tailieunhanh - WHAT IS THE AESTHETIC REGIME?

In Dewey’s discussion of the distinction between mere experience and an experience, it is clear that unity and closure are required for the latter. Also implicit is an expectation that an experience will exhibit some degree of complexity: for instance, elements must be perceived in relation to one another. My examples, along with many other everyday experiences, may seem to be lacking in these qualities. What should we conclude from this? | PARRHESIA NUMBER 12 2011 71-81 WHAT IS THE AESTHETIC REGIME Joseph J. Tanke The aesthetic regime is a polemical concept forged by Jacques Rancière to contest the categories that inform many art historical narratives. It cuts across the divisions that organize museum collections and shape the picture of twentieth-century art handed down in many art history textbooks and survey courses. The majority of Rancière s recent writings on literature art and the history of aesthetic philosophy are intended to clarify what he terms the aesthetic revolution the wholesale cultural transformation that took place at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth century. As such they deal with many of the artists objects and ideas customarily designated as modern. Rancière argues that modernism is a problematic concept that prevents us from grappling with the politics of this radically distinct form of art more properly termed aesthetic. Modernism Rancière suggests is an idea that seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationships with the other spheres of collective experience. 1 By modernism Rancière understands the familiar thesis that modern art in order to effect a demonstration of its independence from other practices and domains of life engages in processes of selfpurification by which each art rids itself of elements borrowed from other media. Rancière has also devoted a considerable amount of energy to critiquing the positions that understand recent artistic strategies in terms of the historico-theoretical concept of postmodernity. For him postmodernism should be understood as a reckoning with the distortion imported into the arts of the aesthetic regime by the myth of artistic modernity. The concept of postmodernism is not for all that the recovery of art s political potential. Rather Postmodernism . was simply the name under whose guise certain artists and thinkers realized what modernism