The Emancipated Spectator - Jacques Rancière

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Ranciere, Jacques. "The Emancipated Spectator," Artforum International, March 2007, Vol. 45, Iss. 7. 270-281


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TheEmancipatedSpectator

I h av e c alle d th is ta lk"The EmancipatedSpectator." * As I understand it, a title is

always a challenge. It sets forth the pre-SUpposirion that an expression makessense, that there is a link between sepa-rate terms, which also means betweenconcepts, problems, and theories thatseem at first sight C O bear no direct relation to one another. In a sense,this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberginvited me to deliver what is supposed to be the" keynote" lecture of thisacademy. He told me he wanted me to introduce this collective reflectionon "spectatorship" because he had been impressed by my book TheIgnorant Schoolmaster [Le Mait re ignorant (1987)]. I began to wonderwhat connection there could be between the cause and the effect. This isan academy that brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, andperformance together to consider the issue of specta rorship today. TheIgnorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and thestrange destiny of Joseph jacotor, a French professor who, at the begin-ning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by assert ingthat an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what hedid not know himself , proclaiming the equali ty of intell igences, and calLingfor intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerningthe instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in themiddle ofthe nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the19805 in order to sti. rup the debate about education and its polit ical stakes ..But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man

whose artistic universe could be epito-mized by names such as Demosthenes,

Racine, and Poussin?On second thought, it occurred to me

that the very distance, the lack of anyobvious relationship between Jacotot'stheory and the issue of spectators hip

today might be fortunate. It could provide an opportunity to radicallydistance one's thoughts from the theoretical and political presupposi-tions [hat still shore up, even in postmodern disguise, most of the discus-sion about theater, performance, and specrarorship. [ got the impressionthat indeed it was possible to make sense of this relationship, on condi-tion that we try to piece together the network of presuppositions thatput the issue of spectators hip at a strategic intersection in the discussionof the relationship between art and politics and to sketch out the broaderpattern of thinking that has for a long time framed the political issuesaround theater and spectacle (and I use those terms in a very generalsense here--to inc lude dance, performance, and all the kinds of spectacleperformed by acting bodies in front of a collective audience).

The numerous debates and polemics that have called the theater intoquestion throughout our history can be traced back to a very simplecontradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox thatmay prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of the actor andwhich can be summed up in the simplest terms. There is 110 theater with-out spectators (be it only a single and hidden one, as in Dideror's fic-tional representation of Le Fils naturel [1757J). But specrarorship is a

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bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking isa bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the opposite ofknowing. It means standing before an appearance wirhout knowing theconditions which produced that appearance or the reality that liesbehind it. Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting. He wholooks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat, l acking any powerof in tervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator isseparated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from thepossi bility 01 acting.

From this diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions.The fi rst is that theater i.ngeneral is a bad thing, that it is the stage of illu-sion and passivity, which must be dismissed in favor of what it forbids:knowledge and action-the action of knowing and the action led byknowledge. This conclusion was drawn long ago by Plato: The theater isthe place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. Whattakes place on the stage is a pathos, the man-ifestat ion of O J disease, the disease of desireand pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused br [he lack ofknowledge. The "action" of theater is noth-ing but the transmission of that disease

through another disease, the disease of [heempirical vision that looks at shadows.Theater is. the transmission of the ignorancethat makes people ill through the medium ofignorance that is optical i llusion. Thereforea good community is a community thatdoesn't allow the mediation of the theater,a community whose collective virtues aredirectly incorporated in the living att itudesof its participants.

This seems to be the more logical conclu-sion to the problem, We know, however, thatit is not the conclusion that was most often

and become active participants in a collective performance instead ofbeing passive viewers.

This turn has been understood in two ways, which are antagonisticin principle, though they have often been mixed in theatrical perfor-mance and in its legitimization. On the one hand the spectator must bereleased from the passivity of the viewer, who is fascinated by theappearance standing inf ront of him and ident ifies with the characters Onthe stage. He must be confronted with the spectacle of somethingstrange, which stands as an enigma and demands that he investigate thereason for its strangeness. He must be pressed to abandon the cole ofpassive viewer and to take on that of the scientist who observes phenom-ena and seeks their cause. On the other hand the spectator must eschewthe role of the mere observer who remains still and untouched in front ofa distant spectacle. He must be torn from his delusivemastery, drawninto the magical power of theatr ical action, where he will exchange the

privilege of playing the rational viewer forthe experience of possessing theater 's truevital. energies.

