- Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art by Jacques Rancière, and: Dance [and] Theory by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gabriele Klein
by Jacques Rancière. Translated by Zakir Paul. 2013. London: Verso. 304pp., index. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper, e-book available.
by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein. 2013. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 324pp., notes. $45.00 paper, e-book available.
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By many recent accounts, dance and theory are natural bedfellows—an art form and a form of critique that are inherently unstable, difficult to discuss. Both are notoriously impervious to systematic accounts because they are in states of physical and conceptual motion, perpetually underdetermined.
Theory—of the Frankfurt or Yale School varieties, of the kind that continues to multiply in the wake of cultural studies—has long been applied to dance as a critical tool. Two new books are part of a scholarly trend that has been reversing that dynamic, applying dance to theory in an attempt to offer newly rich understandings of both. Scholars interested in how dance aesthetics serve a critical function should welcome their arrival. Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art shows a prominent philosopher employing dance and movement as central concepts in his aesthetic theory (indeed, an image of Loie Fuller graces the cover of this and other translated editions). Meanwhile, Dance [and] Theory, an anthology edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein, offers a range of views on how the critical prerogatives of theory intertwine with the practice of dancing. While published just prior to Aisthesis, many of the critics in this collection draw upon Rancière’s earlier work and treat him as a crucial interlocutor. Dance [and] Theory may thus be seen as, in part, a response to Rancière—one that points toward a more capacious, messy, and fruitful relationship between theory and dance.
Since Aisthesis ranges across a variety of disciplines and media, Joseph Tanke (2013), in his review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noted that “it will be interesting to see how specialists from different fields respond.” Such concerns are well founded from the perspective of dance studies, since Rancière makes some questionable claims about dance history, and offers a surprisingly body-averse account of what dance is. And yet because scholarly discussion of dance has often been limited to dance specialists, seeing a prominent thinker treat dance as an indispensible site of inquiry is welcome, and even leads to some of the book’s richest passages.
Rancière’s ongoing discussion of periodization in art is both innovative and arguable, furthered here by a resolute push to bring “modernism” as a critical term toward its day of reckoning. In The Politics of Aesthetics and in various work since, he has characterized three “regimes” in the history of Western art, ways of understanding art that don’t quite map to sequential periods and yet are helpfully understood through them (Rancière 2004). The ethical regime, inaugurated by Plato and predominant in antiquity, understands art (more properly, image) with regard to its influence upon the ethos of an individual or community. The representative regime, inaugurated by Aristotle and predominant in the what he terms the “classical” fine arts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conceives of art as mimesis, a situation in which art is seen as representing life due to a normative relationship between formal properties and what they express. [End Page 96]
Aisthesis furthers Rancière’s theorization of a third regime, the aesthetic—one that he sees arising diffusely during the late eighteenth century, “when Art began to be named as such” (xiii). And yet that very enshrinement of art as a special category continually destabilizes distinctions between art and daily life: “Art exists as a separate world since anything whatsoever can belong to it” (x). Where other approaches to periodization often ground themselves in relation to historical events of wide-ranging consequence (e.g., modernism and global war), Rancière’s account relies on less tidy criteria, for example the aesthetic regime...