Adorno and Art by J. Hellings

Author:J. Hellings [Hellings, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137229601
Publisher: PalgraveMacmillan
Published: 2014-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

8

The Politics of Aesthetic (Mis-)Education

In The Emancipated Spectator Rancière seeks to make the ‘relationship between the theory of intellectual emancipation and the question of the spectator today’ meaningful through reconstructing the ‘general model of rationality’ used to evaluate ‘the political implications of theatrical spectacle’ (ES 1–2). The prevalent (critical and political) view assumes that spectatorship is ‘an absolutely bad thing’ insofar as it promotes, ‘a scene of illusion and passivity.’ ‘To be a spectator’ in this tradition of thought ‘is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act’ (ES 2). To be a spectator is to be neutral, in decision and thus indecisive. The spectator’s experience of art is assumed to be one of consumption, not one of production, one of disinterest, not one of agency. There is, of course, some truth in this.

However, Rancière sets out to critique and challenge the assumed pseudo-activity of spectators by arguing that the theatre (and one can extend his argument to both the politics of spectatorship in the arts, and most art institutions and movements, including relational art1) constructs and internalises passivity as a foundational ‘sin’ (ES 7), which it then redeems by awakening spectators from their (projected or induced) narcolepsy, transforming them via education through art and consciousness raising into enlightened ‘agents of collective action’ (ES 8), capable of seeing through the spectacles of aestheticised society. Rancière is, here, interested in critiquing the fundamental presupposition that spectators stand in need of emancipation, activation and education – an argument he extends to an equally patronising belief that workers require, and must be given, consciousness raising.

Transforming passive and contemplative consumers of culture (spectators) into active participants and co-producers of culture (actors) ‘is [how] art bears upon politics,’ according to Rancière (AD 24), and this transformative education at the level of aesthetic or sensory experience has, historically, been attempted in at least two familiar ways. Either spectators can be shocked, estranged or alienated: effects that stir spectators from their dogmatic slumber. Brecht’s epic theatre of ‘distanced investigation,’ operates in this way according to Rancière (ES 5). Or, spectators can be inculcated into the action and made to shudder, absorbed into the aura of art, which impedes disinterested contemplation. Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and ‘vital participation,’ works in this way according to Rancière (ES 5). In both techniques (either distanced investigation or vital participation), spectators’ spectatorship is interrupted and they are put to work practising ‘the Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of the commodity, of the illusions of the consumer society, and of the empire of the spectacle’ (ES 32). The aesthetic experience of art, here, raises consciousness, educates or emancipates spectators by making them aware of the(ir) situation (passivity and ignorance); but it does so, Rancière argues against Adorno (Brecht and Sartre), at the cost of projecting an assumed incapacity onto subjects. It is this projected incapacity that Rancière’s theory seeks to render null and void.

Rancière’s aesthetics is, in part, clearly indebted to Adorno’s; both decry

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