Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise

Tony Bennett

New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp. 253-276 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2010.0010

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Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise

Tony Bennett

n proposing a theory of literary reproduction, Pierre Macherey distinguishes its concerns from those of a theory of literature, dismissing the latter as a chimerical quest for an impossible object. Literature, he says, does not exist except as a historical ction, a construction of the literary genre that is Criticism. But what does exist, he continues, and in a perfectly real way, is the literary. What difference does he see between the two? Literatures existence is posited in essentialist terms as consisting in a particular set of formal properties, while the literary is construed as an open-ended, dynamic set of intertextual processes which carries its form, conceived as a more uid set of possibilities, ahead of itself, by opening up the eld of its own modications, and of their own exuberant proliferation. If literature consists of a denite textual corpus, the literary is a complex of processes, dynamically articulating among themselves the labour of writing and the labour of its reproductionand this independently of a normative ideal which would try to substitute for this ceaselessly pursued movement the illusion of an identity, a stability or a permanence.1 What can it mean to say that literature is a fabrication, but that the literary exists in a perfectly real way? If the labor of a particular form of expertise (criticism) is acknowledged in the rst case, what forms of expertise are involved in the processes through which the dynamic reinscriptions of the literary are effected? How are they constituted and exercised? These are the questions I pursue by considering how issues concerning the social articulations of literary and artistic phenomena might now be most usefully posed in the light of new approaches to the concerns and procedures of sociology that have been developed since the sociology of literature moment of the 1960s and 1970s. I begin by reviewing what I take to be the distinguishing characteristics of this moment, especially with regard to its concern with the differentia specica of literature and/or the literary. I shall pay particular attention to the logic of explanation which interpreted these and the aesthetic more generally as a particular set of metaformal properties that was to be accounted for with reference to the organization of social relationships of various

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kinds: between classes; the social relations of literary production; or the historical dynamics of literary and artistic elds, for example. I then review a range of subsequent intellectual developments which call into question such constructions of the relations between the literary, the aesthetic, and the social. I chiey have in mind here the varied strands of assemblage and actor-network-theory whose commitment to at ontologies, in which texts, devices, knowledges, techniques, and technologies interact with each other in complexly articulated material ensembles, calls into question the explanatory role attributed to the various forms in which the social was invoked in the sociology of literature moment. My primary interest here is in how these new theoretical settings displace earlier concerns with the aesthetic, construed as a set of metaformal properties to be given a social explanation, to focus instead on its role as a product of particular forms of expertise whose exercise is tangled up in a distinctive set of processes and apparatuses for ordering and organizing particular kinds of subjectivity. In illustrating these concerns, I look at how investigations of the relations between social, literary, and artistic phenomena might be reordered in the light of Jacques Rancires account of the varied emplotments of the relations between the life of art and the arts of life associated with what he calls the aesthetic regime of art.2 I shall, however, work both with and against the terms Rancire proposes for understanding the properties of this regime: with, in so far as his remarks concerning its capacity for effecting a redistribution of the sensible treat it as a historically distinctive dispositif; against, in so far as his formulations validate specic aspects of the operations of this dispositif as a form of metapolitics that transcends the mundane politics of the state, bureaucracy, and the ethical aspects of social life. By way of exemplifying my more general arguments concerning the implications of the new directions of sociological inquiry I have briey summarized above, I show how the space of metapolitics constitutes a historical fusion of new forms of expertise and literary-aesthetic apparatuses whose operations should be considered as parts of a broader eld of liberal technologies bringing social conduct under the inuence of specic regimes of truth and authority.

Sociology and the Literary: An Overdetermined Encounter

First though, what was it that most characterized the sociology of literature moment? Franco Moretti suggests that the great idea of this critical season was a materialist conception of form, or a conception of

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form as a diagram of forces; or perhaps, even, as nothing but force.3 There is a slippage in Morettis formulations here which allows him to invoke the material in relation to form in two ways. In referring to form as a diagram of forces, his concern is with the social forces that act on and shape literary practices: this, Moretti argues, is the most elegant denition ever of what literary sociology should be.4 The accent here falls on the material as a set of social forces that shape literary forms from without as in Morettis account of how, in nineteenth-century British and German village stories, rural class struggle, the industrial take-off, and the process of state formation have converted the shape of nineteenth-century idylls.5 Yet when he speaks of form as nothing but force the balance shifts to a conception of form as itself a material force capable of reshaping the forces which shape ita promise which, for reasons I shall come to, Moretti is unable to make good. For now, though, as Moretti acknowledges, and as James English has argued more fully,6 what matters is to note how far this interest in form derives from the concern of literary studies to establish its autonomy as a discipline by laying claim to a distinctive set of methods and procedures for the analysis of its textual corpus.7 Morettis ambition is to reform this traditional concern by applying a variety of statistical and mapping techniques to analyze changes in formal patterns that are discernible across large sets of texts. This constitutes a challenge to purely formalist or internalist approaches to the analysis of literary form while remaining a move within, but also a critical and purportedly more scientic reformulation of, the materialism characterizing the critical season of the 1960s and 1970s to which he pins his colors. For, in varying ways and to different degrees, it is true of the traditions dening this momentthe work of Georg Lukcs, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Lucien Goldmann, Galvano Della Volpe, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Bourdieu, and, of course, Pierre Macherey, toothat they sought to explain transformations in literary forms in terms of the external forces that had acted on them. These traditions also exhibited a preoccupation with the relations between extraliterary forces and literary form at the two levels that have most preoccupied Moretti: those of literary genres (Lukcss and Goldmanns account of the relations between capitalism and the novel) and literary devices (the role Macherey accords the gure of the island in Jules Vernes narratives as one of the discords which connect the work to itself: that is, as a device through which the fault lines in French imperialist ideology are thrown into high relief).8 There are, of course, signicant differences between the ways in which such questions are approached: between the expressive logic

