Rancire: The Emancipated Spectator

Aim: to investigate the relationship between the theory of intellectual

emancipation and the question of the spectator today, that is: to uncover the
theoretical and political presuppositions which, even in a postmodern form, still
underpin the gist of the debate on theatre, performance and the spectator. (1-2)
I. Starting point: the paradox of the spectator:
One the one hand: "there is no theatre without spectator" but on the other
hand: spectator is a bad thing, since: it involves 1. a passive, immobile (nonacting) position and 2. It is the position of not-knowing
Diagnosis of the paradox leads to two different conclusions:
1. theatre is a bad thing that should be abolished in favor of what it prohibits:
knowledge & action. True community must abolish theatrical mediation and
directly incorporate the measure that governs it into the living attitude of its
members.
2. one should strive towards a theatre without spectators, that is: without
spectators seduced by images but with active participants
Two solutions offered by theatre in 20th century:
According to 1: spectator must be shown a strange, unusual spectacle whose
meaning he must seek out like a scientific investigator (epic theatre of B. Brecht)
According to 2: this reasoning distance/distant investigation of 1. itself must be
abolished in favor of vital participation: Antonin Artaud (5)
Rancire: Both are revitalizing a platonic tradition of opposing good theatre
(articulating the truth of the "choreographic community") to bad theatre of the
simulacra, the spectacle.
Involved here is an idea of community as self-presence (the romantic idea of the
living community, see also Rousseau), in contrast to the distance of
representation. Theatre should be the aesthetic (= sensible) constitution of
community. For Brecht: theatre as assembly where ordinary people become
aware of their situation, discuss their interests. For Artaud: the purifying ritual in
which a community is put in possession of its own energies.
"The basis of both critiques consists in the Romantic vision of truth as nonseparation." (which goes back on Plato's critique of mimesis) (6) Non-separation
means identity of theatre & community (community as theatre) instead of
difference through mimesis, representation, theatrical mediation. See the critique
of the spectacle by Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle.

P 7-8 (sort of summary): "The theatrical stage and performance thus become a
vanishing mediation between the evil of spectacle and the virtue of true theatre.
They intend to teach their spectators ways of ceasing to be spectators and
becoming agents of a collective practice. According to the Brechtian
paradigm....According to Artaud's logic....In both cases, theatre is presented as a
mediation striving for its own abolition." (8)
II. Here, Rancire brings in the story of intellectual emancipation which he worked
out in his early work The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
"The self-vanishing mediation is the very logic of the pedagogical relationship:
the role assigned to the schoolmaster in that relationship is to abolish the
distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus."
Nevertheless: according to the same logic, the schoolmaster is always one step
ahead, he doesn't only know more, but he also knows about the ignorance of the
pupil, he has a knowledge of the exact distance separating knowledge from
ignorance. The schoolmaster takes the position of the one who decides on
knowledge or ignorance, which is a position of power. He always knows what
ignorance consists in, and therefore the gulf separating him and the pupil can
never be breached. This confirms the inequality of intelligence and is called
"stultification" by Rancire.
Rancire counter-poses to this practice of stultification a model of intellectual
emancipation, which is based on the apriori of the equality of intelligence (the
self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations)(10)
"From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs
hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work - an intelligence that
translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in
order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another
intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it. This poetic labor of translation
is at the heart of all learning". The poetic labor of translation is not an attempt to
bridge the gap between schoolmaster and pupil, it articulates the ongoing
process of moving oneself from that what one knows to what one doesn't know
yet. "Distance is not an evil to be abolished, but the normal condition of any
communication. Human animals are distant animals who communicate through
the forest of signs" (10)
III "What is the relationship between this story and the question of the spectator
today?" (11)
According to Rancire, even today theatrical reformers, even though do no longer
want to 'explain' to their audience the truth of social relations etc;, they still want
to draw the spectators out of their presumed passivity and breach the gap
between passivity and activity (participation). That turns them into stultifying
pedagogues.
Yet, the desire to abolish the distance may be exactly what creates it.

