A Gadamerian Response to Rancière's Indictment of the "New Theatre"

In the last few years Jacques Rancière has enjoyed an ever-growing wave of popularity in the visual art world, unparalleled by many of his peers, which is evidenced by his recent invitations to speak for major conferences in the artworld, the publication of his essays in fine arts magazines, and a couple of recent books written on his philosophy of aesthetics.(1) One of these conferences, the opening of the 5th International Summer Academy in Frankfurt, provided Rancière with the opportunity to deliver a keynote lecture entitled “The Emancipated Spectator(2),” subsequently published in Artforum magazine(3). In this lecture, Rancière takes issue with a recent trend in contemporary theatre, one he characterizes as the “New Theatre,” and their response to the relations between audience and art (in this case theatre or performance art). Rancière looks unfavourably upon the ambition of eliminating the traditional distance between the audience and the theatre, which the proponents of this “New Theatre” are said to have taken as their project, as well as the consequences that are assumed to follow this type of coalescence.

It shall be the task of this paper to identify three areas of contention in Rancière’s lecture: his understanding of the “New Theatre’s” view of audience passivity, his understanding of the “New Theatre’s” view of distance, and his understanding of the “New Theatre’s” view of community. This paper shall argue that the insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer can offer us way to bypass the problems set up by Rancière on these three points, and thus arrive at a very different, more sympathetic, conclusion of the “New Theatre.”

Rancière depicts the “New Theatre” trend in contemporary theatre as a unified movement that has branched off into two directions, both of which have as their objective an attack on the conventional theatron. Theatron, the act of subjugating the audience to another(’s) perspective, where spectators are merely passive viewers, is not only to be attacked, but to finally be replaced with drama. Drama, as opposed to the passivity implied in theatron, connotes a sense of action, where spectators become participants: a theatre without spectators.

The two directions of the “New Theatre” are represented by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. For Brecht the spectator must be confronted by the odd and encouraged to abandon the role of the passive viewer and to, rather, turn to the role of the scientist who looks for the cause of the phenomenon. In this realization of the cause of the phenomenon lies the possibility of social change. That is, here, in this self-reflection the spectator must change his view: the audience cannot remain unchanged. It was thought, by Brecht, that a full emotional identification between the audience and the play should not happen while the action of the play is taking place, but, instead, the play should be the cause of a type of self-reflection. A simple Brechtian device like a wink by an actor to an audience member, a technique demonstrated by Anna Karina at the end of Godard’s A Woman is a Woman(4), forces us to a heightened awareness of the fact that we are watching a play (or in this case, a film), which, in turn, causes us to consciously assess its affect and application to our own life.

For Artaud the spectator must resist the Brechtian sense of mastery (brought on by self-reflection), but must, like Brecht taught, also turn away from the traditional role of the mere observer who is unchanged by a distant spectacle. The prescription Artaud demands, to effect this change, is to join the theatrical action so that we are fully drawn into the work, enabling ourselves to be a part of the work, at no distance from the work. To draw upon another filmic example, one can see this type of immersion in the involvement of the audience in De Palma’s Dionysus in ’69(5), or, a more extreme case, in the radical Be Black, Baby segment of his film Hi, Mom!(6)

Rancière identifies the problem Brecht and Artaud have with theatre as theatron as an the identical problem Plato saw a similar problem with it; that is, that it enables a passive spectatorship which is opposed to a view of “communal involvement.” A great difference between the “New Theatre” and Plato lies in the fact that while Plato proposed the abolishment of theatre, the “New Theatre” proposes itself, a new alternative to traditional theatre. Rancière believes that, although the “New Theatre” does not wish to abolish theatre, they accept nevertheless accept Plato’s polemics.(7) But, as we shall see with a comparison between the “New Theatre’s” aim and that of Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics, Plato’s separation of art and reality is not merely reversed by the “New Theatre” (so as to privilege art over reality), but in fact, overcome.

(still from "Be Black Baby" in Hi, Mom!)

The New Theatre on Passivity

What if we were to see Brecht and Artaud as not putting forth the suggestion that in conventional theatre the audience is neutral, passive and unchanged by art, but, rather, that conventional theatre often does nothing to actively dismiss the illusion many have of the audience being passive attendants. If we resist suggesting that Brecht and Artaud actually believe that the audience of conventional theatre is in fact passive, but rather insist that it is the very view of the possibility of passivity that they challenge, then we see the challenge of Brecht’s epic theatre and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty in a different light. Brecht’s theatre has the express aim, then, not of causing the spectator to be “released from the passivity of the viewer(8)” as Rancière claims, but of being released from the illusion of being a passive viewer. Brecht’s challenge to theatre, then, is that it form itself in such a way that it will cause the spectator to abandon the (illusionary) role of the passive viewer and to then be challenged to go reflect, like a scientist, on its effects on our daily lives in order to find the cause of such power in order to enact social change. Artaud’s challenge is more radical, challenging us not to abandon the position of the mere observer, as Rancière claims on his behalf, but to abandon the illusion or sense of all distance and immediately become a participant in the art (or change our view of our position in such a way that we can view ourselves as actively participating in the artwork).