\Ve acknowledge these twoparadigmaticattitudes epitomized by Brecht's epic theaterand Artaud's theater of cruelty. On the one

hand the spectator must become more dis-tant, on the other he must lose any distance.On the One hand he must change the way belooks for a better way of Too king, on theother he must abandon the very position ofthe viewer. The project of reforming the the-ater ceaselessly wavered between these twopoles of distant inquiry and vital ernbodi-memo This means that the presupposit ionsunderpinning the search for a new theaterare the same as those that underpinned thedismissal of theater. The reformers of thetheater in fact retained the terms of Plato's

Since the advent of GermanRomanticism, the concept of the-

ater has been associated withthe idea of the living community.Theater appeared-as a form of theaesthetic constitution of the com-munity: the community as a way ofoccupying time and space, as a setof living gestures and attitudes,

that stands before any kind of politi-cal form and institution; communityas a performing body instead ofan apparatus of forms and rules.

drawn. The most common conclusion runsas follows: Theater involves specratorship, and specratorship is a badthing. Therefore, we need a new theater, a theater without spectator-ship. We need a theater where the optical relation-implied in the wordcheat-ran-is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama.Drama means action. The theater is a place where an action is actuallyperformed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may haveresigned their power. Bur this power is resumed in the performance ofthe former, in the intel ligence that builds it, in the energy that i t conveys.The true sense of the theater must be predicated on that acting power.Theater has to be brought back to i rs true essence, which is the contraryof what is usually known as theater. What must be pursued is a theaterWIthout spectators, a theater where spectarors will no longer be specta-tors, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images

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polemics, rear ranging them by borrowingfrom Platonism an al ternative notion of theater. plato drew an opposi-rionbetwecn the poetic and democratic community of the theater and a"true" community: a choreographic community in which no oneremains a motionless spectator, in which everyone moves according to acomrnunitarian rhythm determined by mathematical proport ion.

The reformers ofthe theater restaged the Platonic opposit ion betweenchoreia and theater as an opposit ion between the true Jiving essence ofthe theater and the simulacrum of the "spectacle." The theater thenbecame the place where passive spectarorship had to be turned into itscontrary-the Iiving body of a community enact ing it s own principle. Inthis academy's statement of purpose we read that "theater remains theonly place of direct confrontation of the audience wi th itself as a.col lec-tive." We can give that sentence a rest rictive meaning that would merely


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contrast the collective audience of the theater with the individual visi torsto 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 con-veys an idea of the community as self-presence opposed to the distanceof the representation.

Since the advent of German Romanticism, the concept of theater hasbeen associated with the idea of the living community. Theater appearedas a form of the aesthetic constitution-meaning the sensory constitu-tioo.-of the community: the community as a way of occupying time andspace, as a set of living gestures and attitudes that stands before any kindof political form and institution; community as a performing bodyinstead of an apparatus of forms and rules. In this way theater was asso-ciated with the Romantic notion of theaesthetic revolution: the idea of a revolu-rion that would change not only laws andinsti tutions b ut transform the sensoryforms of human experience. The reformof theater thus meant the restoration of itsauthenticity as an assembly or a ceremonyof the community, Theater is an assemblywhere the people become aware of theirsima tion and discuss their own interests,Brecht would say after Piscator, Theateris the ceremony where the communityis given possessionOFlts own energies,Artaud would state. If theater is held to bean equivalent of the true community, theliving body of the community opposed tothe illusion of mimesis, it comes as no sur-prise that the attempt at restoring theaterto its true essence had as its theoreticalbackdrop the critique of the spectacle,

What is the essence of spectacle in GuyDebord's theory? It is externality. The spectacle is the reign of vision.Vision means externality. Now externality means the dispossession ofone's own being. "The more man contemplates, the less he is," Debordsays. This may sound anri-Platonic. Indeed, the main source for the cri-tique of the spectacle is, of course, Feuerbachs critique of religion. It iswhat sustainsrhat critique-namely, the Romantic idea of truth asunseparateness, But that idea itself remains in line with the Platonic dis-paragement of the mimetic image. The contemplation that Deborddenounces isthe theatrical or mimetic contemplation, the contemplationof the suffering that is provoked by division. "Separation is the alphaand the omega of spectacle," he writes. What man gazes at in this schemeis the activity that has been stolen from him; it is his own essence tornaway from him, turned foreign to him, hostile to him, making for a col-lective world whose reality is nothing but man's own dispossession.