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of Lukcss and Goldmanns worldview analysis and the sociolinguistic underpinnings of Bakhtins work, or between the principles informing Bourdieus eld theory which places the analysis of literary texts in the midst of the competitive struggles between writers, literary agents, critics, institutions, et cetera, and the different theoretical terms in which such considerations are invoked in the Althusser-Macherey-Eagleton concern with the form-shaping role of the social relations of literary production. I shall, though, pass over these differences to come to the second and, for my concerns here, more consequential respect in which the terms of sociologys encounter with the literary and the aesthetic were staged on a ground that was overdetermined by the latter.9 This consisted in the claim that sociological principles of explanation could be invoked to account for the distinguishing properties which, at a metaformal level, distinguish literary from other forms of writing by construing such properties as the effects of particular kinds of social relations. The closely intertwined sociological and aesthetic reasoning informing Lukcss application of the principles of worldview analysis is a case in point. For Lukcs, assigning a given textual corpus to a specic class position in a particular historical moment always contains a dual component of sociohistorical explanation. The homologies that are posited between the artistic worldview embodied in a particular textual corpus and that of a specic class account for the former by rooting it in the latter. At the same time, that worldview is accorded a specic place within a historicist ordering of the relations between worldviews according to their relative capacity to pierce the illusions of reication and thus offer the reader a means of acquiring a concrete, sensuous, and human-centered self-consciousness of the processes of mans selfmaking. As the baton of aesthetic totalization is passed from class to class, from bourgeoisie to proletariat, so history generates the material conditions which produce for its subject, Man, an increasingly adequate historical self-knowledge. Lukcs insisted on separating the concerns of his theory of realism from those of vulgar sociologythat is, with the role of literary markets, structures of patronage, or critical institutionsas operating at a lower level than the encounters between the world-historical social forces and epochal metaformal literary transformations that were staged in his work. Yet these ingredients of vulgar sociology were the very grist to the mill of Bourdieus account of the organization and development of the literary and artistic elds. More than that, the signicance he accorded the operations of markets, the role of cultural intermediaries, the institutions of legitimation, et cetera, alongside the activities of artists and writers provided the basis for his critique of Lukcs and Goldmann

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for tracing too direct a connection between social (usually in the form of classes) and literary and artistic phenomena, and thus neglecting the role played by the distinctive properties of the literary and artistic elds in mediating such relations. For all that, there is, tangled up in Bourdieus vulgar concern with such matters, a distinctive historicist aesthetic which, not entirely dissimilar to Lukcss, traces the connections between the processes which, on the one hand, produce the increasing autonomy of the literary and artistic elds and, on other, generate the positions from which the metaformal properties of the works which this produces can be properly understood and appreciated. This is evident in his commitment to the historicist form of the transcendental project which consists of reappropriating, by historical anamnesis, the historical forms and categories of artistic experience.10 It is through this practice of historical anamnesis that Bourdieu interprets the autonomization of the literary and artistic elds as a set of continuously unfolding processes which generate cultural forms that exceed their immediate historical determinations to acquire an historically transcendental status. Yet this capacity to transcend their immediate historical determinations that is accorded to those works which embody the historical universal is itself historically shaped by the longer and deeper processes of universalization that arise from the cumulative momentum toward greater autonomy for the cultural and intellectual elds that is nally completed only when properly understood by the collective intellectual that is their product.11 A similar tendency to both invoke and limit historical forms of explanation is evident in Althusserian formulations of the ways in which the literary or aesthetic effect simultaneously transcends the historical forces which shape it. Eagletons account of the relations between modes of literary production and literary forms is a case in point. At one level, Eagletons concern is to nd a place for those immediate and concrete determinations of literary production that Lukcs assigned to the dustbin of vulgar sociology. Instead of construing these as merely the sociological outworks of the text, Eagleton seeks to disclose how the literary text bears the impress of its historical mode of production as surely as any product secretes in its form and materials the fashion of its making.12 Rather than theorizing the role of such factors after the neoWeberian fashion of Bourdieu, with the stress this places on the relations of competitive striving between different agents within the literary and artistic elds, Eagleton proposes a Marxist set of terms for investigating their modus operandi. Modes of literary production thus comprise sets of relations between (i) the institutional forces organizing the production and distribution of literary texts, (ii) the means of literary production

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comprised by the inherited repertoire of literary techniques, and (iii) literary genres and conventions, and the relations between these and the more general eld of ideology. At one level, Eagletons concern is to deploy this conceptual apparatus to show how literary texts are shaped by the social, material, and ideological relationships which condition their making. At another level, reecting his subscription to Althusserian formulations of the relations between science, art and literature, and ideology as categorially distinct practices, Eagleton is concerned with how those texts which are truly literary are so shaped by the conditions of their production as to achieve a literary or aesthetic effect which exceeds those conditions.

Relocating the Social and the Literary

There is, then, a somewhat paradoxical aspect to the logic of the sociology of literature moment. On the one hand, the application of sociological perspectives to the analysis of literary phenomena was overdetermined by the preoccupations of both literary studies and aesthetics with the formal and metaformal properties of literary texts. On the other hand, it constituted a kind of implosion into these disciplinary elds in its contention that a proper resolution of their specic concerns depended on the analytical and methodological resources of sociology. It also displaced the truth claims of literary studies and aesthetics by contending that the key to literatures specicity resided in a set of underlying social conditions and the mediations through which these connected with literary practices in order to shape them. Its logic was, in this regard, governed by a dualistic construction of the relations between the social and and the literary, with the former (as the real) being accorded explanatory priority over the latter (as a specic form of its representation). Of course, this was never done in a crudely mechanical way; we can all recall the qualications associated with the notion of determination in the last instance and the like. However, these qualications still operated in the context of a problematic committed to fathoming the mechanisms of connection through which the social mediately fashions the forms of its literary representation. It is precisely this set of concerns that has been the prime target for the varied branches of social and cultural theory which have subsequently challenged the analytical logic underlying the sociology of literature moment and proposed what is now a sharply different analytical topography for considering the relations between social and cultural phenomena.13 These include those aspects of post-Foucauldian theory focused on

