ABSTRACT
As the communist regime struggled to maintain power in 1980s Poland, political graffiti was commonplace but short term. Any scrawled expression of dissent or protest would vanish soon after it appeared, covered over with almost supernatural speed by hurried splashes of paint that neutralised its message. However, in August 1982 in an even more mysterious fashion, gnomes began to appear, dancing and strolling their way across these hastily painted coverings. The casual, ‘apolitical’ pointy-hatted stick men seemed oblivious to their precarious location in the midst of a political dispute. Nor did they have anything to say about it. They just appeared. Then of course, the government functionaries had to be despatched once more to attend to the urgent business of painting over gnomes. Since the late 1990s Rancière’s work has taken a more explicitly aesthetic
turn, observable in his introduction of a new phrase for the police order as a ‘distribution of the sensible’.4 Although the introduction of this phrase has gone unremarked in earlier chapters it is salient to flag it up at this point in our discussion because it was introduced to articulate more precisely the particular way that police logic defines and legitimates the appropriate distribution of the social. Through this shift to the terminology of the ‘sensible’ Rancière signals the centrality of aesthetics for his conceptualisation of the ‘politics’/police framework. He tells us that the distribution of the sensible refers to a ‘generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed’.5 Accordingly,
the essence of the police is a distribution ‘characterised by the absence of void or supplement’ such that all identities are tied to particular ways of doing, saying and being in particular specified locations.6 In contrast, the ‘essence of politics is dissensus’ which he now describes as a ‘demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself ’.7 As we have seen in the previous chapters, ‘politics’ ‘before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable’.8 ‘Politics’ operates according to dissensus, which is the break in the order of the sensible, allowing us to recognise that the rupture of ‘politics’ is that which ushers in a reconfiguration of our sensory perceptions. While Chapters 3 and 4 elaborated practices that could help to weaken our
attachment to ways of doing and saying, this final chapter will turn to consider how we might conceive of practices that challenge our very ways of being. Following on from the previous chapter’s discussion of poeticity, it will expand the argument beyond the linguistic field to consider poeticity in the more general sense of the poeticity of being. It will begin by questioning the availability of Rancière’s conceptualisation of ‘politics’ as dissensus, raising the concern that this does not acknowledge the ways in which our perceptions are regulated and disciplined to shut down and oppose dissensus. It will suggest that the tradition of the absurd may be able to inspire ways of undermining this regulation, but in order to do so effectively, it needs to be liberated from its location within performance to recognise our everyday lives as performative. It will thus be argued that Butler’s theorisation of performativity through iteration can be used to supplement the theorisation of ‘politics’ as dissensus. In order to make this argument, however, it is necessary to trace the differences between these two thinkers on the topic of subjectivation, which will enable us to think more carefully about the subject of subversion. Thus we will conclude that absurdity can provide us with the final democratic practice of this book, a practice that exploits the poeticity of being to undermine and challenge our everyday adherence to any sensible distribution.
