- What does work look like when it’s made with the intention of emancipating spectators, or for emancipated spectators? (and are they emancipated when they arrive, or only after the work)?
[Problem that everything can become a question of how emancipated am I in every moment (ticket sales, marketing, etc)?]
- When we are creating for emancipated spectators, or in order to encourage emancipated spectatorship, what is an artist’s responsibility?
- No practice in the article, only philosophy
- No implied style (rather, are you creating an ethos for something?)
- Perhaps artist provides:
1. a work and
2. a time and space for audience to freely experience, engage with this work
- Ranciere doesn’t define object in the middle where we meet (the work is the third term) but suggests that if we put the work at the centre, it frees us to not have a dichotomous relationship
- Community or active learning experience for the audience
- No practice in the article, only philosophy
- No implied style (rather, are you creating an ethos for something?)
- Perhaps artist provides:
1. a work and
2. a time and space for audience to freely experience, engage with this work
- Ranciere doesn’t define object in the middle where we meet (the work is the third term) but suggests that if we put the work at the centre, it frees us to not have a dichotomous relationship
- Community or active learning experience for the audience
- Suggestion that when Ranciere says “looking is not acting” it is not a statement of truth … he seems to be saying:
watching (and analysis) can be participation
Posts
Dear "Thinking Out Loud,"
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine introduced me to this site and invited me to join him in reading the proposed articles and to contribute to the discussion. I am working in Buenos Aires, so I cannot participate physically, but I would like to post my thoughts here.
Jacques Rancière proposes an emancipated spectatorship based on a critique of a set of assumed equivalences and oppositions (i.e., the equivalence of theater and community, seeing and passivity, externality and mediation, and the opposition of collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation) that has lead to the paradox of the spectator and, in his view, the failed attempts at resolving that paradox. As I understand it, his essential thesis is that spectatorship need not be understood as passivity, that observation is essentially active, and that the analysis/experience and even appropriation of a spectacle informs the spectator's personal intellectual journey through the world. He suggests a theater in which the artist and the spectator are understood as equals and whose dialog is mediated by the spectacle. The artist abandons his assumption that he can transmit any particular experience to the spectator, and the spectator feels free to translate the spectacle into his own experience.
I agree with Rancière's call for a critique of the set of relationships leading to the paradox of the spectator, but I cannot agree with his conclusions. First, as mentioned by one reader here, I find his definition of the emancipated spectator tautological. If we understand the very act of spectatorship - to observe a spectacle, analyze it, internalize it, appropriate it into one's own story - as action, then the whole history of spectatorship is one of action, the paradox disappears, and all spectatorship is emancipated. That is, Rancière's definition of emancipation is what happens automatically, in varying degrees, with or without the self-consciousness of the spectator.
While the emancipation of the spectator is merely tautological, Rancière's vision of theater is one of impotence and mediocrity. Rancière writes,
ReplyDelete"The dramaturge would like [the spectators] to see this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt, and understood. He proceeds from the same presupposition as the stultifying master: the presupposition of an equal, undistorted transmission."
He proposes, instead, that,
"Theater should question its privileging of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and reading of a book.... Performances, in fact, it should be a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and spectators who are looking to find what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people."
In the first place, Rancière takes away the freedom of the artist to create a spectacle with intention and conviction, replacing these with the exhibition of competencies or the telling of a story. The artist must become passive in the exhibition of her work, limited in her desire to communicate specific ideas or content to a meek presentation of her own experience. The spectacle becomes an object hung on a museum wall.
Second, Rancière reduces theater to a kind of mutual exploration of ideas and experiences between the artist and spectator. Although legitimate and productive in and of itself, this conception as a normative paradigm is a poor restriction of the activity of the theater. It leaves no room for theater as a social weapon, theater as ritual, theater as manifesto, theater as provocation. Brecht and Artaud may be stultifying masters insofar as they believe in and act upon specific philosophies and ideologies, but their theaters have been powerful and inspiring events in the world which cannot be dismissed. Further, their theaters manifest their beliefs without apology, a rarity in a contemporary theater dictated by a post-modern philosophy that devalues any claim to conviction.
Third, the artist and the spectator become unaccountable to each other. Perhaps this is emancipatory, but it leads to mediocrity. When we assign equal value to all experiences and all paths, all experiences and all paths loose all value. Rancière proposes that the spectacle stand between the artist and the spectator as a third and mediating body. In order to emancipate the spectator, he must drop his expectations of the artist, allowing for the personal exploration of the spectator. Presumably this works in reverse as well, so that the spectator analyzes the spectacle without judgment of the artist's experience. But if the artist and spectator are robbed of their ability to criticize or communitcate directly to each other, without placing expectation, judgment, or value upon the other, we arrive in a world of inflated experiences.
