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Shocking (Rancière’s) Spectators

This is an article that criticizes Rancière’s recent work on aesthetics and politics and his dismissal of emancipated spectators, by using Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Michael Fried’s work on absorption and theatricality to argue that spectatorship in art is something that involves aesthetic education.

For Theodor Adorno the raison d’être of advanced artworks is to provoke, activate, and antagonise their producer, spectator, and situation. I write ‘their’ to privilege the peculiar space/time carved out of the here-and-now by this special type of object. Artworks cannot be entirely dominated and devoured, possessed and rationalised by subjugating spectators. ‘The philistine demand that the artwork give something’ and the culture-vulture’s culinary call ‘what-do-I-get-out-of-it?’ reflect equally regressive and instrumentalised relations to art. Spectators of art really ought to become Hegelians practising freedom toward the object. Nowhere is this particular freedom more in the balance than in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality and Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator.

For Adorno this freedom hurts; ‘the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.’ The shock of the splinter’s penetration, the accompanying shudder of the wounded and parallactic vision of the pained is the power and freedom specific to art, which also renews the economy of spectatorship. Art is a complex object requiring the labour of translation; it cannot be fully experienced as a form of ‘edutainment’, it stands in need of philosophy (aesthetics). The spectator capable of experiencing the shock and/or shudder of art does not refer artworks to herself narcissistically to ‘trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather, this shock [aroused by important artworks] is the moment in which [spectators] forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken’.

This article generates new ways of thinking that influence creative practice and art research. The book inspires and supports new forms of artistic, literary, social, and psychological expression.