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The Emancipated Spectator
ArtForum, March, 2007 by Jacques Ranciere
Understanding the sense of that break in the heart of time also meant putting into play another kind of knowledge, predicated not on the presupposition of any gap but on the presupposition of likeness. These men, too, were intellectuals--as anybody is. They were visitors and spectators, just like the researcher who, one hundred and forty years later, would read their letters in a library, just like visitors to Marxist theory or at the gates of a factory. There was no gap to bridge between intellectuals and workers, actors and spectators; no gap between two populations, two situations, or two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness that had to be acknowledged and put into play in the very production of knowledge. Putting it into play meant two things. First, it meant rejecting the borders between disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of those workers' days and nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of "empirical" history and the field of "pure" philosophy. The story that those workers told was about time, about the loss and reappropriation of time. To show what it meant, I had to put their account in direct relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher who had, long ago in the Republic, told the same story by explaining that in a well-ordered community everybody must do only one thing, his or her own business, and that workers in any case had no time to spend anywhere other than their workplace or to do anything but the job fitting the (in)capacity with which nature had endowed them. Philosophy, then, could no longer present itself as a sphere of pure thought separated from the sphere of empirical facts. Nor was it the theoretical interpretation of those facts. There were neither facts nor interpretations. There were two ways of telling stories.
Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurring the hierarchy between the levels of discourse, between the narration of a story and the philosophical or scientific explanation of it or the truth lying behind or beneath it. There was no metadiscourse explicating the truth of a lower level of discourse. What had to be done was a work of translation, showing how empirical stories and philosophical discourses translate each other. Producing a new knowledge meant inventing the idiomatic form that would make translation possible. I had to use that idiom to tell of my own intellectual adventure, at the risk that the idiom would remain "unreadable" for those who wanted to know the cause of the story, its true meaning, or the lesson for action that could be drawn from it. I had to produce a discourse that would be readable only for those who would make their own translation from the point of view of their own adventure.
That personal detour may lead us back to the core of our problem. These issues of crossing borders and blurring the distribution of roles are defining characteristics of theater and of contemporary art today, when all artistic competences stray from their own field and exchange places and powers with all others. We have plays without words and dance with words; installations and performances instead of "plastic" works; video projections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs turned into living pictures or history paintings; sculpture that becomes hypermediatic show; etc. Now, there are three ways of understanding and practicing this confusion of the genres. There is the revival of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is supposed to be the apotheosis of art as a form of life but which proves instead to be the apotheosis of strong artistic egos or of a kind of hyperactive consumerism, if not of both at the same time. There is the idea of a "hybridization" of the means of art, which complements the view of our age as one of mass individualism expressed through the relentless exchange between roles and identities, reality and virtuality, life and mechanical prostheses, and so on. In my view, this second interpretation ultimately leads to the same place as the first one--to another kind of hyperactive consumerism, another kind of stultification, inasmuch as it effects the crossing of borders and the confusion of roles merely as a means of increasing the power of the performance without questioning its grounds.
