as onlyone.As a consequence of this, they can double their working identities; to
the identity of the worker at home in a defined regime can be added aproletarian
identity–in other words, the identity of a subject capable of escaping the assign-
ment to a private condition and of intervening in the affairs of the community.^50
Rancière observes that Kant’sdefinition of the object of aesthetic apprecia-
tion“as neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire”is pre-
dicated on the normalization of the bourgeois social order as part of a
nascent colonial world order.^51 Ironically, in foregrounding the erasure of
class central to the disinterest of taste, he ignores the racialization of base
desire through the primitivized Iroqois, unable to recognize the high
culture of Paris except through the denigrated sense of taste. As Karen
Lang points out, the subject whom Kant universalizes as theWeltbetrachter
is both reasonable and “unabashedly European. If the purpose of
Enlightenment is to release man from his‘self-incurred tutelage,’then
that of enlightened European man is to bring those existing outside
European civilization into‘history’through colonization...the idealized
subject of aesthetic judgment merges with the Kantian subject of history,
for both move toward the same goal over thelongue durée.”^52
Thus the demand for art-historical disinterestedness toward its objects
contributes to a narration of art that colonizes not only other cultural
geographies, but also the premodern cultures that it subsumes within the
modern notion of‘Western.’^53 It requires a disinterested subject that
emerged through a modern, European process through which thefield of
perception was narrowed down to Baumgartner’s invention of aesthesis, a
neologism deceptively authenticated through its Greek etymology. This
reduction transformed the inward mimesis favored in antiquity into the
blind spot of modernity and veiled the Islamic inheritance of antique
thought embodied in its inwardly mimetic subjectivity.
The ontology of inward mimesis depended on cultured sophistication
just as much as the Kantian model, but functioned through the refinement
rather than the rejection of interest and the valorization of intuition over
reason. Obviating such a position, Kant proposes that
the judging person feels completely free as regards the liking he accords the object.
Hence he will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object
and the judgment were logical (namely, a cognition of the object through concepts
of it), even though in fact the judgment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s
presentation merely to the subject. He will talk in this way because the judgment
(^50) Rancière, 2006 :6. (^51) Rancière, 2006 :1. (^52) Lang, 1997 : 435. (^53) Halliwell, 2002 :9–11.
The Competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius 179