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Partage du sensible:
the distribution of the sensible
Davide Panagia
The specificity of any one concept in Jacques Rancires oeuvre is difficult to grasp and impossible to localize because, as Rancire himself
admits I dont speak for members of a particular body or discipline. I
write to shatter the boundaries that separate specialists of philosophy,
art, social sciences, etc. (Rancire 2007a: 257). This is especially true
of Rancires conceptual innovation of a partage du sensible (variously
translated as partition or distribution of the sensible); a term that
refers at once to the conditions for sharing that establish the contours of
a collectivity (i.e. partager as sharing) and to the sources of disruption
or dissensus of that same order (i.e. partager as separating). In every
respect, a partage du sensible is a liminal term that is at once central
to Rancires analyses of the aesthetics of politics but also requires an
exploration of other conceptual specificities in his theoretical lexicon.
In this chapter, I explore Rancires notion of a partage du sensible by
first addressing the multiple meanings of the French verb partager; I
then outline how Rancires partage du sensible is part of his critique of
a poetics of knowledge, and especially of Louis Althussers theoreticism.
Finally, I elaborate the political dimensions of this concept by showing
that politics involves, for Rancire, the rearticulation of a partage du sensible by the excluded or unaccounted-for elements in a political society.
PA R TA G E D U S E N S I B L E : T H E D I S T R I B U T I O N O F T H E S E N S I B L E
PA R TA G E D U S E N S I B L E : T H E D I S T R I B U T I O N O F T H E S E N S I B L E
is the point of contact between commonality and divisiveness that structures the dynamics of a partage du sensible, then Rancire always holds
open the possibility of a political part-taking by those excluded from the
system of distributions that is the reigning partage du sensible (i.e. what
Rancire otherwise calls the police). Politics emerges whenever the
order of the police is disturbed by acts of dis-incorporation of the part
of those who have no part. Political action is thus defined on the basis
of this aesthetic part-taking: it is a reconfiguration of the perceptual
disposition of sights and sounds. In short, the exclusiveness of a partition that divides legitimate and illegitimate modes of being always holds
open the possibility of a dissensual part-taking by those deemed not to
count as legitimate participants in the dominant political community.
Uncertain communities
In order for a collectivity like a social system or a political group to
exist there needs to be in place a frame of equivalences that establishes
the relations of commonality between things. Such a collectivity is at
once a spatial and temporal composition that not only has a series of set
dispositions that compose its structure but also an order to them that
guarantees their proper functioning. The ability to share in this community of parts (i.e. to belong to it) is rooted in distinct conditions of
perception that establish a correspondence between an objects impression and its meaning. We can thus speak of a collectivity as comprising
the set of concrete correspondences between knowledge, awareness,
sound, sight and so on correspondences that count as the perceptual
preconditions for counting. A political community thus holds its shape
because these perceptual preconditions make some parts count as sensible and others as insensible.
The simultaneity of the sensible as what addresses the correspondence between the reasonable and the perceptible or, better put, the
idea that the sensible implies a condition of knowledge is what Rancire means when he affirms that a partage du sensible is the system of
self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the
existence of something in common and the delimitations that define
the respective parts and positions within it (PA 12). If, however, we
were to limit our understanding of the partage du sensible to an external
structural arrangement that imposes form and function upon heterogeneous elements, then we would be circumscribing this concept simply
to an analysis of an external objective reality like a discursive formation
or an ideological apparatus. However, the phenomenological, aesthetic
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Equality is insensible
As Rancire has recently emphasized, this form of a dissensual calling
into question of common sense is also what he means by emancipation.
Emancipation, he affirms,
begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part
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PA R TA G E D U S E N S I B L E : T H E D I S T R I B U T I O N O F T H E S E N S I B L E
PA R TA G E D U S E N S I B L E : T H E D I S T R I B U T I O N O F T H E S E N S I B L E
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