Both Brecht and Artaud, interpreted this way, differ in terms of timing (one believes we should abandon the illusion of passivity after a self-reflection and one, thinking self-reflection as a type of transcendental impossibility, believes we should abandon the illusion of passivity immediately), but not in their object of criticism. What is worth noting, however, is that despite their differently-timed approaches to the destruction of the illusion of passivity, they both, can be viewed as making the ontological claim that we are not, in fact, neutral, passive observers before art, but must still (through our art) aim to challenge the conventional illusion – and it is this illusion that their two forms of “New Theatre” challenges.

This differs with Rancière’s claim that the Brecht and Artaud claimed that at one time, in front of conventional theatre (theatron), we were in fact neutral, passive observers, but now, with the advent of “new theatre” we no longer have to hold this position. Instead, we can see them joining Gadamer in his view that art has the power to affect us immediately, to address us(9). Gadamer writes that “the mere on-looker who indulges in aesthetic or cultural enjoyment from a safe distance, whether in the theatre, the concert hall, or the seclusion of solitary reading, simply does not exist.”(10)

This interpretation of passivity is important because if we interpret the “New Theatre” as having proposed the ontological claim that the audience, prior to epic theatre or the theatre of cruelty was in fact passive, this would call into question the very nature of art as essentially self-transforming and engaging. Such a commitment would place the “New Theatre” with that of Kant, who suggests the possibility of a neutral, unaffected spectator in front of art. In the first part of Truth and Method, Gadamer handily refutes this position. If this were Brecht and Artaud’s commitment, they would be forced to respond to Gadamer’s refutation, even if they were just positing these ontological claims of passivity in order to overcome them or repair them with their new theatre.

If, however, we interpret Brecht and Artaud not as making the claim that the audience is, in fact, neutral, occupying a Kantian “aesthetic position,” unchanged in front of art then on this issue they can be viewed as sharing Gadamer’s company. So, then, when Rancière asks “why identify “looking” with “passivity”” or “the fact of being seated motionless with inactivity,”(11) the answer is that they simply do not and their attack on passivity is more nuanced than Rancière realizes. They are, instead, striving to overcome the illusion many have (and which theatron tends to propagate) that ‘looking is passivity’ with a theatre that does not easily allow this illusion to exist for its audience. So, when Rancière claims that “looking is also an action” and that “interpreting the world is already a means of transforming it or reconfiguring it,”(12) he finds himself in agreement with Gadamer and, under our interpretation here, the “New Theatre” as well.

What can be gathered here, is that, with their critique of the neutral, unchanged spectator, the “New Theatre” stands in opposition to a Kantian form of aesthetic distance which assumes this type of neutrality.


The New Theatre on Distance

Rancière views the “New Theatre’s” aim of turning the audience away from their (illusion of) lifeless spectatorship towards active participation as the goal of transmitting “the living attitudes” of the performers to the audience in order to turn them into the theatre’s participants. Rancière seems to view the “New Theatre’s” aim of eliminating (the illusion) of distance as a type of Schleiermachian ‘divination’ according to which the interpreter “imagines himself completely inside the author, and from there dissolves all the strange and surprising features of the text.”(13)

Rancière characterizes the technique the “New Theatre” proposes in eliminating distance between the audience and the artwork (theatre) as in keeping with the certain pedagogical belief that an (ignorant) student cannot learn in his own way, and thus is not equal in capability to attain knowledge as the professor is. This thinking leads to the belief that the pupil must be taught in the way of his master (teacher) and discouraged from a natural “hit-and-miss groping” style of knowledge attainment.(14) This is say that, in regards to the theatre, the art/performers must teach the audience in their own way, disenabling the audience from arriving at an interpretation based on any sort of dialogue with the artwork. Rancière believes this pedagogical model is echoed in the “New Theatre’s” conception of the audience-art (or audience-stage) relation as that of a Schleiermacherian equal and undistorted intuition-transmission of meaning. What’s more unsettling to Rancière is the hegemonic, violent nature of such a forced transmission. The “New Theatre” is suggested to start with an unequal opposition between the audience and the art, where art has the capacity, while the audience has an incapacity. It is with this understanding of what it means to rid the theatre of distance that Ranciere defends distance claiming that “Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of communication. It is not a gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it.”(15)

