New Left Review 87, May-June 2014

Barry Schwabsky

TERMS OF DISPARITY

In a 1932 tribute to Edouard Manet, Paul Valéry referred to a contretemps over the painter’s work between his two great literary advocates, Zola and Mallarmé—a disagreement so violent that he professed himself ‘unable to report it’; ‘courtesy and crudity appeared as the terms of their disparity.’ [1] Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Verso: London and New York 2013, £20, hardback 288 pp, 978 178168 089 6 Modernism in the arts has been and meant a great many things, some of them fiercely antithetical to each other, as the unrepeatable verbal altercation between novelist and poet, naturalist and symbolist, illustrates. Even in hindsight, the feuds continue, as recurrent attempts to sort out true from false modernisms or—in another widespread articulation of the problem—mere modernisms from veritable avant-gardes, continue to remind us. Perhaps what is most striking, therefore, about Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art is its claim to articulate ‘the mode of experience according to which, for two centuries, we perceive very diverse things’ when we look at paintings and sculptures, read novels or poetry, watch films or plays—to define, that is, the very ground upon which the dispute between a Zola and a Mallarmé can have been conducted, and which in his view utterly separates both positions from any that were possible before the late eighteenth century.

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