What remains useful in Rancière's critique is the responsibility it places upon the spectator. If we do not equate viewing with passivity, we can make room for the spectator to become active in different ways. I imagine an emancipated spectator to be one who recognizes his agency and intelligence and who acts on that knowledge. Brecht's theater may be didactic and presumptuous, but the spectator need not conform to its normative vision of action. Artaud may present a fixed vision of audience incorporation into the vital energy of theater, but the spectator is still free to perform sabotage.
ReplyDeleteBut more than in an emancipated spectator, I am interested in an emancipated artist. Rancière writes,
"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."
Thus the artist has appropriated the spectator's guilt dictated by the equivalences and oppositions of philosophy. The artist takes responsibility for the spectator's passivity, and compensates in "self-suppressing" paradigms. If we break those equivalences and oppositions and emancipate the spectator as an active agent, then we can absolve the artist and theater of its guilt and free it to make contemporary works that take the spectator and the spectacles relation to the spectator as components of the artistic process. Rather than limit the artist in the modes in which she can relate to the spectator, we should recognize spectatorship as a fundamental element of contemporary theater, giving the artist license to experiment with spectatorship. In turn we give the spectator agency to act as a free individual.
Finally, theater "privileges its living presence" for good reason; it is different than a book or a movie because the artist and the spectator exist in space and time together. Rancière is correct to question the idea of the theater as a community and to criticize the resulting theoretical preoccupations, but let us not forget that theater is ultimately the self-conscious provocation of spectacle by an artist, and that "there is no theater without spectators." It is therefor a living and collective event. An emancipated theater is not one free of hierarchy and consisting of isolated individual experiences but rather one in which artist and spectator engage each other and the spectacle with conviction. An emancipated theater is a spontaneous collection of wills acting with individual agency.
Distance: Ranciere draws our attention to the concept of distance. He gives us the illustration of distance when it comes to pedagogy: distance between master and pupil, and how instruction comes down to pointing to this distance, or "gap". The gap between what the master knows and what the pupil does not. He shows some things that seem to follow from the acknowledgement of this gap, namely hierarchy, and suggests that ignoring this gap is the way to "emancipation" in pedagogy. He then brings us back to theater and spectatorship, and suggests that it is a similar viewpoint which is the source of our confusion on this topic--the paradox of the un-acting spectator. And his suggestion is that we drop our notion of this gap in order to figure out the spectator and theater.
ReplyDeleteWhat Ranciere is/not suggesting: Someone already noted that Ranciere doesn't reference practice, only discusses philosophy. I think this is important: the whole article seemed to me to be dealing with a false conception (perception?) of the spectator/theater as the source of confusion, rather than proscribing a right and wrong way to practice theater (such a proscription would in fact be against his very idea of emancipated pedagogy). The farther I got into the article, the more I got the impression the title "Emancipated Spectator" was telling us something far less grand than we might think, that Ranciere was saying "Just let the spectator alone already! She's fine! She doesn't need theater to deliver her into the community, likewise she is not imprisoned by the theater by fact of being stuck in a chair while others move around in front of her!" That is, that the process of becoming an "emancipated" spectator (or of being an artist who encourages spectators to "become" emancipated) has to do not with actual theater practice, but with how our conceptual approach to theater can emancipate us regardless of the specific practice.
I realize so far I've only been outlining what I think Ranciere is proposing. I'm writing this on the fly, which I hope fits in with the "thinking out loud" concept.
What I do think is important for us to take from the article, from the concept of an emancipated spectator, is to understand, 1) as performers/creators etc. we can share with the audience. We can communicate with the audience (as opposed to simply speaking to them, the "equal transmission" Ranciere discusses), if we assume an emancipated spectator. 2) as spectators, we are only as bound (unfree) as we define ourselves to be, that is, as limited as we conceive the role of spectator to be. we do not need to assume the opposition spect-ACTOR vs prisoner. perceiving, looking, sitting still--all these are fine, because they are not negatives to their opposites. we can participate in our own way--this is the critical point, I felt.
as to the tautology of Ranciere's definition, I'd say it's difficult, but I do not find it to be so. I don't think he's saying spectatorship has been fine and good all along. rather, he was discussing the definitional problems of spectatorship that produced opposing proscriptions about what theater should do. the paradox was with our definitions (and hence conceptions), not with spectatorship. that is, I think, why the paradox disappears, because it was a logical paradox, not an actual one. there never was a problem per se with being a spectator--that is his whole point.
