“Before they can be either art or politics, they must be practices after but also before they are ideas.” (p. 8)

“The political is therefore first of all the debate over what is given sensibly, on what is seen, on the way what is seen is sayable and over who can see and say it. This brings into play, then, a distribution of the visible, the sayable and the doable, in both senses of the word partage: what is made common, but also what draws the line between and separates the two sides of what is seeable and invisible, audible and inaudible, possible and impossible, and therefore also ‘divides’ those who speak from those who do not, those who can from those who cannot, etc.” (p. 10)

“[…] since anything can enter the realm of art: the representation of a tavern scene or the adulterous tales of a peasant´s daughter belong to art just as much as princely loves and splendour. But above all, there is no longer any correspondence between poesis and aisthesis: no more rules allowing us to say why things are beautiful or not, no more presupposition of a correspondence between the rules of art and the laws of sensibility.” (p. 12)

“The sensible is sense distributed: the senses related to sense, the visible articulated with the sayable, the interpreted, evaluated, etc. Different distributions of the sensible do not modify our perception of colors as sensual information. But color is precisely always more than colors. Color is inscribed in a distribution of the sensible that related it to something other than itself: line, or drawing. In the ethical regime, color is often associated with a symbolic value. In the representative regime, it is situated in a hierarchical relation of subordination to drawing. The aesthetic regime disrupts this subordination of coloured matter to drawn form. Doing so, it modifies the sensible perception of color itself. When the criticism of the nineteenth century looks at painting, color ceases being a property of the represented subject or an ornament spread out over the represented body. It tends to become a reality in itself, an event of matter. It has value in itself, which also means that the matter of judging it in fat no longer belongs only to connoisseurs alone, it belongs to all. Color, in this way, is inscribed in a distribution of the sensible that is also a distribution of competences. You could say the same thing for sound. The distribution of the sensible does not alter the frequency and intensity of sonorous signals. It alters, instead, the inscription of sonorous sequences in a world of experience. A concept such as music is remarkable from this perspective: it introduces a differentiation into the domain of sounds. Now, this differentiation puts into play categories that are exterior to the domain of sound: ‘music’ means ‘what depends on the muses.’ What depends on the muses involves another order than that of simple technical capacity: the law that separates elite pleasures from artisanal know-how and vulgar pleasures. ‘Music’ introduces, therefore, a social distribution into the universe of sounds. And social hierarchy presents itself, for its part, first of all as a matter of sensorial difference. People of taste, Voltaire says, do not have the same senses as vulgar people. This does not mean that they do not perceive the same sonorous intensities. But it does not mean that people of taste live in a world normed by music while the others live in a world normed by noise. The aesthetic regime puts into question this sensible distribution of two humanities, the distribution between the world of noise and the world of music.” (p. 13)

“[…] there is no longer any border between what belongs to the dignity of the fine arts and what belongs to ordinary experience. The representative tradition transformed mimesis into the construction of linked ‘systems of actions’ and opposed this distribution of actions to the ‘story’ that is simply the reproduction of life, that is, of the conditions of beings excluded from the domain of action and therefore condemned to the simple reproduction of existence. From now on, the border between action and life no longer has any consistency. Anything can enter into art. And, in parallel fashion, there is no longer any separation between a refined and an uncouth nature: art no longer has specific producers nor privileged addressees. This double revocation has nourished the idea of an art become similar to life. An art that would have been, in the past, that of Phidias and Socrates; an art similar to the deployment of the life of a collectivity; an art that in the future is called upon to be one with the production of new forms of life. ‘Life’ should be understood here in the sense of a determined distribution of the sensible rather than in a biological or ontological sense.” (p. 15)

