"Where there is democracy, there is also, in principle, aesthetics": Jacques Rancière and the new dynamics of social organization

Abstract

This article intends to clarify the position of Jacques Rancière in relation to the new dynamics of social organization, particularly the relation of his thought with the great manifestations occurred at the beginning of this decade as the Arab spring, the occupy wal street and the Spanish 15M. In common, these manifestations revealed a refusal of the institutional policy, betting on the autonomy of the street movements. For Rancière, there is a crisis of representation today, revealed in the fact that such movements were not organized by parties, unions, organizations, etc., but revealed the presence of the politics of anyone. Rancière identifies a new way of achieving democracy outside the state sphere, which leads him to identify a fruitful relationship between aesthetics and politics insofar as such manifestations operate a reorganization of the sphere of visibility in the sense that a Consensus on a set of sensitive evidences. Therefore, a political manifestation today gains the airs of an artistic performance, not because aesthetics should replace the real political demands, but because the absence of a centralized political direction liberated the political imagination. Such considerations were the occasion to discuss the conceptions of political moment and scene in order to clarify the paradox inherent in Rancière's thinking between the necessity of political action as the only way to point to social transformation and the absence of a theory of the meaning of history in order to guide this same political action. Finally, the article situates Rancière's critiques of notions of hegemony and strategy.