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the modus operandi of various apparatuses or dispositifs whose composition cuts across divisions between texts, techniques, technologies, persons, and things to bring to light the complex forms of their comingling;14 actor-network-theory in its concern with the relations between human and nonhuman actors in the organization of complex materialities in which things play an active organizing role alongside persons;15 the analytical logics produced by assemblage theoryin both its Deleuzian and Latourian formsin their concern to understand how diverse elements are brought into contingent associations with one another in assemblages which neither homogenize their components nor arrange them in relations of hierarchical super- and subordination to one another;16 and the diverse strands of performativity theoryfrom Judith Butler to Michel Callonwhich focus on how social relations are produced, sustained, and changed through the mechanisms via which they are performed and the role played by material devices in equipping human actors with the varied performative capacities this requires.17 There is not space here to review these traditions, or their differences, comprehensively.18 Taken in the round, however, they challenge dualistic ontologies which separate the real into separate realms (the real/its representations; the social/culture) and then seek to probe the nature and mechanisms of their interconnections. In lieu of this they propose a singular-planar or at ontology in which the real is understood as comprised by the interactions between varied assemblages whose operations and interactions generate signicant transformative capacities through the combinatorial productivity of the heterogeneous elements (things, persons, technologies, texts, et cetera) they bring together. This does not invalidate distinctions between the economy, the social, the political, and culture provided rst, that these are understood as the result of historical processes of differentiation and assembly, and second, that the distinctions between them are not ontologized but are rather understood as publicly ordered differences between particular spheres of action which are, however, indistinguishable from one another so far as their ontological composition is concerned.19 This means that the problems dening the sociology of literature moment focused on how to fathom the connections between two different realms accorded different ontological statuses simply fall away. In their place there emerges a set of problems focused on the ways in which literary phenomena operate in and across different kinds of publicly instituted sociomaterial assemblages. Miles Ogborns account of the role played by varied forms of script and print in the economic and diplomatic practices of the East India Company is a good illustration of these concerns. Examining the varied

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forms of writingdiplomatic, administrative, economicthat circulated between Britain and the East India Company in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ogborn interprets these as material mobile objects in probing their different modes and patterns of movement in terms of the social relations that are constituted around and through them as they are made, made mobile, transferred, and make the world.20 While Ogborn does not neglect questions of form, he does not privilege them. He is equally concerned with the materiality of the scripts he deals with, treating them, after the fashion of Latour and Steve Woolgar,21 as inscriptions whose effectivity is produced via the networks through which they travel, and the centers of calculation and of action (economic or diplomatic) in which they are combined with other inscriptions and instruments of action. This also means attending to the ways in which, after the fashion of Callons account of the role of various agencements in equipping economic actors with specic capacities,22 persons had to be equipped with the capacities required of them if diplomatic letters were to have anything remotely resembling their intended effects. This entails, as Ogborn puts it, following the mechanisms that were put in place around such lettersrather than relying on their form, or contentto produce a strong and effective relationship at a distance.23 Of course, Ogborns concerns are not with literary texts; indeed, they are focused on a period that precedes any clear differentiation of literary from other forms of writing. The merit of his formulations, however, is that of suggesting the terms in which such processes of differentiation and the resulting ordering of the relations between literature and the social might best be accounted for. For they suggest that this has to do with the role of specic authorities in equipping specic textual corpora and their readers with new potentialities and capacities by enrolling both in new sociomaterial ensembles. Mary Poovey, for example, has examined romantic and postromantic criticism (WilliamWordsworth, Thomas De Quincy, John Ruskin) in these terms, focusing on their role in disrupting the continuum that had earlier characterized the relations between informational and ctional writing. She sees the exercise of these new forms of critical expertise as paralleling the processes through which the authority of equally new forms of economic expertise was produced by disconnecting claims to factual adequacy in economic reporting and analysis from novelistic ction or poetic fantasy. This was reciprocated by the production of literary writing as part of a new binary opposition (the literary versus all other kinds of script and print) which distinguished it from and, ideally, elevated it above both all forms of informational writing and inferior imaginative forms. Literary writings were thus distinguished, inter alia, by their tendency to call attention to their own

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artistry as one means of distinguishing between the kind of value they mediated and its antithetical counterpart, the monetary value associated with commodication and the market.24 The production of literary writing is not, though, Poovey insists, merely a formal matter; it is a process dependent on equipping both texts and readers with new capacities by enrolling both within new institutional ensembles. We are in a different territory here from that proposed by Moretti. The question of form is posed not in terms of a given set of textual properties but in terms of the entanglements of texts, forms of expertise, technologies of readings, institutional processes of classication, and so on. There are, of course, similarities between such concerns and earlier accounts of the processes through which particular hierarchies of literary value are produced. Bourdieus assessment of the role of institutions of cultural legitimation in organizing the pure gaze of the aesthetic is perhaps the most inuential account of this kind.25 For this, too, tended to disrupt the problem space produced by the overdetermined encounter with the formal specicity of the literary which dened the sociology of literature moment by reinterpreting this as a question concerning the competition between conicting hierarchies of esteem, principles of evaluation, and processes of canonization. There is, however, a limiting aspect to Bourdieus work here deriving from its tendency to theorize the modus operandi of aesthetic discourses singularly, in terms of their relations to social classes, and as ideologies. This is true of his assessment of the role played by the Kantian aesthetic as an ideology that legitimates unequal class relations by seeming to pass off the differences between class habitus as if they were the results of naturally acquired inheritances.26 Eagleton also interprets the aesthetic as a form of ideology, but one marked by a constitutive tension between its functioning, on the one hand, as a model of and for the self-regulating forms of subjectivity required for the organization and maintenance of bourgeois power, and, on the other hand, the potential for the stress that it places on human self-creation to be fashioned into a critique of bourgeois and, indeed, of all instrumental forms of thought and power.27 The central weakness of such interpretations of the aesthetic concerns their inability to take account of the distinctive forms of truth which characterize aesthetic discourse. The aesthetic, I suggest, is better understood as a historically specic form of knowledge: one which offers, by means of concepts, a knowledge of sensate practices which are themselves, by denition, not knowledges but which, in being brought institutionally and discursively into the orbit of the aesthetic, are subjected, in the name of emancipation, to the authority and direction of a new set of experts.28 It is these kinds of questions that the new directions in the

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sociology of literature I have reviewed should explore insofar as their remit includes a concern with the literary and the aesthetic. Although I shall eventually want to part company with him, I take Rancires account of the aesthetic as a historically particular regime of art as my point of entry into these questions.

