, in every formation there is ‘a part with no part’ which nonetheless is an equal to the whole within which it is uncounted: ‘there is order in society because some people command and some people obey, but in order to obey at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (Rancière, [1995] 1999, p. 16). By understanding, those who obey illustrate their equality to those who order. But those who obey only understand so that they can obey; as such, the nature of their inequality is predicated on equality. Equality, then, is a question of intelligibility and of intelligence that it expresses. Nothing is more fundamental than this presupposition. ‘Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal’, he says. ‘It’s seeing what can be done under that presupposition. And for this, it’s enough for us that the opinion be possible—that is, that no opposing truth be proved’ ([1981] 1991, p. 46). Art and aesthetics are historically marked distributions of the sensible. For instance, as anthropologists John Leavitt and Lynn M. Hart put it, there are ‘sensorial prolongations and elaborations operating in the arts’, and societies everywhere engage in a ‘prodigious aesthetic elaboration of certain sensorial practices’ (1990, pp. 83, 85; in Porcello, Meintjes, Ochoa, & Samuels, 2010, p. 57). Rancière studies that elaboration under the notion of ‘regimes of art’. The Anti-Politics of Music Music results from a double count: it is both a model of the political community as a whole—a model of division and representation—and the musicians’ lot within that model (Rancière, 2002, p. 23). Politics throws this dual distribution into question: ‘Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it’ (Rancière, [1995] 1999, p. 26). To work around this conflict, philosophers of music propose three different solutions: ethical, poetic, and aesthetic. It is no coincidence that these solutions (from which Rancière derives his three regimes of art) correspond to the three anti-political philosophies he outlines: archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics. Ethical Music The weight of ethics’ influence on the history of music is expressible in a single word: harmony. Harmony is the mathematical and ethical essence of music that animates not

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only the Platonic republic, but also the Pythagoric cult. The latter embodies the harmonious ‘submission of the multiple to the law of unity’ in its purest, most extreme form: [T]he whole Pythagoric school produced by certain appropriate songs what they called exartysis or adaptation, synarmoge or elegance of manners, and epaphe or contact, usefully conducting the dispositions of the soul to passions contrary to those which it before possessed. For when they went to bed they purified the reasoning power from the perturbations and noises to which it had been exposed during the day, by certain odes and peculiar songs, and by this means procured for themselves tranquil sleep, and few and good dreams. But when they rose from bed, they again liberated themselves from the torpor and heaviness of sleep, by songs of another kind. Sometimes, also, by musical sounds alone, unaccompanied with words, they healed the passions of the soul and certain diseases, enchanting, as they say, in reality. After this manner, therefore, Pythagoras through music produced the most beneficial correction of human manners and lives. (Taylor, [1818] 1986, p. 61)

The Pythagorean cult deploys harmony as its model and instrument. The Pythagoreans use songs and sound to bind their reason to their health, actions, and desires, and by doing so form the coherent whole of their dwelling. For Rancière, it is precisely this binding that defines ethics. As a community, the Pythagoreans leave no space or time for democratic disturbance, and therefore embody the anti-political strategy that Rancière calls archipolitics. ‘Archipolitics is … the total becoming-sensible of the law of the community. There can be no time off, no empty space in the fabric of the community … [It] reveals in all its radicality the project of a community based on the complete realization of the arkhê of community, on its integral sensibilization, replacing the democratic configuration of politics with nothing left over’ (Rancière, [1995] 1999, pp. 68, 65; trans. modified after Bosteels, 2010, p. 83). The republic is that community in which nature (phusis) is the law (nomos) and in which that law exists as living logos: as the essential ethos (morality, ways of being, character) of the community and of each of its members; as the occupation of the workers; as the tune playing in everyone’s heads and the movement spontaneously animating their bodies; as the spiritual nourishment (trophê) that automatically turns their minds toward a certain cast (tropos) of behavior and thought. Unsurprisingly, Plato’s ethical music was central to the Greek paideia, or pedagogy of virtuosity. Plato’s exacting choreographic music is limited to that which is faithful to the essence of the idea— in this case, harmonious unity and proportionality. Music in which the sonic and the visual coalesce via mimesis, says Rancière, introduces a disturbing multiplicity into the essential harmonious unity of the community. In this sense, mimetic music is without origin (an-archic) and must be disavowed. Rancière’s differs from the standard account of proper and improper ‘music’ given in Plato’s prescriptions of certain tonal configurations (e.g. the ‘Dorian’ mode calms warriors; the ‘Lydian’ mode does not). He regards the force of these widely known admonishments as an effect of a more fundamental ordering: the authority to safeguard ‘the spaces and times, the places and roles’ that define the community in its harmonious unity