From this perspective there is no contradiction berween the quest fora theater that can realize its true essence and the critique of the spectacle."Good" theater is posited as a theater that deploys its separate realityonly in order to suppress it, to turn the theatrical form into a form of lifeof the community. The paradox of the spectator is part of an inrellec-rual disposition that is, even in the name of the theater, in keeping withthe Platonic dismissal of the theater, This framework is built around anumber of core ideas that must be called into question. Indeed, we mustquestion the very footing on which those ideas are based. T am speak-ing of a whole set of relations, resting on some key equivalences andsome key oppositions: the equivalence of theater and community, ofseeing and passivity, of externality and separation, of mediation andsimulacrum; the opposition of collective and individual, image and

living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.

This set of equivalences and opposi-tions makes for a rather tricky dramaturgyof guilt and redemption. Theater is chargedwith making spectators passive in opposi-tion to its very essence, which a l Ieged I

consists in the self-activity of the commu-nity. As a consequence, it sets itself thetask of reversing irs own effect and com-pensating for its own guilt by giving backto the spectators their self-consciousnessor self-acfiviry_ Tbe the-atrical stage andthe theatrical performance rhus becomethe vanishing mediation between the evilof the spectacle and the virtue of the truetheater. They present to the collectiveaudience performances intended to teachthe spectators how they can stop beingspectators and become performers of acollective activity, Either, according to the

Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes the audience aware ofthe social situation on which theater i tself rests , prompting the audienceto act in consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme, it makesthem abandon the position of spectator: No longer seated in front of thespectacle, they are instead surrounded by rhe performance, dragged intothe circle of the action, which gives them back their collective energy. 1

both cases the theater 15 a self-suppressing mediation.This is the poinr where the descriptions and propositions of intellec-

tual emancipation enter into the pictu.re and help LIS refrarne it. Obviously,this idea of a self-suppressing mediation is well known to us. It is pre-cisely the p.rocess that is supposed to take place in the pedagogical rela-tion. In the pedagogical process the role of the schoolmaster is positedas the act of suppressing the distance between his knowledge andthe ignorance of the ignorant. His lessons and exercises are aimed at

E i t h e r ,according to the Brechtianparadigm, theatrical mediation makesthe audience aware of the social situ-ation on which theater itself rests,

prompting the audience to act in con-sequence. Or,according to the Artaudianscheme, it makes them abandon the

position of spectatof;--Nolongerseated in front of the spectacle, theyare instead surrounded by the perfor-mance, dragged into the circle of the

action, which gives them back their col-lective energy. In both cases the theater

is a self-suppressing mediation.

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continuously reducing the gap between knowledge and Ignorance.Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he must reinstate it cease-lessly, In order to replace ignorance with adequate knowledge he mustalways keep a step ahead of the ignorant student who is losing his igno-rance. The reason for this is simple: In the pedagogical scheme, theignorant person is not only the one who does not know what he doesnot know; he is as well the one who ignores that he does not know whathe does not know and ignores bow to know it. The master is not onlyhe who knows precisely what remains unknown to the ignorant; healso 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 aprocess of objective transmission: one piece of knowledge after anotherpiece, one word after another word, one rule or theorem after another.This knowledge is supposed to be conveyed directly hom the master'smind or from the page o the book to the mind of the pupil. But thisequal transmission is predicated on a relation of inequality. The masteralone knows the right way, time, and place for that "equal" transmis-sion, 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 rhe exact distance betweenignorance and knowledge. That pedagogical distance between a deter-mined ignorance and a determined knowledge is in fact a metaphor. Itis the metaphor of a radical break between the way of tbe ignorant stu-dent and the way of the master, the metaphor of a radical break betweentwo inrelligeuces.

The master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits infront of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has [earned 011 hisown, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuringout the meaning of whar he has seen and heard, by repeating 'what hehas beard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers withwhat he already knows, and so on. The master cannot ignore that theignorant pupil has undertaken by these same means the apprenticeshipthat is the precondition of all others: the apprenticeship of his mothertongue ..But for the master this is only the Knowledge of the ignorant, theknowledge of the little child who sees and hears at random, comparesand guesses by chance, and repeats by routine, 'without understandingthe reason for the effects he observes and reproduces. The role of themaster is rhus [Q break with that process of hit-and-miss groping. It is toteach the pupil the knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its O';VD way-s-theway of the progressive method, which dismisses all groping and all chanceby explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complexaccording to what the pupil is capable of understanding, with respect tohis age or social background and social expectations.