Aesthetics as Expertise: The Space of Metapolitics

In his Aesthetics and its Discontents, Rancire argues that the ordered exercise of a particular form of savoir faire, or way of doing, is a necessary but not sufcient condition for the product of a particular form of practice to be seen as art. The artfulness of the art that any such savoir faire produces varies between different regimes of art and the different modes of the partition of the sensible that these establish. In the case of the aesthetic regime of art, Rancire stresses the role played by postKantian philosophical aesthetics as a form of commentary which made a new form of artfulnessof arts specicitythinkable. The philosophers who initiated aesthetics, he argues, did not invent . . . all those recongurations of the relations between the scriptural and the visual, pure and applied art, and the forms of art and those of public . . . life which, rupturing earlier hierarchical orderings of the arts by gathering them together and presenting them to an undifferentiated public, dene the aesthetic regime of art. However, they did, he continues, elaborate the regime of intelligibility within which those recongurations could be thought as constituting an aesthetic regime of art as a specic mode of sensible being.29 Rancire models the specicity of arts being in this regime on the logic of a dispositif, a space of presentation that connects art to the project of transforming common life by virtue of its constitution as at once material and symbolic, of a specic space-time, of a suspension with respect to the ordinary forms of sensory experience (23). It is in this, not in the content of its sentiments or the position it takes up in relation to the struggles between social groups, that the aesthetic regime of art is political. Its politics, however, are pitched over and against the functions of such regular forms of politics precisely because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space (23). When it comes to accounting for differences in the social and political functioning of this space of presentation, Rancire stresses the varied forms of intelligibility that are produced by different versions of philo-

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sophical aesthetics. These form a part of the varied emplotments of the relations between art and life that become possible once art is freed from its singular inscription within the relations between hierarchies of genres and the hierarchies of power and of occupations which characterized its existence in the earlier poetic regime of art. Such emplotments work through articulations of discursive and institutional elements: they take shape in theoretical discourses and in practical attitudes, in modes of individual perception and in social institutionsmuseums, libraries, educational programmes; and in commercial inventions as well.30 Rancire traces three such emplotments of the relations between art and life: rst, the scenario in which art functions as a form of lifes self-education (the post-Schillerian to Marxist-humanist tradition, but also the Art and Crafts movement) in which the originary logic of the aesthetic state is reversed as art is tied to the progressive self-education of humanity; second, the transformation of art into life through the Hegelian emplotment of the museum as a mode of rendering visible and intelligible the life of art;31 and third, the new forms of exchangeability of the relations between life and art produced by Romantic aesthetics in its organization of relations of permeability between art and life. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather it is indicative of the different semiotic and material orderings of the relations between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, that become possible once art is prised free from its earlier, exclusive association with the hierarchical orders of the poetic regime of art. It is in this loosening up of art or, more generally, of the sensible that Rancire grounds his account of arts autonomy: not, as in Bourdieus account, an autonomy of specic forms of art from the constraints of the market and politics, but as an autonomous realm of the sensible whose sequestration from the social, the economy, and the political is variably organized by the different scenarios of the relations between art and life that are produced by different articulations of the relations between philosophical aesthetics, art practices, and cultural institutions. But this autonomy of art is also always produced in ways which reconnect the sensible to the social, retying art to the life from which it is separated, by various institutionaldiscursive knots. One such knot is comprised by the metapolitics of art in which the autonomy that is attributed to art serves as the guardian and promise of an emancipation to come that transcends, and serves as a means of displacing, politics. My interest in these aspects of Rancires work has two aspects. First, his account of the role played by the commentaries of philosophical aesthetics as parts of varied emplotments of the relations between art and life opens up a route into accounts of the relations between aes-

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thetics and the social whichtaking their cue from my discussion of new directions in sociology in the previous sectionwould focus on the operations of distinctive forms of aesthetic expertise in specic cultural assemblages and the techniques for performing the literary or the aesthetic that these cultivate. This change of analytical focus relocates earlier sociological approaches to the aesthetic as a set of metaformal properties by interpreting such properties as ones that are produced for selected texts via their inscription with specic aesthetic-cultural technologies. This is not the route that Rancire himself takes. To the contrary, as his vitriolic criticisms of Bourdieu testify,32 his work is explicitly pitched against a sociological engagement with the aesthetic of any kind. In this regard, to come to the second aspect of my interest in Rancire, his position instantiates a particular form of the social deployment of aesthetic expertise, one which claims an organizing and authorizing role in relation to the project of a metapolitics. For if this is to transcend the eld of ordinary politics and place itself beyond the reach of both ethics and epistemology, it must nd ways of placing itself beyond the reach of all forms of knowledge which, like sociology, rest upon empirical instruments of knowing. It is in relation to the fashioning of a space in which such a project might install itself that aesthetics, in its post-Kantian forms, has been most characteristically socially deployed. There are, of course, other aesthetic traditions that have been actively instrumental in ordering other relations between art and life: the reforming program of missionary aestheticism associated with the Ruskin-Arnold tradition, for example.33 My interest here, however, is in the distinctive social and historical logic informing the organization and operations of the space of metapolitics as an example of the kind of issue that a sociology concerned with the exercise of aesthetics as a specic form of expertise should examine. The key limitation of Rancires position in this regard is that his historicization of aesthetics stops short at Kant whose Critique of Judgement he sees as the crucial foundational event establishing the aesthetic regime of art. In contradistinction to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens attempt to establish aesthetics as a science of the beautiful and, therefore, as a subbranch of poetics, Kant designated the aesthetic as a specic mode of reception of artworks.34 Deleuze, to whom Rancire refers, offers the best summary of the consequences of this aspect of Kants aesthetic.35 Given that, owing to its particularity and its disinterestedness, aesthetic judgement, as Kant denes it, can neither legislate over a particular eld of objects nor secure an interest in reason, it can, as Deleuze puts it, only be heautonomous, that is, it legislates over itself.36 In doing

