Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick M. Bray (review)

Patrick M. Bray’s collection seeks to aid the reader’s understanding of Rancière’s own contribution to the still developing theoretical paradigm of modernism. He frames this project with the claim that ‘Ranciere’s theory does not constitute a definable system’ and, instead, it allows us to ‘see a new, more political aspect of what we have come to call modernity’ (p. 7). Nevertheless, while Rancière’s writing is difficult to define strictly, this collection brings cohesion and some vital insights on it, starting with Emily Apter’s conviction that Rancière’s theories treats politics as ‘ambient milieu intelligible in the material, the sensible, and the aleatory’ (p. 32; original emphasis). A modernist politics of aesthetics subsequently preoccupies most of the thinkers herein. Margaret Flinn brings together Rancière’s writing on literature and cinema, arguing that Rancière ‘seems to need literature’ (p. 82)—and this is not an overstatement. Since before Courts Voyages au pays du peuple (1990), Rancière has placed literary works at the heart of his political theory, a point echoed in Giuseppina Mecchia’s chapter on La Parole muette (2011) and in David Bell’s chapter on Le Fil perdu (2014). However, in these three chapters, literature is understood in ways quite different to Rancière’s usage. Flinn equates literature with storytelling, so the concept of literature becomes synonymous with the fable. For Mecchia, the act of writing itself is made synonymous with literature. And for Bell, Rancière’s politics of literature regards the democratization of literary producers and characters. All three are highly relevant to Rancière’s objective, but they neglect the importance of temporality to literature’s political potential—a point driven home in Le Partage du sensible (2000). The crucial bind between the social and the temporal is dealt with in greater detail by Suzanne Guerlac in her chapter on Rancière’s engagements with Proust. While making important points on his ‘huge contribution to Proust criticism’ (p. 165), Guerlac’s wider analysis offers a clear and insightful take on Rancière’s approach to the modernist canon. A ‘democratic temporality’ (as Rancière names it in his essay, ‘Rethinking Modernity’ (2014)) is Rancière’s principal way of locating the political potential of modernist literature. This comes through in Alison Ross’s exceptional exploration of will (a philosophical concept with much historical baggage) as an aesthetic phenomenon in the plays of Ibsen and Stendhal. The political will explored in their narratives is framed as an ‘aesthetic motif ’ rather than the ‘choice’ of a ‘rebellion’ (p. 196). This characterizes Rancière’s aesthetic politics of literary modernism through temporal suspension (the term both Ross and, elsewhere, Rancière himself, uses). There are many other major contributions to Rancière studies here. These include the diagrammatics of Tom Conley’s take on Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940); Tina Chanter’s significant intervention on what Rancière can bring to feminist political aesthetic theory; Marina Van Zuylen’s reassessment of the theoretical closeness between Rancière and Bourdieu; and Silvia López’s commentary on the uses of Rancière for understanding contemporary Latin American political art. Bray’s collection—and Bloomsbury’s series, generally—provides a wealth of intriguing new theoretical possibilities.