RANCIÈRE's POLITICS OF AESTHETICS AND THE RECENT HISTORY OF POLITICISED ART

In the recent history of politicised art, two forms are readily identifiable. The first might be called content-based commitment and is founded on the representation of politicised subject matter. The second, which might be referred to as formal commitment, locates the political dimension of works of art in their mode of representation or expression rather than in the subject matter represented. In the post-war era in France, content-based commitment is often identified with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Roland Barthes's The Degree Zero of Writing (1953), a critical re-appropriation of Sartre's What Is Literature? (1948), can be seen as one of the pivotal publications in the turn toward more formal concerns, which eventually led to the work of what are now called the French structuralists and post-structuralists, the Tel Quel group, the nouveau roman circles, and certain members of the French New Wave.

There is, however, a notable difference between these two socially recognised positions on the question of artistic commitment and the specific arguments formulated by the authors and artists who purportedly defended them. It is worth recalling, for instance, the following features of Sartre's position in What Is Literature? and other publications from the same time period: he generally restricted the notion of commitment to prose; he affirmed that the very act of writing leads to an inevitable form of commitment independent of the author's intentions; he insisted on the importance of the literary and stylistic dimension of committed prose; he formulated a distinct conception of poetic engagement; he made explicit reference to a type of reader's commitment based on the social nature of writing; and he considered that engagement was always bound to a specific situation. Concerning the work of Roland Barthes, it should be remembered that the history of l’écriture he proposes in The Degree Zero of Writing is not a history of style or language (la langue) but a history of the formal signs used by an author to situate his or her writing in relationship to society. In other words, when he claims that Form remains ‘the first and last instance of [literary] responsibility’, he is not referring to an author's style or to language in general but to a third formal reality, writing, that links literary production to the larger social order.