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so, however, it provides a basis for harmonising the exercise of all the faculties. The supposition that aesthetic judgement is universal, and so communicable to all without the intervention of concepts, provides the basis for a common sense based on the free interplay of the faculties in which imagination and the understanding are brought into a free, undetermined accord with one another. Aesthetic judgement thus provides for the free subjective harmony between the faculties that is necessary if the other faculties are to perform the legislative roles that Kant assigns them. It does so, however, only through the intervention of a particular form of expertise which lays out the person as a set of folds and surfaces to be acted on in accordance with the coordinates for intervention into the regulation of conduct that are provided by Kants account of the relations between the faculties. The productivity of Kants transcendental method is properly appreciated only when it is historicized as proposing a particular architecture of the person which lays it open to the intervention and exercise of a historically novel form of expertise as a part of the preeminently social processes through which bids and counterbids for the regulation of conduct and the ordering of social life vie with one another. What is it, when interpreted in this light, that distinguishes aesthetic expertise? In brief, it is that of drawing artistic products sometimes narrowly conceived, sometimes broadlyinto the orbit of the governance of freedom understood as a particular set of capacities which are made up for certain kinds of persons whose distribution across social categories of various kinds (race, occupation, gender) is variable. The establishment of arts autonomy in the aesthetic regime of art, as Rancire puts it, identies its forms with the forms life uses to shape itself.37 What Rancire fails to do, however, is to place this regime in which aesthetics fashions works of art into instruments for practices of free self-shaping alongside the other forms of knowledge and expertise that are involved in the emergence of liberal forms of government. The direction in which these formulations point is a Foucauldian one. As such, they open up a series of further questions. What are the distinctive qualities of the politics of truth associated with aesthetics? Through what particular forms of expertise are the forms of freedom associated with the aesthetic produced? How are these freedoms distributed? Yet, if these are Foucauldian questions, they are ones which Foucault and a good many Foucauldians have posed largely within the framework of the metapolitics produced by the aesthetic regime of art rather than making this a historicized object of analysis. These are the questions I now go on to consider.

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Historicizing the Aesthetic

In a probing discussion of Foucaults conception of the aesthetics of existence, Thomas Osborne argues that the post-Kantian view of arts autonomy serves as a model for the creation of a style of life without recourse to the xity of moral codes on the one hand, or of epistemological guarantees on the other.38 It thus constitutes a practice of the truth that is connected to certain ways and techniques of working on the self that are distinct from those associated with psychology or anthropology since it repudiates the drowning of our lives in epistemological form in the name of an aesthetic morality that serves as its own yardstick, regardless of the so-called sciences of the self.39 Foucaults account of the aesthetics of existence as a commitment to the elaboration of ones own life as a personal work of art exemplies an ethical practice conducted by means of a free exercise of the will which stands in contrast to Christian ethics in which with the religion of the text, the idea of Gods will and the principle of obedience, morality took much more the form of a code of rules.40 What Foucaults formulations suggest, Osborne argues, is a negative morality in which aesthetics functions as a kind of doctrineless, self-imposed doctrine of how to live.41 These formulations construe the relations between aesthetics and freedom quite differently from the terms Foucault uses when discussing the role played by different systems of truth in relation to the mechanisms of freedom through which liberal forms of government work. In contrast to the purely philosophical nature of his engagement with Kants conception of Enlightenment which informs his account of the aesthetics of existence,42 Foucaults method here is more painstakingly historical, pitching itself against thinking in terms of transhistorical universals. Freedom is not, he says, a universal which can be particularized in different ways and to different degrees in time and space. Freedom is never anything other, he continues, . . . than an actual relation between governors and governed.43 Nor is liberalism a system of government that simply respects or guarantees freedom. It is rather, Foucault argues, a consumer of freedom in the sense that it can only function on the supposition that various kinds of freedom (of the market, of circulation, of discussion) exist. Since it needs freedom as a condition of its exercise, liberalism must therefore also organize, produce, and manage the conditions for freedoma process which always also channels and limits it. Liberalism must produce freedom, as he puts it, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats etcetera.44

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The questions that need to be put to aesthetics from this perspective concern how, as a particular form of knowledge ordering the relations between the production and consumption of works of art in historically specic ways, it organizes and produces certain kinds of freedom, and distributes these in ways which simultaneously place checks and limits on them. This entails a different approach to the history of aesthetics from those which we nd in the literature dedicated to its conception as an emancipatory form of metapolitics. These usually set their historical and theoretical compass according to the settings bequeathed by Kant as though they were a settled starting point. This has two consequences. First, it means that the Kantian apparatus is evacuated of the specic historical politics by which it was shaped in being presented as the outcome of a history which runs entirely along the high road that is its own construction: the struggle to locate in the subject a transcendental basis for free and rational self-formation. This entails, second, that the ways of posing and framing questions of intellectual and aesthetic politics that arise from this particular architecture of the person are simply replicatedwith local historical variationswithout themselves being problematized. Rancires account of the aesthetic regime of art is thus organised entirely in terms of Kants account of the role of the aesthetic in anticipating and contributing to the progressive unfolding of the conditions for the establishment of a sensus communis. In his concern to reconstruct an alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality, Rancire takes as his starting point the Kantian conception of the autonomy of art as a specic form of sensory experience . . . which appears as the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life (23, 32). It is this conception of a revolution within the very idea of revolution, in the idea of a revolution of the forms of sensible existence as opposed to a revolution of state forms (3334), which generates the space of metapolitics that is both occupied by, and made up of, different emplotments of the relations between art and life: art replacing politics; art becoming a kind of social hermeneutics; the autonomy of art as the guardian of the promise of emancipation. A constant factor, however, is the freight that is invested in the capacity of the aesthetic to overcome the sensory divisions between different humanities on which all earlier forms of domination have rested. For it is this that keeps open and provides the means for working on the gap which separates humanity now from an ideal humanity located beyond all historical and sensory divisions. It is this Kantian construction of the form of arts autonomy that generates the two main tendencies of aesthetics as a form of metapolitics:

