The Emancipated Spectator

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Today, his philosophical contributions in important works such as The Politics of Aesthetics, The Future of the Image and, now, The Emancipated Spectator, are embraced by distinguished literary theorists including Kristin Ross and the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The Emancipated Spectator is intended to improve our comprehension of art and deepen our grasp of the politics of perception. Our annual gathering for everyone who loves, makes and lives theatre and the performing arts - online again for the second time. 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 I think the twenty-first century will hopefully be more guided by “how” questions—how am I a product or how am I related to these people here? . . . And what is the ethics implied by this? Devoted & Disgruntled Online 2022: What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts? (19-21 March)

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. The Algerian-born Jacques Ranciere, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris Saint-Denis, is the latest in a long line of "new" French philosophers. Ranciere, who has risen to fame recently in the English-speaking world through his conceptualisations of critical theory and aesthetics, separation, community and the contemporary image, is a "post-Marxist", even though he co-authored the seminal Reading Capital with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in 1968. An emancipated worker is a dis-indentified worker". It seems to me that giving up on a working class identity is often confused by the false dis-identifications of upward mobility which are caused by the success of oppressive messages which have made the identity of being working class unbearable. Not only due to present conditions of immiseration, but because the definitions of becoming that it allows are constrained to the 'shoulds' from our presumed souls of iron. It is not a matter of finding an alchemical solution to this de-valuation, like magically becoming middle-class gold-stars through educational certification, more it is the realisation that all human intelligences are of equal. 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. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: in a series of letters, 1794/5. By using these canonic examples of European learning he is of course paradoxically affirming his belonging to the Humanist community of learning.

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Our 'aesthetic sensorium' as expressed in artworks is then marked by the loss of a destination or social purpose for art. p.70. Social emancipation is an aesthetic process. It calls for the 'dismemberment' of the sensory regime of the body that has been instituted as a classist belief system since Plato made his formulation that the souls of rulers are made of gold and the souls of artisans are made of iron. p.70. Discussing the possibilities of community ownership of music venues in Oxford to help bring about more venues. The systems mechanistic functioning is obvious to all even if it cannot be articulated in the terms of critique. In the politics he proposes: A basic assumption that I make is that the system must manage the media and state cultural institutions well enough to insure that challenges to its survival do not de-stabilise its grip on power. The way this hegemony is maintained is widely known as Ranciere points out. Gatekeepers or managers, patrons and politicians, all contribute to maintaining a status quo, a class system. At the same time they must provide the system with sufficient criticism to inoculate it. Caroline A. Jones is a professor of art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976/2005, two-channel video projection, props, stages, photographs. Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009.

What we are given is, above all, a figure of the spectator whose capacities to sense and think are greater than we have been prepared to conceive.”— Radical PhilosophyJohan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 21, 23. It's not every day that the art world decides to adopt a new philosophical leading-light, so judging by the list of international art institutions and universities at which Ranciere has presented previous versions of these essays, its clear that he has become the latest French thinker to make the crossover from the academy to the artworld." JJ Charlesworth Art Review, January, 2010 Two people who aren't from the UK gathering information about theatres/companies/alternative venues that commission/put on interesting queer work and who are open to experiential/immersive performances that are movement-based.

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. 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. French philosopher Jacques Ranciere is a refreshing read for anyone concerned with what art has to do with politics and society."— Art Review için öğrenir. Onun bu yolu katetmesine yardım edecek cahil hocanın böyle bir ad almasının sebebi, hiçbir şey bilmemesi değil, "cahilin bilmediğini bilme iddiasını" reddetmesi ve bilgisiyle hocalığını birbirinden ayırmasıdır. Öğrencilerine kendi bildiğini öğretmez; onlardan şeyler ve Ranciere who was part of this '68 generation comments: "For me, as for my generation, neither of these endeavours was wholly convincing" p.18. However, his own version of 'going amongst the workers' was to research working class activity and writing of previous century. He did glean some useful education about workers from these archives and his findings are published as 'Proletarian Nights: the workers dream in C19th France'.Seurat evinced both the enigmatic potential of popular bodies that gained access to ‘leisure’ and the neutralisation of that potential.”

Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Discussion

If we take Rancière’s statement alluding to equality between image and lived reality, this is where we can further assume a theatrical iteration of this painting. We can shift the focus in the painting from us watching people watching a marriage ceremony, and we can dissolve the surface of the canvas and enter the scene. We can even continue this by imagining the scene expanding into the room in which it is is displayed. The key problem with The Emancipated Spectator is that, for all its impressive concern with the political analysis of art and the use of imagery, it never asks the crucial question about the position of the postmodern spectator: emancipated from what? He then describes a contemporary art project 'I and Us' that was made on a working class estate in contemporary Asnieres by the art group Campement Urbain. The need expressed by the inhabitants in this stressed area was for a place of contemplation, a place to be alone. I.e. a break from the stress of being together to be individual, a space for contemplation.