118 NINE Regimes of the arts Jean-Philippe Deranty Rancière’s notion of “regimes of the arts” appeared for the first time in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004; original French edition 2000). The term captured much of the substantial work of conceptual and historical analysis begun a few years earlier, notably in La parole muette (1998). In this book, Rancière spoke of “systems of representation” and of “poetic systems”. Since then, his many aesthetic writings have greatly refined and enriched the content of that notion. The notion of “regimes of the arts” is first a descriptive one. It is the gateway to Rancière’s rich aesthetic thinking. At its heart, the notion serves to identify the specific features of the understanding of art char- acteristic of modern society, that is, the society that was ushered in by the political, economic and cultural revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crucially, the notion serves to contrast the modern understanding of art, summarized by the term “aesthetic”, from a classical understanding, encapsulated in the terms “poetic” and “representative”. As always with Rancière, though, the notion also serves a polemical purpose. With its help, Rancière wants to contest some of the promi- nent approaches to art in the contemporary humanities. In particular, the notion is used by him to reject interpretations that frame artistic practices in linear, mono-causal historical narratives: for example, for- malist accounts that read the history of an art form as a movement of purification towards the appropriation by that art form of the specificity of its own medium (like surface and colour for painting); or metaphysi- cal interpretations that read modern art works against the background of a teleological vision of history, as the unfolding of some essential