The birth of aesthetics as a regime of identification of art signifies the overthrow of a set of hierarchies that determined the status

of artistic practices and the very nature of their sensory perception: a hierarchy of the arts and genres determined by the lowliness or nobility of their subjects, that is, ultimately by the rank held by the characters and activities they represented; the subordination of works and practices to social destinations defined within an hierarchically structured world; the definition of taste as a form of sensibility that was the preserve of an elite; the definition of the very practice of art according to the scheme of an active form commanding passive matter. Aesthetics represents the destruction of this edifice: all subjects begin to share an equal status thanks to the reinstatement of genre painting versus historical painting; the production of works without destination comes with the development of museums; the revocation of the form/matter model and Kants definition of universality without a concept of aesthetic judgement. It is this sea change that is taken into account when Schiller translates in political terms Kants free play of the faculties. Aesthetics emerges as the theory of an experience of sensory neutralization, of a concrete experience of the oppositions that structured the hierarchical world-view. This is why, for Schiller and the Romantics after him, it was possible to contrast a revolution in the very forms of sensory life with the revolutionary overthrow of the forms of government. But, alongside the great programmes of aesthetic revolution, a far more diffuse process occurs by which workers, ordinarily destined for a life of passive production or reproduction, internalize aesthetic attitudes, ways of disassociating their gaze from the labour performed by their arms or their language from the language forms of their social milieu. Workers emancipation came about through these processes of break which are not counter-cultural phenomena but ways of neutralizing the distinctions and hierarchies in which a condition was associated with a way of being, of feeling and of speaking. When I say that there is no art in general, it is not because I make art subordinate to some kind of volcanic eventiality. It is a fact that art as a concept for a specific sphere of practices and experiences only emerges in Europe at the end of the 18th century. It is also a fact that it emerges as an undifferentiated concept, free from the forms of normativity that used to define the arts, genres, etc. Art becomes a specific reality when the objective criteria defining the inclusion of a given practice within a defined art form, or enabling the assessment of the quality of works pertaining to this art form, disappear. The consequence is not the establishment of a body of almighty judges. The consequence, rather, is that, as Mallarm upheld, the works must prove themselves, that is to say they must propose singular formulas of this power that is henceforth unbound by norms. Further, this results in a multiplication of formulas, a multiplication of exchanges between art and its other. The same goes for politics. Because politics is not identified through power, because there is nothing that is political in itself, a multiplicity of inventions emerge, which are so many ways of challenging the limits within which politics was more or less confined and confiscated. To define things that are properly political, distinguishing them for example from that which is social, is the point of view I refer to as police. Yet political action starts when this distribution is called into question, when collectives use this or that social issue to define a capacity for thinking and acting that pertains to all. With art and with politics, inventions and subjectifications constantly reconfigure the landscape of what is political and what is artistic.

If art is necessarily political, then how do we distinguish engaged art from other art forms? What can engaged art stand for?

I did not say that art is necessarily political but that politics is inherent in the forms themselves, for example the museum, the book or the theatre. Then, there are the myriad inventions that reconfigure, directly or indirectly, the landscape of the visible, from those that purport to transform the furnishings of individual and collective life, according to the Arts and Crafts or Bauhaus models, or to convert the theatre stage into a site of collective action, in the fashion of Meyerhold or Artaud, right up to all those that rework the images through which a community recognizes itself and its world. These inventions define politics of art that remain the same whatever the artists effective engagements may be: collage has served specifically targeted political denunciations as well as anarchic forms of destruction of an entire cultural universe or disenchanted affirmations of the equivalence of all things. The great political art forms of the 1920s-30s, like Brechts epic theatre, constantly play with this plurality of politics contained within one formula. This is because the concept of engagement does not in itself define an art form. It defines the artists will to place their work in the service of a particular cause. This is precisely what presupposes a split between the two domains, a necessity to de-neutralize art by making it

articulate messages about the social world, or to withdraw it from its exclusive sphere by turning it into a direct instrument of intervention, from agit-prop to contemporary forms of intervention in deprived neighbourhoods or to the participation of artists as such in the big alter-globalization demonstrations. Historically, the tension was resolved through the ambiguity of critical art; by producing a sensory strangeness, this art form was meant to prompt the spectator to seek the reason for this strangeness amongst the contradictions of the social world, and to become mobilized for action through this realization. The deduction was gratuitous, but the system functioned as long as the forms of contestation of the dominant order and the alternatives for the future were strong enough to anticipate its effect. When this is no longer the case, the system is emptied of substance and artists are drawn instead towards direct political activism.

