Session Notes
March 14, 2009 · Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Speakers: Jacques Rancière, Peter Hallward
In March 2009, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted a lecture and dialogue between the philosopher Jacques Rancière and the political theorist Peter Hallward. The event was organized around Rancière’s evolving argument about the relationship between aesthetics and politics — a body of work that had, by that point, become one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in contemporary art discourse.
Rancière’s lecture elaborated on his concept of the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible), which proposes that politics and aesthetics share a common root: both are concerned with what can be seen, heard, and said within a given social order. Art becomes political not when it delivers political messages or mobilizes audiences toward specific causes, but when it disrupts the established distribution — making visible what was invisible, giving voice to those who were counted as noise rather than speech.
Hallward, known for his work on radical voluntarism and the politics of prescription, pressed Rancière on the question of agency. If political art operates primarily through redistribution of the sensible, Hallward asked, does this not risk reducing political action to a matter of perception? Where does the moment of decision, of collective will, fit within Rancière’s framework? The exchange was pointed but generous, revealing a genuine philosophical disagreement about whether aesthetics can do the work that politics requires.
Rancière responded by insisting that the opposition between perception and action is itself a product of the police order — the very system of classification that politics seeks to disrupt. The capacity to perceive differently is not a preliminary to action but is itself a form of action, a reconfiguration of the field of possibility.
The ICA event is particularly valuable as a record of Rancière’s thinking at a moment when his influence on curatorial practice was at its peak. His framework offered curators and artists a way to claim political significance without reducing art to propaganda — a position that was both liberating and, as Hallward’s questions suggested, potentially evasive.