But we can just as easily draw upon Gadamer, rather than Schleiermacher, where the aim of the hermeneutical circle set up by the dynamic between the audience and the artwork is not, as traditional hermeneutics claimed, total understanding, but rather a type of (contingent and potentially changing) agreement between two equal but distinct parties in the matter under discussion. Thus, it is by no means a methodological circle where a strategic logic is applied in order to violently force, from the top down, a particular (dominant) viewpoint upon an (inferior) other. Gadamer further discredits Schleiermacher’s approach as abstracted from the historical particularities that make a work possible, alienating it from its social significance, in order to attain some type of pure objective knowledge of meaning.(16)

The type of divination Rancière correctly fears would suggest that a complete and fully present understanding of the text (the artwork, the play) is possible. It seems that when the topic of the audience-art relation arises in Rancière’s essay, he purposefully interprets the “New Theatre’s” commitments to lie with this type of outmoded Schleiermacherian divination(17)’ as opposed to a Gadamerian dialogical conversation. Furthermore, he has taken this Schleiermacherian ‘divination’ as his definition of what it would mean to ‘eliminate distance’ rather than identifying the destruction of the illusion of distance on an anti-Kantian model, like Gadamer’s. There seems to be no reason evident as to why Schleiermacher has been chosen rather than Gadamer, and why the elimination of distance insinuates a violent ‘divination’ rather than a critique of Kantian ‘aesthetic distance.’

If it follows from this that these reformers of theatre can just as easily be seen, with their new type of theatre and their challenge to traditional theatre, as trying to overcome the illusion of a Kantian distance and, thus, are pursuing a task distinct as well as opposed to the one prescribed to them by Rancière. Read this way, their task would be an overturning of the Kantian view of the aesthetic experience as one involving a pure aesthetic reflective judgment which has as its requirements the moments of disinterest and purposive without purpose (along with two others: universality and necessity).

To be disinterested in the face of art is, for Kant, to appreciate its purely formal qualities indifferent to the existential status of the work; that is, whether it actually exists or not(18). Our aesthetic experience, to Kant, is one of detached pleasure. That is to say that the destruction of an artwork would have no effect on the objectivities such an artwork is said to represent. Furthermore, the object of art is purposive, containing the quality of purposefulness, without actually having a purpose. In this sense, the aesthetic realm is completely cut off from the moral, evaluative realm, which also means that the realm of the audience is cut off from the realm of action or social efficacy. Kant privileges the role of the neutral observer against the possibility of the audience as interpreters, actively involved with a work that has the power to affect its audience. Kant believes that “we respond to the object’s rightness of design, which satisfies our imagination and intellect, even though we are not evaluating the object’s purpose.”(19)

But can the judgment of art truly be free of all social, political, and cultural concerns? Can our experience of art really be completely cut off from our tradition, our prejudices, our horizons of meaning? Gadamer contends that this position limits the possibility of interpretation or any type of personal affect art may have and is therefore unintelligible, an impossible position to hold. Gadamer is also committed to the view that the destruction of an artwork seriously compromises the reality of what is said through it. Such a stance is taken because Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics do not allow for the traditional separation between art and reality. The existence of art is said, by Gadamer, to add to the reality of the subject-matters spoken through it. The idea or meaning of a work can not exist without the artwork itself, as Kant believes, because it cannot be separated in such a way without resting on an idealism that claims artworks are representational. In this way, art would not stand on its own, it would be an instrument for technological use and control.(20) Art is once again reduced to philosophy, powerless on its own. We can read the “New Theatre” in this Gadamerian way, at odds with the approach taken by Kant.

If we take the “New Theatre” to be pursuing the Gadamerian critique mentioned above, which offers us a way out of the illusion of distance and points us toward a audience-art relation based on a hermeneutic circle of dialogical communication, there is no reason to imply a violent, hegemonic perfect transmission of meaning on their behalf, as suggested by Rancière. So, the distance Rancière defends against the “New Theatre” is a different type of distance that is criticized by the “New Theatre.”

The distance Rancière seems to defend is rather the distance between two or more perspectives, periods of time, cultures, etc. (which is a distance the “New theatre” as well as Gadamer might suggest, along with Rancière, as the inevitable distance, at least to some degree, between self and other, never able to be fully collapsed), rather than the Kantian distance that Gadamer and the “New Theatre are reacting against. The distance Rancière is defending might be better referred to as ‘difference’, to avoid confusion with the Kantian meaning of distance.
Under this reading, Rancière’s view of the violent nature of a critique of distance is misguided insofar as the “New Theatre” has as its target not the difference between self and other, but rather the Kantian defence of a formalistic disinterest.