[A]n aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms.The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an awareness of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification

Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the natural order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to prviate or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific bodies, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying. This natural logic, a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, pins bodies to their places and allocates the private and the public to distinct parts this is the order of the police. Police can therefore be defined by way of contrast as the activity that breaks with the order of the police by inventing new subjects. Politics invents new forms of collective enunciation; it re-frames the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible, new configurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time in short, new bodily capacities. As Plato tells a contrario politics begins when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing anything else, take the time that they have not in order to affirm that they belong to a common world. It begins when they make the invisible visible, and make what was deemed to be the mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse concerning the common of the community. Politics creates a new form, as it were, of dissensual commonsense

Art and politics each define a form of dissensus, a dissensual re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible. If there is such a thing as an aesthetics of politics, it lies in a reconfiguration of the distribution of the common through political processes of subjectivation. Correspondingly, if there is a politics of aesthetics, it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience. Similar to political action, [art] effectuates a change in the distribution of the sensible. The difference might be said to lie in the fact that the reconfiguration of the sensible carried out by politics is an effect of forms of subjectivation. In other words, such re-configurations are brought about by collectives of enunciation and demonstration (manifestation). The aesthetics of politics consists above all in the framing of a we, a subject, a collective demonstration whose emergence is the element that disrupts the distribution of social parts, an element that I call the part of those who have no part not the wretched, but the anonymous. The politics of aesthetics, as for it, frames new forms of individuality and new haeccities. It does not give a collective voice to the anonymous. Instead, it re-frames the world of common experience as the world of a shared impersonal experience in which new modes of constructing common

objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed that are characteristic of the aesthetics of politics. This politics of aesthetics, however, operates under the conditions prescribed by an original disjunction. It produces effects, but it does so on the basis of an original effect that implies the suspension of any direct cause-effect relationship.

Within any given framework, artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning. Such strategies are intended to make the invisible visible or to question the selfevidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meaning and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings which were previously unrelated. This might be called the labour of fiction, which, in my view, is a word that we need to re-conceive. Fiction, as re-framed by the aesthetic regime of art, means far more than the constructing of an imaginary world, and even far more than its Aristotelian sense of arrangement of actions. It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the real, or the framing of a dissensus. Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and ryhthms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective. It thus appears that art does not become critical or political by moving beyond itself, or departing from itself, and intervening in the real world. There is no real world that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is in and what is out are continually criss-crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. There is no real world. Instead, there are definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions. The real always is a matter of construction, a matter of fiction, in the sense that I tried to define it above. What characterises the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that real and mulitplying it in a polemical way. The practice of fiction undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs tand spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given commonsense. It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done

However, no direct cause-effect relationship is determinable between the intention realised in an art performance and a capacity for political subjectivation. . The effect [of critical art] thereby produced is not a kind of calculable transmission between artistic shock, intellectual awareness and political mobilisation. There is no reason why the production of a shock produced by two heterogenous forms of the sensible ought to yield an understanding of the state of the world, and none why understanding the latter ought to produce a decision to change it. There is no straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world, and none from intellectual awareness to political action. Instead, this kind of shift implies a move from one given world to another in which capacities and incapacities, forms of tolerance and intolerance, are differently defined. What comes to pass is a process of dissociation: a rupture in the relationship between sense and sense, between what is seen and what is thought, and between what is thought and what is felt. What comes to pass is a rupture in the specific configuration that allows us to stay in our assigned places in a given state of things.These sorts of ruptures can happen anywhere and at any time, but they can never be calculated.

If art is to be political, if it is to maintain its tension between the autonomy and the heteronomy of art which is constitutive of all art and always has been in the aesthetic regime, it must give us some readable political signification.

I did not say that art is necessarily political but that politics is inherent in the forms themselves, for example the museum, the book or the theatre. Then, there are the myriad inventions that reconfigure, directly or indirectly, the landscape of the visible, from those that purport to transform the furnishings of individual and collective life, according to the Arts and Crafts or Bauhaus models, or to convert the theatre stage into a site of collective action, in the fashion of Meyerhold or Artaud, right up to all those that rework the images through which a community recognizes itself and its world. These inventions define politics of art that remain the same whatever the artists effective engagements may be: collage has served specifically targeted political denunciations as well as anarchic forms of destruction of an entire cultural universe or disenchanted affirmations of the equivalence of all things. The great political art forms of the 1920s-30s, like Brechts epic theatre, constantly play with this plurality of politics contained within one formula. This is because the concept of engagement does not in itself define an art form. It defines the artists will to place their work in the service of a particular cause. This is precisely what presupposes a split between the two domains, a necessity to de-neutralize art by making it articulate messages about the social world, or to withdraw it from its exclusive sphere by turning it into a direct instrument of intervention, from agit-prop to contemporary forms of intervention in deprived neighbourhoods or to the participation of artists as such in the big alter-globalization demonstrations. Historically, the tension was resolved through the ambiguity of critical art; by producing a sensory strangeness, this art form was meant to prompt the spectator to seek the reason for this strangeness amongst the contradictions of the social world, and to become mobilized for action through this realization. The deduction was gratuitous, but the system functioned as long as the forms of contestation of the dominant order and the alternatives for the future were strong enough to anticipate its effect. When this is no longer the case, the system is emptied of substance and artists are drawn instead towards direct political activism. **