Becoming an Emancipated Spectator
Notes on Jacques Rancière's theory of theatre applied to real life
Reading this Substack post was an awful, but enlightening experience, revealing a truth that I (like many) had inferred, but tried to sublimate. The truth being that America is living in a "Theater Kid Occupied Government." I won't elaborate too much more on what the author was pointing out, you should just go read it for yourself, but it did make me think about how theories of performance could be applied here. I re-read a portion of Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator, which is a theory of contemporary performance art, to try and see if the methods of Performance Studies might be applied to our hyper-theatrical world.
Some key definitions Rancière begins with are “spectator” and “actor,” and he immediately places a value judgement on each. In the theatrical setting, the actor has the upper hand because the actor has a wider scope of knowledge than the spectator, and it is this knowledge that privileges the actor with the power to act. The spectator is held at a distance from what goes on in the wings and has nothing else to do, but watch how the scenes and story play out. They are immobilized, and kept from participating in the construction of the world—and thus kept from changing any part of it—and yet they are still of that world by virtue of their observation of it.
Modernity has had us hurtling toward a certain kind of theatrical world by way of interweaving the spectacle into our daily lives, this was foretold by Artaud, Brecht, and Debord, amongst others. And now it is our material reality every day. Social media is a theatre of cruelty that used to be interesting, communal, and fun to participate in until the likes of governments, legacy media, and institutions realized they would soon lose grip of the narratives they create and control and so took over. The colonized world became a colonized Internet. In Rancière’s estimation, you’d think that those of us who don’t have large internet presences, or rather, those of us who aren’t “celebrities” are the spectators, but I don’t think that’s actually the case.
There's a suggestion that spectators are relegated to a space of contemplation, that is, contemplating the action taking place, which they cannot participate in. "Organizing a collective world whose reality is [their] dispossession," Rancière says, is what the spectators are contemplating. Social media is a peanut gallery. This must be why it's always so funny to see social media influencers go out of their way to post whatever cause-du-jour activism on their platforms and then go right back to putting out niche content. But if, in the theatrical reality that is the internet, the influencers are alienated spectators, what or who are the regular people who don't produce content? Who don't have large platforms? Those who are on the outskirts even of spectatorship? Do they have the ability to organize themselves into a collective of actors? Maybe those people are the ones who are actually the best equipped to step out of the role of observer and instigate some action to disrupt the drama being played out on the world's stage.
“A true community is therefore one that does not tolerate theatrical mediation; one in which the measure that governs the community is directly incorporated into the living attitudes of its members.”
This means that a true community will also empower its members to take back control of their agency also; is there room for shaming people? No. Maybe there's room for accountability and assessment of mutual values and objectives, but to shame is to act in service of the theatre. The thing about influencers-as-spectators, the internet, and shame is that the influencers, or those who desperately try to always do the "right" thing (which is almost never bound by morals, but rather public judgement) is that they are scapegoats. They are used to deter "regular" people from learning by making mistakes. This is one of the main gatekeeping methods to keeping people separated from knowledge (AKA the first trait of spectatorship).
There's yet another role that Rancière points out, which is that of the "ignoramus." I think this is probably the closest role regular people on the internet have. The ignoramus is someone who possesses knowledge and has the ability to acquire even more knowledge, but they are distanced from it. This the only thing they need to overcome in order to be players. Furthermore, an ignormaus has intelligence, and it's an intelligence Rancière defines as one that "translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it." He goes on to further explain that the relationship between the teacher and the ignoramus is not one of give-and-take, it's not like the teacher is just imbuing the student with their own knowledge—in the metaphorical structure I've set up, this would be like influencers teaching other people to be content creators just like them—it's the teacher telling them how to think for themselves and gain knowledge for themselves.
In the theatre there is a certain logical order to the relationship between actor and spectator/teacher and ignoramus. The actor can—and sometimes will—supply knowledge to the spectator, but will never teach the spectator how to form that knowledge, or how to translate signs into whatever language makes sense for them. But, Rancière says:
“In the logic of emancipation, between the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated novice there is always a third thing—a book or some other piece of writing—alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it.”
In my metaphor, what is the third thing? The thing that no one owns... Maybe it's simply Real Life. This is what is meant by the imperative to "go touch grass," which says, Go look for yourself at what is out in the world. When you go out in the world you see reality for what it is, not what the voices on social media (which includes legacy media and government PR teams) tell you is out there. Those in power use the spectacle to construct a false reality that they broadcast to the world, and they rely on player-spectators to uphold it. It's a colonization of the mind, but the good news is it can be overcome.