Creating the semi‐living: on politics, aesthetics and the more‐than‐human

Abstract

Though geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more‐than‐human world of Semi‐Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern‐day technoscientific biology operates.

Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum

“…Rancière, reflecting on the '(p)olitics of aesthetics ' (2004), has been inspiring to those who research visual culture within geography including Lisle (2006), Staheli (2008), Dixon (2009) and Poole (1997). Others such as Bassett, (2014), Chambers (2011) andDikeç (2005) have considered Rancière's account of 'pure' politics in spaces of dissent.…”

“…Rancière argues that this is not simply about the fact that formal politics depends upon the mustering of emotion and affect via iconic images and spectacle, but that politics in itself -'is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what can be seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time' (Dixon, 2009 citing Rancière 2007, p13). Essentially, Rancière argues that aesthetics, produced through artistic practices, are locked into an elite world of networks of production and self-perpetuating representational reference points and thus the dismantling of the ways we think of artistic regimes of production can contribute to a more democratic politics and aesthetics.…”

A Conceptual Outline of Contemporary Magic Practice

“…Ranciere's method and concepts allow me to speak differently on magic practice, although my interpretations and uses of his texts are surely not customary [in geography, see Dixon (2009) andDikeq (2005;]. …”

Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics inThe Birth of a Nation

“…How something looks (or sounds or feels) contributes to what it does, what effect it has, and what geographies it produces. It is a "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière 2004) with materially geographical consequences (D. Dixon 2009). This implicit notion of an identifiable regulatory aesthetic in geographical literature, then, has several traits: r A regulatory aesthetic effects a spatial and temporal ordering of subjects, objects, or both and is thus simultaneously geographical and historical.…”