http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354915/?tag=content;col1
An English translation of the entire book “The Emancipated Spectator” has recently become available. Here’s the article that set it off, originally delivered as a lecture. As far as the flexible reader is concerned, the emancipated spectator is perhaps his more utopic cousin, insisting that “even when the dramaturge or the performer doesn’t know what he wants the spectator to do, he knows at least that the spectator has to do something: switch from passivity to activity.”
Ranciere begins by claiming an affinity between Brecht and Artaud’s approaches to theatre, rooted in their opposition to Plato’s dismissal of theatre. But he goes on to claim, instead, that both sides of this polemic keep the audience and performer alike caught in a transfer of power and incapacity. “It starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it.”