The New Theatre on Community

Community, for the ‘New Theatre’ is defined as a living, participatory body, in direct contrast to the distance inherent in representational, mimetic forms of theatre. Gadamer, in his critique of a representationalist account of aesthetic experience, seems to mirror this view of art by defining it as a communal event. As Rancière puts it, this effort by the “New Theatre” to restore theatre to reflect its true nature (where there are no distanced / passive viewers) involves a critique of the ‘spectacle’ which divides the audience and the work as if there were no connection.(21)

Debord defined this spectacle as externality, as “images detached from every aspect of life fus[ing] in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished,”(22) which one could position against a phenomenological view. That is, this false division suggests an external art, which implies an autonomous work of art, an autonomous theatre. This view runs contrary to Husserl’s view of intentionality, where our (the audience’s) consciousness always in some way is related to and shapes the object (work of art). This does not mean that our consciousness creates the world or its objects (the work of art) as it does in idealism, but that our consciousness is always at least somehow connected to these objects so that we might have an experience as of an object. This view serves as a counterpoint to the position that our experiences consist of the mere transmission of autonomous raw data to our neutral selves.(23)

Rancière believes the “New Theatre’s” critique of spectacle endows theatre with an unnecessary guilt complex, where it is must suppress what it really is. But this view is predicated on the assumption that what theatre really is is a place of distance, as defined by disinterest and autonomous art unable to affect its audience in any meaningful, living way. As we have argued above, characterizing the audience-art relationship in this manner leads to undesirable consequences and has been heavily criticized since Kant by many commentators drawing upon the phenomenological tradition.

The abolishment of distance, which at this point Rancière misinterprets in the “New Theatre” as a type of difference, combined with their view that theatre is inherently communal, leads Rancière to believe that the “New Theatre” leads to an authoritarian, monolithic sense of “community” where the “spectator is redeemed when he is no longer an individual.”(24) But when we read “community” on the more generous model of Gadamer’s “festival” and “tradition,” the ominous conservative overtones of the belief that “theatre is communal” are expunged.

Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics sees experience (Erfahrung) always as something requiring participation in something beyond itself, a trans-subjective event, like a festival. A festival is brought together with the participation of many individuals, and centred on no one individual in particular. Gadamer, here, is reacting against the individuality of traditional aesthetics which, at least in the case of Kant, urges one to adopt a subjective consciousness, an aesthetic attitude, in order to substantiate a subjective personal response, which is to count for the aesthetic experience in toto.

Gadamer stresses the element of art that is not under our control, that is greater than any one personal response; that is, the festive element.(25) “In the festive the communal spirit that supports us all and transcends each of us individually represents the real power of the festive and indeed the real power of the art work,” the power to bring its spectators to stand as a community.(26) But a community is brought to the event of a festival by the collective agglomeration of practices and experiences (Bildung). We can call this collective agglomeration of practices that brings one to the experience of art as festival the commitment to tradition.

The term tradition instantly raises Enlightenment-style concerns of conservative, unchanging commitments that many find suspect. Gadamer is quick to point out that such a view of tradition is not what is intended here. Tradition is not synonymous with remaining the same and it most certainly does not require uncritical commitments to the suspect engagements that have been passed down through history. Traditions, if founded on fixed identities which are unable to change, usually become obsolete and risk their very existence and transmissibility. The German term for tradition, Überlieferung, has a meaning of movement in the sense of actively tackling the issue at hand and change in the sense of adaptability. That is, a commitment to a tradition is not a commitment to conservative sameness, but really a commitment to a certain field of debate, a form of dialogue, which adeptly handles the contingent questions of the day. But this adaptability and possibility for change inherent in tradition does not act against the notion of continuity in tradition because in every change, when a paradigm is replaced with another, the new paradigm is at least in some way related to the old paradigm. That is to say that the new paradigm always arose because of a lack or deficiency within the former paradigm. It is then in any tradition’s best interest to look at itself critically, be in constant debate with itself, and adopt a type of flexibility so as to not be outmoded and replaced with another paradigm.

