Search Results (15)

This article examines the processes of de-Sovietization of public spaces in Lithuania, focusing on the visual transformation of monuments after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While scholarship has primarily analyzed the dismantling of Soviet monuments as acts of iconoclasm, this study argues that de-Sovietization is a dual process involving both negative and positive dimensions: the removal of Soviet-era symbols and the creation of new monuments that articulate a post-Soviet national narrative. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s framework of artistic regimes, the article explores how newly constructed or restored monuments embody the search for a new symbolic language of political and social communication. The analysis is based on qualitative content analysis of expert interviews with sculptors, architects, and artists involved in monument-making in Lithuania since 1990. Over the past three decades, more than 400 monuments have been erected in Lithuania, reflecting the tensions between continuity and rupture with Soviet monumentalism. While naturalistic monuments often avoided controversy, projects departing from realistic aesthetics—such as Regimantas Midvikis’ Exploded Bunker and Andrius Labašauskas’ Freedom Hill—became sites of conflict and public debate. By identifying the visual features of positive de-Sovietization, the article contributes to understanding how post-Soviet societies negotiate historical memory, identity, and aesthetic form in public space. Full article

This essay argues that Holiday Powers’ s Moroccan Modernism (2025) offers a compelling case study for rethinking global modernist art from a decolonial perspective, highlighting Morocco’s unique creative, esthetic, and philosophical forces. The questions and issues this book raises, and this essay addresses, revolve around the problematic of non-European modernism as both a phenomenon of decolonial politics of esthetics, in the Jacques Rancière sense, and an artistic movement born out of the history of Western art through the colonial imposition of the European conception of modernity and system of education. I take particular issue with the dominance of political history, identity discourse, and redundant postcolonial rhetoric that characterizes not only Powers’ narrative but also the account of other area modernisms. This dominance generates a tendency to misestimate art agency and to neglect the investigation of the complex creative, esthetic, and philosophical underpinnings of the modernist construct. A lucid revisiting of Orientalism is mandatory for tackling this understudied aspect of modernism. Yet, I also demonstrate the accomplishments of Moroccan Modernism as a cogent historical exposition of this construct in Morocco, upon the basis of which future studies can be undertaken. Full article

While Jacques Rancière’s concept of the political, democracy, emancipation, equality and aesthetic have significantly (re)shaped many recent debates, his notion of dis-agreement—in its French formulation of ‘mésentente’, meaning the fact of not hearing, and/or of not understanding—has received relatively little attention. This article argues that if politics, as Rancière suggests, arise from a novel perceptual universe and if dis-agreement entails not-hearing and/or not-understanding, then “speaking politics”—the very act of breaking away from the dominant configuration of the police order—might be perceived as a noisy sound rather than as coherent and intelligible words. Drawing on Rancière’s concept of mésentente, this article examines the noisy, and largely unintelligible, protests sparked by the violent femicide of Giulia Cecchettin which occurred in Italy in 2023. Ultimately, it raises the following questions: which words are intelligible? Does intelligibility depend on the voice of the speaking subjects? Or does it hinge on the (un)familiarity of the vision they project? How can acts of politics be recognized if the words used are unintelligible? Full article

The question of aesthetics in film-theoretical discourse today is split between, on the one hand, a film-phenomenological or “filmosophical” approach that values the putatively immanent relation between film and the mind and, on the other, the naturalizing epistemology of post-theory, which reduces the question of film aesthetics to one of poetics. What unites these otherwise disparate projects is the consideration of aesthetics divorced from the question of politics; in both cases, the social or political significance of the film–spectator relationship has been summarily purged. In this article, I will offer an alternative account of film aesthetics that draws on Jacques Rancière’s theory concerning the mutually determining relationship between aesthetics and politics. In particular, I will consider the relevance of Rancière’s thesis concerning what he calls the distribution of sensible to current accounts, as well as taking up his novel consideration of aesthetic distance and the “emancipated” spectator. With respect to film phenomenology, I will examine how its film-theoretical program rests on the flawed concept of a de-politicized spectator enchained by the film image. With respect to post-theory, I will examine how its appropriation from cognitive science of the rational agent model of meaning making inappropriately limits the political potential of film aesthetics. Full article

