The Future of the Image (review)

The translation of The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière is a further confirmation of the continued commitment to the work of the contemporary French philosopher on the part of the Anglophone publishing world. In particular, this is the third book by Rancière to be published by Verso in 2007, just a few months after On the Shores of Politics and Hatred of Democracy. With respect to these other two Verso titles, The Future of Image presents to the Anglophone reader a different aspect of Rancière’s recent thought, much more connected to his research in modern and postmodern aesthetics than to the field of political philosophy.

The conceptual bridge between these two concerns, which run parallel in Rancière’s recent and current philosophical research, is already available in English, mostly in The Politics of Aesthetics, published by Continuum in 2004. It was in one of the essays contained in this book, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” originally published in 2000, that Rancière outlined his vision of the historical development of three different “regimes” of art: the ethical, the representative, and the aesthetic. The first one, of Platonic origin, saw in the absolute separation of artistic “simulacra” and in “true” educational tools the only politically expedient understanding of art; the second one, inaugurated by Aristotle, saw in the function of mimesis, both in literature and in the visual arts, the legitimization for an independent artistic domain; the third one, which intervened much later, basically with Romanticism, not only destroyed the clearly defined internal and external boundaries of representational mimesis but also increasingly detaching itself from representation tout court. These three different “regimes” of art coincide with the historical dominance of different forms of political ordering: the ethical regime coincides with the semi-totalitarian, ethical state described in Plato’s Republic, the representative regime flourishes in highly organized and even hierarchical political structures, from the Greek polis to the French Ancien Régime, and the third one only truly emerging with the demands of absolute equality making their way into the Western political arena after the upheavals brought about by the French Revolution.

In the five essays contained in The Future of the Image, which originally date from late 2001 and 2002, the issues treated in “The Distribution of the Sensible” come back, but mostly with respect to what we commonly call the modern and postmodern “visual” arts, that is painting, cinema, and also more recent audio-visual installations, where “images” and their connections to a narrative or affective end occupy the center stage. It is already in the first essay, which gives the title to the whole collection, that we immediately grasp the originality of Rancière’s approach to the visual arts, since his very definition of what is an “image” is profoundly innovative: the image is not merely something that you see, and artistic images are not something that refers you to something else. Artistic images “are . . . operations: relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them”(3).

By locating the place of images not in the retina, but in the brain, in the linguistic and discursive processes involved in making sense of perceptions, Rancière both distances himself and neutralizes a whole branch of postmodern discourse on the image, from the never mentioned but clearly present Baudrillard’s nihilistic apprehension of the “simulacrum,” to Lyotard’s opposition of the sublime silence of images to the deadly chatter of Western Reason, which Rancière challenges directly in the second essay of the collection. Devoted to a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s recently published Histoire du Cinéma, this second essay entitled “Sentence, Image, History,” further clarifies Rancière’s understanding of the image, underscoring the dependence of cinema from the general model of the aesthetic regime of the arts. From a discussion of the paratactic juxtaposition of...