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(Rancière, 2002, p. 23). Music qua sounding phenomena is ethical only so long as sensory material, practice, and thought remain in their prescribed space and time. More than any other regime, ethical music delimits the ways of doing and making that constitute ‘artistic practice’ as highly specific spatio-temporal distributions of the general distributions of doing and making. This is so because ethical music discloses for the community the relationship between being in its essence, on the one hand, and specific forms of visibility and audibility that always need to be kept apart without any mimetic link, on the other. All told, ethical music prohibits its makers from being in charge of anything that is truly common to the community: the exclusive inclusion that constitutes it as such and that Rancière calls the ‘wrong’. Rancière suggests a radical apportioning of labor and time in which those who make ‘cannot be somewhere else because work cannot wait’ ([2000] 2004c, 12). Ethical musicians have as their predetermined task to render audible the sound proper to the community. But they can only do this by establishing a partition of the audible that paradoxically excludes them from any other form of community participation. They count in so far as they contribute to the common, by willingly accepting the allotment the community gives them—no emancipation, resistance, or subversion here. Like many theorists, Rancière anchors his analyses on classical texts. He emphasizes, however, that the ethical regime of art is operative across vast swaths of time and place and can be found anywhere that ethics is called upon to do the kind of political work articulated by Plato. There is thus an ethical dimension to music making in the absence of harmony, too, even if that absence is marshaled in the name of emancipation. ‘Noise’, literally and figuratively, is a good example. As an admittedly thinly treated illustration, take for instance the heterogeneous experimental approach through which the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) asserts the capacity for self-determination of the African-American creative community. George E. Lewis, the Association’s leading historian, identifies this project under the rubric of ‘noise’,2 namely, the sound-based disruption of contemporary ‘economies of repetition’ (Lewis, 2008, p. xxxiii, after Attali) that constrain particular groups, times, and places to specific expressive practices or else cordon them off from others. Overcoming the narrow boundaries of the economy of repetition, Lewis writes that ‘the musical influence of the AACM has extended across borders of genre, race, geography, and musical practice, and must be confronted in any nonracialized account of experimental music’ (Lewis, 2008, p. x).3 Indeed, as he later remarks, ‘African American artists of the current generation are free to assimilate sounds from all over the world, even as they situate their work in a complexly articulated African American intellectual, social, and sonic matrix’ (Lewis, 2008, p. 447). This matrix serves as an avatar for both the ethos out of which musical creativity and social agency emanate (this is the practice of ‘assimilation’) as well as the origin and foundation for that ethos (because it is always situated within that matrix). In its Latin rendering as principium, arche is both origin and guiding principle. The matrix, in short, constitutes the principium to which musicians of the Association

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must remain faithful and collectively return if the project is to continue to exert pressure on racial prejudices about black musical creativity in the USA and, by implication, abroad. As such, the ‘noise’ that Lewis designates can only be noisy up until a certain point, after which time it must be brought back under the auspices of the matrix that produced it in the first place: US national racial classification. The AACM does not define African-American musical praxis in terms of particular rhythmic or formal aspects. Its aim, in fact, is to refute any such associations. The Association, then, is not characterized by content or form but is instead ordered through a particular distribution of music making. In Rancière’s framework, the contingent nature of ethical music becomes evident: its internal imperatives and constraints appear directly alongside its dissensual capacity for redistributing the sensible. From his perspective ‘the verification of equality is a punctual action’ (Deranty, 2003, para. 7): in its aftermath and despite its political accomplishments it folds back into an assertion of difference, which is a form of inequality. Here, politics begets its own anti-politics. Rancière would therefore say that the AACM’s declassification can only result in a re-classification.4 As an ethical injunction affirming the creative openness of African-American musicians within a society (i.e. USA) deeply plagued by structural inequality and various forms of covert and overt racial violence, things could not be otherwise. The re-classification or ‘return’ we have described is, therefore, no failure. It is, instead, an inevitable result of any redistribution of the sensible. Our argument, then, is not that music might otherwise and in a different context be universal, or without ‘matrix’. Like all modalities of harnessing the sensible, music is the result of an originary distribution and as such is susceptible to redistribution through the various regimes of art. Following Rancière’s axiomatic assertion of equality, if there is a distribution, there is a corollary practice of inequality. Music is no exception. Before music becomes part of the ‘arts’, it is part of a distribution of the sensible. Typically, Rancière resorts to Greek thought and mythology. ‘Music, of course, is the concern of the Muses before being of the instrumentalists. Which is as much as to say that before being an art, music is a form of sharing the sensitive, conferring space and meaning on the distribution of the bodies and the images, voices and instruments in a given time and space—which makes music homologous of a certain disposition of the community’ (2002, p. 23). Music is, as we have said, a double count, a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive sharing, and the Muses were their first laborers. From that point on, the history of musical art is a series of redistributions he calls ‘metamorphoses’. After Plato’s influential ethical music, it is Aristotle who effectively redistributes the audible, now in a complex relationship with the visible. In the thought of Plato’s student, music becomes an art. Poetic Music Aristotle does not refuse his master’s prescriptions for music’s role in the community. Music remains for him ‘the generic name for the education that shapes noble souls and bodies, subject to divine proportion’ (Rancière, 2002, p. 23). But in the hierarchy of the

