of its attention. The trope of the palace serves as the template through
which to establish the ideal of disinterested taste.
Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace I see before me beautiful. I
might reply that I am not fond of things...made merely to be gaped at. Or I might
reply like that Iroquoissachemwho said that he liked nothing better in Paris than
the eating-houses. I might even go on, asRousseauwould, to rebuke the vanity of
the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I mightfinally,
convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited island with no hope of ever
again coming among people, and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a
mere wish, I would not even take much trouble for it if I already had a sufficiently
comfortable hut...We easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is
beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this
presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s
existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgement about beauty is mingled with
the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgement of taste. In order to
play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the
thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.^47
Rancière critiques this neutralization of the mastery of the owner against
the lowly desire of the‘primitive’as a valorization of“the judgement of the
petit-bourgeois intellectual who, free from the worries of work and capital,
indulges him- or herself by adopting the position of universal thought and
disinterested taste.”^48 He proposes an imaginary diary entry from a French
worker as an antidote to the position of mastery established by Kant:
Believing himself at home, [the worker] loves the arrangement of a room so long as
he has notfinished laying thefloor. If the window opens out onto a garden or
commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides
in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors
enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighboring residences.^49
Rancière describes the politics of disinterest as unethical in purposefully
excluding the contextual facts of ownership and labor establishing crucial
bonds between subject and object. The solution comes from the reframing
of the interested gaze through the eye of the worker, doubling the‘as if’
upon which the possibility of aesthesis is based from one marginalizing
ownership to one pretending it.
Artisans act as if they were at home in the house that they otherwise know is not
theirs, as if they possessed the perspective of the garden. This‘belief’does not hide
any reality. But it doubles this reality, which the ethical order would like to consider(^47) Kant, 1987 :45–46. (^48) Rancière,2009b:6. (^49) Rancière, 2006 :5.
178 Deceiving Deception