The primary knowledge that the master owns is the "knowledge ofignorance." It is the presupposition of a radical break between two formsof intelligence. This is also the primary knowledge that he transmits tothe student: the knowledge that he must have things explained to him inorder to understand, the knowledge that he cannot understand on his

own. his rhe knowledge of his incapacity. II I rhis way, progressive instruc-tion IS the endless verification of its starting point: inequality. That endlessverification of inequality is what Jacotot calls the process of stultification.The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation IS the pro-cess of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelli-gence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is theequality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is nogap between two forms of intelligence. The,human animal learns every-thing as he has 'learned his mother tongue, as he has learned to venturethrough the forest of things and Signs that surrounds him, in order totake his place among his fellow humans-by observing, comparing onething with another thing, one sign with one fact, am: sign with anothersign, and repeating the experiences hehas first encountered by chance. If

the a ignorant" person who doesn't know bow to read knows only onething by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare that knowledgewith something of which he remains ignorant: the words of the sameprayer written on paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance ofthat of which he IS ignorant to that which he knows. He can do it if, ateach step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, andverifies what he has told. From the ignoranr person to the scientist whobuilds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work. anintelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate itsintellectua l adventures and to understand what another intelligence istrying to communicate to it in turn.

This poetic work of translation is the first condition of any appren-ticeship. Intellectual emancipation, as Jacotot conceived of it , means theawareness and the enactment of that equal power of translation and counter-translation. Emancipation entails an idea of distance opposed to the stult i-fying one. Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicatethrough the forest of signs. It is this sense of distance rhar the "ignorantmaster"-the master who ignores inequality-is teaching. Distance is notan evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condit ion of communica-tion. It is not a gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. Thedistance that the "ignorant" person has to cover is not the gap between hisignorauce and the knowledge of his master; it is the distance betweenwhat he already knows and what he still doesn't know bur can learn bythe same process. To help his pupil cover that distance, the "ignorantmaster" need not be ignorant. He need only dissociate his knowledgefrom his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. Hecommands them to venture forth in the forest, to report what they see,what they think of what dIE)' have seen, to verify it, and so on. What heignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is the linkage between theknowledge of the knowledgeable and the ignorance of the ignorant. Anydistance is a matter of happenstance. Each intellectual act weaves a casualthread between a form of ignorance and a form of knowledge. No kindof social hierarchy can be predicated on tbis sense of distance.

What is the relevance of fills story with respect to the question of thespectator? Dramaturges today aren' t out to explain to their audience the

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Ema n c i p a t i o nstarts from the prin-ciple of equality. It begins when wedismiss the opposition between

looking and acting and understandthat the distribution of the visibleitself is part of the configurationof domination and subjection.

It starts when we realize that look-ing is also an action that confirmsor modifies that distribution, andthat "interpreting the world" is

already a means of transforming it .

truth about social relations and the best means to do away with domina-tion. But it isn't Enough to lose one's illusions. On rheconu ary, rhe J o s s

of illusions often leads the dramaturge or the performers to increase thepressure 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 atti-tude and makes him an active participant in the communal world. Thisis the first point that the reformers of the theater share with the stultify-ing pedagogues: the idea of the gap between two positions. Even whenthe dramaturge or the perfo mer doesn't know what he wants the spec-

tator to do, he knows at least that the spectator has to do something:switch from passivity ro activity.