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Poetics, music partakes of a new distribution, a regime Rancière calls ‘poetic’ or ‘representative’. It now lies in between the poem and the ‘elaboration of discourse’, on the one hand, and the incidental and lowliest domain of spectacle, on the other. The dispositive of partage is in full effect, establishing a common from which some things are excluded: song, not mere sound or what we might call ‘instrumental’ music, rises within the new regime by virtue of its link with speech. Why? Because Aristotelian speech, the logos, is not simply the capacity to articulate thought to sound (phone semantike); it is the capacity to address and express the just (and not merely the pleasurable, painful, or harmful). For living forms, speech is the constitutive expression of their suitability for political life. In other words, the Aristotelian ‘metamorphosis of the Muses’ does not consist in the discovery or disclosure of the power of words in song. It is not melody that lends power to words. (Unlike Plato, who censors Homer’s mousike and valorizes melos, the melodic rendering of words, Aristotle understands logos as speech (Cavarero, 2005).) Rather, the establishment of speech as the index and final horizon of political determination makes this metamorphosis possible. Speech lends power to melody, not the other way around. Within the ‘poetic regime’, mimesis begins to exert force. A gap between life and its artistic depiction—that is to say, mimesis—opens up a space for the logic of representation. Music might seem to benefit from the mimetic imperative. Bereft of the ethical essence to which it must correspond, music no longer operates under the control of times and spaces of its production or under constraints for its use. But although music is no longer required to constitute the proper ethical essence of the community and does not contain a truth, it nonetheless finds in the logic of mimesis a constitutive limit. Now music must contend with the fact that it is too close to speech to be its proper analogue (analogon). With no sufficient gap in which to gain a foothold in the operations of correspondence, music is demoted. Horace’s ‘ut pictura poesis’ captures the logic of this demotion, or in Rancière’s words, ‘[t]he matrix couple of the poem that depicts and the painting that recounts, which commands in the representative regime the correspondence of the arts, thus accuses music of “mutism”’ (2002, p. 23).5 From this perspective, wordless music can neither mean nor give an account, being an object of pleasure, an object of sensation, nothing more and nothing less. If ethical music obeyed the legislative command of unity, poetic music does not. But if poetic music stages a gap between its depiction of life and life itself, its actual matter (harmony) does not change. Poetic music too is a ‘new fold in the distribution of ways of doing and making’ that renders it audible and visible as an autonomous practice visà-vis Platonic harmonious unity. This, however, is not the autonomy of what will be known as Absolute Music. The arts remain tethered via analogy to the social order from which they derive their force, even as they help constitute that order. According to Rancière, the logic of representation ‘enters into a relationship of global analogy with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations. The representative primacy of action over characters or of narration over description, the hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of their subject matter, and the very primacy of the art of speaking, of speech in actuality, all these elements figure into an analogy with

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a fully hierarchical vision of the community’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, 22). On the one hand, ethical music like poetic music remains closely regulated within the structures of the Greek polis—the vituperations against music in Politics are not much different from Plato’s. On the other hand, music now belongs to a domain of doing, making, and perceiving distinguishable from other ways of doing, making, and perceiving. It is precisely because of the gap between it and life that contemplation is now possible and indeed part of the political aesthetics of the city. In the end, poetic music forms part of the institutionalization of the arts and partakes of the stability that empowers the arts to do ‘political’ work in the polis under the logic of mimesis: to represent life as it could be. Parapolitics is what Rancière calls the Aristotelian police order in which poetic music operates. Unlike archipolitics, there is no return to a proper foundation. Instead, by recognizing the fundamentally political character of ‘man’ and the conflictive nature of the polis, it elaborates the system of arithmetical distribution that will, by allocating resources according to pre-determined virtues and entitlements of various competing groups, set up a stable system of governance. This stability results from, first, defining the people as the (dispossessed) possessors of something called ‘freedom’, and second, determining freedom to be the common to the community as a whole, the oligarchy and the aristocracy included. By setting up politics as a particular domain of social life, apart from economics and morality, and by conceiving it as a particular human aptitude, Aristotle bequeaths the West, so-called, the democratic model of governance, or proper politics in their essence as a potential struggle over the power to count and be counted. ‘Aristotle … managed … to propose the realization of a natural order of politics as a constitutional order by the very inclusion of what blocked such realization: the demos, either as the form of exposure of the war between the “rich” and the “poor”, or in the ultimate form of the effectiveness of an egalitarian anarchy’ (Rancière, [1995] 1999, p. 72). Parapolitics, then, constitutes the most forceful expression of the Rancièrian ‘wrong’. Addressing the longevity of Aristotle’s model, Rancière designates as ‘modern parapolitics’ the analysis, initiated by Hobbes and refined by Rousseau, in which the natural political aptitude of ‘man’ is rendered as an explicit liability in need of a regulating force. In fact, for Hobbes the Aristotelian aptitude towards politics of ‘man’ is already an effect of a fundamental compulsion to wage a war of all against all. The constitution of power cannot any longer be given in a set of virtuous entitlements; rather, a new figure emerges in whom the absolute capacity and power to govern dwells: the individual. Modern parapolitics consists in the regulation of this individual capacity and power through the mechanism of sovereignty. Rancière’s assessment is fulminating. ‘[Hobbes] shifts Aristotle’s reasoning from the level of the “parties” to the level of individuals, from a theory of government to a theory about the origins of power’, adding that, [T]his also means that sovereignty is no longer domination of one party over another. It is the radical ‘dismissal of the case’ of the parties and of what their interplay gives rise to: the effectiveness of the part of those who have no part. The

