Latour, Rancière, and the Social Turn in Aesthetic Theory

Objects as Social Actors: Latour and the Aesthetics of Exchange

In "The Berlin Key," Bruno Latour discusses the way in which simple objects can suddenly acquire "the dignity of a mediator, a social actor, an agent, an active being" through use. This is a version of aesthetics which imagines the artwork as automatically playing a role as a sort of symbolic token whose exchange value exists in transfer between artist and viewer, or between one viewer and another. Locks and keys, in Latour's view, are a construction of a social relationship rather than an expression of one. It is worth asking whether this new view of aesthetics — in which what is emphasized is not so much the lone creative authority of the artist as the sociable presence of that artist, and how the artwork is completed (rather than judged, apprehended, or "appreciated") by the viewer — represents a fundamental shift in how we understand art's function.

Rancière's Pedagogy and the Problem of Meaning

We can relate Latour's insight to the critique of pedagogy offered by Jacques Rancière. In the fable Rancière tells in An Intellectual Adventure, the schoolmaster Jacotot is obliged to teach a roomful of students most of whom speak no French, while he himself speaks no Flemish. By placing a bilingual edition of Fénelon's Télémaque between master and pupil, Jacotot discovers that "in short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage from the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds" (3). Yet the basic functional procedure of Jacotot's teaching is one in which he is teaching something he does not actually know.

To some degree, the philosophical and aesthetic conundrum described by both Rancière and Latour derives originally from Plato — unsurprisingly, given that the intellectual climate they inhabit was shaped to a considerable extent by Jacques Derrida, who began his critique of Western philosophy with Plato and an inquiry into why Plato chose the dialectical form of his dialogues rather than a simple expository form like Aristotle's.

The "logocentric" Platonism that, in Derrida's view, rejects written communication for its susceptibility to misinterpretation or deconstruction is, of course, hinged upon a theory of "forms," in which any existing object actually reflects a sort of eternal and essential version. The existence of the perfect form in Plato is to be intuited or understood from the proliferation of actual (and imperfect) expressions of it. But in essence, this suggests that two Platonists staring at the same chair will have, in some way, different visions of the essential nature of the object, and that their two mental conceptions must be jointly considered in order to approximate any sense of the "transcendent" meaning Plato promises.