lewis levenberg
Documentary and the Visual Culture of Late-Capitalism
Dr. Tim Kaposy
Response 4: Ranciére, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?”
29 November 2010

In Other Words

Yes, some things are unrepresentable, but only if representation constitutes the dominant regime of thinking about art. However, if another regime takes representation’s place, namely, the aesthetic regime, then nothing is unrepresentable. Ranciére traces a change in conceptual frameworks that implicitly mirrors an historical transition, from classical to romantic to modern art. Making that dialectical transition explicit provides a way to ask what aesthetics/modern art excludes in turn. It also suggests one way to extend Ranciére’s argument against itself, and into what might come after or against an aesthetic regime. And so this response inquires about the conditions of representability in and after an aesthetic regime, precisely on the grounds of an historical politics. This is an attempt to ground the ‘post-’ in the postmodern. 

Ranciére uses the strictest sense of "unrepresentable," as a brief explication of its etymology reveals. The term derives from a negation of "representable," that itself applies a suffix indicating the intransitive possession of agency, to the transitive verb "represent.” That verb stems from another, "present," which in French appears identically, as present. This in turn draws on the Latin oblique stem praesent, which grew from praesens. Breaking this present participle into its roots indicates that prae-, meaning "before," attaches to the root infinitive esse, meaning "to be."  In this sense, "present" means "to be before," or "to be in view." Following this definition provides an important claim, both for Ranciére and for us: Unrepresentability is an ontological condition. 

That which changes in art practice - regardless of medium - changes the structure of art theory. Ranciére attributes one direction to causality: from practice to theory. As history and philosophy adapt in response to anti-representational art, both abstract and realist, Ranciére focuses on the cognitive functions entailed by representation and aesthetics. He shows how we make art by thinking about it, a common thread in such discussions from the early twentieth century on. As he critiques Lyotard’s appropriation of Kant’s and Burke’s sublimes, however, he traces a lapse in their conceptions of a possible anti-representation. 

In his assumption of a linear flow in both causality and history, Ranciére erases a salient historical trajectory. The historical analogy between an “aesthetic regime” and modern art remains implicit. Correspondingly, in tracing a lapse in Lyotard’s arguments, he himself lapses in thought. Ranciére never mentions that just like representation’s dialectical engagement with unrepresentable things, the aesthetic regime also struggles against its own excess.

Aesthetics excretes the concepts of unrepresentability, void, null, and nothingness themselves. These are, in short, not qualities of things with essences, but the very opposites of essences. Furthermore, these concepts occur, and remain excluded, only in the context of aesthetics. An anti-aesthetic regime, then, might incorporate them. If the elision of history in his text admits to its importance, then the movement from classical to romantic to modern now posits postmodern art, analogous to an anti-aesthetic regime of art’s thought. So, following Ranciére’s terms, what might postmodernism hold as its own conditions of excess?

For Ranciére, representation posits the conditions of unrepresentability as the invasion of pathos into the creative power of poiesis and the receptive cognitive function of aesthesis. In this way, some things remain beyond material representation Cognitively, however, they insist on existing and emerging, and so those ‘unrepresentable’ things constitute the excess of representation. Consequently, as Burke and Lyotard posit a so-called alternative, ‘sublime’ art, aesthetics adapts these conditions in practice, to include any event or thing whatsoever as potentially representable. It makes all objects and subjects democratically available for representation. Ranciére describes the adoption of paratactic and generic language to express even the most inhumane events, for example. In short, aesthetics subsumes and consolidates the conditions under which art can represent something, and allows any thing to be represented in art. However, what about non-things?

Here we enter that speculative hyperbole to which Ranciére refers. Perhaps only the very notion of nothingness, the non-existent, the void, or the inconceivable, that is, ‘unrepresentability itself,’ can escape the aesthetic regime. Even in aesthetic or modernist terms, such non-things can be ‘represented,’ for example, by pure white or pure black on canvas, or through language. However, such expressions only represent the “conceptual shape” of those non-things. Neither abstraction nor realism can yet represent the non-existent void itself. Even ‘conceptual’ modern art has a material form. Every aesthetics requires a mediation. 

The excess of modernist aesthetics does not refer to a kind of reformed sublime, and Ranciére correctly critiques Lyotard’s untenable combination of Kant’s and Burke’s homologous concepts. However, Ranciére neglects to account for Lyotard’s insistence that a ‘postmodern’ does not indicate an historical period. Lyotard rejects an era easily demarcated from modernism, which would somehow have been easily severed from romanticism, which would somehow have been easily separated from classicism... No, the ‘post-’ in post-modernism (just like the ‘anti-’ in anti-representation) describes an ongoing irruption of the excess within the regime. 

Ranciére overlooks Lyotard’s argument that postmodernism coexists with and complements modernism, focusing instead on visual and linguistic cues as symptoms of a hypothetical postmodern. Ranciére favors theoretical and conceptual modeling, and declines to think through the historical coexistence between the regimes that he describes. However, his schematic outlining remains clear and productive. It allows us to respond to the conditions under which an ontological distinction may be drawn between available and unavailable objects for art, and to wonder what comes next when that same distinction collapses into a new regime.

Ranciére’s titular question also remains valid and important. However, once we distinguish the unrepresentable from the ‘unaestheticizable,’ we may fold non-things into the systemic conditions of postmodernism. So, to rephrase the argument once more, and in conclusion: if representation indicates the insufficiency of art to its objects, and aesthetics indicates the insufficiency of art to the concept of the unrepresentable, then a postmodern regime indicates the insufficiency of art to itself.

SCHEMATIC OVERVIEW:
First two rows reflect Ranciére’s argument; third row (italicized) reflect my response.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REGIME   			 CONDITIONS   	 	UNREPRESENTABLE?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  				 poiesis   			
REPRESENTATION   			 < pathos   	 	SOME THINGS
(classic-romantic)		 aesthesis
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(anti-representation)		 event
AESTHETICS				 < choices   	 	NOTHINGNESS
(romantic-modern)		 art   			
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(anti-aesthetics)		creativity
POSTMODERN			< capital		ART		
	reception
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. DEFINITION
(Source: Origins, ed. Eric Partridge. New York: Crown, 1983. p. 187.)