Disruptive Politics

In the preceding chapters, I have explored the political aesthetic of Arendt, Nancy and Rancière, focusing, in particular, on the role space plays in their conceptualisation of politics. We have seen that their conceptualisations involve a political aesthetic that makes perception of phenomena central to their politics, and, thus, requires aesthetic forms and domains of relationality. Their politics is based on the apprehension of phenomena that are spatially formed and ordered. Space plays a constitutive role in their politics that requires the apprehension of the world through aesthetic forms and the constitution of relational domains of experience and political subjects. These three thinkers also depend on recourse to space to account for the specificity of politics. This is not, as we have seen, always unproblematic. Arendt's and Nancy's earlier conceptualisations do this by using space for delineating a sphere reserved for politics. But they also employ a more relational and dynamic notion of space that suggests a distinctive gathering with no pre-given form of place, which implies an understanding of politics as an unfolding in space and time. Rancière's understanding of politics also suggests this form of spatialisation to distinguish it from the institutionalised spaces of politics. What distinguishes Rancière from Arendt and Nancy is that, with his focus on distribution, he problematises spatialisation as a political problem and focuses on instances where the consolidated spatial and temporal orderings wrong the principle of equality.

What all three share is that their understanding of politics implies some form of generative rupture in the established order of things by opening up new spaces. Their politics is thus inaugurative and disruptive, emphasising a spatial unfolding that unsettles the established ways of sensing and making sense of the world. Politics, I argued in Chapter 1, is about forms of perceiving the world and modes of relating to it. How this world is constructed, disclosed and disrupted is a matter of politics. But what is the nature of disruption when politics is conceived in such aesthetic and spatial terms? If aesthetic forms and spatial distributions are necessary for sensing and making sense of the world, what does politics introduce to disturb them?