1. The Future of the Image
Jacques Rancière

2. Jacques Rancière
• Althusser’s student- has departed from the path
set by his teacher
• Rancière’s aesthetic theory connects aesthetics
with politics
• Aesthetics: the multiple ways in which any social
order establishes, manages, privileges or
marginalizes different modes of perception
• "distribution of the sensible”: communal forms of
naturalized perception based on what is allowed to
be "visible or audible, as well as what can be said,
made or done”
• “redistribution of the sensible”: Politics
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3. Principle of equality
Deranty (2010)
• an “axiom”: Equality between individuals must be
postulated because it can never be definitively
proven.
• the scope of the principle’s application: Once
postulated, the principle transforms the way in
which individuals, society, politics and the arts are
seen.
• Democracy means equality.
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4. The Future of the Image
• Reflects on what artistic images are, and
contemporary changes in their status
• Deposes the technical features of different media
as constitutive of the identity of art works
• Defines the "aesthetic image” and the aesthetic
regime of the arts based on the dialectic between
the image as raw, material presence and the
image as discourse encoding a history
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5. Rancière’s “materialism”
Deranty (2010)
• Paradoxical: not premised upon a single, firmly defended
metaphysical option, but emerges rather from a mode of thinking
and writing that is sensitive to the constant exchanges and
blurrings between mental and material realities.
• Discursive, conceptual realities, by informing the views of material
realities, determine the types and forms of practice, and thus
indirectly shape the material,
• The material, being the only plane in which practical meanings can be
realized, determines thoughts and discourses.
• There are possibilities for “redistribution of the sensible.”
• Ranciere’s radical extension of the axiom of equality into the
material.
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6. Contents
• Introduction
• Images as “operations” and “regime of
imageness”
• Rancière's deconstructive redirection of
Barthes’ argument
• Conclusion
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7. Image as “operations” and “regime of imageness”
• not primarily manifestations of the properties
of a certain technical medium
• but operations: relations between a whole and
a part; between a visibility and a power of
signification and affect associated with it;
between expectations and what happens to
meet them
• A regime of ‘imageness’: a regime of relations
between elements and functions
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8. Bresson’s images
Bresson’s (1966) Au Hasard Balthazar
• Operations that couple
and uncouple the
• Not a donkey, two visible and its
children and an adult; signification of speech
nor the techniques of and its effect, which
close-ups and the create and frustrate
camera movements expectations
• Do not derive from the • Even presuppose a
properties of the systematic distance
cinematic medium from ordinary
employment
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9. Films and television broadcasting
• Image refers to an Other, and Visual refers to
nothing but itself.
• Television image (has its light in-built- Same) vs.
Cinematic image (from an external source- Other)
• The intrinsic nature of the images remains
unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in
a cinema, or through a cassette or disc on our
television screen, or a video projection
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10. Films and television broadcasting
• The set with in-built light and the camera place us
before a feat of memory and presence of mind that is
in itself foreign to them.
• Cinema also reproduces a constructed performance in
front of a camera. Cinematic images are themselves
the performance.
• Different concerns:
• What has happened elsewhere and what is happening
before our eyes
• Operations that make up the artistic nature of what we
are seeing.
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11. Two different image-functions
• Resemblance- the simple relationship that produces
the likeness of an original: not necessarily its faithful
copy, but simply what suffices to stand in for it.
• An alteration of resemblance.
• The images of art are operations that produce a
discrepancy, a dissemblance.
• The image is not exclusive to the visible.
• The commonest regime of the image: a relationship
between the sayable and the visible which plays on
both the analogy and the dissemblance between them
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12. Cinematic & literary images
• Bresson’s cinema does not realize a peculiar essence
of the cinema.
• The camera’s fixing on the hand that pours the water
and the hand that holds the candle is no more peculiar
to cinema than the fixing of Doctor Bovary’s gaze on
Mademoiselle Emma’s nails, or Madame Bovary’s gaze
on those of the notary’s clerk is peculiar to literature.
• Two cinematic shots or sequences of shots can thus
pertain to a very different “imageness.” Conversely,
one cinematic shot can pertain to the same type of
imageness as a novelistic sentence or a painting
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13. Contents
• Introduction
• Images as “operations” and “regime of
imageness”
• Rancière's deconstructive redirection of
Barthes’ argument
• Conclusion
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14. Barthes' argument in Camera Lucida
• Semiology: pursuing the messages hidden in images to purify both the
surfaces of inscription of art forms and the consciousness of the agent of
future revolutions
• Beyond semiology: The indexical nature of the photographic medium: its
mechanical registration of a past reality untouched by artistic
manipulation
• The studium designates historical, social or cultural meanings extracted
via semiotic analysis of photographs.
• the punctum effect of the photograph arises from details that are
unintended or uncontrolled by the photographer.
• Photography may thus be distinguished from painting or drawing in that
its apparatus visualizes the world automatically, rather than being wholly
formed by the interventions of the photographer/artist.
