Jacques Ranciere: "Apart, we are together"
Reading
(1) WOLTERS, "Who the Fuck is Jacques Ranciere?" [https://goo.gl/ddS97Q] [blog post]
(2) RANCIERE, "The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics" pp. 9–12 [https://goo.gl/gWGjKw] [ the essay! ]
(3) RANCIERE, "Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art" [https://goo.gl/KP45O] [ transcribed lecture ]
Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community
They criticised attempts to "know how and why the masses are caught in the grip of ideological misrecognition, a will to speak on their behalf, to know the truth about them".
Rancière says that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order, and this battle takes place via aesthetics - what is possible or perceivable to show or be seen ('sensible')
Ethical regime of art: art is evaluated in terms of it's utility to society.
Representational regime of art: Art "ceases to be a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases to be the displaced visibility of work. . . . The art of imitations is able to inscribe its specific hierarchies and exclusions in the major distribution of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts."
"Dissensus is the process by which actors disrupt the politics of the police.The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. It is the established litigation of the perceptible". – Ten Theses on Politics
The purism of theory could not but have political effects. And that was really all that mattered: we could say everything, provided nothing that we said had practical effects. – Althusser’s Lesson
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal - Goldman
On Democracy
Plato – asserts that democracy as a government of the people by the people must be limited in order to reconcile itself with the will of aristocratic legislators, or the government of experts.
"On the contrary, the only possible subject of politics is the people or the dèmos, i.e. the supplementary part of every account of the population. Those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal. Democracy itself is defined by these intermittent acts of political subjectivization that reconfigure the communal distribution of the sensible. However, just as equality is not a goal to be attained but a presupposition in need of constant verification, democracy is neither a form of government nor a style of social life. Democratice mancipation is a random process that redistributes the system of sensible coordinates without being able to guarantee the absolute elimination of the social inequalities inherent in the police order."