PAVILION

date their discourse and their knowledge”.
3 The traditional figure of the intellectual
as agent of ‘consciousness’ and
discourse is, following Foucault, an element
of this system of power.
Consequently, he concludes, “the role of
the intellectual is no longer to situate himself
‘slightly ahead’ or slightly ‘to one side’
so he may speak the silent truth of each
and all; it is rather to struggle against
those forms of power where he is both
instrument and object in the order of
‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘consciousness,’ and
‘discourse’.” 4
This is why, argues Foucault, theory does
not “express, translate or apply” a praxis,
but is itself a praxis, a local and regional,
non-totalizing praxis. It is thus no longer a
matter of struggle for a prise de conscience,
but a “struggle to undermine and
take power side by side with those who
are fighting”. 5 In what follows, Deleuze
gives Foucault the credit of having been
the first one to take the “indignity of
speaking for others” seriously: “What I
mean is, we laughed at representation,
saying it was over, but we didn’t follow
this ‘theoretical’ conver-sion through—
namely, theory demanded that those
involved finally have their say from a
practical standpoint”. 6 As an example to
this, Foucault brings up their work with
the G.I.P. and the specificity of the prise
de parole of the prisoners: “When the
prisoners began to speak, they had their
own theory of prison, punishment, and
justice. What really matters is this kind of
discourse against power, the counter-discourse
expressed by prisoners […], and
not a discourse on criminality.” 7
1. Post-mimetic Representation
The possibility of “counter-discourses”
outlined by Foucault is thus the consequence
of the fact that, as Deleuze has
put it, “representation was over”.
Nevertheless this does not mean, as I
would like to show, the end of representation
as such, but the end of a specific
hierarchy of representation and the subsequent
availability of a certain documentary
style realism to fic-tionalizations and
stylizations. What is at stake is thus the
suspension of the sorted relation
between the represented reality or individuals
and the images or words meant
to represent them. This disrupting of the
normative order of representation is
twofold: it refers on the one hand to the
end of the legitimacy of a critical discourse
on a specific socially relevant
situa-tion, relying on the existence of a
transcendent figure of an erudite or
knowledgeable activist intellectual; and it
highlights on the other hand a rupture
with a specific hierarchical disposi-tion of
representation in the field of the aesthetics.
The latter gives way to what I would
like to call an “aesthetic realism”: a representation
beyond the traditional hierarchies
of represen-tation that define what
can be said in which register and by
whom. The emancipation from the normative
mimetic imperative entails a new
politics of description that deposes the
primacy of the narration of the great
events over the description of the ordinary
in its arbitrariness (and thus is
inscribed in a biopolitical paradigm).
Through the rupture with mimetic faithfulness,
realist description becomes available
to different forms of fictionalization
and stylization and breaks with the strict
separation between the fictional and the
documentary logic. It thus dis-covers an
“aesthetic” or excessive power of signification
in the things themselves, as well
as the literarity of language as its anarchic
potentiality of the connection of the
sensible (les sens) to signification (le
sens), that blurs the univocal and harmonious
distribution of places and spaces
according to capacities and actions.
What is at stake in the forms of aesthetic
real-ism is thus the constitution of a political
stage, i.e. a stage or space of
appearance for bodies to be seen and
discourses to be heard.
This construction of a new political stage
is strictly opposed to the assumption of a
binary division between those who have
knowledge and thus are conscious of
their conditions and those who have neither
knowledge nor consciousness, and
depend therefore on the transmis-sion of
knowledge and the unveiling of the ideological
structures their life is entrapped in.
The political action can not aim at illuminating
those who don’t know or occupying
the speaker’s position to represent
them, but at constructing a place of sensible
appearance for those who traditionally,
that is ‘naturally’, are not to be part of
public life and thus of the con-struction of
the common. This is what Jacques
Rancière has characterised in terms of a
distri-bution or redistribution of the sensible,
i.e. of the common spatial and temporal
conditions that permit or bar the
active partaking in the construction of a
common. For Rancière, this political
redistribution of the places, voices and
times relies on the actualization of what
he calls an “axiomatic equality”: “the
equality of intelligences that remains the
more intempes-tive thought that one can
nourish on social order”. 8 In The
Disagreement, Rancière refers to this
gesture as a figure of subjectivation
which he understands as a “disidentification,
a re-moval from the naturalness of a
place, the opening up of a subject space
where anyone can be counted since it is
the space where those of no account are
counted, where a connection is made
between having a part and having no
part”. 9 The opposite of subjectivation is
thus iden-tification, that is, the police
activity of assigning every body its ‘natural’
place and function. To corrode the
implementation of this ‘natural’ order, the
subjectivation “repartitions the field of
experience that gave to each other their
identity with their lot”. 10 Politics is thought
of as the historical aprioristic conditions
of the “perceptible organization” of the
common - that is, as a space of appearance,
a stage where a discourse and a
visibility are possible - a stage that the
police logic of inequality aims to prevent.
This notion of politics correlates to an
aesthetic that I would like to spell out in
the terms of an “aesthetic realism”. This
is to be understood as a form of realism
that is not defined by the imperative of
mimetic representation or resemblance,
but by a “new politics of representa-tion”
whose precondition is the assumption of
the end of the hierarchies of representation
(in Rancière’s terms), or the end of
the “rule of the separation of styles”
(Stiltrennungsregel), following Erich
Auerbach in his book Mimesis. This rule
states that “the realist description of the
everyday is incompatible with the sublime
or serious representation, and only finds
its place in the comical, at best, when it is
accurately stylized, in the idyllic”. 11 This
debate is decisive for the aestheticalpolitical
question of representation inso-
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