Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierian Politics

The police regime is endowed with the power of ordering space. This text stands at the crossroads of space, policing, and visual percep-tion, as I articulate a Rancierean aesthetic dimension of the political and political dimension of the aesthetic. Jacques Rancière is a useful and rich source for this tripartite investigation because in his writ-ings, aesthetics is not only about art, and politics is not only about the state. Politics, as laid out in Disagreement, is that which always takes a stage and takes a theatrical formation, putting ‘two worlds in one world.’ This staging often overturns sense-making at the level of language alone, relying also on microlevels of sensation and sense-making (we inherited the word ‘aesthetic’ from the Greek aistheta‘perceptible things’). In Dissensus, Rancière mentions to art works that focus on matters of space, territories, borders, wastelands, and other transient spaces, matters ‘that are crucial to today’s issues of power and community.’ To provide a framework to the concern with visibility and emancipatory politics, my bifocal reading takes into ac-count (1) the work of the police, seen in near vision, and (2) the work of politics, seen in distant vision