Ranciere - The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere
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issue of spectatorship today might be fortunate. It could provide an
opportunity to radically distance one's thoughts from the theoretical
and political presuppositions that still shore up, even in postmodern
disguise, most of the discussion about theater, performance, and
spectatorship. I got the impression that indeed it
was
possible to make
sense of this relationship, on condition that we try to piece together
the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a
strategic intersection in the discussion of the relationship between art
and politics and to sketch out the broader pattern of thinking that has
for a long time framed the political issues around theater and
spectacle (and I use those terms in a very general sense here—to
include dance, performance, and all the kinds of spectacle performed
by acting bodies in front of a collective audience).
The numerous debates and polemics that have called the theater
into question throughout our history can be traced back to a very
simple contradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a
paradox that may prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of
the actor and which can be summed up in the simplest terms. There
is no theater without spectators (be it only a single and hidden one, as
in Diderot's fictional representation of
Le Fils naturel
). But
spectatorship is a
The Emancipated Spectator
Jacques Rancière
Excerpt from Art Forum, March 2007
I have called this talk "The Emancipated Spectator."* As I
understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the pre-
supposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link
between separate terms, which also means between concepts,
problems, and theories that seem at first sight to bear no direct
relation to one another. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity
that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is
supposed to be the "keynote" lecture of this academy. He told me he
wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on "spectatorship"
because he had been impressed by my book
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
[Le Maitre ignorant
(1987)]. I began to wonder what connection there
could be between the cause and the effect. This is an academy that
brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, and performance
together to consider the issue of spectatorship today.
The Ignorant
Schoolmaster
was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange
destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting
that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he
did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling
for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning
the instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in
the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive
it in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political
stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic
dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by
names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?
On second thought, it occurred to me that the very distance, the
lack of any obvious relationship between Jacotot's theory and the
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bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And
looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the
opposite of knowing. It means standing before an appearance without
knowing the conditions which produced that appearance
o r t h e r e a l i t y t h a t l i e s behind it. Second, looking is deemed the
opposite of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless
in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator
means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of
knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.
From this diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing
conclusions. The first is that theater in general is a bad thing, that it is
the stage of illusion and passivity, which must be dismissed in favor
of what it forbids: knowledge and action—the action of knowing and
the action led by knowledge. This conclusion was drawn long ago by
Plato: The theater is the place where ignorant people are invited to
see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the
manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which
is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack
of knowledge. The "action" of theater is nothing but the
transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease
of the empirical vision that looks at shadows. Theater is the
transmission of the ignorance that makes people ill through the
medium of ignorance that is optical illusion. Therefore a good
community is a community that doesn't allow the mediation of the
theater, a community whose collective virtues are directly
incorporated in the living attitudes of its participants.
This seems to be the more logical conclusion to the problem. We
know, however, that it is not the conclusion that was most often
drawn. The most common conclusion runs as follows: Theater
involves spectatorship, and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore,
we need a new theater, a theater without spectator-ship. We need a
theater where the optical relation—implied in the word
theatron—
is
subjected to another relation, implied in the word
drama.
Drama
means action. The theater is a place where an action is actually
performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may
have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the
performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the
energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theater must be
predicated on that acting power. Theater has to be brought back to its
true essence, which is the contrary of what is usually known as
theater. What must be pursued is a theater without spectators, a
theater where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will
learn things instead of being captured by images and become active
participants in a collective performance instead of being passive
viewers.
This turn has been understood in two ways, which are
antagonistic in principle, though they have often been mixed in
theatrical performance and in its legitimization. On the one hand the
spectator must be released from the passivity of the viewer, who is
fascinated by the appearance standing in front of him and identifies
with the characters on the stage. He must be confronted
with the spectacle of something strange, which stands as an
enigma and demands that he investigate the reason for its strangeness.
He must be pressed to abandon the role of passive viewer and to take
on that of the scientist who observes phenomena and seeks their
cause. On the other hand the spectator must eschew the role of the
mere observer who remains still and untouched in front of a distant
spectacle. He must be torn from his delusive mastery, drawn into the
magical power of theatrical action, where he will exchange the
privilege of playing the rational viewer for the experience of
possessing theater's true vital energies.
We acknowledge these two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by
Brecht's epic theater and Artaud's theater of cruelty. On the one hand
the spectator must become more distant, on the other he must lose
any distance. On the one hand he must change the way he looks for a
better way of looking, on the other he must abandon the very
position of the viewer. The project of reforming the theater
ceaselessly wavered between these two poles of distant inquiry and
vital embodiment. This means that the presuppositions underpinning
the search for a new theater are the same as those that underpinned
the dismissal of theater. The reformers of the theater in fact retained
the terms of Plato's polemics, rearranging them by borrowing from
Platonism an alternative notion of theater. Plato drew an opposition
between the poetic and democratic community of the theater and a
"true" community: a choreographic community in which
n o o n e remains a motionless spectator, in which everyone moves
according to a communitarian rhythm determined by mathematical
proportion.