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The politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form. If the rst of these ascribes to art the task of consructing new forms of life in common, the second encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in arts very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life (44). These two orientations are, however, caught up with one another in relations of reciprocal dependency, providing a contradictory combinatory which generates the metapolitics of aesthetics which frames the possibilities of art.45 And it is from this position that Rancire seeks to ward off other emplotments of the relations between art and life, other actual or putative social and political inscriptions of art, which do not comply with a metapolitical framing of the aesthetic as inherently outside of, and occupying a relation of critical transcendence in relation to, the politics of the state: of parties, bureaucracies, pressure groups, and so on. This is the basis for his opposition to what he calls the current ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. This has two versions. The rst, the hard version, comprises the postholocaust inversion of the aesthetic promise of emancipation to link arts specicity, instead, to an immemorial and never-ending catastrophe (Jean-Franois Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben), while the soft version transmutes the Soviet dream of arts role as a means of reengineering social life into the more modest contemporary utopias of the architects of new cities, of designers reinventing a community on the basis of new urban design, or the relational artists introducing an object, an image or an unusual inscription into the landscapes of difcult suburbs (129). Here, then, are the worldly issues at stake in the construction and defence of the space of metapolitics and the role this accords the philosopher-aesthetician in mediating the reception of artworks. For this space is only secured as a metapolitics through how it frames, and discounts, other formulations of the relations between art and life produced by contending forms of expertise. Rancire is by no means unaware of this. His comments on the ethical regime of images (28), in which works of art are perceived and judged in accordance with their relations to the norms and standards of divinity, amply demonstrate his appreciation of the mutability of the effects which artworks might have depending on the regimes in which they are apprehended. The difculty here, then, is not Rancires blindness to the relativity of the framing of artworks effected by the aesthetic regime of art; indeed, his argument is built around this central tenet. The problem is rather that he has no understanding of the ways in which this regime bears the continuing impress of a secular and historicized version of Christian metaphysics.

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One of the difculties here is that, for Rancire, aesthetics emerges more or less fully formed from Kants brow. Aesthetics, he tells us, was born as a discourse two centuries ago (6). Ian Hunters work opens up a different set of possibilities by historicizing the relations between Kantianism and Christianity considered as technologies of the self. Albeit in a rational and puried form, Hunter argues, Kants system reinstated the organizing role that Christianity had enjoyed in the earlier tradition of university metaphysics through his conception of the homo duplex governed by the antinomy between mans sensible and intelligible natures. This antinomy established a grid for the cultivation of the ascetic relation to the self it imposed and the spiritual exercises it required by imbuing individuals with a sense of their deviation from the ideal way of thought and life represented by mans intelligible nature.46 In this way, the aesthetic plays a particular role within the broader Kantian architecture of the person by inducting individuals into a particular regime of selfcultivation through which they try to reshape themselves in relation to this ideal. This continuing role for a secularized and rationalized Christian metaphysics is produced by Kants designation of humanity as loaded with all the attributes previously accorded to God, thereby producing a difference between humanity as an ideal yet to come and human beings as the space for the formation and distribution of a new regimen of the self under the tutelage of the Kantian philosopher-aesthetician. Kants ideal of community governed by equal participation in the kingdom of ends is thus not, Hunter concludes, a preguration of political democracy, but a thought-gure used in the grooming of a spiritual elite whose claims to exercise specic forms of civil power depend on a capacity to close the gap between the two humanities by so purifying their own human-sensible nature as to qualify them for participation in transcendental forms of reasoning.47 The same is true of the space for art that is produced by Rancires account of the aesthetic regime of art. This, too, is a framing of the reception of artwhich embodies, as Rancire puts it, the refutation, within the sensible, of this opposition between intelligent form and sensible matter which, properly speaking, is a difference between two humanities (31)in which a still operative Christian metaphysic provides the coordinates for the grooming of a corps of paradoxical freedom ghters who, committed as they are to an unrealizable politics,48 reproduce a position of self-authorized transcendence in relation to the realm of mundane politics, the state, and civic reasoning. This depends on particular techniques of self-grooming which place the aesthetic consumption of art in a different register: the cultivation, for example, of the attributes of non-possession and passivity (35) that aesthetic

