Art as pieces of fiction

The images of art are not here held up as truths but fictions; yet fictions

that do not pose the problem of fictionality but the common-sense to which they hold a voice

of authority.
The emancipated spectator is a sequel to Rancière's The Future of the Image and presents a critique of leftist melancoly in regard to the spectacle and the spectator. Rancière criticises the tendency of theorists of both art and film to portray audiences passive. Moves against this can be seen in forms of art, like new theatre and performance art. Yet, the spectator has not been passive to begin with: like a reader, the spectator makes unique connections, selects, and frames the performance. Left-wing melancholy in regard to the spectator becomes self-defeating and merely reifies the operation of the 'machine'.

Aesthetics is not a discipline dealing with art and artworks, but a kind of, what I call, distribution of the sensible. I mean a way of mapping the visible, a cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible. Aesthetics was a kind of redistribution of experience, the idea that there was a sphere of experience that didn't feed the traditional distribution, because the traditional distribution adds that people have different senses according to their position in society. Those who were destined to rule and those who were destined to be ruled didn't have the same sensory equipment, not the same eyes and ears, not the same intelligence. Aesthetics means precisely the break with that traditional way of embodying inequality in the very constitution of the sensible world.
Rancière, Jacques.

The idea of Jacotot and the idea of intellectual emancipation was that there is always some point of equality. There is always something that is shared, for instance when the teacher is explaining something to the student, on the one hand it supposes that he has something to explain, that the student is unable to understand by himself or herself etc, so this is a relationship of inequality, but it can work only if the master supposes that that the students can simply understand the explanation, understand what the master is telling him. So there is a kind of equality in the fact that they atleast share the same language.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

Bourdieu's judgement, and that of all those who denounce the aesthetic illusion, rests on a simple alternative: you know or you do not [on connaît ou on méconnaît]. If you do not know [méconnaît], it is because you do not know [sait] how to look or you cannot look. But to not be able to look is
still a way of not knowing how to look. Whether philosopher or petit-bourgeois, those who deny this, those who believe in the disinterested character of aesthetic judgement do not want to see because they cannot see, because the place that they occupy in the determined system, for them as for everyone else, constitutes a mode of accommodation which determines a form of misrecognition [méconnaissance].