Abstract:
In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière gestures toward a “third way”1 of conceptualizing spectatorship without fully elaborating the form it might take. Emancipation is largely defined against what it is not: it is not theatre that seeks to transform spectators into active participants; it is not “hyper-theatre”; it is not the return of the total artwork.2 What kind of theatre, then, might realize Rancière’s vision of “a community of emancipated narrators and translators” who might “change something of the world we live in”? This essay asks how the “emancipated spectator” might be understood in more fully theatrical terms than those that Rancière outlines, and, furthermore, how such a figure—and the relationships that constitute him or her—might be read ethically.