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education transmits, or the cultivation of a demeanor which opposes to the dissensual intervention of political subjects a putative overcoming of political dissensus by looking beyond the appearances of democracy and of the forms of the State to the infra-scene of underground movements and the concrete energies that comprise them (33). Hunter also helps to historicize the relations between aesthetics and metapolitics by challenging the ground on which such claims to transcendence of the civil and political have rested. He does so by reviewing the rival tradition of the Enlightenment represented by the civil philosophies of Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius. In Pufendorfs account of the citizen as one who accedes to his civil duties for reasons of civil security rather than through an insight into moral truth, philosophy serves as a regimen for the production of civil personae rather than for the production of a singular moral persona based on a self-authorizing claim to a transcendental truth. As such it proceeds not via reection on the transcendental qualities of god or mind, but by empirical observation of the nature, condition, and desires of men, and of the forms of governmental action that are needed to produce civic harmony between them. To place civil and metaphysical philosophies side by side in this way requires a suspension of the criteria which the latter proposes for disqualifying the latter to examine instead their role in cultivating particular intellectual comportments whose instruments and means of ordering and equipping the person for particular kinds of self-action are connected to particular ways of training intellectual elites and disposing them to act in relation to, or above, the social and the civic in particular ways. In his remarks on the aesthetics of existence and his take on Kant and the Enlightenment more generally, by contrast, Foucault takes at face value the Kantian construction of the aesthetic as an authority-free zone rather than probing the transmuted forms of religious authority it aspires to. By taking a leaf out of Hunters book, however, its possible to adopt a more open-ended, empirical approach to the relations between aesthetics and the organization and distribution of freedom, rather than one divided in advance by a Chinese wall between the articulations of such relations associated with the realm of metapolitics and the ordering of art/social relations associated with other forms of expertise, their institutional associations, the varied forms of inscriptions of the sensible they effect, and the different ways in which these are mobilized to act on and within variable architectures of personhood. The relations between the Kantian project of the ethical state as a means of resacralizing government by subjecting its members to the guidance of a new form of secular-spiritual authority; the connections between the post-Kantian

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history of Bildung and its relations to the earlier history of Pietism that brought its spiritual exercises to bear, variously, on the training of a new group of experts and state administrators, bourgeois forms of socialization in clubs or the domestic sphere, or public art programs; the different ways of socially organizing and distributing the capacity of freedom associated with the division between Bildung and Halbbildung: these are all cases in point.49 As such, their investigation requires that we step outside the Kantian assumption that aesthetic agency is a unique property of the autonomous individual to focus sociologically on how specic aesthetic competencies are produced as a consequence of the ways in which people are equipped to perform aesthetic judgementsand to order the relations between themas a result of particular discursive and sociomaterial orderings of the relations between persons, spaces, texts, and things.50

The Social Force of Form

In his interview with Gabriel Rockhill for the English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancire equates Althussers and Bourdieus commitment to a science of the hidden with a quest for a position of intellectual mastery over others. He goes on to state his own preference for a at analytical topography, for thinking in terms of distributions, combinations between systems of possibilities, not in terms of surface and substratum, that denies the possibility of any such mastery over the social.51 However, although sharing Latours dissent from the depth/ surface model of traditional forms of sociological explanation, Rancire, far from sharing Latours perception that critique has run out of steam,52 seeks to refound it as a form of metapolitics based on a premise of equality which does not assume any vertical ordering of the relations between science and the people.53 I have, in the previous section, reviewed the limitations of this position. At the same time, I have dwelt at some length on Rancires conception of the aesthetic regime of art in view of the possibilities it presents for new ways of conceptualising the relations between art, literature, and the social. The aspect of Rancires work that is most relevant here concerns the similarity, which he himself draws attention to, between his methods and Foucaults in aiming to historicise the transcendental.54 His concern in relation to the category of art is thus to reconstruct the conceptual network that made art as such a thinkable, perceptible, visible, and, above all, an actionable reality. However, the fact that the visibility of art depends on a historically constituted regime of perception

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and intelligibility does not mean that the earlier realities produced by the poetic regime of art cease to be visible and actionable as such.55 At any given time several regimes coexist and intermingle in the works themselves.56 In these terms, then, Rancire offers a way of thinking about the relations between art and the social that takes account of the ways in which the formal properties of works of art are structured and organized by the ensemble of institutional and discursive forces that produce them as distinctive and perceptible realities with specic zones and forms of effect, different ways of acting and being acted on, that derive from the ensembles in which they are assembled. Different regimes of art, he argues, articulate modes of production of objects or of the interrelation of actions; forms of visibility of these manners of making and doing; and manners of conceptualising or problematising these manners of making or doing and these forms of visibility. These modes of conceptualization, he continues, are not simply added interpretations; they are conditions of possibility for what artistic practices can produce and for what the aesthetic gaze can see.57 Where I have parted company with Rancire is in refusing the privilege he accords that form of arts deployment arising from the aesthetic regime of art which he calls metapolitics. I have done so by offering the glimmerings of a genealogy of the displaced forms of religious authority that continue to inform mobilizations of Kants aesthetics in the cause of critique and against civic forms of reasoning and calculation. This, in turn, has formed part of a displacement of the terms in which Rancire poses questions concerning the role played by aesthetics in the relations between governors and governedterms which, for Rancire, are constant from Plato to Bourdieu in concerning how the aesthetic maps a division within the sensible across the relations between different humanitiesin favour of the more historically focused terms of inquiry proposed by Foucaults account of liberal government in view of the attention it pays to the ways in which such government must make up, organize, and distribute the freedoms it needs for its exercise. None of this, however, detracts from the historical reality of the aesthetic regime of art, or construes it, in accordance with the logic of the cultural turn, as a cultural construct that is thereby evaporated into a set of purely representational effects. My concern has rather been with how this might serve as a point of entry into a sociology that is concerned with how distinctive spheres of formal action are produced for literary and artistic works by virtue of the always plural and varied ensembles of relations in which they are assembled. This would include a concern with the ways in which varied devices and institutional conditions of deployment equip such works and their readers or viewers with specic capacities