Ranciere’s skeptical view of the theatre as inherently communitarian is rooted in his objection to Plato’s heavyhanded “well-ordered community” presented in The Republic, “where everyone must do only one thing, his or her own business, and that workers in any case had no time to spend anywhere other than their workplace or to do anything but the job fitting the (in)capacity with which nature had endowed them.”(27) This, needless to say, does not give a flattering picture of the possibilities inherent in theatre as depicted as community. But the question remains whether or not it is appropriate to use Plato’s Republic as the sole example of the communal model assumed in contemporary theatre. If we, instead, see community in the Gadamerian sense outlined above, the fears of being too orderly, static, and resistant to a dynamic history of changes are shed for an animate, playful community that need not take an hierarchical structure (as in Rancière’s pedagogical example). This view of community as participatory, dynamic and full of life seems to best characterize the “New Theatre’s” efforts to make the audience aware of their involvement in the artwork.

Conclusion

From this examination, we can conclude that Rancière seems to misread the “New Theatre” in three ways: on audience passivity, on distance, and on community. Rancière’s assumption that the “New Theatre” believes the audience to be passive, without the possibility of any sort of praxis, leaves him to further misread this new movement in theatre in two other ways. If we clarify the intention meant by the application of the term passivity, and interpret this intention as similar to Gadamer’s use of it for the purposes of overcoming its illusory presence, we are then able to better identify what is meant by the next term, ‘distance.’

Rancière takes the pursuit to eliminate distance as synonymous with a type of instantaneous transmission of meaning, an attempt at full semantic disclosure. When we read the “New Theatre” in the manner above when discussing passivity, drawing upon Gadamerian insights, we are led to disagree with Rancière and instead posit the claim that the “New theatre”, in their aim to eliminate distance, in fact, wishes to dispel the illusion of passivity, not overcome any internal difference in art, histories, cultures, and so on. Here we have a case of speaking past one another, using two different definitions of distance: distance as (the illusion of) aesthetic disinterest / unaffected passivity and distance as difference. It seems perfectly intelligible to read the “New Theatre” as applying the former definition in order to overcome its illusory power, instead of the latter, as Rancière claims. And since Rancière adopts this other definition of distance and reads this into the “New Theatre’s” intentions, which he claims are hegemonic and violent, it is evident why Rancière misreads their understanding of community.

When interpreted as an unchanging, authoritative body, which violently forces a certain point of view on a subordinate, community can be seen as an obvious danger. But when we read the pursuit to eliminate distance not as Rancière does, as a violent transmission of meaning, but in the way we mentioned above, we are led to a more complex view of community as festive and able to change. With this Gadamerian understanding of community, the supposition that art is inherently communal, avoids the monolithic, inflexible meaning Rancière gives it.

Under this alternative reading, it is possible to see Rancière as not entirely opposed to the true aims of the “New Theatre,” but instead to be reading them in a disingenuous way which places them as a counterpoint to his own philosophy. If we see the “New Theatre”as able to break from this cornered reading we find that this movement might have something valuable to offer in contemporary discussions of audience-art relations and the communal aspects of art.


(1)An example of which can be found online at Ben Davis, "Rancière, for Dummies," Artnet, 15 August 2007, .
(2)A video of the presentation is available online at “Jacques Rancière: The Emancipated Spectator,” V2V: Video Syndication Network,
.
(3)Jacques Rancière, "The Emancipated Spectator," Artforum, March 2007, 271-281.
(4)A Woman is a Woman, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1961, videocassette.
(5)Dionysus in '69, dir. Brian De Palma, 1970, videocassette.
(6)Hi, Mom!, dir. Brian De Palma, 1970, videocassette.
(7)Rancière, op. cit., 272.
(8)Ibid., 273.
(9)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gassamelte Werke 1993 (GW8) Kunst Als Aussage (Gesammelte Werke Bande 8), trans. Paul Siebeck (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993), 374
(10)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 130.
(11)Rancière, op. cit., 277.
(12)Ibid.
(13)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen, 1960), 277; quoted in John M. Connolly, “Gadamer and the Author's Authority: A Language-Game Approach”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44, no. 3 (Spring, 1986): 271-277.
(14)Rancière, op. cit., 275.
(15)Ibid.
(16)“Hans-Georg Gadamer” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 March, 2003, (15 August, 2007).
(17)While he does not mention Schleiermacher’s name specifically, this type of transmission is best exemplified in Schleiermacher’s ‘divination’ efforts, and, thus, stands opposed to any sort of Gadamerian reading of the ‘New Theatre.’
(18)Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 128.
(19)Cynthia Freeland, But is it Art? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14.
(20)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 89.
(21)Rancière, op. cit., 274.
(22)Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle,” marxists.org, (15 August, 2007).
(23)Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 47.
(24)Rancière op. cit., 278.
(25)Hans-Georg Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 60.
(26)Ibid., 63.
(27)Rancière op. cit., 280.