“The principle of the aesthetic regime is first of all that beauty is indifferent to the quality of the subject […] Aesthetic equality is first of all the neutralisation of a certain regime of expressivity […] What it annuls, then, is the system of verisimilitude [vraisemblance]. Now, verisimilitude is the way the representative regime holds the truth at a distance… They have to be judged from the point of view of their coherence alone, from the coherence of the groups of actions, the forms and signs they deploy (which were no less bound, of course, to external norms and hierarchies). It is this coherence that the aesthetic regime comes to ruin by declaring all subjects to be indifferent and by revoking the classical models with their construction of actions and their expression of passions. Beauty no longer finds its norm in verisimilitude. It is once again related to truth. But this truth has no criteria. It must impose itself by its own power, it must be index sui […] We find the same paradox in Flaubert´s reflection on literature: there are no longer any subjects, the work rests on itself alone, it makes itself its own proof, sentence by sentence. But the truth or the falsity of the sentence is something that is known only through its sonority. Proust resolves this problem in a completely different way, by doubling the truth of the book: on the one hand, the truth is revealed as the conclusion of an apprenticeship knowingly constructed by the author as a traversal of anti-artistic errors; on the other hand, the truth appears in the form of the pure event that surprises and overtakes the subject and writes itself in him without him knowing it.” (p. 17)

“[…] this regime is defined not by rules but by a disordering [dérèglement].” (p. 17)

“In any case, my problem is not that of proposing frameworks that envelop everything. It is to put into question a certain number of categorical distributions whose explanatory value is extremely weak but that have nevertheless imposed themselves due to a certain spirit of the times.” (p. 18)

“The declaration of the “postmodern” is, for the most part: we no longer believe in the revolutionary potential of art or anything else for that matter. With this, you are not really equipped to analyze the cinema, video or music of today, no more than you were equipped to analyze the painting of Manet, Kandinsky or Malevich with modernist categories.” (p. 18)

“I am more sensitive to what a regime of perception and thought allows for than to what it forbids, to what it brings together and makes circulate than to what it excludes.” (p. 20)

“The notion of subjectivation refers to a set of operations, and it defines a subject only in the relation between these operations and what they produce. A political subjectivation is the constitution of a collective statement and manifestation of demonstration. It can declare itself using the name of a subject –’we, citizens,’ ‘we, workers,’ ‘we, women’– but the political subjects thus defined only exist in the relation between the pronoun and the noun, in the difference between them, and in the opposition that this difference brings out with regard to every form of identity assumed by a real group defined by a common social belonging. This is what opposes the political to what I call the police: the police is the regime of identity and the calculus of identities, the symbolic constitution of a society as a set of defined and identifiable groups. This is why a subjectivation is always a misidentification.” (p. 25)

“A form of subjectivation is constructed through a multiplicity of sensible micro-events that break the alignment of the sensible body to a symbolic body. From a certain body it is necessary to draw out the possibility of other bodies that are potentially there: this is the heart of the aesthetic dimension of the political and this is what has strongly tied political emancipation to experimentations with new powers of the sensible proper to the aesthetic regime of art.” (pp. 25-26)

“It is clear that there is no permanence to the forms of subjectivation as such. This does not mean that the political would only consist in the emergence of singularities with no links among them. Forms of subjectivation produce modifications of the common tissue: forms of organization, new spaces for the demonstration of dissents, new possibilities of enunciation; they determine new combinations of temporalities. Parties and political organizations make up part of this changing landscape but precisely only as possibilities for new forms of subjectivation in a modified common world, not as permanent subjects. What remains, but moving all the while, are spaces of possible subjectivation, where new forms of subjectivation are elaborated. This is the space of a micro politics that neither complements nor substitutes for the politics of collectives: it is the element of their transformation.” (p. 26)

“A tool is supposed to serve anybody and everybody equally.” (p. 31)

“[…] aesthetics and politics are no doubt mixed with each other: there is an aesthetics of politics since politics concerns first of all what one sees, what one says, and what one can do about it. There is a politics of aesthetics, because aesthetics creates forms of community, ruptures in the perceptual order, overturning of sensible hierarchies.” (p. 33)

“The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as the adventure is not like any other.” (p. 74)

“[…] could we not say that works of art can give us confidence that a different order of the sensible is possible? And could we not say that this confidence is in itself only possible as a collective effect, precisely because the art scene is not an individual scene, but a scene that we could call public? it is public because it is in space and time, and because it directly refers to space and time. If the book is a translation machine, the scene of art is a direct intervention in space and time. And, publicly, it immanently addresses everyone. This is also why art objects actually form scenes of art, because they are always necessarily integrated in a space and a time, and as a split in space and time they depend on a public ‘audience.’ Otherwise the intervention in space and time through the art object would not be real.” (p. 75)