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problematization of the ‘origins’ of power and the terms in which it is framed— the social contract, alienation, and sovereignty—declare first that there is no part of those who have no part. There are only individuals and the power of the state … [Modern parapolitics] begins by initially braking down the people into individuals, which, in one go, exorcises the class war of which politics consists, in the war of all against all. (1999, p. 78; trans. rev. after Bosteels, 2010, p. 89)

Modern parapolitics replaces the distance of the people from itself with a distance of ‘man’ from himself, now conceptualized as the gap between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ (Bosteels, 2010, p. 90). It is possible to see how modern parapolitics helps frame contemporary liberal politics of recognition with particular force in societies where the individual is the sacrosanct unit for action and transformation. Consider the case of Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón (b. 1976). In 2008, he received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called ‘genius award’. The Foundation proclaimed: ‘Zenón demonstrates an astonishing mastery of old and new jazz idioms, from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American rhythmical concepts to free and avant-garde jazz … The result [of Jíbaro, a 2005 release] is a complex yet accessible sound that is overflowing with feeling and passion and maintains the integrity of the island’s music. This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century’ (MacArthur Foundation, 2008). This captures the modern parapolitical spirit to the letter. An individual is ascribed a role in the renovation of a national tradition even though that individual is constitutively split from the nation. Why? Because as member of the ‘Associate Free State’ of Puerto Rico, Zenón is not a citizen like the rest, having conditional status before US democratic institutions. Just as the Aristotelian equality of logos conceals the political tear of wrong, here music is mobilized to close a gap it cannot bridge between the Hobbesian individual and the democratic citizen. That music operates in plain view of modern parapolitical wrong should give us pause. True, this episode could be taken as a routine superstructural work, and the award does not seek to render democratic citizenship as such. The Rancièrian argument, however, would be that by virtue of his creative acts, Zenón is verified in his equality—this is what is political here. In its encounter with the police order, however, those same acts leave him as a democratically unequal individual. The incommensurability between an institution of the police order (the Foundation) and the presupposition of equality is staged on the terrain of ‘aesthetic creativity’ and on behalf of a potential politics of ‘national reinvention’. The transference of actual political struggle to a surrogate terrain enables the emergence of metapolitics. Against action, which takes place in the present, metapolitics regards radical equality on an ever-receding horizon, neutralizing its force as the presupposition for politics. Aesthetic Music Finally, the aesthetic regime of art breaks the mimetic bond that had guaranteed the proper functioning of the poetic regime and had linked ways of doing to the task of

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artistic representation. Without mimesis as a mediating principle, the hierarchy of the fine arts dissipates, along with the material and technical norms that had kept the arts distinct from each other and from ways of doing and making in general. If Rancière identifies ethics with Plato and poetics with Aristotle, he associates aesthetics with Kant. For Rancière, the aesthetic regime is coeval with a number of upheavals in eighteenth century Europe—most notably, the French Revolution— although it is not reducible to any of them. Does the inauguration of the aesthetic regime imply the subsequent impossibility of ethical or poetic music? On this point, Rancière is unequivocal. Departing from Foucault, he insists that the concept of regime does not require that something is unthinkable beyond a certain point, that each new epoch marks an irreversible threshold beyond which the past is essentially unknowable. We do not simply ‘jump from one system to another in such a way that the possibility of the new system coincides with the impossibility of the former system’, Rancière ([2000] 2004c, p. 50) tells us. At any point in history, several regimes ‘coexist and intermingle’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 50). Aesthetics, of course, is a very broad category for Rancière. Most fundamentally, aesthetics simply means the organization of forms that determine what is able to appear to the senses. As such, all music is aesthetic music. However, the aesthetic regime—which designates a historically particular phenomenon and not the a priori organization of sense perception—is more specific. It is marked by a series of deregulations, the most important of which is a ‘freeing up of the norms of representation’ and the establishment of an autonomous community of sensible apprehension (Rancière, [1995] 1999, p. 58). It is easy to see why Rancière refers to this as the aesthetic regime. As he notes, the notion of autonomous art was articulated most clearly by Kant, in his critique of aesthetic judgment. But Rancière differs with Kant on one fundamental point. Whereas the latter conceptualizes autonomous art in terms of the formal characteristics of the artwork, Rancière is interested in autonomous sensoria. Kant, it is well known, was ambivalent towards music, an art he derided for its lack of form, and thereby forfeiting the capacity for judgment. Because Rancière shifts the focus to sensoria, however, the question of form need not concern him (2002, pp. 24, 30 nn. 3). Rancière (2010b, p. 115) is conscious of the inevitable criticism that the idea of autonomous art is simply a ruse to mask class domination or, worse still, a means to depoliticize all art in the name of art itself. On this point, it is interesting to note that his notion of the aesthetic regime developed out of his research on laborers. Already in Nights of Labor, he derides the worker who is ‘always ready to exalt the music of “his” plane’. In contrast to this, he celebrates ‘the authentic joiner Gauny, who already mistrusted the spiritedness of Saint-Simonian choirs, [who] does not find satisfaction or recompense in this industrious music’ (Rancière, [1981] 1989, p. 76). A few pages later, Rancière quotes a passage from Gauny’s notebook that he will continue to quote throughout his career: Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a

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view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighboring residences ([1981] 1989, p. 81).

