Table Of ContentAesthetics of Politics: Refolding Distributions of Importance
by
Simon Labrecque
B.A., Université Laval, 2007
M.A., Université Laval, 2009
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in the Department of Political Science
& the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought Program
Simon Labrecque, 2014
University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author.
ii
Supervisory Committee
Aesthetics of Politics: Refolding Distributions of Importance
by
Simon Labrecque
B.A., Université Laval, 2007
M.A., Université Laval, 2009
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Arthur Kroker, (Department of Political Science)
Supervisor, CSPT Program
Dr. R.B.J. Walker, (Department of Political Science)
Departmental Member, CSPT Program
Dr. Nicole Shukin, (Department of English)
Outside Member, CSPT Program
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Abstract
Supervisory Committee
Arthur Kroker, Department of Political Science
Supervisor, CSPT Program
R.B.J. Walker, Department of Political Science
Departmental Member, CSPT Program
Nicole Shukin, Department of English
Outside Member, CSPT Program
This dissertation engages a very general question: what matters politically? This question
is characterized as a point of heresy, as a site through which different political stances
differentiate themselves from one another and account for their differences. Building on
the concept of aesthetics of politics developed by Jacques Rancière, I seek to free up this
concept’s critical and analytical potential by arguing that different aesthetics of politics
act as prerequisites to divergent determinations of political importance. More precisely, I
argue that significant formulations of how variations in distributions of political
importance occur tend to presuppose particular accounts of the relationships between
perception and interpretation, sensibility and understanding, or how we sense and how we
make sense. While the concept of aesthetics is tied to particular histories of what has been
called Western Modernity, I argue that Western political thought has been characterized
by a deep concern for questions of perception since its allegedly inaugural texts in
Classical Greece, and that the so-called postmodern condition continues to put into play
aesthetic terms of political engagement. To test this hypothesis positing that we always
already think of politics aesthetically, I map five influential aesthetics of politics:
aesthetics of prevalence, aesthetics of emancipation, aesthetics of temperament, aesthetics
of friction, and aesthetics of endurance. Each one is already manifold. To make sense of
these multiplicities, each aesthetics of politics is studied through a fourfold engagement
with the politics of one of the senses of the age-old fivefold of sight, taste, hearing, touch,
and smell. The politics of each sense are engaged along a politological, an artistico-
political, a polemological and a hauntological folds. I am thereby able to show the
intricacies of how the problem of political importance has been and is being dealt with.
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Table of Contents
Supervisory Committee......................................................................................................ii
Abstract..............................................................................................................................iii
Table of Contents...............................................................................................................iv
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................vii
Dedication........................................................................................................................viii
Initial Exposition: Politics & Aesthetics..............................................................................1
A problem of importance.................................................................................................1
A brief genealogy of a distinction...................................................................................8
Aesthetics of politics as prerequisites: a hypothesis......................................................14
Generating folds: method & structure...........................................................................23
Liminary Knots: A Fugue of Importance..........................................................................33
On condition(s) of writing.............................................................................................33
A politology of distributions of importance..................................................................38
An aesthetic mode of thought........................................................................................43
Modulations of violence................................................................................................49
Refolding the age-old fivefold.......................................................................................55
Envoi..............................................................................................................................68
Chapter I – Aesthetics of Prevalence: the Politics of Sight...............................................80
Viewers’ discretion........................................................................................................80
1. Politics and/as prevalence: sight, insight, foresight...................................................83
1.1 The prevalence of prevalence..............................................................................84
1.2 Ocularcentrism, or the contested prevalence of sight..........................................89
2. Artful detections: lightbulbs & stealthiness...............................................................99
2.1 “Sûr que tu pourras devenir un krach boursier à toi tout seul”?......................103
2.2 Tactics of unaccountability................................................................................106
3. Automated surveillance: security, selection & elegance.........................................111
3.1 “Trust your senses”—“If you see something, say something”..........................113
3.2 The longue durée of automation........................................................................116
4. Spectral geometries..................................................................................................121
4.1 Only metaphors & metonymies?.......................................................................123
4.2 The pineal eye hypothesis..................................................................................126
Refolding distributions of importance (I)....................................................................133
Chapter II – Aesthetics of Emancipation: the Politics of Speech, and Taste..................134
Voice(s)-over...............................................................................................................134
1. Politics and/as emancipation: productively interruptive phrases.............................141
1.1 The prevalence of the notion of an emancipation from what prevails..............142
