Idle No More: Emancipatory Politics

"What is required is a theatre without spectators..." ~ Jacques Rancière

Idle No More has inspired a movement that's not only responsible for some cool art by Dwayne Bird, it has also been challenging traditional hierarchies everywhere, within and without native communities. As Jacques Rancière would say, it's a form of dissensus, or a dissent from inequality, and an insensibility. By not adhering to conventional methods of protest, Idle No More has been reconfiguring the sensory apparatus that permits participation in legitimate political struggle. The movement is located beyond the pale of acceptability and thus appears as irrational and insensible in the best way possible.

Employing an aesthetic that recalls Viktor Shklovsky's notion of "defamiliarization", Idle No More has forced a new way of seeing by embodying the unfamiliar as a way of enhancing perception of the familiar. At its core, this is essentially revolutionary and absolutely emancipatory. It traverses what Rancière calls the partage, or partition, that separates the legitimate from the illegitimate, and generates genuine hope for substantial and lasting change.

Anil's Ghost: Allegory Of Enlightenment

"The reason for war was war"

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost can be read as an attempt to address the jagged dichotomy that separates the universal from the particular, or in the lexicon of the novel, the international from the local. Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist from Sri Lanka who was educated abroad in the US and Britain and has returned home to begin working on a UN funded investigation into human rights abuses. She arrives in Sri Lanka at dawn, literally the lightening of the world, or the enlightenment. She is 33-years-old, the same age Jesus was at his crucifixion. She is about to embark on a journey that will leave her frequently disorientated as she tries to adjust to her place of (re)birth.

(c/o The Guardian)

Anil represents Kant’s notion of the sensus communis in her capacity as a United Nations envoy tasked with investigating war crimes using the instruments of universal justice. Her challenger is Sri Lanka, the obstacle embodying Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible." Local customs, beliefs and relationships fragment the assumption of a sensus communis by sinking Kant’s transcendental method into immanent context. At the heart of this event is Anil. She is local and international, subjective and objective, immanent and transcendent.

(Squares with Concentric Circles, Wassily Kandinsky)

Rancière’s "radical egalitarianism" is also at play in the novel's attempt to have local issues addressed by native Sri Lankans. This is why Anil was chosen for the job, we are told, because she was born in Sri Lanka. The hierarchy of the UN is supplanted as a local sense of order is imposed from the bottom up, not the top down. However, on closer inspection this is merely a hollow gesture as Anil is actually hired by bureaucrats in Geneva.

Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic is also relevant. Sri Lanka can be read as an untamed wilderness that the UN, with instrumental logic and reason, is attempting to subdue through its notions of universal justice. Rather than allow Sri Lanka to mend itself and discover an alternative justice (and thus undermine UN authority) it must be brought into the fold, or the jurisdiction of the international system of human rights law.

(Guantanamo, Amas, Amat, Rita Duffy)

Onaadtje has avoided any easy conclusions. Anil’s relationship is not only with Sri Lanka; it is also with Sarath, a forty-nine-year-old widowed archeologist from Colombo who is assigned to work with her. Is this a strategy on the part of Ondaatje to suggest that others often introduce variables (love?) into our lives that can upset the most controlled of experiments?

Challenging Aesthetics: Kant Vs. Rancière

I've been subjecting myself to Kant’s Critique of Judgment recently as a primer to engage Jacques Rancière and formulate some hard thoughts on aesthetics. It's not difficult to understand why Kant has animated so many thinkers over the past few centuries and why his legacy is so fraught with contradictions. Was he the rational humanist, Buddha's detached disciple hiding under a powdered wig? Or was he the sinister elitist who laid the groundwork for the universalizing project that ultimately led to the gas chambers? Much of the confusion is a result of what little he had to say about one of Rancière's main concerns: the limits of universality.



Kant's sensus communis is the idea that everyone has access to the same perception of common sense. This essentially rests on the assumption that all of us are hardwired in the same way to determine how an object will be perceived, rather than the object dictating the terms. We're in control. The subject not only transcends the demands of an object, he/she also transcends context or culture, or what Kant called space and time. If everyone has the same basic sensory apparatus then it's possible to define proper standards of perception. If an individual’s sense falls outside the common standard, then the person is at fault, not the system.

 

Rancière’s distribution of the sensible relies on particular social factors related to the subject’s position such as gender, class or race, which can limit or influence his/her participation in the sensible. The distribution assumes a partition or unequal access to the object of perception, which may limit or enhance a subject’s ability to engage with it.



Not surprisingly, these two approaches are at odds with each another. Kant implicitly emphasizes the subject’s power to overcome the limitations that Rancière explicitly describes. Where Kant assumes the subject can transcend context, Rancière suggests it's impossible. How I intend to synthesize these two diametrically opposed positions remains to be seen...

Adorno To Zappa: Culture Mechanics

If the A-Z of cultural studies begins with Theodor Adorno's critique of enlightenment as "mass deception," it should include Jacques Rancière's "emancipated spectator" as its dialectic and wrap up with Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy as its synthesis.

"The single most important development in modern music is making a business out of it...you have reached a point where you can't just sit down and write because you know how to write and you love to write and eventually somebody will listen because they love to listen and maybe somebody will play it because they'll want to play it. That is gone." ~ Frank Zappa

"The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them." ~ Theodor Adorno

Don't be too sure, Mr. Magoo...

"An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators." ~ Jacques Rancière

The Situation: Occupy Wherever

"In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society."

Guy Debord and the Situationists brought game to the spectacle of street protests. It was performance waged with style and subversion that ultimately turned May 1968 into a touchstone for future generations. Did they result in any systemic change? No, but they did cause adjustments and shifts in the system that led to limited forms of progress. Even if this was just an illusion of progress they still raised awareness and opened new ground for future movements to effect change.

So what's going on with the Occupy Wall Street movements flourishing around the globe? First, as should be expected, they're taking on different levels of intensity depending on local or national circumstances. Second, they've crystallized a consensus that is widely shared across a variety of demographics, cultures, political systems and ethnic groups. Third, the potency for change, whether small or large, systemic or not, real or illusory, is still yet to be seen. In the meantime, as Jacques Rancière has suggested, the emancipated spectator is free to find anything valid on his own terms without leaders determining a frame of reference. Be realistic - demand the impossible.