The Emancipated Spectator

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I've read it and would love to chat (I was sorry to miss the session but I was in my own). My research is all about theatre See Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” lecture given at the Fifth International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, August 20, 2004; Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum (March 2007): 271–80. Later published as the first chapter in Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009). Thanks to Rebecca Uchill for this important reference. Let us take a moment to connect these ideas to The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife. The painting can be read as a depiction of a crowd surrounding two individuals, Aoife and Strongbow; however if we accept Rancière’s cohesion between the collective and the individual, we can instead understand all the people in the painting (including Aoife and Strongbow) as a collective or a mosaic of individuals, with an equality given to each of them. This, perhaps, does not correspond with either the artist’s intentions or the real political implications of this event. There is a hierarchy offered by the artist, which you can read about here in this post on the painting’s history, characters, and symbolism. For him, there is evil in the act of spectating. The spectator is divorced from both the capacity to know and the power to act. Their pleasure is derived from this impotence and ignorance. The spectator should be removed from this position of divorced and detached examination of the spectacle which is being offered on stage. Here, Ranciere's principal theoretical argument is that the position of the spectator in contemporary cultural theory is reliant on the theatrical idea of "the spectacle", a concept the author employs to describe any performance that puts "bodies in action before an assembled audience". For Ranciere, the masses, exposed to what Guy Debord in 1967 called "the society of the spectacle", are usually understood as passive. Consequently, poets, playwrights and theatre directors such as Bertolt Brecht have tried to convert the inert spectator into a committed aesthete and the spectacle into a political presentation.

In the final chapter he considers an idea of the 'pensive' image. It seems related to Barthes earlier idea of the third meaning. The Pensive image provides a zone of indeterminacy in relation to which emancipatory thought is possible. This is a more positive way of thinking but is still tentative and incomplete. It is easy to interpret the onlookers at the wedding as the ‘audience’ (or a co-audience, along with us, the viewers), surrounding the ‘performers’, Strongbow and Aoife. Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Ranciere'nin Cahil Hoca kitabını ne çok sevmiştim. Bu kitabı da Cahil Hoca'yı yazarken aldığı notlardan oluşuyor. We are left with many questions. Does a documentary with a voice-over give too much interpretation? Can such a didactic form still ask you to think about something, rather than telling you? Does the selection of what to shoot, how long to shoot it, what sort of shot to use, still constitute a selection and so a way of directing the viewer how to think about something? Of getting the viewer to see the world in a particular way. My hunch is that we should not be concerned so much about the artworks as the frames and spaces in which they are seen.For any critical assessment of Ranciere's theoretical work on the spectacle must allow for bodies and actions, gatherings and audiences that are no longer what they were in Debord's time, with the important theoretical and practical difference being that almost no one today believes that the society of the spectacle can be reversed or used against consumer capitalism. So while the historian will still want to figure out what happened (or probably didn’t) in the darkened Munich porno theater where Export’s Action Pants was supposedly staged, the invisibility—or even unlikeliness—of the event itself does not invalidate its history as a performative. What the recent explosion of live art makes clear is that art’s contemporaneity has always relied on a capacity to mobilize ongoing and subtle performatives: things and thoughts made in the present by audiences confronting something in the past. Any artwork, no matter how fleeting, perforce comes from the past (even Sehgal’s situations have their rehearsals) and must speak to us in the present if they are art at all. Contemporaneity can consist of nothing else, whether we are dealing with the ongoing liveness of Raft of the Medusa or of This Progress. Maria S. H. M. (left) and Abigail Levine reenacting Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, 1977, Museum of Modern Art, New York, spring 2010. Photo: Scott Rudd. Mike Kelley, Mike Kelley: Minor Histories—Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 114–15. This chapter is the most abstruse and theoretically abstract. It reminds me of Barthes third term of semiotics from Image - Music - Text (1977). [7]. Ranciere writes that an image "contains … a thought that cannot be attributed to the intention of the person who produces it and which has an effect on the person who view it without her linking it to a determinate object." "This indeterminacy problematises the gap that I have tried to signal elsewhere between the two ideas of the image: the common notion of the image as a duplicate of a thing and the images conceived as an artistic operation." p.107

Where is the most interesting queer theatre work in london happening today (Christophers question)? Where are the smaller theaters willing to accommodate movement/dance without gendered expectations of the body (Kayla's question)?The passive observer should be transformed into an engaged part of the community. The theater remains one of the only places where the audience is aware of its collectivity. The community is put in possession of its own energies. In the spectacle, the spectator contemplates an activity which he can not engage in. The spectators’ essence and agency are turned against them. This idea is borrowed from the Brechtian paradigm: Ranciere manages to jiggle my thinking but as an analysis there are too many variables. I feel there is also something missing.

