In this interview in Eurozine Jacques Rancière says in reference to his book The Politics of Aesthetics, that:

What I meant is that 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.

He adds that:

Aesthetic has to be rethought precisely in its political meaning. What "aesthetics" meant when it was created at the end of the eighteenth century was something very different from beauty or a philosophy of art. It was a new status of experience. Aesthetics meant that for the first time, artworks were not defined according to the rules of their production or their destinations in a hierarchical system, but taken for a kind of specific sensation. So artworks were no longer addressing a specific audience or social hierarchy. This was conceptualized at the time by philosophers like Kant and poets like Schiller, who thought there was something specific, a new kind of equality, involved in the aesthetic experience. At this time, the idea was born that in aesthetic experience and in aesthetic community there is a possibility for another kind of revolution.