Radical History and the Politics of Art

Radical History and the Politics of Art. Gabriel Rockhill. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 274 pp. $28.00 (paper); $85.00 (cloth).

Gabriel Rockhill's Radical History and The Politics of Art articulates a perceptive counterhistoriography against a "substantialist" (233) view of art and politics as separable categories with universal meanings. Instead of one clearly definable relationship, there are "sundry modes of interrelation" (55) between these two "concepts in struggle that vary according to the social setting and historical conjuncture" (179). By demanding a "sociohistorical praxeology" (233) which takes specific cultural practices as the starting point rather than assuming their conceptual unity, and by considering the three dimensions of history-chronology, geography, social practice- Rockhill's methodology of "radical history" exceeds periodizing frameworks for the avant-garde.

The book is part of Columbia's "New Directions in Critical Theory" series, which has also published Rockhill's co-edited collection Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, Jacques Rancière's Mute Speech, as well as books by Nancy Fraser and Alex Honneth, among others. An examination of Rancière, whose work Rockhill has translated, is central to his reevaluation of "the politics of art." Radical History extensively discusses Rancière's "politics of aesthetics," which according to Rockhill is still primarily interested in the "product" of art. By contrast, Rockhill's own methodology-which he calls "the study of the social politicity of artistic practices"-recognizes these practices as collective and as "politicized precisely through their production, circulation, and reception in the social world" (188). To this end, Rockhill incisively explicates contradictions in Rancière's work, such as that for Rancière "art and politics are actually consubstantial as distributions of the sensible" (163) but then "constantly remind[s] us that there is no clear correspondence between them" (164).

Radical History, though a development out of Rancière's thought, shifts the question from "what is the relationship between art and politics?" to "how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as aesthetic or political overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise sociohistorical conjunctures?" (234). Overlaps and intertwined junctures are of course relations, but Rockhill maintains that in the absence of "distinct entities" such relations are constantly shifting and need to...