1.2 Speech as the paradigm of political action........................................................147
2. Suspensions: tasting limits & elevating hooks........................................................161
2.1 A sense of one’s place.......................................................................................163
2.2 Curious verticalities...........................................................................................172
3. Mute muses & muddled cries, or entrenched silencings.........................................180
3.1 “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”...........................181
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3.2 “Experience has fallen in value”........................................................................188
4. All ventriloquists.....................................................................................................196
4.1 The exception and the rule.................................................................................198
4.2 “Here, I will not be hustled”..............................................................................203
Refolding distributions of importance (II)...................................................................205
Chapter III – Aesthetics of Temperament: the Politics of Hearing.................................206
Concordia discordantium canonum............................................................................206
1. Politics and/as temperament: modulating modulated ardors...................................211
1.1 The discordant prevalence of emancipatory temperaments...............................212
1.2 Politology as a phonotopology..........................................................................228
2. Equalizers: aural (dis)articulations & hammered wolves........................................233
2.1 “The ear is the quintessentially egoistic organ”................................................234
2.2 Well-tempered, well-tuned, and (thus) well-behaved?......................................240
3. Tense melodies, woven & pierced...........................................................................249
3.1 Sarajevo, 1993...................................................................................................251
3.2 “The slogans are jamming the airwaves”..........................................................259
4. What hums under & through...................................................................................263
4.1 To be in tune with one’s time(s)........................................................................264
4.2 Rhythmic thresholds..........................................................................................271
Refolding distributions of importance (III).................................................................280
Chapter IV – Aesthetics of Friction: the Politics of Touch.............................................281
“I cannot put my finger on it now”..............................................................................281
1. Politics and/as friction: tweaking itchy togetherness...............................................286
1.1 The veiled prevalence of a pineal hands conjecture..........................................287
1.2 Polytical unguents..............................................................................................299
2. Contacts, contaminations, compacts & complications: aesthetes’ ethics................306
2.1 Affording to be touched through hands-on engagements..................................307
2.2 “The problem inherent in the surface of things is the heart of things”..............311
3. Digging, leveling, erasing or slicing through the f(r)ogs of war(mth)....................317
3.1 Politics as the continuation of war.....................................................................318
3.2 Diagrams of incystence......................................................................................324
4. “You’re never actually touching anything”.............................................................332
4.1 Horizons of concerns.........................................................................................333
4.2 Holy motors.......................................................................................................339
Refolding distributions of importance (IV).................................................................343
Chapter V – Aesthetics of Endurance: the Politics of Smell...........................................345
A whiff of import.........................................................................................................345
1. Politics and/as endurance: holding on, holding your nose......................................351
1.1 “The social question is not only an ethical one, but also a nasal question”......352
1.2 A politology of enduring fumes.........................................................................360
2. Atmospherics: conditions of survival & pestering creases......................................369
2.1 “Breathe, breathe in the air—Don’t be afraid to care”......................................370
2.2 Becoming capable of creative emanations........................................................378
3. Withstanding an overblown political climate..........................................................383
3.1 What doesn’t kill you….....................................................................................385
3.2 Marching Plague in the midst of authoritarian power vectors..........................390
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4. Explicitations of political re-implications...............................................................395
4.1 Politicizing the atmotopic situation...................................................................396
4.2 “The point of everything he does is to last”......................................................402
Refolding distributions of importance (V)..................................................................408
In Guise of a Conclusion, or Desistance..........................................................................410
“My son, my son, what have ye done?”......................................................................410
And (not quite) all that could have been......................................................................415
Bibliography....................................................................................................................423
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Acknowledgments
Studying in the Department of Political Science and in the Cultural, Social, and Political
Thought (CSPT) Program at the University of Victoria has been a much more
transformative experience than I could ever have imagined. There, I learned to pay
attention to the difficulties involved in naming this land on which the university resides,
often referred to as unceded Coast Salish territories. There, I had the chance to encounter
a remarkable nebula of sharp, critical and engaging people whom I hereby acknowledge.
