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What is the present terrain on which battles of emancipation are fought? (9, aesthetics)

What should be the definition of aesthetics? “a regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts. . . “ (10)

What does he dislike about some present definitions of modernity? (mix of unrelated items from Cartesian science to revolution, 11)

What should we avoid in rejecting these ideas? (notions of an “end” or a “return”; these are mistaken false counters of time, 11))

The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics

What is the “distribution of the sensible”? (by “sensible” he may mean something like “perceivable”--establishes a commonality but also ways individuals have a part in this distribution, 12)

What examples does he give of classical exclusions? (Plato states that artisans cannot be managers because “work will not wait”--that is, occupational discrimination based on the nature of work and the time and space in which it is performed)

In what way is aesthetics at the core of politics? (system determining what presents itself to sense experience, 13; “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see an the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”)

What was wrong with Plato’s view of art? (too rulebound and hierarchical, likes theater, choreographed dance, and writing, 13-14)

What had been revolutionary about Madame Bovary? (democratic in its refusal to be didactic, 14)

What have been some other examples of revolutionary changes in art? (16, Renaissance brought three-dimensionality; romantic art; these changes occurred at the interface between media, 16; art seen as part of everyday life)

What kinds of art/writing does he seem to like? (arts which connect different media, 16; writing with shared visual and written elements, 15; Arts and Crafts movements which developed furniture for a new community, with the pictorial surface as a surface of shared writing, 15; dislikes didactic art; dislikes what he sees as dogmatically flat art of modernism, 15; advocates art which enters the very décor of everyday life, 17)

How does he respond to the nineteenth century elevation of the artisan to the status of great artist? (17 applauds)

Can the same forms have different political interpretations? (yes) What are some examples of such forms? (theater, rhetoric, dance, 17)

What are important features of all art? (bodily movement, speech)

Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity

What does Ranciere find limiting about notions of modernity and the avant garde? (overly fixated on notions of breaking with the past and future, 20)

What does he view as major modes of identifying art's function? (ethical regime of images, representational regime of mimesis, 21, and finally, the aesthetic)

How does he respond to a critical emphasis on rupture? (ahistorical and simplistic, 25)

What term should we use for new interpretations? (“modern,” 25)

What does he point to as limitations of modernism? 27-18

What is post-modernism? (28,  rejects ideas of emancipation)

What should art be? (invention of sensible forms for a life to come)

In what sense is politics a total life program? (30)

Mechanical Arts and the Promotion of the Anonymous

What disagreement with Benjamin does he express, and on what ground? (31, 33 aesthetic comes before technological, 33)

How does law differ from political history? (34)

What definition of art does he offer? (the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true)

Is History a Form of Fiction?

What changes according to Ranciere occurred in art during the Romantic era? (35-37; a prior Aristotelian view of art as carefully arranged fictions gave way under Romanticism to a proliferation of signs, blending with events and signs in the outer world)

What is the subject matter of the new sensibility? ("the history of material life," 37)

How have fact and fiction collapsed? (37-38, art orders the outer world in meaningful ways, no longer fiction in older sense; all persons are able to "make history", 38-39)

How does he respond to documentaries? (38)

How do his  differ from the view that everything is fiction?

How are political communities formed? (39-40, through words)

How does he define utopia, and what does he mean by heterotopia? (40, "extreme point of configuration of the sensible," "distribution of sensible universe where what one sees, what one says, and what one makes or does are rigorously adapted to one another")

What disputes lie at the heart of politics? (those concerning the relation of words to things, 40)

On Art and Work

What is the “factory of the sensible”? (42, a common habitat, by the weaving together of sensible activities)

How had Plato degraded the workers? (42-43, removed from the sphere of art)

What is the relation of artistic practice to work? (worker enters public sphere of art, art is a displaced form of its visibility, 43)

What had Schiller advocated in the "aesthetic" state? (end to opposition between thinking and manual labor, 44; Romanticism added to earlier formulations the notion of an aesthetic will, 44)

What should be the relationship between workers and thinkers? (opposes any division, 44, art becomes symbol of work)

What for him is the value of the term "production"? (unites ideas of manufacturing and visibility; artistic practice not exception to other practices; art "represents and reconfigures the distribution of these activities," 45)