Doing art means displacing art's borders, just as doing politics means displacing the borders of what is acknowledged as the political.

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics - Jacques Ranciere

What is the political efficacy of Art? Despite his insistence on “aesthetic indifference” (“a film remains a film,” etc.) and the “aesthetic cut” (what separates “consequences from intentions”) Rancière acknowledges;

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 crisscrossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. There is no 'real world.'

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics - Jacques Ranciere

What I want to be able to claim here is that database documentary, as an art practice that facilitates political subjectivation, constitutes a field of intervention that maps directly onto and into “politics,” re-imagining and reconstructing the ‘fictions’ of the real. I want to be able to say that such acts of subjectivation undo the status quo and “implement the only universal in politics: we are all equal.”

There may well be no “real world” as Ranciere suggests, but there is still the problem of the “real” that is manifest in the operations of power. There is the difficulty of the material realities my interlocutors experience despite their political subjectivation – realities that are the result of structural inequality. To reach the space of “we are all equal” in this context will require relocating politics, in a fundamental and material way, outside the logic of the state. Clearly, the state is not susceptible to the persuasions of art, or, necessarily, the politicized speech of “the part that has no part,” but new political subjects generating new ‘fictions’ of the real, change the conversation. Each event, each body, carries the "affective potential" for things to turn out differently.

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Begin this path: Material Realities

1. Aesthetics | Politics
2. Inquiry | Argument

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