How Does Architecture Distribute the Sensible?: Engaging Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière is one of the leading thinkers not only of contemporary aesthetic theory but contemporary philosophy in general. After his break from Althusser, Rancière developed the radical and axiomatic principal of the absolute equality of intelligences and capacities that defined his entire body of work, from his critique of philosophy, to his historical studies of emancipated modes of labor and education, to the articulation of dissensus from the order of the police. Rancière’s trajectory as a philosopher led him towards aesthetics where offered a radical reinterpretation of the political meaning of aesthetics and with it, of modernism and postmodernism that, having shaken the world of art, is now shaking the world of architecture.

This book brings Jacques Rancière’s demand for equality and his reformulation of aesthetics into direct dialogue with architecture. In doing so, it inquires into the role that architecture plays in distributing the sensible, in creating aesthetic experiences, in creating order or dissensus, in serving as a mode of critique, and in emancipating or stultifying its users and subjects.

Through this detailed exchange between Rancière and four of the world’s leading architectural thinkers; Anthony Vidler, Joan Ockman, Peggy Deamer and Michael Young, a debate unfolds within the book that tests the implications of Rancière’s aesthetic philosophy for architectural practice today; questioning the way we write architectural history, how architects draw, what the labor of the architect is, and that questions key architectural ideas such as the distribution, function, use, ornament, discipline and design.

Joseph Bedford is Assistant Professor of History and Theory at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, degrees from Cambridge University and the Cooper Union, and is the founding editor of Attention: The Audio Journal for Architecture and the Architecture Exchange, a platform for theoretical exchange in architecture.

Jacques Rancière is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School, professor emeritus at the Université de Paris, VIII, and one of the more significant and influential philosophers of our time. He is the author of: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1987) The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989); Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998); The Politics of Aesthetics (2004); The Future of the Image (2007); The Emancipated Spectator (2010); Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010); Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013).