But why not turn things around? Why not think, in this case too, thatit is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that constitutes thedistance itself? Why identify the fact of being seated motionless withinactivity, if not by the presupposition of a radical gap between activityand inactivity? Why identify "looking" with"passivity" if not by the presupposition thatlooking means looking at the image or theappearance, that it means being separatedfrom the reality that is always behind theImage? Why identify hearing with beingpassive, if not by the presupposition thatacting is the opposite of speaking, etc.? All

these oppositions-looking/knowing,looking/acting, appearance/reality, activity!p a ssi vity-are much more than logicaloppositions. They are what I call a partitionof the sensible, a distribution of places and ofthe capacities or incapacities attached tothose places. Put in ocher terms, they are alle-gories of inequality. This is why you canchange the values given to each positionwithout changing the meaning of the opposi-tions themselves. For instance, you canexchange the positions of the superior and the inferior. The spectator isusually disparaged because he does nothing, while the performers on thestage-or the workers outside-do something with their bodies. But it iseasy to turn matters around by stating that those who act, those whowork with their bodies, are obviously inferior to those who are able tolook-that is, those who can contemplate ideas, foresee the future, ortake a global view of our world. The positions can be switched, but thestructure remains the same. What counts, in fact, is only the statement ofopposition between two categories: There is one population that cannotdo what the other population does. There is capacity on one side andincapacity on the other.

Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle ofequality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking andacting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of

the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realizethat looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution,and that "interpreting the world" is already a means of transforming it,of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, just like the student or rhescientist: He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets. He con-nects what he observes with many other things he has observed on otherstages, in other kinds of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem thatis performed in front of him. She participates in the performance if she isable to tell her own story a bout the story that is in front of her. Or I f she

is able to undo the performance-for instance, to deny the corporealenergy that it is supposed to convey the here and now and transform itinto a mere image, by linking it with something she has read in a book ordreamed about, that she has lived or imagined. These are distant viewersand interpreters of what is performed in front of them. They pay atten-tion to the performance to the extent that they are distant.

This is the second key point: The specta-tors see, feel, and understand something tothe extent that they make their poems as thepoet has done, as the actors, dancers, or per-formers have done. The drarnaturge wouldlike them to see this thing, feel that feeling,understand this lesson of what they see, andget into that action in consequence of what

they have seen, felt, and understood. He pro-ceeds from the same presupposition as the--stultifying master: the presupposition of anequal, undistorted transmission. The masterpresupposes that what the student learns isprecisely what he teaches him. This is themaster's notion of transmission: There issomething on one Side, in one mind or onebody-a knowledge, a capacity, an energy-that must be transferred to the other side,into the other's mind or body. The presup-

position is that the process of learning is not merely the effect of itscause-teaching-but the very transmission of the cause: What the stu-dent learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of cause andeffect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle ofemancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect. The paradox of theIgnorant master lies therein. The student of the ignorant master learnswhat his master does not know, since his master commands him to lookfor something and to recount everything he discovers along the waywhile the master verifies that he is acrually looking for it. The studentlearns something as an effect of his master's mastery. But he does not learnhis master's knowledge.

The dramaturge and the performer do not want to "teach" anything.Indeed, they are more than a little wary these days about using the stageas a way of teaching. They want only to bring about a form of awareness

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or a force of feeling or action, But still they make the supposit ion that whatwill be felt or understood will be what they have put in their own script orperformance. They presuppose the equality-meaning the homogeneity-of cause and effect. As we know, this equality rests on an inequality, Itrests on the presupposition that there is a proper knowledge and properpractice with respect to "distance" and the means of suppressing it.Now this distance takes on two forms. There is the distance betweenperformer and spectator. But there is also the distance inherent in theperformance itself , inasmuch as it is a mediating "spectacle" that standsbetween the artist 's idea and the spectator 's feeling and interpretation.This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but whichprevents any kind of "equal" or "undistorted" transmission. It is a medi-ation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in theprocess of intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there mustbe something between the master and the student. The same thing thatlinks them must also separa te them. jacotot posited the book as thatin-between thing. The book is the material thing,foreign to both master and student, throughwhich they can verify what the student has seen,what he has reported about it, what he thinksof what he has reported.

This means that the paradigm of inrellectualemancipation is clearly opposed to another ideaof emancipation on which the reform of theater_h'!S often been grounded-the idea of emanci-pation as the reappropriation of a self thathad been lost in a process of separation. TheDebordian critique of the spectacle still rests onthe Feuerbachian thinking of representation as analienation of the self: The human being tears itshuman essence away from itself by framing acelestial world to which the real human world is

form of Platonic assignment of bodies to their proper-that is, to their"communa.l"-place.