ReplyDeletepasullero: I would suggest that you read the part about "question its privileging of living presence" and being of equality with a book etc., incorrectly. he was writing specifically about contemporary performance, where "all artistic competences stray from their own field...there are three ways of understanding...this confusion of genres." I don't follow how this section takes any freedom away from the artist, and I also don't think he's removing any possibilities for theater as "social weapon..." etc.
one thing I was really interested in, was his questioning of the model of a theater audience as community. Why should we necessarily think of a "live audience" as a "community"? And yes, why is an audience collected in one area considered a community while people watching TV in separate places but the same time, or perhaps people looking at paintings in one gallery at different times, not? Would it be audacious to think about the benefits of not considering a live audience a community?
Distance: Rancière is treating distance in a more complicated way. He does not suggest that we ignore the distance between the artist and spectator or the master and ignorant, but rather translate that distance. The stultifying paradigm creates a hierarchical distance, a gap between intelligences, that is reinforced even as the master tries to suppress it. The break between the master and the ignorant is precisely the assumption that the master knows how and what to teach the ignorant student. Rancière draws our attention to a second distance, the distance inherent in communication. “Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicate through the forest of signs.” Though Rancière doesn’t use the terms, we can understand these two distances spatially, the former as a vertical distance (hierarchical, unequal, stultifying) and the latter as a horizontal distance (non-hierarchical, equal, emancipating). His suggestion is not that we drop the notion of the gap between actor and spectator, precisely the self-suppressing attempt of the stultifying theater, but rather that we embrace the distance inherent in theater as a form of communication. Theater should recognize the mediating nature of the spectacle as a positive and emancipating condition, in opposition to the traditional belief that mediation creates self-alienation, illusion, and jeopardizes the community of theater.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I should take a step back. If, as you suggest, Fivel, Rancière is “only discussing philosophy,” that is, if he is only engaging in a theoretical analysis of how spectatorship functions in theater, then of course there is a great deal that is both interesting and accurate. I am also interested in his critique of the community. I agree that spectacle functions as a mediating body. I agree that spectatorship is neither inherently passive nor alienating. I agree that the set of relationships that creates the paradox of the spectator should be called into question. If, at the end, Rancière is only suggesting that the spectator be free to engage as she wishes without being subjected to a theoretical denunciation of passivity, then perhaps I agree.
But Rancière is “proscribing.” He is denouncing “stultifying theater,” and uses Brecht and Artaud’s theaters as particular examples thereof. The assumption in the article (or am I wrong?) is that emancipation is good and that stultification is bad. Therefore Rancière does not stop at the (correct) analysis that Brecht and Artaud fail in their attempt to resolve the paradox of the spectator, caught in their own creation of distance between artist and spectator even as they try to suppress that distance; rather, Rancière continues to condemn Brecht and Artaud’s theaters as theoretically and practically oppressive. What is Rancière prescribing? An emancipated theater. But this prescription is not just a theoretical analysis, it is a practical call for theater to reorganize its philosophical and practical relationship to the spectator. This is manifested exactly in his dictation for how spectacle should function as a mediating third body. It is this vision that I took issue with in my first response.
How does Rancière remove the possibility of theater as a social weapon? First, we have to understand what it might mean for theater to be a social weapon. One meaning is the process that Rancière describes in his analysis of Brecht: “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 as Augusto Boal (a disciple of Brecht) writes: “I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theatre so that the people themselves may utilise them. The theatre is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.” Both of these models for theater as a social weapon rest upon the existence of an ideology. Both are didactic. The question is always, action towards what end, a weapon against what enemy? As a weapon, the spectacle functions to cause a specific effect. But Rancière is explicit on this point: he wants to disassociate cause and effect in the way theater is conceived, thus limiting the possibility of theater as a social weapon. I may or may not agree with Brecht or Boal’s politics, but I do not want to theoretically disarm their theaters.
ReplyDeleteHow can we use Rancière’s critique of Brecht, for example, to arrive at an emancipated and socially armed artist? First, we accept Rancière’s analysis that Brecht’s attempt to empower and motivate the spectator into action simultaneously reinforces the pedagogical inequality between Brecht and the spectator. Second, we understand our resistance to this inequality as the product of a long-standing theoretical guilt based upon a set of assumed relationships regarding spectatorship. (“This set of equivalences and oppositions makes for a rather tricky dramaturgy of guilt and redemption.”) Third, we adopt Rancière’s critique of those relationships in order to give agency (to emancipate) the spectator, thereby absolving Brecht of his theoretical guilt which prompts him to take responsibility for the actor and his intellectual capabilities. This leaves Brecht free to create a theater which dictates to the audience a particular ideology, course of action, and model of spectatorship (a stultifying, hierarchical, and socially dangerous theater) while leaving the spectator the agency to act as an empowered individual able to take up the call to arms or reject it.
