Godard, Rohmer, and Ranciere's Phrase-Image

According to Jacques Rancière, we are in the midst of a seminal aesthetic regime. The paradigm of this new regime is hybridity. Everywhere we look, Rancière explains, we witness continuous and unfettered border-crossings between genres, between high and low art, art and non-art, art and commodity. These border-crossings are not evidence that differences have been reduced to sameness, but are the sign of a capacity to maintain identities at the heart of pluralism. What appears paradoxical is not. Pluralism is manifest in aesthetics as well as in the larger cultural and political spheres. Jürgen Habermas writes, "la reconnaissance des différences, la reconnaissance mutuelle de l'autre dans son altérité peut aussi devenir la marque d'une identité commune."¹ And Tzvetan Todorov, writing in praise of a united Europe, states in Le Nouveau Désordre mondial,

On pourrait se demander dans ce contexte si l'unification de l'Europe, se produisant de surcroît à l'âge de la mondialisation, ne menace pas cette diversité culturelle. Je crois pour ma part que le danger est surestimé. Les êtres humains ont su de tout temps faire la différence entre identité civique, ou administrative, et identité culturelle; à cet égard, l'Etat-nation est plutôt l'exception que la règle. Posséder un passeport européen ne vous empêche nullement de vous sentir espagnol de coeur, et même andalou.

(133)

Rancière argues that the work of contemporary artists, without being indifferent to distinctions, reflects the collapse of difference we perceive in the world at large. The new aesthetics acknowledges and celebrates multiplicity without reducing it to sameness. It undermines homogeneity and similarities while asserting consensus, diversity, and hybridity. In Le Destin des images, Rancière observes that contemporary art forms, like installation art and conceptual art, are sites where the new paradigm is expressed and promoted. These works may not always be recognized as art because they seem (and often are) random and makeshift constructions. But this is only because we are in a period of transition when both paradigms exist side by side.

Rancière reminds us that the new paradigm explains the collapse of distance between words and images. He points out that although we have long recognized the tight relationship between them, we generally do not grasp how thoroughly words and images have become integrated. We understand, for example, their relationship as one of resemblance and equivalence, based on the notion that words conjure up images and, as the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words. But this under-standing does not go far enough; to use the terms word and image betrays the fact that we are still thinking of their separate and distinct attributes. By their collapse, Rancière suggests that artists no longer see a difference between images and words. He writes,

... l' image n'est pas une exclusivité du visible. Il y a du visible qui ne fait pas image, il y a des images qui sont toutes en mots. Mais le régime le plus courant de l'image est celui qui met en scène un rapport du dicible au visible, un rapport qui joue en même temps sur leur analogie et sur leur dissemblance. Ce rapport n'exige aucunement que les deux termes soient matériellement présents. Le visible se laisse disposer en tropes significatifs, la parole déploie une visibilité qui peut être aveuglante.

Il pourrait sembler superflu de rappeler des choses aussi simples. S'il faut le faire, pourtant, c'est que ces choses simples ne cessent de se brouiller, que l'altérité identitaire de la ressemblance a toujours interféré avec le jeu des relations constitutives des images de l'art.

(15-16, italics in original)

To identify and to explain how the collapse of difference works in aesthetics, Rancière introduces the term phrase-image, an expression that implies more than the joining of words and image. The phrase-image is a rhetorical figure, something like Flaubert's orchestration. It is formed when heterogeneous elements...