In 1981, Rancière is satisfied to simply present Gauny’s words without much commentary. He only asks: ‘But don’t these possessions presented to the worker’s gaze call to mind those “palaces of ideas” built, says Feuerbach, by philosophers living in thatched cottages?’ Of course, for Rancière they do not: against Feuerbach’s ‘vulgar’ materialism, Rancière proposes the political efficacy of deregulating the correspondence between ways of being, doing, and seeing. However, Kant and aesthetics are not mentioned in Nights of Labor. The theorization of Gauny’s gaze will have to wait for a new interpretation in The Philosopher and His Poor. There, Rancière quotes the same passage, but this time he introduces it with the following words: ‘Strangely enough, the carpenter Gauny seems to be commenting on the Critique of Judgment when, from the room in which he lays a parquet floor, he offers the gaze of an aesthete on the décor of his servitude … ’ ([1983] 2004a, p. 199). In 1983, Rancière relates ‘the anticipation of the perceptible equality to come’ explicitly with Kant, but also with Schiller who developed the ‘utopian content of Kantian aesthetics’ ([1983] 2004a, pp. 198–199). He suggests, moreover, that in the aesthetic regime of arts ‘communities’ are difficult, if not impossible, to establish because of the indeterminate relation between autonomous sensoria of art and the allocation of jobs and lots. As remarked in the Bourdieu vignette, because ‘music is the art that resists most resolutely the empire of commentary’, it does not ‘signal for which habitus it is suitable’ (Rancière, [1983] 2004a, p. 185). Over the next three decades, Rancière will return incessantly to Gauny’s gaze. In his essay ‘Thinking Between Disciplines’, he presents the passage from Gauny’s notebook and then emphasizes the ‘as if’ (the Kantian als ob of aesthetic judgment) of the joiner’s gaze. In the ‘Paradoxes of Political Art’ (Rancière, 2010b), he mobilizes the same passage to elucidate his concept of ‘dissensus’. Put simply, the fact that Gauny’s gaze is not determined by the work of his body illustrates a ‘dissensual re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2010b, p. 140). In every case, Rancière insists on an autonomous realm of sense experience. For historians of ‘modernism’—a term Rancière does not care for—autonomous art is identified with anti-mimesis, in which pure form is valorized at the same time as the exploration of specific artistic media. From this perspective, musical modernity would be identified with formalism and ‘the language of twelve sounds, set free from any analogy with expressive language’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 26). For Rancière, as we have seen, the aesthetic regime has less to do with autonomous form than an autonomous sensorium. The assumption of such a sensorium provides some important theoretical and historiographical insights. It is a truism in much (ethno) musicological research that social groups perform themselves. This notion generally falls under the rubric of ‘identity formation’, and is easily discernable from the titles of a number of recent

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monographs and collections, for example, Music and identity (Akrofi, Smit, & Thorsén, 2007), Identity and everyday life (Berger, 2004), and Ethnicity, identity, and music (Stokes, 1994). Other titles more explicitly foreground the performative construction of identity, for example, Performing the nation: Swahili music and cultural politics in Tanzania (Askew, 2002) and Performing democracy: Bulgarian music and musicians in transition (Buchanan, 2006). The fact that almost all of these scholars are ‘antiessentialist’ is of no import. Whether the link is natural or not, music is always considered ‘of’ a particular social group. Few scholars writing today believe that the music ‘of’ a particular group is necessarily produced by and for that group. One the contrary, musical works (or ‘texts’) created by one particular social group are liable to appropriation or ‘poaching’ by unintended addressees. Meaning is not immanent in a text. Instead, all texts—to use an old post-structuralist coinage— are polysemic, which is to say they are open to multiple meanings and interpretations. Writing about Beethoven and German politics between 1870 and 1989, Dennis (1996, p. 19) suggests that the ‘abstract nature of music itself’ makes music particularly susceptible to contradictory appropriations. Rancière, as we have seen, also insists that music does not signal a habitus that is proper to it. Nonetheless, a crucial difference remains: in contrast to the argument that various, even competing, social groups vie for the music of a composer as ‘their own’, Rancière insists on an experience of art that is completely unmoored from social position. This is the ‘disinterested judgment’ that Kant spoke of, but it is also the gaze of the builder, Gauny, and not, strictly speaking, a matter of the non-signifying nature of musical sound, or what Dennis calls music’s ‘abstract nature’. In the aesthetic regime music is autonomous, yes—but there is more to the story. As Schiller tells us in On the aesthetic education of man (1794), aesthetic experience bears on the autonomous art of the beautiful and on the art of living. Aesthetics, then, is both autonomous and heteronomous. ‘The entire question of the “politics of aesthetics”— in other words, of the aesthetic regime of art—turns on this short conjunction’ (Rancière, 2010a, p. 116). According to Rancière, every aesthetic theory is an attempt to come to terms with this ‘and’, which essentially allows for three possibilities: art becomes life, life becomes art, or ‘art and life exchange their properties’ (2010a, p. 119). Rancière is able to provide many historical examples for each of these scenarios. For example, one major effort of the 1920s artistic avant-garde was to construct new forms of life based on aesthetic experience (see also Bürger, 1984). Thus, although art suspends its relationship to ordinary forms of experience, it nonetheless takes on the role of educator: ‘As self-education art is the formation of a new sensorium— one which signifies, in actuality, a new ethos’ (Rancière, 2010a, p. 119). As such, the becoming life of art reverts back to the ethical regime. Rancière makes the intriguing point that revolutionary Marxism, which advocates the material realization of the Idea of Communism, converges with the revolutionary artistic avant-garde at precisely this point. On the other hand, the becoming art of life is seen most explicitly in the museum context, which Rancière calls the ‘curiosity shop’. Here, religious artifacts and

