Tag Archives: aesthetics

My sense of Ranciere’s aesthetic theory is that it curiously both overvalues and devalues the field.  At one level, aesthetics is associated with the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – the social regimes of sense that structure our capacity to experience … Continue reading →

I can imagine an objection to my previous post: there may be different periods of art but that does not indicate that the notion of the aesthetic is anything more than a peculiarly modern phenomenon, emerging during the Enlightenment as … Continue reading →

The following are a set of questions about Ranciere’s notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’. The term ‘distribution’ suggests a work of differential apportionment – aspects of sensibility are made available here, but not there, and to some, but … Continue reading →

In a note on the tradition of modern aesthetics, Ranciere offers a definition of the field: ‘Aesthetics’ designates two things in this work: a general regime of the visibility and the intelligibility of art and a mode of interpretative discourse … Continue reading →

Of course, everything I have written so far about Ranciere betrays layers of ignorance, so I have set myself a program of (constantly expanding readings): Kant: must make my way through Critique of Pure Reason to get a grasp on … Continue reading →

Bourdieu, Eagleton, etc. are probably right – aesthetics is ultimately all about class and class difference. (Or at least I can imagine arguing this.) For example, Plato’s prohibition of the poets is usually interpreted in epistemological terms as relating to … Continue reading →