On the Difficulty of Naming a Production of the Present: Rancière and Laddaga and the Regimes of the Arts

Abstract

We propose a reflection on some ways of thinking and naming artistic-literary production of the present from the text “In what time do we live?”, by Jacques Rancière. Thus, we seek answers to the implications of thinking about the time in which we live as a post time. A time that, for Rancière, must be seen as non-homogeneous, a time in which ruptures and intervals occur, making the global time and individual time not matching once again. For Rancière, our post time, as far as the way of reading art history is concerned, is still the time of the Aesthetic Regime, which succeeded other two Regimes, the Ethical and the Poetic or Representative. Reinaldo Laddaga, an Argentinean who settled in the USA, disagrees with Rancière and sees rupture where he sees continuity. Thus, for Laddaga, after the Aesthetic Regime, we would have entered what he calls the Practical Regime of the Arts. This discussion makes us see what these terms represent in contrast to the idea of Modernism and Postmodernism.