The Emancipated Spectator

This is the second key point: The spectators see, feel, and understand something to the extent that they make their poems as the poet has done, as the actors, dancers, or performers have done. The dramaturge would like them to see this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt, and understood. He proceeds from the same presupposition as the stultifying master: the presupposition of an equal, undistorted transmission. The master presupposes that what the student learns is precisely what he teaches him. This is the master's notion of transmission: There is something on one side, in one mind or one body--a knowledge, a capacity, an energy--that must be transferred to the other side, into the other's mind or body. The presupposition is that the process of learning is not merely the effect of its cause--teaching--but the very transmission of the cause: What the student learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of cause and effect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect. The paradox of the ignorant master lies therein. The student of the ignorant master learns what his master does not know, since his master commands him to look for something and to recount everything he discovers along the way while the master verifies that he is actually looking for it. The student learns something as an effect of his master's mastery. But he does not learn his master's knowledge.

The dramaturge and the performer do not want to "teach" anything. Indeed, they are more than a little wary these days about using the stage as a way of teaching. They want only to bring about a form of awareness or a force of feeling or action. But still they make the supposition that what will be felt or understood will be what they have put in their own script or performance. They presuppose the equality--meaning the homogeneity--of cause and effect. As we know, this equality rests on an inequality. It rests on the presupposition that there is a proper knowledge and proper practice with respect to "distance" and the means of suppressing it. Now this distance takes on two forms. There is the distance between performer and spectator. But there is also the distance inherent in the performance itself, inasmuch as it is a mediating "spectacle" that stands between the artist's idea and the spectator's feeling and interpretation. This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which prevents any kind of "equal" or "undistorted" transmission. It is a mediation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there must be something between the master and the student. The same thing that links them must also separate them. Jacotot posited the book as that in-between thing. The book is the material thing, foreign to both master and student, through which they can verify what the student has seen, what he has reported about it, what he thinks of what he has reported.