"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. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an
action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator
also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. "
He/She is both distant spectator and active interpreter. (13)
P 14: the stultifying logic as a logic of cause and effect (the pupil learns what the
teacher makes her learn/teaches her - the spectactor sees what the performers
make him/her see etc.) is opposed to the emancipating logic of dissociation: from
the schoolmaster the pupil learns something that the schoolmaster does not
know himself. The pupil 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. (14)
Another distance (than the one that insists in the stultifying relation) insists: it is
the distance inherent in the performance itself or in the thing(s) to be studied
(e.g. a book, a poem, a play, a film etc.). Both spectator/pupil and
performer/schoolmaster are at a distance of this 'third' , an "autonomous thing"
(14, bottom) alien to both. "It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose
meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any
uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect."
"This idea of emancipation is thus clearly opposed to the one on which the
politics of theatre and its reform have often relied: emancipation as reappropriation of a relationship to self lost in a process of separation." (15)
"For the refusal of mediation, the refusal of the third, is the affirmation of a
communitarian essence as such". (16)
But (says Rancire): " An emancipated community is [rather] a community of
narrators and translators." The theatrical stage should not be transcended
(abolished); it is the scne of equality where heterogeneous performances are
translated into one another. (22)

Samuel Weber: Theatrocracy; or, Surviving the Break

On the relation between politics and theater

Starting point: Plato, Laws, book 3 & book 7

Book 3: whereas in earlier times, the Athenians were able to resist the enemy out
of fear both for the enemy nd for the law, which they imposed upon themselves
(democracy) and which allowed them to turn mere fear into disciplined
resistance, recent developments show a degeneration of democratic liberty into
licence, which brings about the collapse of a state of law. This degeneration is
illustrated by a development of the function of music in society.
In times gone, the rules and patterns for performing music were fixed; nowadays,
unmusical licence set in (creation of universal confusion of forms, no
demarcations, delimitations) and inspires the crowd with the contempt of musical
law and a conceit of their own competence as judges= sovereignty of the
audience= THEATROCRACY.

Book 7: wandering choirs intrude into the city and disturb certain legal or
religious rituals (e.g. sacrifices); they transgress the boundaries between
discourses.

Plato suggests that this is a consequence of democracy or a radical form of it (not

only composed of free men). This degenerated form of democracy in the realm
of art has infected the whole political realm with contempt for law and order, for

confines, delimitations, demarcations. The driving force of such a development is

not only mere lust but fear/pain as well.

The performances Plato is referring to are not just theater in the strict sense, but
rather spectacles with performance, dance, music,> multimedia. Weber sees
here the origin of the critique of multimedia. There is an interesting paradox from
the very beginning, since theatron designates the place from which the
spectators see and therefore seems to refer to a fixed place and a fixed location,
but here theatrocracy seems to entail a complete lack of fixations, stable and
defined rules etc. It almost designates the opposite of a fixed and confined space.
Whereas theatrocracy in this sense stands for an unsettling of fixed relations that
correspond to power relations (reason why it is condemned by Plato), the German
philosopher and sociologist Walter Benjamin will condemn theatrocracy for
opposite reasons: as the enemy of all innovation and change. Based on his
experience of the ideological manipulation of media in the twenties and thirties of
the 20th century, he sees in the overt affirmation of theatrocracy (the audience
having the right to judge, to choose, to decide) the false pretense that the
addressee of the appeal (the public) is one and the same, monolithic,
unchangeable, natural. A false fictional identity is projected onto the
heterogeneous multitude of the public as well as the illusion of free choice, power
of decision,...: see televoting!). But for Benjamin (as opposed to Plato) the
potentiality of theatrical spectators is not to be found in their staying the same,
but in their possibility for change (35) And that is exactly what Plato valorizes
negatively: the potential of disturbing and transforming the established order,
traditional authority, and the hierarchies it entails.

But what is the power of theatrocracy? It has to do with the thaumatic power of
theatrocracy, the fascinating power to draw and hold ones gaze, which makes it
hard to control.

Two conclusions on Plato-quotations p. 36:

"First, theatrocracy, which replaces aristocracy and is not even democratic, is

associated with the dissolution of universally valid laws and consequently with
the destabilization of the social space that those laws both presuppose and help
maintain." It "subverts and perverts the unity of the theatron as a social and
political site by introducing an irreducible and unpredictable heterogeneity , a
multiplicity of perspectives and a cacaphony of voices. (..) this disruption goes
together with a disruption of theory (=the ability of knowledge to localize things,
keep them in their proper place and thus contribute to social stability"

Secondly (especially based on book 7): "the power to move and disrupt the
consecrated and institutionalized boundaries that structure political space (e.g.
separation of sacred and profane space)"Theatrocracy demonstrates its
subversive power when it forsakes the confines of the theatron and begins to
wander: when, in short, it separates itself from theater."

