Mar 23, 2006

So what's with Ranciere's notion 'distribution of the sensible' which seems to be getting some academic attention currently. It seems as if Ranciere is arguing that our bodily senses provide individuals with a world they can share, and hence provide the foundations of community. This realm of the sensible, held in common, is then divided and segmented by processes
that are properly called political.

Democracy is a form of politics which imposes a equality to individuals and a regularity to communal life outside and in violation of the commons of the sensible. So there is a tension between democracy as we know it and a communal distribution of the sensible

Because the capacity to aestheticise the sensible is not evenly distributed it also divides and segments the originary sharedness of the perceptible world. On these terms, it too is a form of politics with political agency and potential.

What I like about this is that the capacity to engage the world aesthetically is figured as a political stake.

But Ranciere's readings, even the best like the one of Wordsworth, seem to me to lack something. More on this one day I hope?