“So there is an address to everyone, but this address is only a negative one, because the art object is only a rupture in space and time that shows the spectator negatively that there is a distribution of space and time that does not relate to us all and that there are other possible distributions, and that therefore the possibility of other distributions will bring a founding equality to light.” (p. 75)

“[…] the work of art can be considered a de-realization of the order of the sensible, and this present absence integrates the individual spectator into a collective process of dis-identification. The de-realization has a universal address, it is embodied in the specific work of art, but it addresses everyone. The world of things, the world of object is not all, there is more to it than we can grasp with our senses. Or: what we grasp with our senses is not all, there is more in it than what we grasp with our senses.” (pp. 76-77)

“[…] the work of art … is a mediator between the individual scene of emancipation and the political, collective subjectivation.” (p. 77)

“The criticism of intellectual authority is always justified by the distribution of the sensible that made it possible. Plato, Althusser, Braudel, Bourdieu, Sartre, Marx and many others are proved complicit with the desire to obliterate the voices of proletarian or assimilate them within a philosophical system whose final aim is to absolve its creator and not put him in touch with his real conditions.” (p. 82)

“It finds a tone and a language that can coexist with the desire for freedom without showing the way to follow and without prescribing any ethical position– leaving us, indeed, alone in the deceptive company of words.” (p. 88)

“There cannot be a class of the emancipated, an assembly or a society of the emancipated. But any individual can always, at any moment, be emancipated and emancipate someone else, announce to others the practice and add the number of people who know themselves as such and who no longer play the comedy of inferior superior.
A society, a people, a state, willy always be irrational.
But one can multiply within these bodies the number of people who, as citizens, will know how to seek the art of raving as reasonably as possible.” (p. 93)

“[…] it is also just as importantly the constitution of a ‘polemical site’ (or ‘polemical space’) where the root resonating in the adjective polemical–polemos– must be understood at once as an act of war and as space of litigiousness, a dispute between speaking being that cannot be mediated by a given form of legality or settled by a third-party, by an arbitrator. The polemos produces a space common to the plebeians and the patrician in the very act of separation, and this space is to a certain extent forced on the patricians: they have no choice but to listen to these people, these people who only a moment before were capable only of signalling, through cries and moans, the abjection of the most common pleasure and the suffering of martyrs pain.” (pp. 97-98)

“The intelligence be dispersed among individuals is the very condition of equality […]” (p. 99)

“This emancipation, again, does not tae the form of a prior possession of knowledge, but a prior demonstration of the capacity for everyone at all to verify, in a disciplined process, the sameness of the intellect.” (p. 99)

“This keeping undecided enables a reflection on the general conditions under which reality can appear or be accessible in the first place, that is, a level on which divisions and classifications of realities are performed.” (p. 118)

“There are no longer appropriate subjects for art. As Flaubert puts it, ‘Yvetot is as good as Constantinople’ and the adulteries of a farmer´s daughter are as good as those of Theseus, Oedipus or Clytemnestra. There are no longer rules of appropriateness between a particular subject and a particular form, but a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever.” (p. 118)

“[…] that is exactly what constitutes the political claim of artistic forms whose relation to the real do not simply indicate reality or continue and fix its constellations, but stage the contingency of the constitution of this reality and thus its changeability.” (p. 119)

“[…] setting in a Brechtian sense (about film) ‘a setting where the production of images is exhibited as well as the strategies for their appropriation, and where the effects of both the production and its appropriation are experimentally tested.’” (p. 130)

“The work exhibits the movement of appropriation of the symbols of the political moment by producing a theatrical apparatus that suggests the process of production of the banner, the revolution in the process of taking place.” (p. 131)

“ […] introduces the politics of images established […] into an archival paradigm, and therefore functions as re-contextualization of this aesthetic form of realism, which does not aim at being a ‘better’ representation of a socially relevant reality, but rather at constituting a new political stage understood as the realisation of the collapse of a normative distribution of the roles and places within the sensible in which intellectuals know about art, workers know about watchmaking and artists know about filmmaking.” (pp. 131-132)

Smith E., J. y Annete W. (Eds.). Everything is in Everything: Jacques Rancière Between Intellectual Emancipation and Aesthetic Education. China: Art Center Graduate Press.