Michael J. Shapiro’s book Aesthetics of Equality is another rewarding contribution to an ever- growing and exciting body of work in political theory that takes culture, and the many forms and scenes of culture, seriously. At this point, we may in fact call it a veritable tradition, one whose early touchstones include Michael Rogin’s Ronald Reagan, the Movie (1987), Anne Norton’s Republic of Signs (1993), and Jodi Dean’s edited volume Political Theory and Cultural Studies (2000). Readers familiar with Shapiro’s work will know that he has long been attentive to culture, especially cinema, as not only a site of but also a resource for politics and political theory. This latest book not only confirms his work as a cornerstone in the tradition but also shows him turning his penetrating eye toward an impressive range of aesthetic objects and genres—principally fiction, music (classical and jazz), films, television, and architecture, with attention to art history, photography, and more. Refreshingly, Shapiro’s structuring attention to the politics of “compositional form” is a welcome shift from inquiries focused mainly on political meaning and messages.
Aesthetics of Equality brings a “focus on textual form” and “an attentiveness to persons and voices that tend to be civically invisible and unheard” (p. 6) to bear in its five chapters analyzing specific aesthetic objects and contextualizing them in creative ways. The first chapter examines Thomas Mann’s four connected Joseph and His Brothers novels, drawing out his musically inspired compositional forms and concluding that “the main political effect of what Mann’s text does is owed to the compositional, grammatical and rhetorical structures with which it unsettles hierarchies and instills an equal eligibility for moral solicitude for all of humanity” (p. 30). The second chapter studies Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, arguing that “her writing mimics a jazz performance as it animates Black voices, moving them from the margins of a white-dominated social order to give them a vocalized civic presence in American urban life” (p. 58). The third chapter, perhaps the strongest, looks closely at Michael Haneke’s film Caché, which Shapiro argues is “a nuanced treatment of what Haneke refers to as ‘the primal legacy of colonialism,’ expressed through a cinematic form that looks at the way the past registers itself in psyches that have closed themselves off from that legacy” (p. 116). The fourth chapter reads the Turkish Netflix series Ethos, whose “main theme is a juxtaposition of Western European psychoanalysis and traditional Islamic spiritual therapy” (p. 13), by situating its “cinematic portraiture within a historical trajectory of portraiture that has moved on from historical preoccupation with elites to allow ordinary people to rise above the threshold of recognition” (p. 14). The very strong final chapter on “the Latinx experience in historical and contemporary California and Texas” is constructed via “an architectural narrative thread” that sees Shapiro insightfully knitting together analyses of two films, a novel, and the politics of public memory centered on the Alamo.
Additionally, several of the chapters in Aesthetics of Equality make productive use of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the right to the city” to thematize the ways in which diverse ethnic groups in cities like New York, Paris, Istanbul, and Los Angeles struggle for “recognition of a multiplicity of lifestyles and voices” to counter “the incessant urban (re)designs of urban planning agencies” (p. 7). Across all these analyses, Shapiro “works to unsettle the interpretive practices that obscure a pervasive discontinuity, that between egalitarian pretentions and the realities of structures of domination and exclusion… emphasiz[ing] how those texts make visible and audible—in short, enfranchise—politically disqualified persons and assemblages in order to lend them civically relevant recognition” (p. 17).
A striking, but mostly implicit, aspect distinguishing Shapiro’s work here is the signal influence of Jacques Rancière, someone whom Shapiro is comfortable “thinking with” (to borrow Deleuze and Parnet’s phrase, as he does). Key insights from Rancière, such as the axiomatic premise of equality and the configuration of the distribution of the sensible, are essential if underthematized in the analysis. Even the title Aesthetics of Equality fittingly suggests the book’s intervention into the broad and significant field of the “politics of aesthetics” (p. 17), a field that owes much to Rancière and his own book of that title. Yet that title, Aesthetics of Equality, belies the specificity and novelty of the approach Shapiro adopts in concentrating on the form and not merely the meaning of the aesthetic texts and contexts he analyzes. By “being attentive to aesthetic form in a variety of artistic genres that challenge institutionalized accounts of history” (p. 6), Shapiro charts a fresh course through a thicket of problems continually confronting work in political science and political theory (as well as American studies and cultural studies) that takes film, literature, and other cultural texts as objects of analysis. It is the problem of how to establish and draw links between (a) the specific texts, the particular narratives, and the singular characters in these texts and (b) the larger social, political, cultural, and economic issues and contexts that political theorists address.
Shapiro’s attention to “compositional form” is quite consistent with Rancière’s elemental concept of the partition of the sensible, the visible, and the sayable. One telling insight into the question of method and stakes appears at the conclusion to the introduction, where Shapiro quotes Rancière: “Literary fiction—or avowed fiction in general—is not so much the object that social science has to analyze as it is the laboratory where fictional forms are experimented as such and which, for that reason, helps us understand the functioning of the forms of unavowed fiction at work in politics, social science or other theoretical discourses” (quoted on p. 17, from Jacques Rancière, “Fictions of Time,” in Rancière and Literature, ed. Grace Hwellyer and Julian Murphet, 2017). This is a remarkably fecund statement about the significance of fictional form(s) for the study of politics and social science. More contextualization and argumentation, perhaps in a conclusion, about the significance of this framing would have been most welcome and provided a good addition to this otherwise excellent contribution.
In terms of tradition (or perhaps even counter-tradition), Shapiro’s work supplies an instructive contrast to dominant approaches in the field of cultural studies focused on content and reception. Although there is much work in cultural studies and elsewhere focused on content and meaning, this book’s attention to form provides a studied and useful contrast. Shapiro’s close attention to the structuring significance of form leads him to the essential insight that “what [an aesthetic object] contributes is less its ‘meaning’ than the unsettling impact of the way it constructs a micro-world of associations” (p. 6). The centrality of this attention to the politics of compositional form, together with the nimble deployment of Rancière’s insights into equality and disruption, allows Aesthetics of Equality to delineate an alternative and productive trajectory for the political study of culture.