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15. Barthes' argument in Camera Lucida
• Assertion of "the wordless, senseless materiality
of the visible" that eludes or resists discursive
domination
• The privilege Barthes assigns to the photographic
punctum: an exaggerated form of realism- defined
by Rancière as hyper-resemblance
• Hyper-resemblance is the original resemblance,
the resemblance that does not provide the replica
of a reality but attests directly to the elsewhere
whence it derives. It never disappears.
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16. Rancière's deconstructive redirection
• detaches Barthes' ontology of photography from
any unique technical features of the medium
• links it to the aesthetic regime of art, which has
informed art practice and theory for at least two
centuries
• specifically: The polarities of punctum and studium
express a "double poetics" of the "aesthetic
image" as it came to be conceived and manifested
within the aesthetic regime.
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17. From one regime of ‘imageness’ to another
• A particular regime of articulation between the
visible and the sayable
• The representative regime (Aristotle’s poetics): an
order of stable relations between the visible and
the sayable
• The aesthetic regime: the image is no longer a
codified expression of a thought or feeling.
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18. The aesthetic regime
• It is a way in which things themselves speak and
are silent.
• Silent speech
• The meaning of things inscribed directly on their
bodies, their visible language to be decoded
• The eloquence of the very thing that is silent
• Art as displacement between two image
functions- the unfolding of inscriptions carried by
bodies and the interruptive function of their
naked, non-signifying presence
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19. Photography as an art
• By placing its particular techniques in the
services of this dual poetics, by making the
face of anonymous people speak twice over-
as silent witnesses of a condition inscribed
directly on their features, their clothes, their
life setting; and as possessor of a secret we
shall never know, a secret veiled by the very
image that delivers them to us.
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20. The aesthetic regime
• First, it dismantles the hierarchical system of
artistic subject matter, styles and genres
consolidated in the representative system.
• Secondly, art of the aesthetic regime breaches
ontological divisions between fine and applied art,
or between art and non-art categories.
• The third shift instituted by the aesthetic regime
repeals the privilege assigned to the written word
and art's story-telling functioning Aristotelian
poetics.
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21. Rancière's deconstructive redirection
• What the simple relationship between
mechanical impression and the punctum
erases is the whole history of the relations
between three things: the images of art, the
social forms of imagery, and the theoretic
procedures of criticism of imagery.
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22. A historical perspective
• Artistic images were redefined in a mobile
relationship between brute presence and encoded
history
• An encyclopedia of the shared human inheritance:
remote life-forms, works of art, popularized
bodies of knowledge, thanks to mechanical
presses and the new procedure of lithography
• New exchange between artistic images and
commerce in social imagery
• Criticism of imagery: Marx, Balzac, Freud
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23. The end of images is behind us
• Proposals to abolish the mediation of the
image- that is, not only resemblance but also
the power of operations of decoding and
suspension- just as they do in the interaction
between the operations of art, the commerce
of images and the labour of exegesis.
• pure art
• becoming-life-art
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24. • Pure art: whose results
no longer compose
images, but directly • Becoming-life-art: which
realize the idea in self- abolishes the distance of
sufficient material form the image so as to
• Loie Fuller, whose identify its procedures
“dance” consists in the with the forms of a whole
folding and unfolding of life in action, no longer
a dress lit up by the play separating art from work
of spotlights or politics
• Vertov’s eye-machine
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25. The end of images is behind us
• The end of images- the only one to have been
rigorously thought through and pursued lies
behind us.
• The spectators were taking care of
construction, and required of artists nothing
but precisely images
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26. Naked, ostensive, metamorphic image
• Three ways of
• coupling and uncoupling the power of showing
and the power of signifying, the attestation of
presence and the testimony of history
• sealing or refusing the relationship between art
and image.
• None of these three forms thus defined can
function within the confines of its own logic
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27. Naked image
• The image that does not constitute art
because what its shows us excludes the
prestige of dissemblance and the rhetoric of
exegeses.
Mémoires des camps
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28. Ostensive image
Voici- 100 Years of Contemporary Art
• It asserts its power as
that of sheer
presence, without
signification but it
claims its power in the
name of art.
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29. Metamorphic image
• It is impossible to delimit a specific sphere of
presence isolating artistic operations and
products from forms of circulation of social
and commercial imagery and from operations
interpreting this imagery.
• The images of art possess no peculiar nature
of their own that separates them in stable
fashion from the negotiation of resemblances
and the discursiveness of symptoms.
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30. Voilà: The world in my head
• The labour of art thus involves playing in the ambiguity of
resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about
a local reorganization, a singular rearrangement of circulating
images.
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31. Contents
• Introduction
• Images as “operations” and “regime of
imageness”
• Rancière's deconstructive redirection of
Barthes’ argument
• Conclusion
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32. Conclusion
• Media- functions; images- operations
• Technical devices; social production
• Rhetoric of exegesis
• Material embeddedness of discursive
practices, constant exchanges and blurrings
between mental and material realities
• Emancipated spectators as artists
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33. References
• Deranty, J.-P. (Ed.). (2010). Jacques Rancière:
key concepts. Acumen.
• Rancière, J. (2007). The future of the image.
The future of the image (pp. 1-31). (G. Elliott,
Trans.). New York and London: Verso.
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