http://www.egs.edu/ French theorist Jacques Ranciere speaking at the European Graduate School (EGS) in August, 2009 on the relation between cinema, movement and truth, or more precisely between the cinematographic deployment of appearances and classical narrative logic. Examining several films, especially Hitchcock's Vertigo as a paragonistic example of the medium, Ranciere works through the shifting play between truth and Aristotelian plot. Free Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009 Jacques Ranciere.
Jacques Ranciere is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St. Denis). He first came to prominence under the tutelage of Louis Althusser when he co-authored with his mentor Reading Capital. After the calamitous events of May 1968 however, he broke with Althusser over his teachers reluctance to allow for spontaneous resistance within the revolution. Ranciere is known for his sometimes remote position in contemporary French thought; operating from the humble motto that the cobbler and the university dean are equally intelligent, Ranciere has freely compared the works of such known luminaries as Plato, Aristotle, Deleuze and others with relatively unknown thinkers like Joseph Jacototy and Gabriel Gauny. The idea of equal intelligence shines, for Ranciere, a light on the status of political equality; ordinary people should have a presumption of intelligence, in the same way we offer a presumption of innocence. Like a compassionate Plato (rather than the insecure, bullying Plato we see in the Meno Dialogue), Ranciere simply believes that everyone can think. The original wrong, according to Ranciere occurs when we hear the roaring of the masses in place of people speaking.
There is, in Rancieres vision, a surprising level of trust in the word and the image, one of an almost anti-hermeneutical structure. He is confident in language as a structure for identifying things and events in the world, while at the same time identifying that distance between words and things. Democracy then is the experience of the distance of things; man acts as though his voice can be heard, but is always a proper distance from it. The problem, then, is not knowing what you are doing but the problem is to think about what you are doing, to remember yourself.
Jacques Rancieres books have covered pedagogy, the writing of history, philosophy, cinema, aesthetics and contemporary art. His critics have had a hard time defining him, placing him at different points as a philosopher, a literary critic, an art theorist and a marxist. In Rancieres words, thought is just an expression of a condition, and his work doesnt belong to a discipline because it belongs to an attempt to break the borders of a discipline. Like Foucault then, Ranciere has returned to the archives to, in a sense, re-examine the practices of historiography pitting the ideas of Plato on workers time with the writings of a nineteenth century worker writing about his sense of time.
In The Future of the Image, Ranciere argues that, through the image, art and politics have always been intrinsically linked. Drawing on a series of art movements, filmmakers like Godard and Breson, as well as theoreticians Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and others, Ranciere claims that artists and theorists often suffer from mystical tendencies. Ranciere believes that there is a bold choice to be made in art; either it can reinforce a move towards radical democracy, or it is mire in reactionary mysticism. Ranciere argues against the idea that a revolutionary act is located within the art work itself; instead he argues that the revolution exists prior to the work of art. Revolutionary impetus exists instead in the workers emancipation, in his chance to view a work of art versus the work itself. Ranciere writes that what happens in the aesthetic regime of art is that artists create objects that escape their will.
Jacques Rancieres translated works are, among others , Reading Capital (1968), The Nights of Labor; The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France (1989), The Ignorant Schoolmaster; Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), The Names of History; On the Poetics of Knowledge (1994), On the Shores of Politics (1995) Disagreement; Politics and Philosophy (1996), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), The Future of the Image (2007), Hatred of Democracy (2007), and The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009). His most recent title, The Emancipated Spectator, is to be released in November, 2009.
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