Black Lives Matter and the Concept of the Counterworld

Abstract

This article explores the question of how we should conceive of the aesthetic dimensions of politics that Rancière identifies. Among some interpreters of Rancière, there is a tendency to posit a binary opposition between the aesthetically transformative dimensions of politics, on the one hand, and cognition and communicability, on the other, and then to reduce the aesthetic dimensions to moments that rupture the dominant order of sense. I examine Black Lives Matter activism to argue against this tendency. Black Lives Matter activism introduces new perceptions into the field of sensory experience, but these new perceptions arrive in cognitive and communicative form. Moreover, the activists' performances insert these new perceptions into the world of their opponents, transforming the dominant sensory world from within. Political-aesthetic transformations occur not when heterogeneous elements interrupt the dominant order of sense but when actors invoke a counterworld that is imbricated in the sensory world it opposes.

Settling Accounts at the End of History: A Nonideal Approach to State Apologies

“….] in which it is necessary to state that black lives do in fact matter ” (2016, 473, emphasis original). Likewise, when a state refuses to acknowledge that a given act was wrong, activists enact a moral counterworld where the act counts as a transgression and an apology is owed—it is the very fact that apology implies an established normative order that makes it a powerful tool for the subversive and potentially transformative enactment of a counterworld.…”

The Aesthetic Habermas: Communicative Power and Judgment

“…Instead of a critique of reason and proceduralism in the name of an aestheticized and indeterminate otherness, we get a critique of particular expressions of reason and proceduralism, performed in the name of determinable counterworlds invented in identifiable speech acts (cf. Mackin 2016). There is a radical hope in this account: not so much that communication can generate rationally acceptable truths and norms, but that it can generate a world in which procedures, truths, and norms become meaningful.…”

Rethinking the ordinary and the extraordinary: Reading Rancière’s dissensual politics through Kuhn

“…The work of Jacques Rancière has inspired a variety of disciplines, including Political Theory (Bassett, 2014; Chambers, 2013; Schaap, 2011), Philosophy (Apostolidis, 2016; Deranty and Ross, 2012; Panagia, 2009), Aesthetics (Davis, 2010; Panagia, 2006), Education Studies (Biesta, 2010, 2011; Bingham and Biesta, 2010; Pelletier, 2009), Citizenship Studies and Resistance Studies (Cámara, 2013; Flores, 2003; May, 2010; Nicholls, 2013; Nyers and Rygiel, 2012; Puggioni, 2015, 2018; Schwiertz, 2016). In this article, I explore Rancière’s theorisation of the political, taking into consideration the way in which it has been applied to political struggles and social movements, including the Occupy movements (Bassett, 2014; Lorey, 2014; Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013); undocumented mobilisation (Galindo, 2012; Kmak, 2020; Millner, 2011; Rigby and Schlembach, 2013); Black Lives Matter protests (Havercroft and Owen, 2016; Mackin, 2016); and the Palestinian intifada, among others (May, 2010). While this literature mainly explores the (political) transformation of the undocumented, the excluded and the abject into visible and audible subjects – that is, from being ‘uncounted’ to ‘counted’ (Rancière, 1999) – I am interested in scrutinising Rancière’s distinction between la police and la politique , particularly, how disruptive politics is for the dominant (police) order.…”