To understand why Rancière’s vision of politics and the power of sensory impression takes on particular urgency in the age of generative AI, it is necessary to distinguish between two levels of impression. The philosophical foundations for their distinction were laid by Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Lyotard, developing Kant’s analytics of the sublime, insisted that it is an experience that fundamentally exceeds the capacity for representation and comprehension. In the gap between what happened and the inability to comprehend it, a thought is born. The sublime is not produced to order—it arises where form capitulates to what cannot be formed. Derrida, through the concept of différance, showed that meaning is always deferred, arriving through a trace. A deep impression continues to “work” after the encounter with the object, does not let go, requires interpretation—and in this capacity it acts as the antipode of virality: content optimised for instant affect leaves no trace and does not demand interpretation.
Thus, these two levels:
1. Affective. Engages chemoreceptors and other sensory channels—such as vision, hearing, and tactile sensations—and serves to produce a rapid physiological response, broadcasting mass images designed to capture attention. The impression at this level is predictable, projectable, replicable, and marketable. It is intended not only for oneself, but also for the Other—as a gesture of self-presentation, a tool for satisfying ambitions, a status signal.
2. Experience. An ongoing existential event that is not exhausted at the moment of contact with an object. It is with experience that true reflection begins, including aesthetic reflection. Experience is not produced; it happens.
Between these levels lies the entire space of contemporary creative production—the experience industry. While affective impressions are produced and sold, experience fundamentally defies direct monetisation. According to Rancière, whoever controls the infrastructure for producing first-level experiences at scale controls sensory perception—shaping what is perceived as worthy of attention. This power over the division of the sensible is no less real than legal power.
Generative AI is a “machine,” a “factory” for producing impressions. The developer, by selecting training data and target functions, exercises sovereignty, determining which sensory mode will be broadcast to millions of users. In current mass deployments, generative AI primarily operates at the affective level—optimising for response speed, visual appeal, and conformity to average “like” patterns. The question of whether the technological environment is capable of creating the conditions for a second-level experience—one that leaves a trace, opening an encounter with the unimaginable—remains open. The answer is determined not only by architectural decisions, but also by the sensory mode initially embedded in the system’s foundation.
Thus, the aesthetic, the technical, and the political are intertwined in the struggle for the right to sovereign expression as the right to set the focus of visibility, to define more than just friend/enemy in Schmitt’s sense, but also, in his logic, beauty/ugliness—and to construct trajectories for the creation of meanings and values. This is precisely why states and regulators, developers and investors quite consciously claim a monopoly over creative expression. From this perspective, the struggle for sovereignty in the field of generative AI takes on a dimension that extends beyond technology or economics—a political-aesthetic one.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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