This presupposit ion against mediation is connected with a third one,the presupposition tha t the essence of theater is the essence of the com-munity. The spectator is supposed to be redeemed when he is no longeran individual, when he is restored to the status of a member of a com-munity, when he is carried off in a flood of the collective energy or ledthe position of the citizen who acts as a member of the collective . Theless the dramaturge knows what the spectators should do as a collective,the more he knows that they must become a collective, turn their mereagglomeration into the community that they virtually are. It is high time[ think, to call into question the idea of the thea ter as a specifically com-munita rian place. It is supposed to be such a place because, on the stage ,real living bodies perform for people who are physically present togetherin the same place. In that way it is supposed to provide some uniquesense of community, radically different from the situa tion of the indi-

vidual watching television, or of moviegoers whosir in front of disembodied, projected images.Strange as It may seem, the widespread use oimages and of all kinds of media in rhearrical peforrnauces hasn't called the presupposition inrquestion. Images may take the place of livingbodies in the performance, bur as long as thespectators arc gathered there the living and com-munitarian essence of the theater appears to besa ved, Thus it seems impossible to escape rhquestion, What specifically happens amongthe spectators in a thearer that doesn't happenelsewhere? Is there something more interactive,more communal, that goes on between them thanbetween individuals who watch the same show

T h ecommon power of spec-tators is the power of the

equality of intelligences.This power binds individualstogether to the very extent{nat it Keeps them apartfrom each other; it is the

power each of us possessesin equal measure to makeour own way in the world.

submitted. In the same way, the essence of human activity is distanced,alienared from us in the exterioriry of the spectacle. The mediation of the"third te rm" thus appears as the instance of separation, dispossession,and treachery. An idea of the theater predicated on that idea of the spec-

tacle conceives the externality of tbe stage as a kind of transitory statethat has to be superseded. The suppression of that exteriority thusbecomes the relos of the performance. That program demands that thespectators be on the stage and the performers in the auditorium. Itdemands that the very difference between the rwo spaces be abolished,that the performance take place anywhere other than m a theater.Certainly many improvements in theatrical performance resulted fromthat breaking down of the traditional distribution of places (in thesense of both sites and roles). But the "redistribution" of places is onething; the demand that the theater achieve, as its essence, [he gatheringof an unseparare community is another thing. The first entails the inven-tion of new forms of intellectual adventure ; the second entails a new

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011 TV at. the same time?I think that this "something" is nothing more than the presupposition

that the theater is cornmunitarian in and of itself . That presupposition ofwhat "theater" means always runs ahead of the performance and pre-dates its actual effects. But in a theater, or in front of a performance, jus

as in a museum, at a school, or on the street, there are only individua ls,weaving their own way through the forest of words, acts, and things thatsra nd in front of them or aro und them. The colleen ve power tha t is com-mon to these spectators is not the status of members of a collective body.Nor is it a peculiar kind of interactivity, It is the power to translate intheir own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it withthe intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any otherinsofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power isthe power of the equali ty of intell igences. This power binds individualstogether to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each other; itthe power each of us possesses in equal measure to make our own way i

the world. What has to be put to die test by'our performances=-whether


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teaching or acting, speaking, writing, making art, etc.-is OOt thecapacity of aggregation of a collective but the capacity of the anony-mous, the capacity that makes anybody equaJ to everybody, Thiscapacity works through unpredictable and irreducible distances. Itworks through an unpredictable and irreducible play of associarionsand dissociations.

Associating and dissociating instead of being the privileged mediumthat conveys the knowledge or energy that makes people active-thiscould be the principle of an "emancipation of the spectator " whichmeans the emancipation of any of us as a spectator. Spectatorship isnot a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is om normal situa-tion. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link whatthey see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamed. There isno privileged medium, JUSt as there is no privileged starting point.Everywhere there are starting points and turning pornts from which welearn new things, if we first dismiss the presupposition of distance , sec-ond the distribution of the roles, and third the borders between territo-ries. We don't need to turn spectators into actors. We do need toacknowledge that every spectator is already an actor in his own storyand that every actor is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story. Weneedn't turn the ignorant into the learned or, merely Our of a de ire tooverturn rhings, make the student or the ignorant person the master ofhis masters.

