"Social Revolution is the daughter of Aesthetic Revolution": the monumental dimensions of Jacques Rancière's political and aesthetic thinking

The spatio-temporality embodied in the statement that “social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution” grounds the exegetical flow of this thesis. Rancière claims the aesthetic revolution, as a regime of art, emerged some two centuries ago, and is still active in the twenty-first century. With the violence of inequality evident in modern times, can his claim of social revolution be validated? Is this revolution a history, a present, or yet to come? This thesis responds to these questions by analysing what Rancière argues are revolutions of equality and their potentialities. By exploring an expansive body of Rancière’s literature, we extract and expand upon a model of how he envisions emancipatory revolution, and demonstrate the complex spatio-temporal dimensions that constitute the structure of a Rancièrian account of individual and collective revolution. Key to this thesis is the crystallisation of these remarkable moments as artefacts that share the experiential event as sensations of a freedom as equality – compositions that make visible and sayable the overturning of a material and symbolic realm of domination into other expansive, liberated worlds, forms of words, images and everyday objects that express the conditions of equality that open up new perceptual fields. These are the claimed territories of resistance and emancipation which suggest other revolutionary possibilities – artefacts presented here as the monumental dimensions of Rancière’s thinking on emancipatory rupture and continuity. We conclude that his model provides analytical tools with which to recognise individual and collective revolutionary modalities in their thematic and concrete expressions, uncovered in this thesis as Rancièrian revolutionary monuments.