Notes on: illusion of the spectator

Ranciere’s pivotal assumption is that art is political in its own very
specific way, not in the same way as politics itself. He divides art from
politics, arguing that ‘[t]he very same thing that makes the aesthetic
“political” stands in the way of all strategies for “politicising art”.
This difference between art and other fields is held by Ranciere and
the majority of philosophers to be sacrosanct.
He is dismissive of Brecht, Godard, Eisenstein, Guy Debord
and others – targeting their arguments for a critical, dialectical,
transformative and shocking art – because this critical tradition
of the avantgarde does not regard art and aesthetics to be the
solution but the problem. Ranciere’s aesthetic politics and politics
of aesthetics begins with the notion that aesthetics is the solution.
For the avantgarde, art and aesthetics are necessarily problematic.
He calls this the ‘misadventures of critical thought. Ranciere
counters the avantgarde politicization of art and the spectator by
insisting that the spectator does not need to be emancipated. The
spectator, he argues, is already emancipated. This argument is
based on Ranciere’s previous work on the relationship between the
schoolmaster and the pupil.
Ranciere defends the spectator as the cultural figure that
matches the pupil subjected by pedagogy (compellingly revealed in
his The Ignorant Schoolmaster).
Rancière diagnoses the situation of the spectator by noting that,
according to the accusers, being a spectator is a bad thing for two
reasons. First, viewing is the opposite of knowing: the spectator is
held before an appearance in a state of ignorance about the process
of production of this appearance and about the reality it conceals.
Second, it is the opposite of acting: the spectator remains immobile
in her seat, passive. To be a spectator is to be separated from both
the capacity to know and the power to act.
DAVE BEECH