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.

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

Novelistic democracy, on the one hand, is the indifferent democracy of writing such as [18] it is symbolized by the novel and its readership.