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ethnographic specimens are aestheticized as objects of disinterested pleasure. ‘We know what came out of this shop’, writes Rancière (2010a, p. 126): collages, Pop Art, and jumbled commodities. But when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the extraordinary also becomes ordinary. In the end, we are left with the ubiquity and pervasiveness of ordinary objects that have been thoroughly aestheticized. In short, we are left with a Debordian society of the spectacle. A series of inversions (life and art, or properties of either) criss-cross endlessly. This ‘scrambling of the opposition between art and non-art’ (Rancière, 2002, p. 27) has several surprising consequences. For one, there is a seeming identity between noncorresponding pairs, an equivalence between consciousness and unconsciousness, the voluntary and the involuntary, activity and passivity (Rancière, 2002, p. 24, 2010a, p. 121). The arts of space and the arts of time permeate one another. There is an interchangeability of modes of production, a ‘boundless and anonymous murmur of life and/or machines’ (Rancière, 2002, p. 27). On the other hand, there is an infinite multiplication of commodities and useable things (Rancière, 2002, p. 27). In the end, aesthetic art is a matter of staging (Rancière, 2002, p. 26). The ‘curiosity shop’ is simply one name for a space in which everything can metamorphize beyond anything Aristotle’s poetic metamorphosis of the muses ever imagined. Rancière emphasizes that these characteristics are not specific to so-called ‘postmodern’ art. On the contrary, they are the logical outcome of Romanticism, and more generally of the aesthetic regime. Stated otherwise, the aesthetic regime is highly susceptible to an ‘entropy’ resulting from the permeability of art and life which constituted in the first place as a ‘sensible mode of being specific to artistic products’ in which the sensible ‘is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, pp. 22–23). Note well: the aesthetic regime is first and foremost a mode of being, not, as earlier regimes, ways of doing and making. Doing and making are still operative, of course, but they are now part of the apparatus of explanation and understanding of new sciences dedicated to account for what makes art and what art makes. With this transformation, art’s heterogeneous power may be marshaled for other means. Rancière goes to the long eighteenth century in search of evidence: Vico renders Homer as a poet despite himself who unknowingly bears witness to the image-laden language and thought of ancient times; Hegel determines the true subject of Dutch painting to be the display of a nation’s freedom in the play of light, not the depiction of room interiors; Mendelssohn restages Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as the truth of a sonorous theology; etc. ([2000] 2004c, 25). By the protean logic of the aesthetic regime, ‘a product is identical with something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos, the intention of the unintentional, etc’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 23). If art is engaged by the world, it is in a sense radically empirical and realist; but if it cannot fully think this empiricism and realism, then it must be equally shot through by transcendentalism. All told, Rancière’s aesthetic regime replicates the structure of the Kantian notion of the empirical-transcendental as the duplet art-life.6 This means,

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among other things, that the aesthetic experience, which is none other than the hyphen between art and life, could be harnessed for political life. In the poetic regime, the critic could identify each art positively, by virtue of its particular means and medium, of its hierarchies of genres. In the aesthetic regime, however, the arts come into tension with art in the singular—a category of experience and mode of being unique to the artistic products which, paradoxically, can only be identified negatively, through the manifestation of an unbridgeable gap between conscious efforts and unconscious effect: The end of mimesis is not the end of figuration. It is the end of the mimetic legislation whereby a productive nature and a sensible nature were made to fit. With this end, the muses cede their place to music, that is, to a relation without mediation between the calculus of the work and the pure sensible affect, which is also an immediate relation between the technical device and the song of inner life. … Poiesis and aisthesis stand henceforth in immediate relation to each other. But they relate to one another through the very gap of their ground. (Rancière, [2004] 2009, p. 7)

