The Political Interface: How Jacques Ranciere's concept of the distribution of the sensible  applies to the aesthetics of contemporary political activism.

Public Protest

Over the past year widespread political protest has been front page news in the UK and abroad. We have debated the re-emergence of a political youth and have contemplated the rise of democracy in some Arab states. The student protests in particular have been compared and contrasted with the political ambitions of 1968 and the term ‘lost generation' is back yet again, if with a hint of sarcasm. With continued historicity we look backwards as we try to move forward.

One keen difference between contemporary political movements and past is the use of modern communication technology. Protesting groups have advertised their message and attracted participation through a spread of social media that allows them to be seen and heard by a wider audience. Activists in the UK and across the globe have also been able to connect to each other via the Internet to show solidarity. Combined with the actions of Wikileaks and the more recent fixation on superinjunctions, the limits of control over the information tide have been questioned, with some advocating a central controlling power to regulate it.

Advances in technology that brought about the advent of the personal computer and smartphone have breached more and more barriers to the flow of data. Our vision has been extended by the breadth of its reach and complicated by the web of user generated content. Whilst in no way the free space that the pioneers of the Internet envisaged, having been as clogged as the London Underground with advertisements and the infuriating shuffle of inept users, for many any censorship of the Internet by a central controlling body would be to remove the last hope for a truly open public space.

Despite this rather desperate grasp at control, the ability to organize and share information has also been lauded as democracy in action. Whether or not one agrees with the motivations of the youth movements, older generations have been happily surprised by the reemerging interest in politics amongst a previously apathetic youth. Others have been more skeptical, shaping it as a fad or fashion. This harshness is as unwarranted as it is unimaginative, but it is worth questioning the scope of the protests -whom they include and exclude - and looking more closely at the methods used in contemporary circulation of information.

Looking further than the remit of protest, it is interesting to take stock of the real ‘freedom’ of access to information and who or what controls what is visible and to whom. Even more importantly who has a hand in what information is generated for others to see and for what purpose. The complex hybrid nature of  contemporary visual culture often makes this difficult to define.

Politics is Art is Advertising

A recent exhibition in Oxford by final year students at the Ruskin college of Art highlighted the similarity in visual prompts between politics, art and advertising. The collaborative works utilised the use of technology and visual practice that entices people to feel involved or attracted to participate with something for a variety of ends. This might be political and social empowerment or it might be the solicited attention of the consumer. ‘Planning for Paradise’ included attractive protest placards bearing innocuous abstract designs, lifted from night club advertisements. Additionally, there was a pair of geometric paintings that, when scanned by an smartphone, would provide the viewer with a visual treat – a technique used as much in advertising as by public services to provide information.

This blending of visual cues is demonstrative of the contemporary difficulty in separating art from other things. Such crossovers and the borrowing between political poetics, advertising and art in the forms that we are so accustomed to today are heralded by a new relationship, formed in the 20^th Century with images and things.

Paradoxically, Modernist art of the 20^th Century tried both to make art into the singular - Art with a capital A - whilst limiting our ability to draw a line between it and other activities. In bringing art and life together, art became a ‘thing’ that existed in the real world rather than a representation of it.  As a real thing in the real world it was to break down the walls of exclusivity and appeal to something definitive about the human condition. And, as it was Art with a capital A, it also held the power of certain ideals and was able to inspire them in people.

Herein lies the tie of the avant garde in art to the avant garde in politics. Not only was art the method by which conceptual thought was made real in the world, but it was the tool for an 'aesthetic education'. Modernist thought defined itself as new by contrasting itself to the past.  Through experience of art one would be able to 'read and interpret the signs of history'. Not only this, but through art one could visualize the 'invention of sensible forms for a life to come' welding together the aesthetic and the political into 'a total life program'. The reach of art to the everyman was considered important in the struggle for equality, aiming to breach the gap between 'the cultivated classes that have access to the totalisation of lived experience and those less fortunate who are controlled by immersion in the parceling out of work and of sensory experience'. Not all artists or movements were politically or socially motivated in this way during the multifaceted period of modernism, but there were those that took such ideas to their limit.

In general, this ideal of 'aesthetic emancipation' has become jaded. Post-modernism continues to draw connections and to blend genres and subjects, but without the same utopian ideals. However, it is still true that the progress of equality has changed the way we tell stories. Poetry is to be found in the everyday object and ordinary scenarios. All possible represented subjects have become equal as have the styles of methods to render them. Things themselves have an 'immanence of meaning’ they did not have before, an idea that changed social existence as much as it did art. At the same time, those working in industry, media and advertising were creating a new way of living amongst images and commodities, which fed off the modern narrative of art as much as it fed the ideas of artists.

In terms of style and form it has become increasingly difficult to draw a line between an advertisement, a political poster, an everyday object and an art work. The methods of the avant garde to write ideas into the very fabric of our everyday lives certainly has not been lost; any artistic practice is work that grabs the spotlight and therefore is an attractive technique to a variety of ends. It is a way of doing or making that claims visibility in the public realm and becomes part of a 'collective sphere of consciousness'. In this way it can have great political potential and selling power. In theory the ‘artist’ can become a deliberative citizen with influence on what is seen and heard. Like politics, art can create fictions that pollute existing stories; a map that shows the way between 'the visible and the sayable'. Any structure that seeks to make such practice exclusive, not only to types of making, forms and genres but also to certain places, times and people, limits this effect.