"It is the stability of place and the durability of placing that theatrocracy
profoundly disturbs" (38) "Imitation destroys the self-identity of the same and the
fixity of values" - "it leads to confuse phantoms with reality".

(role of laughter in this process see p. 39)

Weber focuses on two important authors to" rethink the relationship between the
theatrical, the theoretical and the media": Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Benjamin

Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy.

In his account of the tragic chorus as dramatic Urphnomen Nietzsche stresses

the process of Verwandlung (metamorphosis, trial, change) of the participants,
involving both change of place and of identity. "The theatrical site itself splits and
stretches, twists and turns into a space of alteration and oscillation, of
Verwandlung." "..Repositioning of place and body " also involves disruption of the
opposition between life and death. Therefore Nietzsche stresses the ghostly-like
character, the "spectrality"(42) of the dionysian performance. Individuality is
'split' (not just abolished/transcended by a collective unity) > dividuality.
Weber links this to the de-localizing effect of electronic multi-media, yet "delocalization" should not only be understood in a purely spatial, physical sense, it
refers rather to the radical alienation of the self that sees itself "as though it had
entered into a foreign body and character." Theatricality designates the medium
of this "as if" that is not just 'located' in theatre as such, but in every aspect of
our media-society in which identies are disrupted and construed all the time and
at the same time caught in a process of perceiving and being-perceived.

Walter Benjamin: What is epic theatre?

Notion of interruption, which involves "the disruption of a temporal process or

progression, associated with narrative-based drama, by spatial factors associated
with theater as medium and above all with the stage"
Two key-concepts of epic theatre: gesture & citation (citational): epic theatre
renders gestures citable (which is still different from quotable, since citation
etymologically also refers to 'set in movement' as well as to arrest - interrupt- a
certain movement and incite another one (as in receiving a traffic citation which
means a summons to appear before a tribunal). Inciting and arresting, the two
aspects of citation, are based on "interruption", that is: a process of separation,
dislocation and reconfiguration. As a result of interruption, acts become re-citable
and gestural arrested/suspended movements that are less actual than possible:
"The actuality of the stage, as a site of citable gestures, is defined with respect to
a potentiality rather than a reality;" (45). Interruption is about "rendering-possible
rather than actual or real". "This is why the stage is a place where potentialities
are tried out, rather than realities enacted or performed." "Citability means
recalling the past as the possibility of a future that would be different from the
present."

Weber relates this dimension of citability of gesture (which involves

fragmentation, interruption of a narrative process, breaking-up a whole,
interrupting action and replacing it by acting as if) to a critique of the (concept
of the) aesthetic work as a self-contained construction with a fixed identity.
Citable gestures create conditions (situation, stance, Zustnde) which are no
longer reducible to the actions of an individual subjects will. Moreover, as
repeatable gestures, they are split between past and future, and are not really
present: they refer to habits, gestures, rituals that have determined subjects (and
their relations to others) beyond their will and are repeated automatically, unless
they are interrupted and their contingency is revealed (which means: they could
be different, singular, they are not bound to be repeated in the same way; thats
the emancipatory impetus of Benjamins reading, the idea of transformation
through interruption.)
This transformation also affects the body and its relation to place. Weber sees
here again a link between theater/theatricality (since the early 20 th century I
would say) and the electronic media; both question the Western idea (and ideal)
of the human body as a container/vessel of identity through the organic unity of
parts and whole (including the questioning of the human body as the standard).
Dismemberment and non-humanness fracture this phantasm of organic unity, the
body becomes the site where otherness intrudes, breaks through, transgresses
from in- or outside the boundaries.
Politics has always been occupied with constructing an imaginary coherent unity,
the body politic, the idea of a nation, a people as one body etc. The increasing
disruption of this idea in the globalized world seems to be compensated by the
media (who are themselves partly responsible of the feeling of uncertainty /
instability through permanent disruptions, mobility, dis- and re-locations): the

commercial break both articulates in a systematic (and therefore predictable)

way this experience of disruption, yet, at the same time, suspends the feeling of
uncertainty through its predictability and the reassurement that soon well
continue with the same, producing the illusion of an ongoing teleological
narrative with a (happy) end. The breaks have a totalizing, framing function,
quite the opposite of what Benjamins and Brechts interruptions intend to do.