Jaques Ranciere by T. J Demos

"[Aesthetics] is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the
visible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it"
The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it.
And while, for Rancière, aesthetics signifies a mode of appear-
ance that extends beyond artistic practice—in terms of its “dis-
tribution of the sensible” within everyday life, regulated by
institutionalized and policed systems of power—it also defines
the force of the political within art, which is capable of propos-
ing alternatives to conventional politics from outside its system.
For Rancière, fiction (as from the Latin, fingere) means
to forge, rather than to feign, and therefore what he appropriately
calls “documentary fiction” reconfigures the real as an effect to
be produced, rather than a fact to be understood.28“Documentary
fiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-
ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fable
that joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story and
character, shot and sequence—the powers of the visible, of speech,
and of movement.”As a result “we cannot think of ‘documen-
tary’ film as the polar opposite of ‘fiction’ film,”
Far from being opposed to fiction, documentary is actually one mode of it,joining—both in continuity and conflict—the “real” (the indexical, contingent elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated” (the constructed, the edited, the narrative) in cinema.