Algunos ejemplos de fenomenología emocional

To think through uncomfortable communication as a refraction of dialogue’s idealised horizontality, we need to look at Ranciere’s notion of “dissensus” to orient the politically and aesthetically productive stake of disagreement. For him, “[t]he exceptionality of politics is the exceptionality of a practice that has no field of its own but has to build its stage in the field of police” (Rancière, 2011, p.11). Politics is apt to be found in the disagreeing collision of multiple worlds away from our normal, policed understanding of what makes sense.

What is normalised by the state as politics is therefore, for Rancière, a state of restriction rather than a fully active platform for the participation of all.

Instead, greater potential lies in the realm of “fictions” (Rancière, 2010). A volatile site outside and in excess of police, politics only becomes tangible when certain groups begin to initiate a “reconfiguration” of life:

What I mean is that politics, rather than the exercise of power or the struggle for power, is the configuration of a specific world, a specific form of experience in which some things appear to be political objects,

some questions political issues or argumentations and some agents political subjects. I attempted to redefine this ‘aesthetic’ nature of politics by setting politics not as a specific single world but as a conflictive world: not a world of competing interests or values but a world of competing worlds. (Rancière, 2011, p.11)

Compared to Paulo Freire’s humanistic and collaborative project discussed at the beginning of this chapter – which requires a facilitated process of consciousness-raising – Rancière’s vision of fictions is rather a “competition”

between worlds as they emerge, which encourages a flourishing of dissonance between them. Recalling the loneliness of bodies and counterpublic affect (Warner, 2002; see: 1.1.2.), both Rancière and Warner identify the restrictions of the public space (or a “state of police” via Rancière) and how it enacts the limits against which alternatives can be lived out, formulated. In these generative spaces of counterpublic fictions, other rules, practices, and meanings are able to flourish. But where a counterpublic harnesses resistance from being subordinated, Rancière’s fiction is embedded within an aesthetic space that attends to “the equality of speaking beings”

(Rancière, 2011, p.14), or to an ideal that is practically impossible in a state of police. Yet a poetic elsewhere is not completely contained from everything that keeps our subjectivities in check. His expanded definition of fiction is as follows:

It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the ‘real’, or the framing of a dissensus.

Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation, of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective. (Rancière, 2010, p.141, my emphasis)

For him, fiction contributes towards a “commonsense” by “rearticulating the connections between signs and images, images and times, signs and spaces”

(ibid., p.149). In other words, between seeing, hearing, feeling, and the meaning-making is the possibility of rupture, the space wherein art – fiction – must operate. Art then becomes a temporary habitat for enacting different political reveries that, in the end, cannot properly re-enter our policed reality;

after all, Rancière’s understanding of reality is a “consensus” that, by definition, effaces dissensus (Rancière, 2010, p.144). Because of this, dissensus has to take place elsewhere, e.g. within the aesthetic regime, and poetic forms are in fact non-life forms in their refusal of policed sense-making. It is this very “aesthetic indifference”, he reminds us, that must be reiterated in a new “critical art” unconcerned with its own political efficacy (ibid., p.138).

The space of fiction is therefore as limited as it is provocative, seeing how its liberties are coupled with its non-realised status. But in distancing himself from politics as a struggle for power, Rancière is more focused on the dissensual multiplicity of fiction in which art is most political when it shows no pretence of the political. That way, Rancière’s “emancipated spectator”

(Rancière, 2009) is able to rupture the connection between what they sense

and the meaning construed; the safe zone of fiction enables dissent to take place. What of the permeability of this space though? The fact that it “re-frames” and does not “oppose” the real suggests a certain susceptibility.

There are indeed some considerations of such negotiation found in his earlier text “Disagreement” (1995), in which he describes a “surplus subject”.