I am infinitely indebted to Dr. Arthur Kroker for his unwavering commitment and
support in supervising this doctoral dissertation and for being a resolute ally from the
start. His difficult questions pushed me to reexamine my own values and assumptions in
productive ways, and to take seriously the lightest and the darkest of creative deeds. His
enthusiasm for poetic modes of political thought encouraged me to experiment with my
own writing in ways I could not have foreseen, and which I am still trying to control.
I am also deeply indebted to Dr. R.B.J. Walker for his invaluable insights into the
difficult problems of political life and the price of good questions. His invitations to take
serious political writings as intricate sites where complex lines are forcefully retraced,
and to come to acknowledge the political importance of questions of sovereignty and of
“the international” have been truly challenging and inspiring.
I thank Dr. Nicole Shukin for her support and her thoughtful and substantive
advice as a member of my supervisory committee, of the evaluation committee of my
comprehensive examination in CSPT, and as a remarkable CSPT director.
I also thank Dr. Warren Magnusson for his insistence on the importance of
writing clearly about complex issues, and for his willingness to help me read Rancière.
Merci à Joëlle Alice, Pierre-Luc, Sagi, Kelly, Andréa, Tim F., Tim S., Guillaume,
Marta, Adam, Chris, Marc, Rob H., Seth, Renée, Maria, Serena, René, Jade, Diane, Dalie
et Eve. Merci aux amiEs, à ma belle-famille, à mes parents et à Florence.
Finally, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
for its financial support, which helped me spend considerable time thinking, reading,
writing, and talking with friends who matter about what matters most politically.
viii
Dedication
À Florence!
Initial Exposition: Politics & Aesthetics
We think in generalities, but we live in details.
Alfred North Whitehead (1968a [1926], 29)
A problem of importance
Attention to the relationships between politics and aesthetics characterizes a number of
notable strands of contemporary scholarship. Such attention certainly characterizes what
has come to be known as “French Theory”, this nebula operating at both the external
border of academia and the internal borders of the humanities, the social sciences, and
philosophy, and that is sometimes held responsible for making it difficult to speak of
academia and of the humanities, the social sciences, and philosophy as different fields
circumscribed by clear and distinct borders (e.g. Rancière 2000; Derrida 1978). Attention
to the relationships between politics and aesthetics also characterizes “Anglo-American”
endeavors such as pragmatist political sociology (e.g. Edelman 1995)—which is not to
say that so-called French Theory is not Anglo-American in many ways (see Cusset 2005).
Certain modes of paying attention to the relationships between politics and aesthetics are
undoubtedly at work in the innumerable accounts articulating descriptions of the political
significance of particular rhetorical modalities, of specific works of art, of singular media
like film or music, of influential genres or movements like Romanticism or Surrealism,
and of policies such as the management of museums, the promotion of so-called public
art, or the inclusion of an exception culturelle in international free trade agreements.
2
I have been engaged in such research work from the standpoint of political theory.
I have been studying how using so-called postmodern or poststructuralist concepts
enables artists and art scholars to articulate and to support claims to the effect that
contemporary art, and in particular performance art, is politically important because it can
be transformative, and how, simultaneously, using such concepts exposes them to the
enduring critique that “postmodernism” fosters “a retreat from the political”, understood
as both a neglect or an outright rejection of institutional politics (especially of party
politics), and an excessive privileging of subjective, cultural expression in its stead.
During my doctoral studies, as I began to research what I call the politics of bio-art,
that is the allegedly transformative effects of the practices of artists who are dealing with
biotechnologies, and as I presented a number of preliminary talks on this project, I myself
encountered the claim that paying attention to aesthetics is a way to neglect politics.
More precisely, I repeatedly encountered this question: why does it matter? The
sometimes implicit and often explicit issue woven into this interrogation is: why does it
matter politically? The implication is that surely, it does not matter that much; surely,
wars, exploitation, and other practices of violence matter much more, politically. I have
responded to this concern a number of times in a number of ways, not least by asking in
return just where one could retreat if one were to “retreat from the political”, to what
“outside”, and how “the political” must be traced, delimited, (re-)treated in the first place
for such an outside to be thinkable1. I nonetheless believe that the question of the political
importance of art and aesthetics is a legitimate question to ask. It also seems to me that
my responses have not always, or rather, that they have rarely been deemed convincing. I
1 For a collective interrogation along those lines, see the two books published by the Centre de recherches
philosophiques sur le politique, initiated by Jacques Derrida in 1980 (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy 1983; 1981).
