Refelction after reading "The Emancipated Spectator"

“The Emancipated Spectator,” by Jacques Ranciere, was a difficult paper to read because the writing was so complex. The first thing I did was I looked up the dictionary definition of the word “emancipated.” It meant to be restrained by custom or tradition. One aspect of this essay that I noticed is that it used a lot of syllogisms (the P to Q format). At the beginning Ranciere describes the paradox of being a spectator. Essentially he said, since being a spectator means looking, and looking is bad because it means you are the opposite of knowing. Therefore, being a spectator means you do not know. Another syllogism Ranciere pairs this with is that if you are looking, then you are not acting. Therefore a spectator, who is a person who looks, is not acting. Combining these two syllogisms, the output is that a spectator is not knowing and not acting, both, of which, are deemed negative things. Ranciere improves his credibility in his logic by citing Plato. Then Ranciere states another assumption: theater in general is a bad thing. The logic behind this is that if spectators are bad, and theater involves spectators, then theater must also be a bad thing. Ranciere summarizes, “The most common conclusion runs as follows: Theater involves spectatorship, and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore, we need a new theater, a theater without spectatorship.” Later, Ranciere cites that German Romanticism used the concept of theater to be associated with the “idea of the living community.” Ranciere develops this later in the essay and states that theater is a sense of community that connects all different people. He states, “One the stage, real living bodies perform for people who are physically present together in the same place. In that way, it is supposed to provide some unique sense of community, radically different from the situation of the individual watching television, or of moviegoers who sit in front of disembodied, projected images.” Then Ranciere introduces the concept of “equality of intelligence.” This is an important part of his argument about community within theater. First Ranciere describes his idea of primary and secondary knowledge. Essentially, he says that a master teaches primary knowledge and primary knowledge leads to secondary knowledge. The example given is: “If the ‘ignorant’ person who doesn’t know how to read knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare that knowledge with something that remains ignorant: the words of the same prayer written on paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of that of which he is ignorant to that which he knows. He can do it if, at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, and verifies what he has told.” The word “observes” is very important in this section. The ignorant person uses observation to become knowledgeable. Therefore, observation is action. Ranciere later states, “looking is also an action that confirms or modifies distribution, and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it.” The main point made about the community within theater is that it preserves the sense of equality, or “equality of intelligence.” Even the “workers who should have provided information about the conditions of labor” were intellectuals in theater. Ranciere states, “Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurring the hierarchy between the levels of discourse…These issues of crossing borders and blurring the distribution of roles are defining characteristics of theater and of contemporary stray from their own field and exchange places and powers with all others.” In this section, Ranciere is reinforcing the ideas of equal intelligence and community within theater. Ranciere, overall, believes that the purpose of theater “should be a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and spectators who are looking to find what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people.”