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The Emancipated Spectator (2009)

by Jacques Rancière(Favorite Author)

3.95 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

184467343X (ISBN13: 9781844673438)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Verso

review 1: Tough and demanding. You really have to stay focus and well concentrated to really appreciate this book and its meaning. Ranciere tries to connect 3 different corners of the same spectrum: art, politics and the spectator; and he does that with such a brilliant way of writing, going through several references since Walker Evans till the portuguese director Pedro Costa. What lacks in literary accessibility spares on literary intelligence.
review 2: Ranciere takes exception to the idea of the passive spectator in the world of aesthetics. He posits a power of the spectator that is reactivated in performance (he gives the example of theatre). Intelligence that constructs the performance for the spectator generates energy and thus reformulates a concept of theatre ... morewhere the spectator becomes an active participant. “…intelligence is always at work—an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparison and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it” . This paradigmatic shift is also opposed to three currents of thought on aesthetics, namely modernist, post-modern, and the sublimation of the aesthetic. He criticizes them for not adequately treating what he calls the "aesthetic break", where there is no boundary between concepts realm of art and the realm of the real. He draws on everything from photography and painting to literature, from the fine arts to the perorming arts. The spectator is then understood to act like the pupil or scholar (his previous book discusses this relationship and this forms the derivative of concepts in this volume) where he/she observes, selects, and compares this with what he/she has seen in other places, on "other stages". Applying this to poetry, the spectator can be understood to producing a new poem by participating in its performance. “Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation”. With this concept, Ranciere challenges communitarian logic of the spectator, the activity particular to it is constructed through transference and becomes a spectator in the simultaneity of the performance and the performance of the spectator his/herself. less

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