Chiming in with AR’s post, I have been thinking
about Rancière’s emancipated spectator in relation to Godard. One of the
interesting threads that came up in the class discussion was whether Rancière
might be considered post-modern. While I don’t want to and probably can’t offer
a complete argument one way or another, I would like to spelunk one important
crevice along this fault line.
Like many post-structuralist arguments, Rancière’s
argument for the emancipation of the spectator is based in the rethinking of
(deconstructing) a series of apparent oppositions. This is where he discusses
the binaries of activity/passivity, viewing/knowing, appearance/reality to
suggest that they are perhaps not really so diametrically opposed and that
someone who appears passive can really be very active in that their observation
is a part of their way of knowing and that the mere appearances they are
observing can tell them many things about the world.
Simultaneously, however, Rancière makes the case
for the importance of the impenetrably garrisoned individual. This, I maintain,
proclaims loudly against the pomo annihilated subject. Does Rancière’s argument
go this far? I think it might. While we must submit to a vast blurring of
boundaries it is only through the “irreducible distance” between the viewer and
the viewed that we are capable of composing these, our own poems out of the
timber of the forest of signs and facts – a notion that is the foundation of
the possibility of emancipation for Rancière.
Godard on the other hand, believes that “in the
cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” For
Godard, Rancière's one irreducible distance is abolished by the very
nature of cinema. The viewer and the viewed are one. He wants to make us
think, it’s true. In fact, according to this argument, he wants to "think
us" – a totalitarian proposition if I ever heard one. Of course, I don’t
think Godard really wants to be a totalitarian, he wants us to be
free, but his epistemology is opposed to the realization of this goal. He seems
to be operating under the New Hampshire state motto, but read as an imperative:
Live Free or Die!
-Jerry Prokosch
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