Conceived as a figure external and responsive to an ongoing discussion, the surplus subject can be used to unsettle the boundaries of fiction more explicitly. While Rancière means for it to embody “the point at which the logos splits” and “what can be thought of specifically as politics” (Rancière, 1995, pp.xii-xiii, my emphasis), the surplus subject is just as applicable to his understanding of fiction. Arguably, fiction is a “split” as well, with resonances of the third space adherence to and splitting from norms (see: 1.1.1.). He explains:

The play of the third person is essential to the logic of political discussion, which is never simple dialogue. It is always both less and more: less, for it is always in the form of a monologue that the dispute, the gap internal to the logos, declares itself, and more, for commentary sets off a multiplication of persons. (Rancière, 1995, p.48)

The surplus subject specifically disrupts the pendulating to-and-fro movement between two interlocuting points. The addition of this crucial third person position embodies a dissensual polyphony that questions order, authority, and normativising demands. In other words, it is able to see and say something that neither interlocutor is capable of. The following is an extract from the

Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) manifesto from 2008 which puts the role of the surplus subject into context:

W.A.G.E. (WORKING ARTISTS AND THE GREATER ECONOMY) WORKS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THE ARTS, AND TO RESOLVE THEM.

W.A.G.E. HAS BEEN FORMED BECAUSE WE, AS VISUAL + PERFORMANCE ARTISTS AND INDEPENDENT CURATORS, PROVIDE A WORK FORCE (W.A.G.E., 2008).

By speaking of the collective from the outside and taking it as a third person, W.A.G.E. artists are both present (as themselves) and represented (by referring to themselves externally) as a delegate, to whom the group attributes power while owning it at the same time. In terms of Rancière’s surplus subject, being present and at the same time representing is “both less and more”: it is speculative and it breathes life; it questions the constraints of

“we”, “you”, or “they” into new forms of identification, counterpublics, etc.; it is a mechanism that redirects the speaker, the addressee, as well as the act.

In this particular case, the third person surplus and singular plural subjects enact other possibilities by venturing into a fictional, collectively lived presence. Regarding the complications of “we” in statements like the above W.A.G.E. manifesto, it is “[n]either the we or the identity assigned to it, nor the apposition of the two”, but rather

modes of subjectification only in the set of relationships that the we

and its name maintain with the set of ‘persons,’ the complete play of identities and alterities implicated in the demonstration and the worlds – common or separate – where these are defined. (Rancière, 1995, p.59)

The playfulness opens up the possibility of reconstituting who “we” are, thus highlighting how Rancière’s dissensus is emergent, negotiated. By resituating his surplus subject into his argument for fiction, a more permeable understanding of his aesthetic regime is brought to light. The multiplicity of subjects in competing, frictive processes of reconfiguration then resonates widely, including in Chantal Mouffe’s reflections on agonistic art practices (2007; 2013). She is concerned with the “the fostering of new social relations” in a co-generated public space “where conflicting points of view are confronted without any possibility of a final reconciliation” (Mouffe, 2013, p.92). Her agonistics depend on this “discursively constructed” criticality that veers away from the assessment of political efficacy, and instead asks how the “common sense” (also found in Rancière’s writing) is made and remade (ibid., p.90). Of note in Mouffe’s assessment is how art is capable of moving us and of attending to desire, which parallels the affective dimension that is inseparable from this study’s focus on embodiment (see: chapter three on the political ramifications of love). “From the point of view of the theory of hegemony”, she argues, “artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order” (ibid., p.91). As such, their role in the formation of subjectivity comes from the friction of unsettling norms and, crucially for this study, from the dissimilarities between the practices

themselves. If the notion of dialogue suggests an all-too compliant position with dominant discourse, then what I propose in this chapter is the nourishing of other, dissenting subjectivities that alert us to alternative possibilities.