Such an organizing principle re-affirms what Jacques Ranciere calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’. Very simply, this is what is visible and to whom it is visible. It 'reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and the time and space in which this activity is performed'. The disruption and supplementation of this system is work of politics. It is through this concept that Ranciere explores the aesthetic nature of politics and how disturbing the distribution of the sensible can amount to political action.

The Political Interface

When using the word interface, what tends to spring to mind is a GUI: a graphical user interface. It is what allows us to use a computer; manipulating a screen, mouse and keyboard to gather information, input or modify information. An interface is a tool that allows us to communicate proactively.

As such, it is a tool that embodies a key human concept: the divide between internal and external, or, oneself and everything else. Where exactly to draw that dividing line is difficult. In this cycle of input and output, how much one side affects the other is highly debatable. However, that cycle itself- or at least the appearance of it- is the framework in which we quite literally 'feel' we exist. The body could be thought of as an interface with which the mind or consciousness can work on the world. We experience the world through sense data and we have learned to affect that world in order to change what we and others can see.  Our perception of what the world is like, or could be, are often more flexible that first assumed. New information, new concepts and new structures organise what we presume to understand, and in turn, we can change and modify that system in a way that may significantly alter our understanding or even way of seeing.

This is why - whilst the distribution of the sensible is 'the system of a-priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience'- that system itself is not fixed. It results from not only the tangled relationship between one consciousness and the external world, but many. It is the culmination of a community of such relationships.

However, if our ‘view’, what we can see and understand, determines what we can ever hope to affect, we need to understand how we are limited and focused. Sometimes our view is controlled: either personally and purposefully, or simply by an indifferent correlation of a particular organisation or structure of society. More likely, these situations are confluent. Ranciere calls this organisational force the 'police', which not only defines the 'organisational system of co-ordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible' but is also a law that determines who takes part and who is excluded from defining that distribution.  Further control over the methods by which people can communicate and organise en masse, such as regulation methods of the freedom of information on the Internet is a very obvious example, but there are many that are more subtle and more inherent controlling elements to the structure of society.

The failure of the modernist idea of an aesthetic emancipation of man was linked to an inability to define art as a significant, separate form in the way it sought to, whilst defining itself also as 'work'; as part of reality and everyday life and therefore non-exclusive. In fact 'art is exclusive in so far that it is work'. Equality of subject, form or genre is not the same as political or social equality; it is the 'equality of the communicated' rather than the 'equality of communicators'. The skepticism of the late 20^th century and the present is linked to the failure of such utopian ideals and the lesson that 'neither art in books nor art in life is synonymous with democracy as a form for constructing dissensus over the given of public life'.

That is not to say that art cannot change the framework of how we see things; it can affect the distribution of the sensible, a system that is flexible, but that also has a tendency to re-assert itself. As long as there is a distribution of the sensible that excludes and includes who gets to say what, when and to whom, this distribution remains unequal:

'Equality of the demos can never be adequately accounted for within the police order'

Demos refers simply to 'the people'. It is concerned with the question of who communicates rather than what is communicated. Ranciere makes the point that equality must be something that is assumed if we are ever to have any hope of putting it into practice. All people have the capability to be included in the distribution of the sensible, but there are reasons why some are excluded. Many of us are overly used to access – the touch screen on our i-Pad makes information feel very close at hand. However the question remains who is sharing information with who and why? The tendency to appeal to a particular audience or readership is as prevalent on the Internet as elsewhere. Due to preference, which is strongly related to social and economic situation, people are more likely to read, watch, notice, listen to and buy particular things. Encouraging you to link to certain pieces of information through clever use of social media has become a whole industry of its own, as has carefully sorting people into various categories to market to.

The scope of political resistance is confused by an increasing awareness of this complexity. The conflation of so many forms of communication and information - politics is art is advertising - illustrates the tangle that has to be worked through in order to get a fuller picture of how things connect together.  For many, skepticism towards idealistic political mantra may be born of an awareness of the many overlying structures that organize what we experience of the world. However difficult navigating this situation is, it is also worth bearing in mind that there are many others who remain cut off from the reference points that determine the workings of the distribution of the sensible. The ability to navigate and use this system is massively dependent on wealth, education, social and cultural identity and happenstance. The political interface should be accessible to everyone, but then, not everyone has a smartphone.

An awareness of the unequal distribution of the sensible can only help to frame 'how we are to continue to resist'. The political potential of aesthetic practice is the reconfiguration of sensible experience and creating new forms of visibility. In the contemporary world where the senses are constantly bombarded, understanding the inherent aesthetics of politics is crucial. An ideal political artwork, or indeed an ideal political activity, would not simply make a statement, or even a spectacle, but would strike the difficult balance between 'readability' and 'the uncanny'. The message would be understood at the same time as showing something new – joining the dots in a wholly unexpected way that shifts our perception.

Social media and the internet are fabulous tools, but are limited by other structures that are in place inside and outside of them. As well as being able to share information on a grander scale than ever before, the Internet can also be a very large and very loud echo chamber. This is the present limitation of the student movement; it has yet to really break its bounds. The more connections made and 'lateral links' that unexpectedly disturb the usual framework of what we see and know, the closer such a movement can get to a real shake up. The power of fast, viral communication technology to create a new dimension of visibility and visuality offers great possibilities. However, the tools and knowledge necessary to access the political interface must become more widespread if we are to hope to make any significant changes. The ideal of the free-space of the Internet might be a good place to start looking forward, rather than back to 1968.


Hannah Newell is an Artist and Freelance Writer based in Oxford

Blog: http://newellposts.wordpress.com/
Website: http://hannahnewell.me.uk/

With reference to Ranciere, Jaques, (Translated by Gabriel Rockhill) The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2007