Viewing is a routine human activity, an activity comprising of selection, comparison, interpretation and of making connections. And it is part of a process that inevitably leads to the viewer creating something of her own, even if it is a negation; a turning away, yawning or choosing another path. As he says spectators are "only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them." p.16 The systems mechanistic functioning is obvious to all even if it cannot be articulated in the terms of critique. In the politics he proposes: His art lies in the rigor of his argument—its careful, precise unfolding —and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.”—Kristin Ross In this follow-up to his fruitful The Future of the Image, French philosopher Rancière argues forcefully against familiar critiques of the ‘spectacle’ ... This persuasive argument is fleshed out through close readings of art, ¬photography, literature and video installation, and a drily amusing analysis of leftwing ‘melancholy’ and ‘rightwing frenzy’ in critiques of ¬capitalism."—Steven Poole, Guardian Do you think the Daniel Maclise’s interpretation of this event reflects sympathies with the Irish nationalist cause or a desire to exercise high drama and theatricality?Ranciere points out the Left's dream of a community in harmony, as against the goal of a community of dissensus and struggle, is a utopian one. Dissensus here is the inevitable 'conflict' or 'tension' between the essentially different sensory worlds of two or more individuals. This has been forgotten by 'the modernist dream of a community of emancipated human beings' p.60. The 'intertwining of contradictory relations' can itself produce community. "The paradoxical relationship between the 'apart' and the 'together' is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future." p.59

Oldukça düşündürücü ve bazı yerlerde tekrar tekrar okuma isteği uyandıran çok güçlü bir kitap bence.. Rancière argues that political or critical art had traditionally taken for granted a straightforward relationship between political aims or effects and artistic means or causes with the ambition, which he considers sheer supposition, to raise an apparently passive spectator’s political awareness leading ultimately to her political mobilisation. Political art revealed that commodity and market relations lie behind beautiful appearances and are their truth. It aimed to disabuse the spectator and induce a sense of complicity, guilt and responsibility in her. As archetypal means of achieving those ends, Rancière cites Brecht’s theory and practice, the political montage of German Dada, and the American artist Martha Rosler’s series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful , 1969–1971 that juxtaposes photographs of luxurious petty-bourgeois interiors cut out from House Beautiful magazine with images of the Vietnam War from Life magazine. Rosler’s work, which continues a tradition of twentieth century committed art, reveals to the spectator a hidden reality of imperialist violence behind happy and prosperous domestic interiors. He talks about the spectator as “separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (Rancière, 2009). To resolve this problem of passivity, theatre-makers Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) attempted to create versions of theatre with active participants as audiences. However, Rancière identifies a myth that the spectator is ever passive, and challenges art that makes a conscious attempt to activate the spectator by experimenting with ways of abolishing the gap between the audience and the performers. According to Rancière, this is simply replicating an authority over audiences by prescribing modes of connection between the spectator and art. Rancière points out that the audience can never be passive. He does not see a structural opposition between collective and individual, image and lived reality, or activity and passivity. This fetishism of presence becomes bathetic “lifestyle” in the New York Times feature on Abramović’s SoHo loft and country house. See Elaine Louie, “On Location: Sets for the Artist Marina Abramović’s Dramatic Life,” New York Times, March 3, 2010: D1. What each individual has in common is the fact that their intellectual journey is unique and it is this very uniqueness that is the basis of our sense of community. We should not see our expressive power 'embodied' by designated others but accept it as the normal everyday capacity of each of us as individuals, in the same way that the power to speak is an equal ability learnt by all humans. p.17 This reminds me of Raymond Williams idea that 'culture is ordinary' and with Joseph Beuy's 'Everyone is an artist'. Culture works through an "unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations." p.17. The implication is that as soon as the process is planned or designed as a process of cultural reception with an effect in mind, it leads to something that is no longer a place where each individual is using her intelligence to make their own aesthetic judgement. This point is core to the argument in The Emancipated Audience. However individual freedom as a core value does not mean he espouses 'bourgeois individualism'. Ranciere's understanding of community recognises it as an amalgam of myriad individual intelligences.Join us for our 14th annual Devoted & Disgruntled event on 'What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?' On the other hand, it brings the logic of imperialism home, it brings the consequences to its doorstep and makes the screams of the innocent difficult to ignore. It attempts to shake them from their apathy. It also tells us that the comfortable upper middle class suburban life is maintained through war and disaster somewhere else, making the contradictions of global capitalism ever more unavoidable.