Let me make a little detour through my own political and academicexperience. I belong to a generation that was poised between two com-peting perspectives: Acco;ding to the first, those who possessed the intel-ligence of the social system bad to pass their learning on to those 'whosuffered under that system, so that they would then take action. to over-throw it. According to the second, the supposed learned persons were infact ignorant: Because they knew' nothing of what exploitation andrebellion were, they had to become the students of the so-called ignorantworkers. Therefore, initially I tried to reelaborate Marxist theory inorder to make its theore tical weapons available to a new revolutionarymovement, before setting out to learn from chose who worked in thefactories what exploitation and rebellion meant. For me, as for manyother people of my generation, none of those attempts proved very sue-cessful. That's why I decided to look into the history of the workers'movement, to fmd out tile reasons for the continual mismatching ofworkers and the intellectuals who came and visited them, either toinstruct them or to be instructed by them. It was my good fortune todiscover that this relationship wasn't a matter of knowledge on one sideand ignorance on the other, nor was ir a matter of knowing versus act-ing or of individuality versus community. One day in May, during the19705, as 1was looking through a worker's correspondence from the18305 to determine what the condition and consciousness of workershad been at that time, I discovered something quite different: the adven-tures of two visitors, also on a day in May, but some hundred and fortyyears before I stumbled upon their letters in the archives. One of the two

correspondents had just been introduced into the utopian community ofthe Sainr-Simonians, and he recounted to his friend his daily schedule inutopia: work, exercises, games singing, and stories. His friend ill turnwrote to him about a country outing that he had just gone on with twoother workers looking to enjoy their Sunday leisure. But it wasn't theusual Sunday leisure of the worker seeking to restore his physical andmental forces for the following week-of work. It was in fact a break-through into another kind of leisure-that of aesthetes who enjoy theforms, lights, and shades of nature, of philosophers who spend theirrime exchanging metaphysical hypotheses in a country inn, and of apos-tles who set out to communicate their faith to rhe chance companionsthey meer along the road.

Those workers who should have provided me information aboutthe conditions of labor and forms of class-consciousness in the 18305instead provided something quite different: a sense of likeness or equality.They too were spectators and visitors, amid their own class. Their activ-ity as propagandists could not be tom from their "passivity" as merestrollers and contemplators. The chronide of their leisure entailed O

reframing of the very relationship between doing, seeing, and saying. Bybecoming" spectators," they overthrew the given distribution 0 .the sen-sible which had it that those who work have no rime left to stroll andlook at random, that the members of a collective body have no time tobe "individuals." This is what emancipation means: the blurring of theopposition between those who look and those who act, between thosewho are indivicluals.. .andtho.s. .e ..who are members of a collective bod)' .What those days brought our chroniclers was not knowledge and energyfor future action. It was the reconfiguration / J iG et nunc of the distribu-tion 0 . Time and Space. Workers ' emancipation was not about acquiringthe knowledge of their condition. It was about configuring a time and aspace that invalidated the old distr ibution of the sensible, which doomedworkers to do nothing with the ir nights bur restore their forces for workthe next day.

Understanding the sense of that break in the heart of rime also meantputting into play another kind of knowledge, predicated not on the pre-supposition of any gap but on the presupposition of likeness. These men,too, were intellectuals-as anybody is. They were visitors and specta-tors, just like the researcher who, one hundred and forty years later,would read the ir letters in a library, just like visitors to Marxisttheory orat the gates of a factory. There was no gap to bridge between intellectu-als and workers, actors and spectators; no gap between two populations,two situations, or two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness thathad to be acknowledged and put into play in the very production ofknowledge. Putting it into play meant two things. First, it meant rejectingthe borders between disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of those workers'days and nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of"empirical" history and the field of 'pure" philosophy. Tbe Story thatthose workers told was about time, about the loss and reappropriationof time. To show what it meant, I had to put their account in direct

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relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher who had, longago in the Republic, wid the same story by explaining that in a well-ordered community everybody must do only one thing, his or her ownbusiness, and that workers in any case had no time to spend anywhereother than their workplace or to do anything but the job fitting the(in)capacity with which nature had endowed them. Philosophy, then,could no longer present itself as a sphere of pure thought separated fromthe sphere of empirical facts. Nor was it the theoretical interpretation ofthose facts. There were neither facts nor interpretations. There were twoways of telling stories.

Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurringthe hierarchy between the levels of discourse, between the narration of astory and the philosophical or scientific explanation of it or the truthlying behind or beneath it. There was no meradiscourse explicating thetruth of a lower level of discourse. What had to be done was a work oftranslat ion, showing how empirical storiesand philosophical discourses translate eachother. Producing a new knowledge meantinventing the idiomatic form that would maketranslation possible, r had to use that idiomto tell ofmy own intellectua l adventure, at therisk rhar the idiom would remain "unread-able" for those who wanted to know the cause

of the story, its true meaning, or the lessonfor action that could be drawn from it. I hadto.produce a discourse that wo\!hLbe read-able only for those who would make theirown translation from the point of viewof theirown adventure,

That personal detour may lead us back tothe core of our pro blem. These issues of cross-ing borders and blurring the distribution ofroles are defining characteristics oftheater andof contemporary art today, when all artist iccornpetences stray from their own field andexchange places and powers with all others. Wehave plays without wordsand dance with words; installations and performances instead of "plas-tic" works; video projections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs

turned into living pictures OI history paintings; sculpture that becomeshypermediatic show; etc. Now, there are three ways of understanding andpracticing this confusion of the genres. There is the revival of theGesamtkunsturerli, which is supposed to be the apotheosis of art as aform of lifebut which proves instead to bethe apotheosis of strong artisticegos or of a kind of hyperactive consumerism, if not of both at the sametime. There is the idea of a "hybridization" of the means of art, whichcomplements the view of our age as one of mass individualism expressedthrough the relentless exchange between roles and identities, reality andvirtuality, life and mechanical prostheses, and so 011. In my view, this sec-ond interpretation ultimately leads to the same place as the first one-toanorher kind of hyperactive consumerism, another kind of stultification,

inasmuch as it effects the crossing of borders and the confusion of talesmerely as a means of increasing the power of the performance with omquestioning its grounds.

The third way-the best way in my view---does not aim at the amplifi-cation of the effect but at the transformation of the cause/effect schemeitself, at the dismissal ofthe ser of oppositions that grounds the process ofstultification. It invalidates the opposition between activity and passivityas well as the scheme of "equal transmission" and the communitarianidea of the rheater that in fact makes it an allegory of inequality. Thecrossing of borders and the confusion of roles shouldn' t lead to a kind of"hypertheater," turning spectators hip into activity byturning representa-tion into presence. On the contrary, theater should question its privilegingof livingpresence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with thetelling of a story or the writ ing and the reading of a book. Itshould be theinstitution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of perfor-

mances would be translated into one another.In all those performances, in fact, it shouldbe a matter of linking what one knows withwhat one does not know, of being at the sametime performers who display their cornpetencesand spectators who are looking to find whatthose comperences might produce in a newcontext, among unknown people, Artists, like

researchers, build the stage where the mani-festation and the effect of their cornperencesbecome dubious as they frame the story of anew adventure in a new idiom. The effect or----the Idiom cannot be anticipated. It calls forspectators who are active interpreters, whorender their own translation, who appropriatethe story for themselves, and who ultimatelymake their own story out ofit. An emancipatedcommunity isin fact a community of storytellersand trans lators.

I'm aware that all thismay sound likewords,mere words . .Bnt I wouldn't take that as an insult . We've heard so manyspeakers pass their words off as more than words, as passwords enablingus to enter a new life. We've seen so many spectacles boasting of being no

mere spectacles bur ceremonials of community. Even now, in spite of theso-called posunodcrn skepticism about changing the way we live, one seesso many shows posing as religious mysteries that it might not seem sooutrageous to hear, for a change, that words are only words. Breakingaway from the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectatorturned active, knowing that words are only words and spectacles onlyspectacles, may help llS better understand how words, stories, and per-formances can help us change something in the world we livein. 0

Th e a t e rshould question its privi-leging of living presence and bringthe stage back to a level of equalitywith the tell ing of a story or thewriting and the reading of a book.It should call for spectators who

are active interpreters, who rendertheir own translation, who appro-priate the story for themselves,

and who ultimately make their ownstory out of it . An emancipatedcommunity is in fact a communityof storytellers and translators.

280 ARTFORUM

J A CQUES RANC I ~R E I S P RO FE S SOR EMERI TU S O F PH I LO SOPHY ATTHE UN IV ERS ITY O F PAR IS V I I i,

'I- , rTl le Emon ci pmed Sp ect at or " was o ri gi nal ly pr es ent ed, i n Eng ii sb, a tt he ope ni ng of t he F if th l nt er nat ion a! S limmer Acad emy of Ar ts J~nFrankfurt

Or! August 20,2004, The text appearshere inslightly revisedform.


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The Emancipated Spectator - Jacques Rancière

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