Having intended to write a brief report on Ranciere's ICA lecture, I find that Infinite Thought has done exactly that, in a way that thankfully pre-empts and renders obsolete all other other reports and commentaries. I'm particularly grateful that she was able to hear and record his remarks about 'cauliflowers'. What follows, therefore, is a mixture of notes made during the lecture (written up) and some other thoughts of my own. I make no great claims, only that some of my misunderstandings may have proved productive.
Place
Art and politics in Plato. People are identified with their social function, they occupy a place and a mandate which has been defined for them. This is right and proper and it is also the reason why art creates problems. Actors, for example, occupy, through imitation, the place of someone else. In doing so, however, they expose the fact that that place is empty - i.e., it can be filled by anyone and is not ontologically wedded to someone in particular. Art therefore reveals this 'emptiness of place' and the 'illegitimacy' of its current occupant. (This was one of the charges leveled against Elizabethan actors too, as a matter of fact). In this instance, art performs a political function - the disruption of that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order.
Space
For Ranciere, art is political not on account of its message; nor on account of reproducing - through mimesis - the social structure (and thus perhaps revealing it to us). It is political because it creates a 'specific space-time sensorium' which can 'reframe' the practices and categorical imperatives of common sense. It is the space of a specific experience of freedom, and this experience is prefigurative of political freedom. (Sorel's related aphorism: art is the way all work will be in the society of the future). There is the aspiration, which is to be found in Schiller but also in the Modern avant-garde, that the freedom and equality of aesthetic experience can be generalised out into Life.
All art functions as 'installation art'. i.e., An installation is that which creates a defined space into which we can enter which is not simply a mimesis /reproduction of one of the spaces in the outside world. As such it creates a little pocket wherein our senses are addressed and configured in a new way.
This applies even to an art form like the novel. There is a 'phenomenolgy' of entering into, say, Proust's great novel, and of dwellng therein, such that we cling to this world we have entered and do not want to stop reading. The novel has created a habitation for us, and a habitation different from that wherein ordinarily we dwell, even though the novel may tell us all kinds of things about that world (as Proust's undoubtedly does). However implicit, Proust's novel constitutes a silent demand to 'change your life'.
Okay, What defines art is a 'specific sensorium'. But this definition of Art is comparatively recent. Say two hundred years. The museum 'reveals' this concept to us: here, art is disconnected from use, from social hierarchy, from its conditions of production. Infact this relation between art and the museum is the position, roughly, attributed to Proust in Adorno's cardinal essay Valery-Proust museum. Only with the museum, does the truly artistic dimension of art shine through, only now that the art-work has been sequestered from the context in which previously it had been put to work. Postumously, it comes into its own. In Hegelian language, we might say that here art arrives at its concept.
(Proust compares museums to railway stations. Railway stations are peculiar places, removed from 'the field of ordinary pragmatic activity'; they stand outside the town, yet somehow contain the 'essence of its personality'. Removed from the town, they thus return it to itself all the more forcefully. Perhaps, by comparison, the museum removes art to a place apart, only so as to return art to its 'proper home').
Fiction. There is a revealing doubling involved in Ranciere's concept of fiction. (Fiction, the power of fabulation; the giving to 'airy nothing' of a local habitation and name. ) Thus:
Fiction [let's call it F1] creates, inaugurates or opens 'new gaps and new bridges' between different levels of reality*; the undoing of the connection between sign and image, between what can and can't be said, or done, and other such 'ghostly demarcations' which consensus assumes to be pre-inscribed in things themselves. Presumably, this process is to remind us that reality is never simply given but that its borders are endlessly framed and reframed by fiction [F2]. Thus, fiction (F1) is the becoming visible of (F2), ie the work of fiction in unravelling and breaching levels of reality, reveals that reality to have been all along demarcated and framed by fictions which have sunk into the very texture of things and thus become invisible [lost to comprehension]. F1 if the truth of F2.
*reality is here the regime which assigns things their place and relation, polices differences and defines the bounds of the permissable, reality is the regime of signs and distinctions which are misrecognised as the way things are. Thus, reality does not = the Real.
Art and Art.
The chair, P. Hallward suggested there was a conceptual doubling inherent in what Badiou said, 'Art [a1] invents new ways of distinguishing art[a2] and non art'. I.e.clearly a1 and a2 here cannot be identical, even if the word is identical. But what is the difference? I wonder if we're dealing here with something like Badiou's event. Schoenberg's invention of the twelve tone system or whatever does not fall within the existing concept of music, yet cannot simply be written off as non-music. The non-identity of the concept with itself is disclosed by this event.
Put in general terms, then: we are confronted a newness that confounds the existing concept of art, but not in such a way that one can simply say 'sorry, this new thing is not art. It falls outside the concept.' The concept has to be revised or expanded. And this revision presumably reveals a truth about that concept.
n.b. Ranciere seems to have given a lecture very similar to the ICA one here.
For Ranciere's intriguing book on the 'Ignorant Schoolmaster' see here. What I take to be the central point of this book, of which I am wholly ignorant, is that it is the place of the teacher which is crucially important, the structural position of 'Pedagog'. This place has to be there to set the learning process in motion, but it is in a sense an empty place. To offer an anecdotal example along the same lines, many years ago I enrolled on a poetry writing course. Now the person teaching this course didn't seem particularly qualified, knowledgeable etc, but it was enough to have someone setting assignments, arranging meeting times, and someone in relation to whom the students could be defined as students. Consequently, I really did learn things and produce things that I couldn't have produced outside this context. What 'teaches' is the place of the teacher, and this place is 'ignorant'.
See also this interview: "Deleuze fulfills the destiny of the aesthetic'.