The aesthetic regime of art thus functions insofar as it is dysfunctional: although it may long for a lost community (as the early Romantics did in their construction of Classical art) or the community to come (as a number of avant-garde utopians have proposed and the MacArthur Foundation presages), it can never reinstitute the unified humanity that contradicts its basic premise. As he puts it, ‘the aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 23). Without a fixed boundary between art and life, this regime solicits political intervention through artistic products. Autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, and life and art are all enigmatically reversible pairs, and create two major variants in the discourse of modernity. First, the autonomy of art made it possible for each form to exploit its specific medium: language would not need to communicate and would be instantiated only as ‘word-islands’ released from ‘forms of presentation of phenomena and from the connections between phenomena that define the world of representation’ (Rancière, [1998] 2004b, p. 148); painting would return to two-dimensional surfaces and pigmentation; music would become emancipated from language or be set free, in dodecaphony, from ‘any analogy with expressive language’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 26). This autonomous dimension does not, on its own, overcome the problem of the unthought at the heart of the aesthetic regime. In fact, because of that problematic, autonomous art is susceptible to the clamors of revolutionary radicality as well as to the murmurs of good republican government (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 26). Second, forms become also identified with the task of fulfilling the telos of modernity. Rancière calls this modernatism, identifying Schiller as its main ideologue. According to Schiller, the French Revolution could have fully succeeded had it seized the free

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play and appearance of aesthetic experience as an opportunity to realize the latent equality of ‘man’. True freedom can be achieved only if the activity of thought and the passivity of sensible matter achieved a neutral state: the aesthetic state. That is, if the aesthetic is free, then it belongs to anyone who has undergone an aesthetic education. This is the region of free play and appearance which Gauny inhabited, at the brief moment in which ‘the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life’ coincided (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 27). By this logic, and at roughly the same time, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie shared, albeit for different reasons, in their enthusiasm for Beethoven (Taruskin, 2005, pp. 641–689). Tragically, all such moments are short-lived. The convergence of art and life often loses momentum. Even worse, however, is when it goes too far. Rancière alludes to the Frankfurt School and Surrealism as expressions of the discontent with modernatism, and for unmasking, although in opposite ways, the degeneration intrinsic to the project of modernity. Modernatism would become a fatal destiny, as revealed by Heidegger’s critique of technology, or by Adorno’s horror at the alienation of administered society and the machinations of the culture industry. Rancière alludes to this fatal destiny in a cryptic remark about ‘the original sin of human beings, forgetful of the debt to the Other and of their submission to the heterogeneous powers of the sensible’ (Taruskin, 2005, p. 28). Is this ‘Other’ the Other of psychoanalysis, of the sciences of anthropology and sociology, or of Lyotard’s sublime placing anew a ban on representation, what Rancière calls the ‘grand threnody of the unrepresentable’? Or, is this ‘Other’ the stubborn unthought at the heart of the aesthetic, that is, the fact that the aesthetic regime could and can never solve the question of the relation of art to life and aesthetics and politics, let alone the improbable injunction of postmodernity that art be indistinct from life and yet retain its singularity, its distributive character? It is impossible to tell. Perhaps the issue is that, whether as a singular domain of doing and making that engages the world, or as a diffuse but singular domain of being, art is caught between parapolitical hierarchies and the metapolitical commitment to ‘the potentiality inherent in the innovative sensible modes of experience that anticipate a community to come’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 30). The community to come is, of course, a community that nevertheless has (always) yet to arrive. This forms part of what he calls la malaise dans l’esthetique, a discontent that the arts, music included, can never shake off. And since aesthetics and politics revolve around the axis of the sensible, there is also a coterminous malaise dans l’politique, although Rancière does not explicitly say so. Equal Music Where does this all leave music? Edward Said remarks that after Beethoven ‘music veered off from the social realm into the aesthetic almost completely’ (1991, p. 12). Rancière proposes instead that politics are reconstituted with aesthetics as a central dimension. Music, it should be clear, does not provide Rancière with a particular

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purchase on philosophy, or more precisely, with a purchase that is inherently more secure than that of other forms. Aesthetics may be immanent to politics in his thought, but aesthetic forms, let alone content, are not. They are, as we have insisted, distributions of the sensible that exclude as they include. This is certainly true of the aesthetic regime, but also of the other regimes. In the case of ethical music, for example, political events do sometimes make something count that was previously uncounted, and so in doing disrupt the social order. But in the end, because archipolitics and the ethical regime uphold unity above all else, another ethical order always threatens to become a permanent and thus intolerable trace of dissensus. The illustration of the AACM shows how its unprecedented achievement of creative autonomy, the radical reconfiguration of the definition of what music by African Americans could be, and the staggering mobility across musical, educational, and economic institutions of its members constituted a previously unimaginable redistribution of the sonically and musically sensible. In the fraught racial environment of the USA this counts as one of the most important political mobilizations of music in the recent past. At the same time, the very force compelling the Association’s past and ongoing accomplishments—that is, the systemic injustice that African Americans suffer on account of race —could only engender a commitment to declare blackness as a grounding principle of their very existence. The Association is famously heterogeneous and fluid in its engagement with all kinds of musicians and music making. But it needs to remain committed to a nationally bound principle of race as the logos of its continuing existence. This ‘existence’ is not simply an identity bound by particular formal predilections. It is, instead, an ethical commitment and an expression of ethical music. In the case of the MacArthur Foundation’s recognition of Miguel Zenón’s creative innovations, we noted the impossibility of overcoming the structure of the logos through music: music cannot possibly assist the passage of an individual into the cultural canon of national traditions without a re-structuring of the political constitution which denies that individual a full count in the calculus of the nation. These political matters are not more fundamental than artistic ones. On the contrary, art and politics abide by similar distributive logics. What matters is only the intersection between the two terms, their ways of relating to each other. By his very creative action, Zenón represents the continuing potential of music to participate in new distributions. In this sense, he has rendered himself intelligible. This redistribution is significant in its own right, but it cannot ever patch over the tear of the political wrong with which it intersects. The malaise that affects politics and aesthetics does not appear to diminish human enthusiasm to engage in them; on the contrary, their contradiction compels human action. In this sense, Rancière is a thinker of action, grounding his analysis on concrete practices where the capacity of people to act is always in ample evidence. Equality is not ‘a founding ontological principle but a condition that only functions when it is put into action’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 52). Music is political only when it activates the presupposition of equality. Political music is, therefore, radically equal to any other action. This equality is both its condition of possibility and its raison d’être. With this

