Appearance, politics, subjectivation: from Foucault to Rancière

Abstract

The author takes as a starting point the conflict between Michel Foucault's description of panopticism and Jacques Rancière's claim that the imperative of emancipation consists in one's making oneself visible in the public space, and, by comparing the methods followed by both philosophers, exposes the discrepancies in the way either of them thematizes each of the three elements which combine to make for the said contradiction, i.e. politics, subjectivation and appearance. Parting from Foucault's archaeological method and his concept of power, Rancière aims at making the practices of resistance to power positively conceivable. This is achieved mainly by introducing the notion of 'subjectivation' as a productive form of resistance. As a key characteristic of the subject, along with its finitude, being for the other, etc., Rancière puts forward its ability to influence the existing 'division of the sensual'. Rancière's more open attitude towards the problem of emancipation can be explained, among other things, by the role allotted within his philosophic system to aesthetics both as sensual cognition and as discourse on the arts. It may be argued that, among the three actors of the aesthetics, the philosopher, the author and the spectator, it is the latter who is the immediate object of emancipation for Rancière. To the extent the spectator displays activity not expected from him or her within any regime of sensuality implying a hierarchy between activity and passivity, he or she brings this regime into question. There is a correlation between subjectivity and spectatorship: it is precisely because the subject, for Rancière, is what is 'unaccounted for' in the current order of distribution of the sensual that it can be seen by the 'emancipated spectator' alone and thus escapes the 'trap' of panopticism.