The Politics of Aesthetics

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.5 A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that deter mines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=23&selection=7,39,14,26|p.13]]) If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense - re-examined perhaps by Foucault - as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=23&selection=17,0,19,51|p.13]]) Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=23&selection=30,38,33,23|p.13]]) From the Platonic point of view, the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=24&selection=32,64,57,62|p.14]]) When *Madame Bovary* was published, or *Sentimental Education*, these works were immediately perceived as ‘democracy in literature’ despite Flaubert’s aristocratic situation and political conformism. His very refusal to entrust literature with any message whatsoever was considered to be evidence of democratic equality. His adversaries claimed that he was [17] democratic due to his decision to depict and portray instead of instruct. This equality of indifference is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very equality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes?

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=25&selection=10,45,12,43|p.15]]) Novelistic democracy, on the one hand, is the indifferent democracy of writing such as [18] it is symbolized by the novel and its readership.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=25&selection=17,0,19,23|p.15]]) This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=25&selection=33,0,34,29|p.15]]) A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=26&selection=0,52,5,6|p.16]]) The reproduction of optical depth was linked to the privilege accorded to the *story*.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=26&selection=8,68,15,73|p.16]]) In opposition to the Platonic degradation of *mimesis*, the classical poetics of representation wanted to endow the ‘flat surface’ with speech or with a ‘scene’ of life, with a specific depth such as the manifestation of an action, the expression of an interiority, or the transmission of meaning.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=27&selection=26,44,29,22|p.17]]) Politics plays itself out in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the audience, as meaning produced by the actor’s body, as games of proximity or distance.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=27&selection=36,11,42,23|p.17]]) Let us take the example of the tragic stage. It simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating *mimesis* in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle - even if this was not his intention - redefined its politicity.

([[Ranciere_Jacques_The_Politics_of_Aesthetics_The_Distribution_of_the_Sensible.pdf#page=28&selection=1,54,5,28|p.18]]) Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy.