Rambling on Ranciere and The Emancipated Spectator

Contemporary art practice is engaged in intersubjectivity which calls for interaction, participation, collaboration and co-authorship.
The definition of the relationship between art and politics is through 'the transformation that occurs through inter-subjective relations.'

Ranciere seems to be threatened by the artist's role, his/her intentionality as opposed to the spectator in contemporary practice.He sees this in the master/servant dialectic which places the spectator in the passive role. According to Ranciere, 'the emancipatory potential of art does not come from the locus of the artist's intentionality' but rather through a process he defines as 'the distribution of the sensible'. Ranciere is interested in the emancipatory potential of the spectator who he claims has 'the capacity of anybody' - the necessary universality that politics is all about.He 'defines the logic of transformation through the interplay between the rise of the new subjects and the re-articulation of the common'. The emancipated spectator is able to see a new narrative rather than the one being presented and thus does not need to rely on the agency of the artist.

However, Ranciere defends the 'passive, ignorant spectator' as the spectator who is somehow outside of the art system.He champions the unlearned against the educated, attributing agency to the disruptive potential of the untrained intelligence. This seems to run counter to the idea of the 'spectator as a repository of established ideologies and cultural practices - as the specific body adapted to art's institutionalisation.' Ranciere defends the spectator's capacity to 'observe, select, compare, interpret' but does not invoke any other mode of subjectivity other than that of the aesthetic onlooker.It seems as if the critical discourse of Post-Modern Theory has passed him by and certainly bypasses the agency given to the spectator- an empowered subject- through the discourse of Barthes. In fact, it seems as though Ranciere is championing and seeking to emancipate the 'privileged spectator who has occupies a central and powerful role within the ideology, economy and knowledge of art'.

If it is truly an spectator outside of the art system which Ranciere is seeking to emancipate then it would be that of the philistine, someone who is outside of the aesthetic regime.To attribute 'the distribution of the sensible' as an emancipatory concept and giving agency to the re-articulation of the common is a task which, in my view, requires more than the disruptive potential of the untrained and uneducated. This common spectator would incorporate subjects with fetishes, cynicism, and embedded ideologies irrespective of education and being outside of the art structure. One can not assume this emancipatory potential being realised by popular fundamentalists who are manipulated in their ignorance by the dominant ideology of the Neo- Liberals. If a pan-universalism is what Ranciere is seeking then it is only through the collaboration and agency of the spectator, artists, activists, trade unions and intellectuals that any emancipatory potential can be realised.