ABSTRACT
‘Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct “fictions,” that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done’, claims Jacques Rancière (2004: 39; emphasis in original). These ‘fictions’ link the knowledges created by politics1 and art through their narrative practices that reconfigure what is seen, heard and understood about the contemporary world. The word ‘fiction’ used in this way signifies a strategy rather than a genre; it ‘means far more than the constructing of an imaginary world. … It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the “real”’ (Rancière 2010: 141). Fictions are particular to what Rancière calls the ‘aesthetic regime of the arts’. Temporally associated with modernity, the aesthetic regime offers a contrast to the other two regimes in Western art: the ‘ethical regime of images’ that focuses on the authenticity (or ‘truth content’) of the images and how they are to be used and the ‘representative regime’ that identifies what is appropriate for artistic representation and how it should be represented (mimesis). The aesthetic regime breaks from these strictures and disengages the arts from rigid rules of subject matter and form. It breaks down ‘the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making’ (Rancière 2004: 23), and in so doing, it not only establishes a connection between the art work and the social world, but significantly it also democratises art in that art becomes the domain of everyone. Fiction, as redefined within the aesthetic regime, is a strategy to alter perception and understanding and to expose the invisible; it ‘is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance’ (Rancière 2010: 141).