The reformers of the theater restaged the Platonic opposition
between
choreia
and
theater
as an opposition between the true living
essence of the theater and the simulacrum of the "spectacle." The
theater then became the place where passive spectatorship had to be
turned into its contrary—the living body of a community enacting its
own principle. In this academy's statement of purpose we read that
"theater remains the only place of direct confrontation of the
audience with itself as a collective." We can give that sentence a
restrictive meaning that would merely
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contrast the collective audience of the theater with the individual
visitors to an exhibition or the sheer collection of individuals
watching a movie. But obviously the sentence means much more. It
means that "theater" remains the name for an idea of the community
as a living body. It conveys an idea of the community as self-presence
opposed to the distance of the representation.
Since the advent of German Romanticism, the concept of theater
has been associated with the idea of the living community. Theater
appeared as a form of the aesthetic constitution—meaning the
sensory constitution—of the community: the community as a way of
occupying time and space, as a set of living gestures and attitudes that
stands before any kind of political form and institution; community as
a performing body instead of an apparatus of forms and rules. In this
way theater was associated with the Romantic notion of the aesthetic
revolution: the idea of a revolution that would change not only
laws and institutions but transform the sensory forms of human
experience. The reform of theater thus meant the restoration of
its authenticity as an assembly or a ceremony of the community.
Theater is an assembly where the people become aware of their
situation and discuss their own interests, Brecht would say after
Piscator. Theater is the ceremony where the community is given
possession of its own energies, Artaud would state. If theater is
held to be an equivalent of the true community, the living body
of the community opposed to the illusion of mimesis, it comes
as no surprise that the attempt at restoring theater to its true
essence had as its theoretical backdrop the critique of the
spectacle.
What is the essence of spectacle in Guy Debord's theory? It is
externality. The spectacle is the reign of vision. Vision means
externality. Now externality means the dispossession of one's own
being. "The more man contemplates, the less he is," Debord says.
This may sound anti-Platonic. Indeed, the main source for the
critique of the spectacle is, of course, Feuerbach's critique of religion.
It is what sustains that critique—namely, the Romantic idea of truth
as unseparateness. But that idea itself remains in line with the Platonic
disparagement of the mimetic image. The contemplation that Debord
denounces is the theatrical or mimetic contemplation, the
contemplation of the suffering that is provoked by division.
"Separation is the alpha and the omega of spectacle," he writes. What
man gazes at in this scheme is the activity that has been stolen from
him; it is his own essence torn away from him, turned foreign to him,
hostile to him, making for a collective world whose reality is nothing
but man's own dispossession.
From this perspective there is no contradiction between the quest
for a theater that can realize its true essence and the critique of the
spectacle. "Good" theater is posited as a theater that deploys its
separate reality only in order to suppress it, to turn the theatrical form
into a form of life of the community. The paradox of the spectator is
part of an intellectual disposition that is, even in the name of the
theater, in keeping with the Platonic dismissal of the theater. This
framework is built around a number of core ideas that must be called
into question. Indeed, we must question the very footing on which
those ideas are based. I am speaking of a whole set of relations,
resting on some key equivalences and some key oppositions: the
equivalence of theater and community, of seeing and passivity, of
externality and separation, of mediation and simulacrum; the
opposition of collective and individual, image and living reality,
activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.
This set of equivalences and oppositions makes for a rather tricky
dramaturgy of guilt and redemption. Theater is charged with making
spectators passive in opposition to its very essence, which allegedly
consists in the self-activity of the community. As a consequence, it
sets itself the task of reversing its own effect and compensating for its
own guilt by giving back to the spectators their self-consciousness or
self-activity. The theatrical stage and the theatrical performance thus
become the vanishing mediation between the evil of the spectacle and
the virtue of the true theater. They present to the collective audience
performances intended to teach the spectators how they can stop
being spectators and become performers of a collective activity.
Either, according to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation
makes the audience aware of the social situation on which
theater itself rests, prompting the audience to act in
consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme, it makes
them abandon the position of spectator: No longer seated in
front of the spectacle, they are instead surrounded by the
performance, dragged into the circle of the action, which gives
them back their collective energy. In both cases the theater is a
self-suppressing mediation.
This is the point where the descriptions and propositions of
intellectual emancipation enter into the picture and help us reframe it.
Obviously, this idea of a self-suppressing mediation is well known to
us. It is precisely the process that is supposed to take place in the
pedagogical relation. In the pedagogical process the role of the
schoolmaster is posited a s t h e a c t o f s u p p r e s s i n g t h e
distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the
ignorant. His lessons and exercises are aimed at
the ignorant student and the way of the master, the metaphor of a
radical break between two intelligences.
The master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who
sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned
on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by
figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating
what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he
discovers with what he already knows, and so on. The master cannot
ignore that the ignorant pupil has undertaken by these same means
the apprenticeship that is the precondition of all others: the
apprenticeship of his mother tongue. But for the master this is only
the knowledge of the ignorant, the knowledge of the little child who
sees and hears at random, compares and guesses by chance, and
repeats by routine, without understanding the reason for the effects
he observes and reproduces. The role of the master is thus to break
with that process of hit-and-miss groping. It is to teach the pupil the
knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its own way—the way of the
progressive method, which dismisses all groping and all chance by
explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complex,
according to what the pupil is capable of understanding, with respect
to his age or social background and social expectations.