In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches. Full article

The concept of navigation, introduced by Harun Farocki in his lecture Computer Animation Rules, explains the digital/algorithmic choreography of consumer behaviour through media platforms. This article contends navigational connectivity is a cybernetic operating structure for capital, which mediates the techno-geographic milieu of the capitalocene and is a key factor in the present destabilization of earth systems. There is, therefore, an urgent need to formulate ways of disarticulating navigational processes to fragment global capitalism and re-establish a diversification of local cultures. We undertake this task in tandem with the critical project of cosmotechnics developed by Yuk Hui and examine how an ontological disagreement between Gilles Deleuze and Quentin Meillassoux shapes Hui’s analysis of cybernetics. Contra Meillassoux’s correlationist reading, we argue Deleuze foregrounds machinic becoming through a primal contact with the virtual and claim practices of montage are machines of analysis that dismantle navigational connections and establish alternate patterns of feedback estranged from the capitalist process. To this end, we examine models of montage developed by Jacques Rancière, Farocki and Deleuze, and consider the potential of such models to function as machines of navigational disarticulation and cultural pluralization. This approach reframes user engagement as modulative becoming in a manner that introduces new techno-cultural-geographic conjunctions appropriate to cosmotechnics. Full article

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. Full article

This paper locates the educational psychologist’s (EP) involvement in addressing social justice in practice. It uses some philosophical ideas from Jacques Rancière, particularly the idea of the distribution of the sensible and dissensus, to help us question how systems that are aimed at contributing to a socially just society can limit social justice itself. Whilst the argument of this paper is applicable to educational psychologists internationally, this paper is situated within a Scottish context. It uses a vignette to draw out a philosophical reading of the EP’s involvement in the narrative. This paper gives some examples of how structures that are aimed at supporting social justice often position the EPs within these systems so that thinking, being and doing are shaped according to the structures that they inhabit. The establishment of such structures and discourses have limited the meaning and implementation of social justice. This means that the identity of both those requiring the involvement of the EP, as well as the EP and other professionals is determined in terms of their ‘proper place’ and their activity is determined in terms of its ‘proper function’. The paper argues that EPs can interrupt the procedural flow and provide a dissenting voice which can ultimately lead to social justice in ways that the normal flow of procedure does not. Full article

Necropolitics centers on the dark side of biopolitics, but if we are to take seriously Jacques Ranciere’s reassignment of ‘politics’ and ‘police,’ then what is revealed by necropolitical analysis is not simply the capacity to ‘make and let die’, but also the policing of a contingent order sustained by necropolitics. I describe this process as the necropolice-economy, and in this paper demonstrate its contours with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic which, I argue, has revealed the expendability of particular populations under conditions of risk and uncertainty. My analysis proceeds in three parts. First, I present the thesis of necropolice economy, arguing that the capitalist system has historically produced not simply a political economy, but a policed economy that induces a necropolitics of dispensability for unproductive or replaceable populations. Second, I develop this thesis by examining the relegation of society in relation to the economy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, I argue that the inability of states to be decisive in the pandemic reveals that the sovereign prerogative to decide on the exception is constrained by capitalist forces. This suggests that the world market is itself a sovereign force, though it is one that remains ever dependent on state violence. To conclude, I ask whether we can channel the trauma of death made visible into processes of memorialization that might catalyze revolutionary action, rather than accelerating the evolution of our necropolice economy into its next capitalist guise—I ask, provocatively, whether an emancipatory necropolitics might yet result from the contemporary moment. Full article

