The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière
Verso, £9.99
Jacques Rancière’s latest work represents an enjoyably multifarious rescue of the artistic image: a rescue from both the communicative impotence to which it is sentenced by the cynicism of mass media-driven life and the other-worldly autonomy to which it is elevated by the reactionary romantic.
In his answer to the familiar lament that “if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content”, Rancière introduces his own multivalent conception of the image: that which constitutes both a common artistic currency across all mediums, as well as an anti-representative aesthetic cohesion of art and life as the image is freed from its bounded existence as autonomous other and art is embedded within the realm of the everyday. And this future of the image is also a past and present of the image; it provides a complex, although always rationally grounded, means of negotiating modern and contemporary art, bringing forth many and various focused examples across painting, literature and film.
Naturally, however, this would-be chivalrous act of rescue does not come without its own didactic agenda or without a healthy dose of loaded rhetoric. Indeed, it is interesting to note that Rancière’s ostensibly all-encompassing, egalitarian liberation of the image from the holy shrouds of purity and mysticism is not without its own limiting implications.
The image for Rancière is a perplexing synthesis of numerous contrasting binaries: it is the word and the image; the sayable and the visible; the before and the after; the cause and the effect. It is the particular operations at work, both between different parts of the whole composition and between what is experienced and what is conceived. In fact, it is such an “interplay of operations” that produces for Rancière “what we call art” and since this interplay is so unbounded – it has no fixed product, only the particular experience of the viewer or reader – it is this very “imageness” that we may think of as art. Thus we come to realise that it is not just the future of the image that Rancière presents to us, but a rather more weighty prophecy altogether: that of the future of art.
Rather typically, Rancière is keen to show a close relationship between politics and aesthetics and it seems to him that we have a choice to make in terms of the conjoined future of both. Either we allow a dangerous religious sentiment to implore the purity of the sublime and help a threatening mystical fervour to ferment, or we utilise artistic qualities to “reinforce a move towards radical democracy”.
Rancière makes his choice known and shunning the idea that art may provide a peculiar and specific form for otherwise unrepresentable conceits as a “vacuous” spiritual escapism that “places a whole regime of art under the sign of holy terror”, he embeds the language of art within that of the everyday such that it acquires a certain “boundlessness” in terms of representable content, but also a notable accessibility to all.
Yet within Rancière’s boundless system, it seems to me that there are certain art works or forms that we may have trouble including or that we might not be able to conceptualise under the anti-representative aesthetic regime of novelistic realism. For example, although Rancière devotes his efforts in Painting in the Text to the dilution of Clement Greenberg’s particular brand of formalist purity (and following the pointed reaction of the Neo-Dadaists to and the writings of several subsequent art theorists on Greenberg et al, one questions whether this particular dethroning is as necessary as Rancière seems to deem it), he does not offer his own interpretation of the Abstract Expressionist works with which Greenberg’s discourse was so intertwined. Instead, the majority of Rancière’s examples of abstract painting tend to be styles that although de-figured to an extent, still incorporate traces of volumetric or linear form. In particular, I would have liked to have seen how the placid, abstract surfaces of Mark Rothko acted as “an interface that transfers the images into the text and the text into the images”; or how the techniques of novelistic realism are at work, how to trace a “logic of minor perceptions” across the flat unbroken plane of Rothko’s canvases. Similarly, it would have been interesting to have been shown “imageness” at work in examples of formless music.
Rancière writes that the abstract canvas is “only constructed in the device whereby words work the painted surface so as to construct a different plane of intelligibility for it” and what is to be noted about this surface, it seems, is that it is one of “dissociation and de-figuration”. So it seems that every abstract canvas is reduced to the same “imageness”. It is all art purely because of the words that we may attach to it to describe its achievement of visible “anti-representation”. As such, there can be nothing to differentiate a Rothko from a Pollock, a Mondrian, a Richter or even from another Rothko. Where forms remain, such as in Cubism or Impressionism, we may recognise each individual work’s particular visible and sayable “blur” of “identities of objects” and “boundaries between realms”; each specific composition may evoke its own character as such. But where all we have are colour fields or disjointed slashes of paint, is all that is remarkable about the work really the fact that it is “de-figured”, “anti-representative”, abstract?
Of course, translating a general thesis into every specific example will always be problematic, but to assign a universal political purpose to all artworks is dangerously limiting. One wonders whether certain unaddressed and awkward forms even register for Rancière as artworks if they cannot be made to fit with his definition of art or to reinforce his political agenda. Still, The Future of the Image is an enjoyably complex, although gratifyingly lucid work. This is a highly recommended read for anyone who is interested in the ways in which art may be seen to function within modern social and political life.
Laura Hayhurst-France
