The Emancipated Spectator

I have called this talk "The Emancipated Spectator."* As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems, and theories that seem at first sight to bear no direct relation to one another. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the "keynote" lecture of this academy. He told me he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on "spectatorship" because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster [Le Maitre ignorant (1987)]. I began to wonder what connection there could be between the cause and the effect. This is an academy that brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, and performance together to consider the issue of spectatorship today. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?

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On second thought, it occurred to me that the very distance, the lack of any obvious relationship between Jacotot's theory and the issue of spectatorship today might be fortunate. It could provide an opportunity to radically distance one's thoughts from the theoretical and political presuppositions that still shore up, even in postmodern disguise, most of the discussion about theater, performance, and spectatorship. I got the impression that indeed it was possible to make sense of this relationship, on condition that we try to piece together the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a strategic intersection in the discussion of the relationship between art and politics and to sketch out the broader pattern of thinking that has for a long time framed the political issues around theater and spectacle (and I use those terms in a very general sense here--to include dance, performance, and all the kinds of spectacle performed by acting bodies in front of a collective audience).

The numerous debates and polemics that have called the theater into question throughout our history can be traced back to a very simple contradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox that may prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of the actor and which can be summed up in the simplest terms. There is no theater without spectators (be it only a single and hidden one, as in Diderot's fictional representation of Le Fils naturel [1757]). But spectatorship is a bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before an appearance without knowing the conditions which produced that appearance or the reality that lies behind it. Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.

From this diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions. The first is that theater in general is a bad thing, that it is the stage of illusion and passivity, which must be dismissed in favor of what it forbids: knowledge and action--the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion was drawn long ago by Plato: The theater is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The "action" of theater is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision that looks at shadows. Theater is the transmission of the ignorance that makes people ill through the medium of ignorance that is optical illusion. Therefore a good community is a community that doesn't allow the mediation of the theater, a community whose collective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of its participants.