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understanding alone can music be freed from the celebratory singularity—be it material or transcendental—that burdens it with impossible powers. As he warns in an early essay, citing Marx: ‘all the mysteries which lead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the understanding of that practice’ (Rancière, [1969] 1974, p. 2), hence his refusal of metaphysics, transcendentalism, and other forms of inert immaterial thought—or, in some of these forms’ musical incarnations, the refusal of pieties regarding musical charm, ineffability, or bodily jouissance. Similarly, music’s powers cannot be assessed under the enchanting spell of ‘radiant appearances’ (Wackenroder’s uncanny expression—Gläzenden Geisterscheinung) that helped elevate the art of sound to the status of the unthought itself. And the work of mourning—the critique of instrumental reason, the detuned world, or the impossibility of art after Auschwitz— cannot on its own clue us in on the gap between the unredeemed world of human affairs and the redeemed sphere of the (selected) modernist musical work, as in Adorno. As David Ferris notes, ‘the negation of the negation demanded by Adorno’s dialectical account of the aesthetic, that is, his embrace of a politics of aesthetics through the denial of negation as the representation of what it is different from … finally remains unproductive with respect to the tradition it would transform … [T]he Frankfurt School could only arrest the dialectical foundation of its thought’ (Ferris, 2009, p. 39). In short, the negative dialectic needs the link between politics and aesthetics in order to hold on to a notion of progressive and regressive music, a hierarchy that would be perfectly at home in the poetic regime. Rancière does not refuse the link we identified in the enigmatic ‘and’ that renders aesthetics immanent to politics and politics immanent to aesthetics, while simultaneously allowing for their specificity. Neither negative nor positive—or what is the same, both negative and positive—this link that Rancière maintains has one decisive outcome: art interventions qua art cannot guarantee dissensus. ‘The arts’, writes Rancière, ‘only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation’ (Rancière, [2000] 2004c, p. 19). And so, there remains music, not as an alternative to politics or as a form through which alternatives politics are staged. Rather, music is now seen as a form of action whose function cannot be scripted in advance, an action which is always already split from itself by the force of the unthought that makes the link ‘music and politics’ or ‘music as politics’ possible in the first place. And to return to an earlier point, music emerges from this analysis with its own uncommon distribution: what it holds in common with that which it forms part (life, art, politics) is its own distributive character. We would not go as far as saying that this is music’s ‘wrong’. But we would affirm that at its most potent, music, qua music, does not transcend, distill, clarify, or escape political action, but instead becomes, qua action, equal to it: an action like any other.

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Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank Alexander Ness for allowing us use of his work on Pythagoras.

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Notes [1] Gabriel Rockhill notes two other definitions of politics in Rancière: ‘the act of political subjectivization that breaks with the police order [any form of established order]’ and ‘the meeting ground between police procedures and the process of equality’ (Rockhill, 2009, nn. 5, 308). [2] The reference, here, is to Attali (see Lewis, 2008, p. 510). [3] Co-author Jairo Moreno addresses this issue in his forthcoming work on Latin American musical modernisms and their imbrication within US Empire. [4] Rancière refers to the capacity of identity politics for transformation ([1995] 1999, p. 36), although earlier he disqualified notions of relatively stable identity as political means (1992). For Oliver Davis, Rancière’s critiques are ‘troublingly consistent with the consensus of mainstream French republican universalism, notoriously sensitive as this is to what it labels pejoratively as le communautarisme’ (Davis, 2010, p. 88) (see also Deranty, 2003; Chambers & O’Rourke, 2009; May, 2009). [5] Bourdieu’s analysis of music’s muteness vis-à-vis habitus makes sense only because he frames his interpretation within the principles of poetic music. [6] One recognizes trademark Kantianisms here: the coming into being of a transcendental subject which however cannot think itself; the genius ‘unaware of the law it produces’ (Davis, 2010, p. 23).

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