Despite a decade of diversity policy plans, a wave of student rallies has ignited debates across western European university campuses. We observe these debates from a situated call for anti-racism in Belgian higher education institutions, and critically reflect on the gap between diversity policy discourse and calls for anti-racism. The students’ initiatives make a plea for racial literacy in the curriculum, to foster a critical awareness on how racial hierarchies have been educated through curricula and institutional processes. Students rethink race as a matter to be (un)learned. This pedagogical question, on racial literacy in the curriculum, is a response to diversity policies often silent about race and institutionalised racisms. Students request a fundamental appeal of knowledgeability in relation to race; diversity policy mostly envisions working on (racial) representation, as doing anti-racist work. This article argues how racial literacy might offer productive ways to bridge the disparities between students’ calls for anti-racism and the institutional (depoliticised) vocabulary of diversity. We implement Stuart Hall’s critical race theory and Jacques Rancière’s subjectification as key concepts to study and theorise these calls for anti-racism as a racial literacy project. This project can be built around engagement as educational concept. We coin possibilities to deploy education as a forum of engagement and dialogue where global asymmetries such as race, gender and citizenship can be critically addressed. Full article

In recent years, scholars in broadly considered posthumanities have attempted to reconceptualize politics in order to better account for the role of nonhuman entities in political processes. In this context, the article instantiates a dialogue between Jacques Rancière and Bruno Latour on one of the fundamental questions of politics, that is, the question of logos. Even though Latour and Rancière differ considerably in their theoretical and political orientations, each of them revisits the question of ‘who can speak?’ in order to examine the ways in which speechless entities gain a voice, thereby becoming intelligible as political entities. In this article, I confront Rancière’s reservations about nonhumans as political agents, showing how Latour offers pathways beyond Rancière’s apparent bias towards the human, a bias that is, I argue, fundamentally contradictory to the latter’s broader conceptualization of politics as aesthetics. I formulate a Latourian rebuttal of Rancière’s reservations and analyse the utility of Latour’s thought in overcoming Rancière’s limitations. Latour’s reorientation of logos towards the concept of ‘articulation’ makes it possible to evacuate, to some extent, the human exceptionalism from Rancière’s philosophy. Combining Latour with Rancière permits to fundamentally rearticulate the parameters of left-wing thinking about nonhumans. Full article

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three theorists have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything. Full article

This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened. Full article

This article aims to present a few tensions and contradictions when implementing children’s rights using the case of three Casas de Pensamiento Indígena (CPI)—indigenous childcare services—in Bogotá. It questions global policies and local interpretations of early childhood education. Its main purpose is to find insights on what it means to attend to young children from minority groups. Could early childhood education and care (ECEC) services be reduced to ethnic backgrounds? In the struggle to deal with global, local, and community discourses, policy makers see positive discrimination not only as a way to justify their actions and their policies but also as a way to respond to the question of equity and diversity, regardless of equality. Therefore, this article highlights this discussion on positive discrimination as a way to intensify social inequality or reproduce inequalities at another level with a different name. Rancière’s dissertation on politics (Rancière 1998) and on the different meanings of politics and politique is used to understand the subtle relationship between equity and diversity. Considering all of this, it was decided to do fieldwork to comprehend the daily lives of CPI settings and the complexity of their formalization/institutionalization. The study highlights how CPI both differs from and is part of conventional services, and how indigenous caregivers and children face an institutional script that asks them to perform indigenism. Full article

Rebutting J. M. Bernstein’s interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics in an essay where Bernstein uses Rancière to praise classic Hollywood cinema, the present article turns to a series of recent essays and a lecture by Rancière to argue that, pace Bernstein, for Rancière the conditions that demanded 19th-century modernism’s critique of the intertwined concepts of narrative and action still prevail today, in the era of entertainment cinema. The egalitarian social condition foreshadowed by the aesthetic for Rancière demands suspension of the very conditions of domination of nature and passive spectacle endemic to contemporary life. In other words, my essay argues that Rancière must and does remain committed to a version of aesthetic modernism, albeit one founded in an undoubted realism and a concomitant ideal of social equality. Full article