“Rancière’s lofty language and constant qualifications signal to the reader on every page that we are dealing with a problem that is very difficult indeed. But the question of political art is, in fact, straightforward. We can see how Rancière muddies the waters if we look at how he treats Russian Constructivism. “It is the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy,” he declares, “that became the new paradigm for revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life” (p. 27). This is to give rather too much autonomy to the paradigm of esthetic autonomy. Trotsky’s argument in Literature and Revolution is simpler and clearer: Bohemian artists and political revolutionaries both stood in opposition to the conservatism of Russia’s Czarist society. But it was the success of the political revolution that opened a channel for artistic rebellion to play a socially progressive role (and without the political clarity of a Trotsky, some of these same artists were even able to buy into the right-wing, art-hating Stalinist state — say what you will about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible as a satire on Stalin’s leadership cult, The Old and the New is an avant garde hymn to his brutal forced collectivization of farming).”

Interesting here is the critique of artistic autonomy. In this model, truly political/progressive artists are necesarrily reactive – watching and waiting for opportunities for relevance to open up or be created by other, more active, members of the community…

“I must confess that I also have in my sights those on the political left for whom the aesthetic is simply ‘bourgeois ideology’, to be worsted and ousted by alternative forms of cultural politics. The aesthetic is indeed, as I hope to show, a bourgeois concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the Enlightenment; but only for the drastically undialectical thought of a vulgar Marxist or ‘post-Marxist’ trend of thought could this fact cue an automatic condemnation. It is left moralism, not historical materialism, which having established the bourgeois provenance of a particular concept, practice or institution, then disowns it in an access of ideological purity. From the Communist Manifesto onwards, Marxism has never ceased to sing the praises of the bourgeoisie — to cherish and recollect that in its great revolutionary heritage from which radicals must either enduringly learn, or face the prospect of a closed, illiberal socialist order in the future. Those who have now been correctly programmed to reach for their decentred subjectivities at the very mention of the dread phrase ‘liberal humanist’ repressively disavow the very history which constitutes them, which is by no means uniformly negative or oppressive. We forget at our political peril the heroic struggles of earlier ‘liberal humanists’ again the brutal autocracies of feudalist absolutism. If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so.”

So, from this, my interpretation is the “new aesthetic discourse” to which he refers is the radical poststructuralism/postmodernism of that time. My sense, from the brief glance at descriptions of Ranciere’s work, is that his approach to aesthetics is quite in-line with Eagleton’s.

It is sometimes amazing to me the degree to which the popular idea of art remains so idealized and yet in it’s appearances is so debased. There are many examples, but in the recent Oscar-nominated short documentary “Rehearsing a Dream” you have a particularly blatant instance. Here we are introduced to the unsinkable spirit of young creative people–actors, painters, writers, musicians– with a religious fervor and faith in their holy mission which should, honestly, be sickening to intelligent viewers. You might ask, “is supporting these little narcissists what art educators and the so-called art world really take pride in?” Or for the more conservative, “Is that where my tax dollars are going?”

That reaction is where the pedestal of the young creative begins to crumble. Because at the same time as the young artist is idealized, they are also conflated, entirely uncritically, with the young entrepreneur. Their unquestioned and uniform task is individual popular success in the face of bitter competition. Their methods are to create a brand and sell it. The film, which apparently intended a social interest by encouraging more arts funding, also sadly could only justify it’s efforts in the terms of the market economy.