Jacques Rancière. An Archaeology of the Temporality of Modernism and Avant-Gardism. 2014

• published: 04 Feb 2015
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http://www.egs.edu/ Jacques Rancière, philosopher of aesthetics and politics, delivering a talk on the temporality of modernism as "the time of the not-yet." Rancière presents his reading of artistic modernism as communist treatment of heterogeneous movement and time in the work of Emerson, Vertov, Mallarmé, Woolf and others. Topics discussed include dance, poetry, capitalism, art as the creation of new forms of life, freedom, leisure, and work. Other philosophers mentioned are Hegel, Marx, Aristotle, Schiller, and Grundberg. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2014. Jacques Rancière (b. 1940 in Algiers) is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St. Denis). He first came to prominence under the tutelage of Louis Althusser when he co-authored with his mentor Reading Capital (1968). After the calamitous events of May 1968 however, he broke with Louis Althusser over his teacher's reluctance to allow for spontaneous resistance within the revolution. Jacques Rancière is known for his sometimes remote position in contemporary French thought; operating from the humble motto that the cobbler and the university dean are equally intelligent, Jacques Rancière has freely compared the works of such known luminaries as Plato, Aristotle, Gilles Deleuze and others with relatively unknown thinkers like Joseph Jacototy and Gabriel Gauny. For Jacques Rancière, the idea of equal intelligence shines a light on the status of political equality; ordinary people should have a presumption of intelligence, in the same way we offer a presumption of innocence. Like a compassionate Plato (rather than the insecure, bullying Plato we see in the Meno), Jacques Rancière simply believes that everyone can think. The original wrong, according to Jacques Rancière, occurs when we hear the roaring of the masses in place of people speaking. There is, in Jacques Rancière's vision, a surprising level of trust in the word and the image, one of an almost anti-hermeneutical structure. Jacques Rancière is confident in language as a structure for identifying things and events in the world, while at the same time identifying that distance between words and things. Democracy then is the experience of the distance of things; man acts as though his voice can be heard, but is always a proper distance from it. The problem, then, is not knowing what you are doing; the problem is to think about what you are doing, to remember yourself. Jacques Rancière's books have covered pedagogy, the writing of history, philosophy, cinema, aesthetics and contemporary art. His critics have had a hard time defining him, placing him at different points as a philosopher, a literary critic, an art theorist and a Marxist. In Jacques Rancière's words, thought is just an expression of a condition, and his work does not belong to a discipline because it belongs to an attempt to break the borders of a discipline. Therefore like Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière has returned to the archives in order to, in a sense, re-examine the practices of historiography pitting the ideas of Plato on labor time against the writings of a nineteenth-century worker about his own sense of time.