The term for sensory knowledge appears twice in the title of Jacques Rancière’s book—once in transliterated ancient Greek (the “genitive, third declension” aesthesis, meaning “perception via the senses”) and once in the Latinate form innovated by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750 (when he published the first volume of his Aesthetica), which Rancière takes in its adjectival form, aesthetic. There is a clue in this doubling that helps decode this strange and rewarding text: we need an “aesthetic regime of art” to make the space for “aesthesis,” a place of relative sanctuary where “sensible experience” can occur. The job of philosophical aesthetics since the Enlightenment—to describe what kind of thing art is, what kind of cognition it stimulates, how it is different from nature or useful objects made with craft—these are not Rancière’s primary focus. Instead, each chapter places the reader within an already aesthetic situation (the aforementioned “regime”). The art is already embedded in a network of interpretations: “thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas” (xi), and the text moves through a roughly chronological history of performative encounters with this art. I say “performative” since these are often durational media: this is not T. J. Clark in The Sight of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) ruminating on an oil painting from the period when France took a leadership role in this medium. Oil paintings appear here and there, there are a few sculptures, but mostly Rancière tackles artworks he could never possibly have seen: a performance by Loïe Fuller, a nineteenth-century pantomime of clowns; an original Charlie Chaplin film in pristine condition. Thus he must engage with textual remains—traces of reception or works of literature in themselves. The emphasis is on the perspicacious or even brilliant critic (G. W. F. Hegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Charles Baudelaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, John Ruskin, Rainer Maria Rilke—and someone the author clearly admires, Erich Auerbach). Rancière uses these writers as lenses, magnifying the moments in prose that allow for something of the originary strangeness of the art they were writing about to be gleaned—ekphrasis unpacked to reveal a social history of sensory knowledge in the making.

Rancière’s is a modernist project. He modestly acknowledges that the book could be read as “a counter-history of ‘artistic modernity,’” but the scare quotes imply that he wants to pressure the very conception of “artistic modernity”—perhaps by this he means modernism?—as somehow ocular or pictorial. His “counter-history” would seem to favor the condition of modernity in the life-world of its subjects (xiii). Yet I would argue that his project is still modernist, for Rancière is most interested in “scenes” that reveal changes in the paradigms of art—“a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable” (xi). I take this to be a variation on the old avant-garde project, but with radically transformed forms and media in play. What traditional art history might characterize as vaudeville or popular entertainment, Rancière wants to see as the glimmerings of new aesthetics—“regimes of art”—coming into being. So even as works of art are encountered as already enmeshed in aesthetic systems (criticism, producers, programs, lighting, audiences), these works are transforming their viewing subjects, at least in Rancière’s argument. There are politics in this move, of course, for these are definitely not the beaux arts; these are scenes for, from, and about middle- and lower-class folks—citizens of the republics in which these forms appeared (mostly in France and the United States, a little in Germany and England). If the instigating object for these encounters came to Western culture from a cultic or princely past (the Belvedere Torso, for example), it is the way that remnant functions for modern people that interests Rancière. And so, Johann Winckelmann becomes the figure inaugurating the historical moment “when Art begins to be named as such, not by closing itself off in some celestial autonomy” (none of Victor Cousin’s l’art pour l’art here!), “but on the contrary by giving itself a new subject, the people, and a new place, history” (xiii). As expanded in the chapter on Winckelmann and the birth of art history, this crystallizes into one of the hundreds of aphorisms that will certainly be pulled from this book: “History exists as a concept for collective life” (15; emphasis added). Rancière is after the shape of that collective, and how it can wrest, from the base materialism of popular culture as well as the rarer forms of art, progressive forms of living and being.

Aisthesis is organized with a solemn rhythm, exploring its “scenes” through time and place (each chapter bears a subtitle, such as “Boston, 1841” or “Moscow, 1926”)—as if the pace and intensity of modernization was itself the protagonist of this narrative, but one that has been captured and slowed down for careful examination. There are no names that signal what each chapter covers, no monographic treatments within these essays, no pictures—but clear evidence of thoughtful apprenticeship to the work of historians, and to the archives they inhabit. This makes for convoluted reading, and often interest wanes. But the overall project is attractive. Rancière pursues the oldest modernist dream, which is to find in culture the means for producing a new democratic or even revolutionary consciousness—not from “content” or “message,” but from a poetic and engaging Art that is honest but transformative. (To my mind, there is something very pragmatist about this project, yet there is no John Dewey or William James in sight, just many of the artists and writers contributing to their milieu, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Henry James and James Agee. Perhaps that is the Continent’s myopia.)

The most satisfying of these encounters or “scenes” are the ones in which the philosopher tangles with the meat of sensation under rampant modernization. Georg Simmel helps him, quoted in mid-book on “the aesthetic attempt to solve the great problem of life: how an individual work . . . can simultaneously belong to something higher, a unifying encompassing context” (149). The “unifying context,” which might be understood as that which binds the collective, is doubly challenging when “the aesthetic attempt” is unprecedented. The subject it will produce is coming into being only at the moment of the aesthetic encounter. For Rancière, the context of contact is only lightly sketched, but Simmel’s concerns with the sensory assault of the Weltstadt and its industrial surrounds might be a good guide for what the philosopher is thinking about when he conjures up various dynamic moments between the utterly new and the subjects we have all become in modernization: “the social art” of decoration in the mind of Ruskin; the perfect happiness of a sensorially aware Stendhal character waiting for death; the craft of Whitman and Agee as they each, at different times, produce a modernist idiom that “subtracts [the aesthetic] both from the logic of the economic and social order and from the artificiality of poetic exception” (72).

Rancière wants this liminality, this edgy and restless becoming-Other inside a populist ordinariness that has produced us as its later progeny. This is the signature of his philosophy. As it has been translated into English, Rancière’s writings celebrate “the inexhaustible totality of every instant” from high modernist literature (Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf), while also applying these appetites to social realism and the beggars, Jules Chéret posters, and Emersonian nominalism that lives in the street. Here it helps to recall the signal moment that the young student of Louis Althusser (with whom he co-authored Reading Capital, which came out in 1968) became the solo Rancière—embracing a certain anarchy of open possibilities (not even “the people,” but just “people”) as opposed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s or Althusser’s concerns with Man. Rancière broke with Althusser formally in the tumult of Mai ’68 and became ever more interested in annihilating the programmatic. In this respect, he is like Michel Foucault, uneasy with the mantle of “philosopher” and more likely to position himself as a questioner, a seeker, an interlocutor, and/or relentless self-reviser. Rancière’s rhetorical figures are always on the move, whether they are Ignorant Schoolmasters open to being educated by their students or Emancipated Spectators of a theater they no longer “watch” as passive guests but performatively constitute through their active mental and emotional engagement. Despite his native generosity in these matters, Rancière nonetheless arrogates to himself the power of the philosopher: to question the status quo in search of a better, more contemplated existence, as in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004).

But in Aisthesis, rather than merely parsing the contemporary sensory condition, Rancière seeks its history. He does so in a string of moments that focus the reader’s attention—not on the honored “resistant works” of high modernism, but on surprising popular concoctions that might mix, for example, “the intoxication of art and industrial accomplishment” (on Loïe Fuller, 108)—where “the sensible milieu of existence and the form of community obey one and the same principle.” It would be all the more compelling if the schoolmaster Rancière would compare Fuller’s industrial light and magic with, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s, to examine how communities formed through media of spectacle might differ. A broader history reminds us: we will not get the right kind of collective through media automatically. We have to make the time to contemplate mediatic effects and invest in the moral thinking of aesthetics. Which is to say, we need philosophy.