He then describes a contemporary art project 'I and Us' that was made on a working class estate in contemporary Asnieres by the art group Campement Urbain. The need expressed by the inhabitants in this stressed area was for a place of contemplation, a place to be alone. I.e. a break from the stress of being together to be individual, a space for contemplation. Aesthetic Separation and Community “Bathers in Asnières”, 1884, retouched 1887, painting by Georges Pierre Seurat, via National Gallery, London.

Multiple D&D Satellite events in partnership with NSDF. Open Space events will be running across the week. Finally a passage from Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?' (1991) is quoted at length. His summary is that this is about the link between "the solitude of the artwork and human community" p.55. "For the complex of sensations to communicate its vibration, it has to be solidified in the form of a monument. Now the monument in turn assumes the identity of a person who speaks to the 'ear of the future'." p.56 Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. The idea of pensiveness is first ascribed to Honore de Balzac in his novella 'Sarrasine' (1830) via Barthe's famous analysis in S/Z (1970). Balzac ends his narrative indeterminately by finally leaving the protagonist 'pensive', with the suggestion of a continuing and undefined thought process that goes beyond the narrative. Ranciere goes on to discuss the incidental micro events described in 'Madame Bovary' (1856) by Gustave Flaubert. The micro events are like silent pictures inserted into, but also above, and beyond the narrative. "The pensiveness of the image is then the latent presence of one regime of expression within another." p.124He sees these left-field theories as perpetuating the idea of a public that are presumed to be 'ignoramuses' by an intelligensia. If The Society of the Spectacle tells us anything at all, it is to underline the message about our own inability. "It thereby constantly confirms its own presupposition: the inequality of intelligence". p.9 In fact all humans will take a unique path from what they already know to what they do not yet know if given an environment where this is possible. A person will translate experience into words and then test the statements that result. p.11. This of course follows on directly from Jacotot's theory espoused in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Rancière abolishes the distinction between activity and passivity: watching, observing, and spectating are monumental acts, no different to that of coming together in marriage. Through the act of spectating, we are participating. It locates the art object as an autonomous thing, dislodged from the intentions of the artist and available to associations attributed by the viewer at any given moment. Contemplation may appear to be passive, but it is an action that is internal and not explicitly visible. Here, Ranciere's principal theoretical argument is that the position of the spectator in contemporary cultural theory is reliant on the theatrical idea of "the spectacle", a concept the author employs to describe any performance that puts "bodies in action before an assembled audience". For Ranciere, the masses, exposed to what Guy Debord in 1967 called "the society of the spectacle", are usually understood as passive. Consequently, poets, playwrights and theatre directors such as Bertolt Brecht have tried to convert the inert spectator into a committed aesthete and the spectacle into a political presentation. Apparently, at a performance art workshop, Abramović asked Sehgal openly how he managed this, when her practice requires her to continue selling photographs and videos. He answered that his training began in economics and that through this discipline he learned how exchange could be based on consensus about value rather than about objects. Carol Kino, “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue,” New York Times, March 10, 2010: AR25.

Human beings are tied by the same field of sensation which defies their way of being together in the world. Politics should aim to transform this sensory field, to show the community new ways of experiencing themselves, new ways of configuring their relations to each other. Seurat’s painting, Bathers at Asnières, for Rancière, encapsulates the conflict inherent in the notion of community leisure itself:There were two people (myself - Amy Golding and Ben) making verbatim shows with care leavers. One around politics and one around mental health and immigration. We discussed the importance of anonymity of the people sharing their stories with us due to safeguarding and potential repercussions amongst peers or with service providers. Movie audience wearing special 3D glasses. J. R. Eyerman—The LIFE Picture Collection, via the Times. Oldukça düşündürücü ve bazı yerlerde tekrar tekrar okuma isteği uyandıran çok güçlü bir kitap bence.. What each individual has in common is the fact that their intellectual journey is unique and it is this very uniqueness that is the basis of our sense of community. We should not see our expressive power 'embodied' by designated others but accept it as the normal everyday capacity of each of us as individuals, in the same way that the power to speak is an equal ability learnt by all humans. p.17 This reminds me of Raymond Williams idea that 'culture is ordinary' and with Joseph Beuy's 'Everyone is an artist'. Culture works through an "unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations." p.17. The implication is that as soon as the process is planned or designed as a process of cultural reception with an effect in mind, it leads to something that is no longer a place where each individual is using her intelligence to make their own aesthetic judgement. This point is core to the argument in The Emancipated Audience. However individual freedom as a core value does not mean he espouses 'bourgeois individualism'. Ranciere's understanding of community recognises it as an amalgam of myriad individual intelligences. Perhaps because he foregrounds the traction of symbolic transformation on material change, Rancière’s work has been most readily absorbed into contemporary art discourse." Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, 'From The Cult of the People, to the Cult of Ranciere', Mute vol 3 n.3, 2012

He proposes three propositions about the seemingly contradictory terms, community and the individual. This is a key Ranciere's theme - exploring the seeming contradiction between the unique sensibilities of each human and our need to be social beings and co-ordinate our actions.He suggests we must overturn "the dominant logic that makes the visual the lot of multitudes and the verbal the privilege of the few." p.97. Although this appeals to me it is complicated by the oral verbal also being the lot of multitudes and on the other hand the growing literature on visual cultures. "An image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit." p.99. Working class artists are likely to find themselves outside the game. Only a few can emerge into the light of publicity through the chicanery of selective filters. By Rancière’s time, critical theory had become pervasive in almost every field of study, from the theater to paintings to the social body and the economy itself. According to Rancière, the critical approach attempts to make one aware of the repressed, ugly parts of the system in which they are complicit in. A basic assumption that I make is that the system must manage the media and state cultural institutions well enough to insure that challenges to its survival do not de-stabilise its grip on power. The way this hegemony is maintained is widely known as Ranciere points out. Gatekeepers or managers, patrons and politicians, all contribute to maintaining a status quo, a class system. At the same time they must provide the system with sufficient criticism to inoculate it.