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and aptitudessuch as those required to produce art consumers who are able to immerse themselves in the fathomless depths of absolute art and nd there new coordinates for self-fashioning58as parts of histories that are always social, material, and discursive. Rather than a concern with form as an effect of social relations which lie outside or below the literary or artistic work, the focus here is on how form is produced by and operates as part of a matrix of determinations which always include the operations of specic forms of expertise in relations of competition and contestation over the coordinates through which the free self-activity of individuals is to be managed. Or, to put the point differently, we might say that the historical reality of the aesthetic consists in the ways in which its various architectures of personhood have been translated into complex apparatuses for directing the ow of the subject through the range of spaces in betweenbetween the faculties of practical and pure reason, between ideology and science, between habituation and defamiliarizationwhich such architectures produce. It is for this reason, to go back to my starting point, that Machereys invocation of the literary as perfectly real in contrast to literature as a mere fabrication of criticism will not serve the purpose he intends, for it simply makes invisible the role of the moment of theory as a historically new cut into questions concerning the nature of form and its effects.59 And it is for this reason that when Moretti speaks of form as nothing but force he has no means of analysing how such force might operate because, neglecting entirely the role of institutional and discursive factors in making up the space of the literary in favor of an account of how form is affected by extraliterary social forces, he is unable to engage adequately with the respects in which the force of form is itself made up of a composite set of social forces. If, then, the sociology of literature is still to pursue questions of formand although I can see no reason why it should not, there are also no good reasons for axiomatically privileging such questionsthese are the directions along which those concerns might perhaps now most productively be refashioned. University of Western Sydney
Notes 1 Pierre Macherey, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, ed. Warren Montag, trans. Ted Stolze (London: Verso, 1998), 4951. 2 Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). 3 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005), 92, 64.

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4 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 57. 5 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 64. 6 James English, Literary Studies, in Handbook of Cultural Analysis, ed. Tony Bennett and John Frow (London: Sage, 2008), 12644. 7 See Tony Bennett, Counting and Seeing the Social Action of Literary Form: Franco Moretti and the Sociology of Literature, Cultural Sociology 3, no. 1 (2009): 27797. 8 See Georg Lukcs, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971) and Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 239. 9 I have offered more detailed accounts of both of these questions: on the rst, see Bennett, Sociology and Culture in Bennett and Frow, Handbook of Cultural Analysis, 86106; on the second, see Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003). 10 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 288. 11 See Bennett, The Historical Universal: The Role of Cultural Value in the Historical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, British Journal of Sociology 56, no. 1 (2005): 14164. 12 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), 48. 13 See the discussion of the limits of cultural constructivism in Manuel De Landa, Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-ended Becoming of the World in Elizabeth Grosz, ed., Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 2932. 14 See the discussion of this aspect of Foucaults work in Frow, A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole, in Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 34661. 15 See, for example, the essays collected in John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1999). 16 Representative examples are John Law and Annemarie Mol, eds., Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). 17 See, for example, Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, eds., Market Devices (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), and Judith Butler, Performative Agency, Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 2 (2010). 18 I have offered fuller discussions elsewhere: see Bennett and Chris Healy, Introduction: Assembling Culture, Journal of Cultural Economy 2, nos. 1 and 2 (2009): 310; Bennett Museum, Field, Colony: Colonial Governmentality and the Circulation of Reference, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2, nos. 1 and 2 (2009): 99116; and Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett, Material Powers, in Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material Powers: Culture, History, and the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010). 19 For fuller elaborations of this argument, see Bennett, Making Culture, Changing Society: The Perspective of Culture Studies, Cultural Studies 21, nos. 45 (2007): 61029, and Bennett, The Work of Culture, Journal of Cultural Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 3148. 20 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), 32, 423 21 See Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientic Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986). 22 See, for example, Liz McFall, The Agencement of Industrial Branch Life Assurance, Journal of Cultural Economy 2, nos. 1 and 2 (2009): 4966. 23 Ogborn, Indian Ink, 38.

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24 Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008), 30. 25 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 25466. 26 See Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 27 See Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 28 The sense I have in mind here of philosophical aesthetics as a form of knowledge of the aestheticwhich it posits as a form of knowing independently of conceptsis clear in David Paxmans account of the early-eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics. See David Paxman, Aesthetics as Epistemology, or Knowledge without Certainty, EighteenthCentury Studies 26, no. 2 (1992): 285306. 29 Rancire, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 1011 (hereafter cited in text). 30 Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy, New Left Review 14 (2002): 134. 31 Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution, 140. 32 See the discussion of Bourdieu in Rancire, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Lorinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 165202. 33 I take the phrase missionary aestheticism from Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 18701900: Beauty for the People (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2006). 34 See Rancire, What Aesthetics can Mean, in Peter Osborne, ed., From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art, and the Senses (London: Serpents Tail, 2000), 18. 35 See, for a fuller discussion, Bennett, Aesthetics, Government, Freedom, in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 6 (20089): 7691. 36 Gilles Deleuze, Kants Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 48. 37 Rancire, Politics of Aesthetics, 23. 38 Thomas Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth (London: UCL Press, 1998), 102. 39 Osborne, Aspects, 104. 40 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews 19611984, ed. Sylvre Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), 311. 41 Osborne, Aspects, 103. 42 See Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvre Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porfer (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007). 43 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 197879, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 63. 44 Foucault, Biopolitics, 64. 45 Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution, 151. 46 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). In his references to spiritual exercises, Hunter draws on the work of Pierre Hadot who also expresses his skepticism in regard to Foucaults concept of the aesthetics of existence as failing to adequately historicise its relations to earlier practices of the self. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 211. 47 Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, 311. 48 See, for his account of the melancholic politics generated by the aesthetic regime of art, Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution, 151.

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49 I draw here on Reinhart Kosselecks discussion of Bildung in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner, Kerstin Behnke, and Jobst Welge (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002). 50 I draw here on Laurent Thvenot, Which Road to Follow? The Moral Complexity of an Equipped Humanity, in John Law and Annemarie Mol, eds., Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002). 51 Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 49. 52 See Latour, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 22548. 53 See, for further elaboration, Kristin Ross, Rancire and the Practice of Equality, Social Text 29 (1991): 5771. 54 Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 50. 55 Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 50. 56 Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, 50. Rancire presents this argument as a critique of the tendency to place unbridgeable historical barriers between one system of thought and another which he attributes to Foucaults archaeological method. While a valid criticism of Foucaults earlier work, it was a tendency Foucault corrected in his later accounts of governmentality by stressing the continuing existence of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power alongside the governmental. 57 Rancire, What Aesthetics can Mean, 1617. 58 See Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, trans. Helen Atkins (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). 59 For a discussion of theorys role in relation to such conceptions of the literary, see Ian Hunter, The History of Theory, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 78112.