The Emancipated Spectator

Jacques Ranciere, 2008

Key Terms:
 * Emancipated Intellectual
 * Emancipation: the blurring o the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.
 * Paradox of the spectator: there is no theatre without a spectator
 * Truth of the theatre:
 * Simulacrum of the spectacle: unsatisfactory distance between spectator and action to be destroyed.

Notes:
 * Builds on Brecht, Diederot, De Board, and Plato


 * Until now, there has been no relationship between theory of intelligence and question of spectator
 * Reasons being a spectator is bad
 * Viewing is the opposite of knowing. The viewer is usually held before an appearance in a state of ignorance
 * Spectator is passive, the opposite of acting. A spectator is separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act.
 * Ranciere suggests the need for a theatre without spectators- without passivity. We need active participants, not passive voyeurs.
 * How to have this: spectator shouldn't understand- they should be kept in a state of mystification and have to work things out for themselves, so they assume the roll of the investigator. They must engage and be asked to evaluate, using their sense of reason, to make decisions. Seemingly contrary to this, we need the 'reasoning distance' to be abolished.
 * De Board said on the spectator: "The more he contemplates the less he lives."
 * "What human beings contemplate in the spectacle is the activity they have been robbed of; it is their own essence become alien, turned against them, organizing a collective world whose reality is that dispossession."
 * "This is where the descriptions and statements of intellectual emancipation and proposals for it might come into play to help us reformulate its logic. For this self-vanishing mediation is not something unknown to us. It is the very logic of the pedagogical relationship: the role assigned to the schoolmaster in the relationship is to abolish the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus. His lessons and the exercises he sets aim gradually to reduce the gulf separating them. Unfortunately, he can only reduce the distance on condition that he constantly re-creates it. To replace ignorance by knowledge, he must always be one step ahead, install a new form of ignorance between the pupil and himself The reason is simple. In pedagogical logic, the ignoramus is not simply one who does not as yet know what the schoolmaster knows. She is the one who does not know what she does not know or how to know it. For his part, the schoolmaster is not only the one who possesses the knowledge unknown by the ignoramus. He is also the one who knows how to make it an object of knowledge, at what point and in accordance with what protocol. For, in thrush, there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors."
 * "To this practice of stultification he counter-posed intellectual emancipation. Intellectual emancipation is the verification of the equality of intelligence. This does not signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence, ,but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. There re not two sorts of intelligence separated by a gulf. The human animals learns everything in the same way as it initially learnt its mother tongue, as it learnt to venture into the forest of things and signs surrounding it, so as to take its place among human being: by observing and comparing one thing with another."
 * Distance is not an evil to be abolished, but the normal condition of any co munition. The distance the ignoramus has to cover is not the gulf between her ignorance and the schoolmaster's knowledge. It is simply the path from what she already knows to what she does not yet know.
 * We can teach ourselves and we learn by comparison. We do not always need a school teacher because we can relate things to what we already know. This is a way to destroy our role as spectator.
 * Distance, according to Ranciere, is not the ignoramus translating what the schoolteacher says. Distance is, instead, what the ignoramus' new information being compared and translated to what they already know.
 * The problem is that by reacting in a form of abolishing the distance are we reinforcing it? If we try to abolish the spectator as passive we only enforce this hierarchy.
 * "Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection." The spectator also acts.
 * "Spectators see, feel, and understand something in as much as they compose their own poem, as, in their way, do actors or playwrights, directors, dancers or performers."
 * "From the schoolmaster the pupil learns something that the schoolmaster does not know himself. She learns it as an effect of the mastery that forces her to search and verifies this research. But she does not learn the schoolmaster's knowledge." This is because the student is the one who makes the connections. Very Foucauldian, in the sense of structures of knowledge as power.
 * Rather than the artist's message being translated to art and that very same message being then passed on to the spectator the artist creates art, but the spectator reads tin a way different than the artist, because the message never transfers perfectly from the artist to their artwork and because the spectator has a different language with which they read the art. So the spectator helps create art as much as the artist.
 * "Meaning is owned by no one, but which subsets between them, excluding any uniform transmission."
 * "The mediation of a third term [art] can be nothing but a fatal illusion of autonomy, trapped in the logic of dispossession and its concealment."
 * "It its in this power of associating and dissociating that the emancipation of the spectator consists -- that is to say, the emancipation of each of us as spectator."