I am suggesting, essentially, that we not be afraid of stultifying or hierarchical modes of thought. There is a paradox inherent in all calls for non-hierarchical models: the assertion of a non-hierarchical model is necessarily hierarchical. Fivel, you recognize this when you write, “such a prescription would in fact be against his very idea of emancipated pedagogy.” If we emancipate the spectator, let us emancipate the artist as well.
On another note, Rancière seems to admit the tautology of his vision of the emancipated spectator when he writes on page 10/279, “Spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but I am interested in a theater that takes the question of spectatorship not as a neutral normal state. I believe that the artist should do more than present spectacle as a mediating body existing in a vacuum and instead use the spectacle and its relationship to the spectator in specific and deliberate ways, even if this projects a vision of spectatorship that may, upon execution, fail to manifest. Spectatorship may not be bad, but it still remains problematic, or at least interesting.
ReplyDeleteAs for the question of theater as a living presence, it appears to me that Rancière is indeed referring to contemporary performance and a confusion of genres, but it is from this point of departure that he outlines his vision of an emancipated theater in general, and as such appears to me to have broader significance than a discourse on the use of eclectic mediums in contemporary performance art.
Hi - this is great - thanks for joining in. I've been enjoying following this conversation.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I wonder is what definition we might have for "competences" in "performers who display their competences"
For me the competences might include social and political analysis, rhetorical skill, manifesto writing. This (maybe personal) definition allows for the art maker to take a position or make proposals.
This may be an easy out - but I find it very useful to reconcile my desire to speak towards meaning/change and a corresponding openness.
On the question of tautology, I imagine a theatre that shapes the surroundings, contexts and attitude of the performers to elbow out the room for an emancipated spectator. In this way we could find the potential that Ranciere identifies in all performance and spectatorship? I agree that it's not enough to just say "There is potential" - I need to look for the ways to not only realize that potential but to frame it towards a ethical and political understanding.
And these understandings are then included in my competences which the spectator "find[s] what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people."
Distance: I would agree with your reading of it. It was a little too simple to say Ranciere suggests we ignore it (though in some ways, that is what he is suggesting). Rather, I would say he is saying that we refrain from calling attention to it as our form of pedagogy.
ReplyDeleteCause/Effect //Social Theater: Hmmm...It seems that you outline the consequences of separating cause and effect as removing the effectiveness of social theater et al. I think it's a useful reading, and important to keep in mind. I would also offer another reading: my tendency being to keep things theoretical as long as possible, I took it not as Ranciere wanting to "disassociate cause and effect", but rather he supposes that they already are inherently--theoretically--disassociated. (I'll also admit this is a bit of a tautology). He points out that a performance, a "spectacle is a third term, to which the other two [artists/performer and audience] can refer, but which prevents any kind of 'equal' or 'undistorted' transmission." It is in some ways a really simple point: just because I say something, doesn't mean that you will understand it the way I want you to. What I've said, is something between us, that we both can refer to, but perhaps we understand it in different ways--also, perhaps not. The point is that it is between us, "The same thing that links them must also separate them," so it can never be a direct transmission. In your reading, this could lead to a disarming of 'theater with a purpose', so to speak. But I feel it is important to remember that, in the context of this essay, we see that disarmament may be in some ways necessary because the very grounds of such theater are/can be "stultifying."
Jacob--I found your proposal about competencies interesting, though I haven't quite worked it out for myself. It does seem a rather simple solution--which I tend to enjoy, rather than be wary of.
ReplyDeleteOn the other note of theater as a community place...I have to admit I haven't gotten very far. I really found it to be one of the most startling points in the essay, and it is perhaps the most important basis for his definition of the emancipated spectator: "The collective power that is common to these spectators is not the status of members of a collective body...It is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at...This power binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart." Unfortunately, that paragraph (288) is about the extent of his discussion of it. Part of the reason I find it so interesting, is that so much of dance theory, much of which in turn grounds itself in phenomenology, finds its justification for the power of dance (and perhaps performance in general) in the living presence of the human body, and the experiential significance of being present in our bodies while other bodies perform (present in their own). That is, much of dance theory rests on the assumption of a live audience and its implications. Though I suppose a live audience is not called into question just because we question the community of such an audience, but there must be ramifications---right?