To end, we can consider Rancière’s critique of a particular project by the French-Australian collective of artists and architects Urban Encampment (Campement Urbain) called I and Us (Je & Nous, 2003-2008). The group carves out a place of solitude in the middle of a satellite Parisian town called Sevran, which was built in the 1970s for immigrants primarily from around North Africa. For Rancière, the deliberate suspense materialised by the contemplative space is in itself a crucial aspect of an aesthetic sensibility that permits “embracing” as much as “splitting” (Rancière, 2008) – the latter of which hearkens not only to his surplus subject, but is also found in the enunciated third space (Bhabha, 1994; see: 1.1.1.) of cultural reiteration and innovation. However, as it has been discussed earlier, Rancière tendency is to insist upon the fiction of dissensus, of a non-existent “paper life” (Rancière, 2011, p.13). Its presence is first and foremost only ever in conditional terms, never breaking into everyday experience (Rancière, 2008, p.9). As much as I and Us is a situated art project, it paradoxically takes part within its surroundings by being separate from it. Quoting the artist group, the space was meant to be “extremely useless, fragile and non-productive” which, for Rancière, perfectly embodies that rupture of art: in “constructing a place for solitude, an ‘aesthetic’ place appears as a task for engaged art” (Rancière, 2008). However, François Daune offers the following explanation in an interview about the project with art and architecture scholars Peter

Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer:

We proposed creating an object where an individual could be alone but that would be everyone’s responsibility at the same time. All the communities would take care of the object while allowing people to get away from their respective communities. In other words, people entering the object exit their communities. This means their communities have to accept that they’re taking (an individual) time out when they go away and stay there. It’s a place that might be able to trigger new practices. Though, since the project is the responsibility of the community, it exists only as long as people agree to keep the physical object intact. They have to discuss how to do this, how to use it, maintain it and so on. If discussion stops, the object will disappear. So discussing the meaning of such a space actually constitutes its beginning. (Campement Urbain, 2008, my emphasis)

This is where Rancière’s idea of an aesthetic dissensual community becomes difficult, for this space of possibilities is in fact made to exist, and is not merely a guarded territory that subsequently allows things to take place. The emphasis turns to the discursive performativity between bodies and how they create or destroy objects / potentials through negotiation, a situated process that is largely overlooked in Rancière’s reflections on art and politics as dissensus. Recalling Mouffe’s co-existing artistic agonisms, this particular space has to be discursively produced and maintained. Rancière later clarifies his thinking in his 2011 essay by stating that “the truth about the Truth can

only be told as myth”, which is something he “refuse[s] to ontologize” (Rancière, 2011, p.15, my emphasis). This, he contends, is what underpins aesthetics, politics, and philosophy: none of them can be successfully given a form. Yet a project such as I and Us clearly makes something – a physical place – out of fiction’s social performativity, ushering other forms of life that are tangible even if only momentarily, continuing to exert some kind of influence even after they disappear. Even though the result is an aesthetic break, or an “exit” from “communities” as the artist says, it is still a space within life, and it is one that is brought to life through discursive negotiation.

It can be said, as Rancière argues, that “critical” art practices must always fall short of delivering actual political change. What they do in the context of this study’s socially negotiated art is explore and speculate, freely associating imaginations of different subjectivities. As examined above, this negotiation is also materially constitutive of a political reality that breaks into new ground.

Socially negotiated art is, at its best, as committed to testing the material restrictions of reality as it is to nurturing non-life forms of fiction; as serious about the failures of the real as the imagining of new possibilities. The

“socially negotiated” element then involves the critical consideration of embodied, physical experience that breathes meaning into flourishing and livability. In supplementing Rancière’s dissensus with embodiment, I am seeking and marking out a communicative and relational possibility for a permeable yet frictive socially negotiated art; the very “I and us” only ever come-to-be performed through social contact, yielding, and resistance. In the next section, two art projects are described and examined (2.2.1.). They each

demonstrate in different ways how dialogue fails to achieve discursive equality between speakers. The intention is to understand the hopes and difficulties of dialogue when it is sought in practice, which leads to the question of other possibilities if dialogue is, in fact, not the answer. The breakdown of the two projects are then followed by the analysis of two frictive forms of speech – gossip and teasing – that argue for their counterpublic and epistemic potential (2.2.2.).

2.2. Dislocating dialogue: two socially negotiated art projects