The primary knowledge that the master owns is the "knowledge
of ignorance." It is the presupposition of a radical break between two
forms of intelligence. This is also the primary knowledge that he
transmits to the student: the knowledge that he must have things
explained to him in order to understand, the knowledge that he
cannot understand on his own. It is the knowledge of his incapacity.
In this way, progressive instruction is the endless verification of its
starting point: inequality. That endless verification of inequality is
what Jacotot calls the process of stultification. The opposite of
stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of
verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence
is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the
equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is
no gap between two forms of intelligence. The human animal learns
everything as he has learned his mother tongue, as he has learned to
venture through the forest of things and signs that surrounds him, in
order to take his place among his fellow humans—by observing,
comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with one fact, one
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continuously reducing the gap between knowledge and ignorance.
Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he must reinstate it
ceaselessly. In order to replace ignorance with adequate knowledge,
he must always keep a step ahead of the ignorant student who is
losing his ignorance. The reason for this is simple: In the pedagogical
scheme, the ignorant person is not only the one who does not know
what he does not know; he is as well the one who ignores that he
does not know what he does not know and ignores how to know it.
The master is not only he who knows precisely what remains
unknown to the ignorant; he also knows how to make it knowable, at
what time and what place, according to what protocol. On the one
hand pedagogy is set up as a process of objective transmission: one
piece of knowledge after another piece, one word after another word,
one rule or theorem after another. This knowledge is supposed to be
conveyed directly from the master's mind or from the page of the
book to the mind of the pupil. But this equal transmission is
predicated on a relation of inequality. The master alone knows the
right way, time, and place for that "equal" transmission, because he
knows something that the ignorant will never know, short of
becoming a master himself, something that is more important than
the knowledge conveyed. He knows the exact distance between
ignorance and knowledge. That pedagogical distance between a
determined ignorance and a determined knowledge is in fact a
metaphor. It is the metaphor of a radical break between the way of
sign with another sign, and repeating the experiences he has first
encountered by chance. If the "ignorant" person who doesn't know
how to read knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he
can compare that knowledge with something of which he remains
ignorant: the words of the same prayer written on paper. He can
learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of that of which he is ignorant
to that which he knows. He can do it if, at each step, he observes
what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, and verifies what he
has told. From the ignorant person to the scientist who builds
hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work: an
intelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate its
intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence is
trying to communicate to it in turn.
This poetic work of translation is the first condition of any
apprenticeship. Intellectual emancipation, as Jacotot conceived of it,
means the awareness and the enactment of that equal power of translation
and counter-translation. Emancipation entails an idea of distance
opposed to the stultifying one. Speaking animals are distant animals
who try to communicate through the forest of signs. It is this sense of
distance that the "ignorant master"—the master who ignores
inequality—is teaching. Distance is not an evil that should be
abolished. It is the normal condition of communication. It is not a
gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. The distance
that the "ignorant" person has to cover is not the gap between his
ignorance and the knowledge of his master; it is the distance between
what he already knows and what he still doesn't know but can learn
by the same process. To help his pupil cover that distance, the
"ignorant master" need not be ignorant. He need only dissociate his
knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach
his
knowledge to the
students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to report
what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to verify it,
and so on. What he ignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is
the linkage between the knowledge of the knowledgeable and the
ignorance of the ignorant. Any distance is a matter of happenstance.
Each intellectual act weaves a casual thread between a form of
ignorance and a form of knowledge. No kind of social hierarchy can
be predicated on this sense of distance.
What is the relevance of this story with respect to the question of
the spectator? Dramaturges today aren't out to explain to their
audience the
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truth about social relations and the best means to do away with
domination. But it isn't enough to lose one's illusions. On the
contrary, the loss of illusions often leads the dramaturge or the
performers to increase the pressure on the spectator: Maybe
he
will
know what has to be done, if the performance changes him, if it sets
him apart from his passive attitude and makes him an active
participant in the communal world. This is the first point that the
reformers of the theater share with the stultifying pedagogues: the
idea of the gap between two positions. Even when the dramaturge or
the performer doesn't know what he wants the spectator to do, he
knows at least that the spectator has to do something: switch from
passivity to activity.
But why not turn things around? Why not think, in this case too,
that it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that
constitutes the distance itself? Why identify the fact of being seated
motionless with inactivity, if not by the presupposition of a radical
gap between activity and inactivity? Why identify "looking" with
"passivity" if not by the presupposition that looking means
looking at the image or the appearance, that it means being
separated from the reality that is always behind the image? Why
identify hearing with being passive, if not by the
presupposition that acting is the opposite of speaking, etc.?
All these oppositions—looking/knowing, looking/acting,
appearance/reality, activity/ passivity—are much more than
logical oppositions. They are what I call a partition of the
sensible, a distribution of places and of the capacities or
incapacities attached to those places. Put in other terms,
they are allegories of inequality. This is why you can change the
values given to each position without changing the meaning of
the oppositions themselves. For instance, you can exchange the
positions of the superior and the inferior. The spectator is
usually disparaged because he does nothing, while the
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