Making Sense: Jacques Rancière and the Language Poets

"Making Sense: Jacques Rancière and the Language Poets" reads the political poetics of the group known as the Language Poets alongside the recent writings on aesthetics by the political philosopher Jacques Rancière. Both Rancière and the Language Poets, I argue, make a political claim for the aesthetic by way of writing's disruptive reconfiguring of ordinary forms of sensory experience. Also, both position aesthetics as anterior to politics and thereby grant to aesthetics a determining relation to the political. While in part interested in making plain the parallels between Rancière and the Language Poets, the essay also argues that this "thinking together" permits both a clarification of the political aesthetic project of Language Poetry and a recognition of a substantial shift in Rancière's thinking as he moves from political philosophy to aesthetics.