Translator's Introduction: Jacques Rancière, "Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative"

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION: JACQUES RANCIÈRE, “AUTONOMY AND HISTORICISM: THE FALSE ALTERNATIVE” PATRICK NICKLESON A discipline . . . is not first of all the definition of a set of methods appropriate to a certain domain or a certain type of object. It is first the very constitution of this object as an object of thought, the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge. —Jacques Rancière1 HE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER JACQUES RANCIÈRE has recently gained much notice in Anglo-American scholarship for bringing an egalitarian theory of politics and historiography to bear on the aesthetics of literature, poetry, film, sculpture, and painting. That Rancière has little to say about music has been noted in many sources.2 The rare essay on music historical literature translated below was written as a contribution to a 2003–04 seminar called Penser l’oeuvre musicale au XXe siècle: avec, sans ou contre histoire? at l’École Normale supérieure,3 organized by François Nicolas and Gilles Dulong. As such, many of Rancière’s lines of argument are specifically responses to the proceedings, and in T 326 Perspectives of New Music particular to Nicolas’s formalist insistence on an autonomous “world of music.”4 Because this contribution is atypical of Rancière’s writing, and it may be a first introduction to his thought for some readers, I offer a brief overview of his thought as a means of tying this essay into his broader writing. Rancière’s egalitarian philosophy is founded on a premise, as much political and pedagogic as methodological, that “the same intelligence is at work in all acts of the human mind.”5 From this foundational axiom he challenges what he calls “allegories of inequality”—between teacher and student, performer and listener, subject and object, even cause and effect.6 This has led to a particularly pointed critique of mastery and expertise, as well as the Althusserian scientism in which he was trained, which places the opening sentences of this essay—in which he confesses he is neither a musician nor a historian of music, and that the specific power of music has always evaded him—particularly pointed. While the reference to musicians and music literature found here distinguish “Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative” from his other writing, the essay also reveals close parallels to ideas presented elsewhere more prominently. Readers familiar with Aesthetics and Its Discontents will recognize an early version of his commentary on Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s diminished-seventh chords, and the ideas presented here on artistic autonomy and heteronomy are more prominently laid out in articles like “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.”7 While the latter article makes its case through reference to those whom Davide Panagia calls Rancière’s “writerly figures”—Mallarmé, Flaubert, Schelling, and so on8—here we find him referring to the Ars Nova, Bach, Rameau, the Second Viennese School, Lachenmann, and Sciarrino. Rancière is not introducing the reader to new work, new ideas, or new concepts in music; his approach is that of a philosopher of historiography , set out to “dissonate” our foundational assumptions about the teleological underpinnings of modernism in music and elsewhere.9 These musical figures shift the discussion of Rancière’s well-known regimes of art in light of the regimes of historicity that he borrows here from François Hartog,10 such that the representative regime is described as “the pairing of history-as-example and of history-as-agency” and the aesthetic regime as a form of history-as-coexistence. In this sense, it is a unique introduction to his often misinterpreted (or at least oversimplified ) ideas of the regimes of the arts, of interest to both Rancière scholars and newcomers. Further, in his opening discussion of Rameau’s Treatise, Socrates’s dreamed injunction to “make music,” and the relationships between the Conservatory classroom and the popular Translator’s Introduction: Autonomy and Historicism 327 radio audience, we get a clear sense of the broad method of equality through which Rancière’s thought comes into contact with a discipline like music—that is, in forming itself around the constitution of a particular...