“The collective power that is common to these spectators is not the status of members of a collective body. Nor is it a peculiar kind of interactivity. It is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any other insofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power is the power of equality of intelligences. This power binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each other; it is the power each of us possesses in equal measure to make our own way in the world. What has to be put to the test by our performances — whether teaching or acting, speaking, writing, making art, etc. — is not the capacity of aggregation of a collective but the capacity of the anonymous, the capacity that makes anybody equal to everybody. This capacity works through unpredictable and irreducible distances. It works through an unpredictable and irreducible play of associations and dissociations.
“Associating and dissociating instead of being the privileged medium that conveys the knowledge or energy that makes people active — this could be the principle of an ‘emancipation of the spectator’, which means the emancipation of any of us as a spectator. Spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have been told, done and dreamed. There is no privileged medium, just as there is no privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points and turning points from which we learn new things, if we first dismiss the presupposition of distance, second the distribution of roles, and third the borders between territories. We don’t need to turn spectators into actors. We do need to acknowledge that every spectator is already an actor in his own story. We needn’t turn the ignorant into the learned or, merely out of desire to overturn things, make the student or the ignorant person the master of his masters (278-279).
“I am aware that all this may sound like words, mere words. But I wouldn’t take that as an insult. We’ve heard so many speakers pass their words off as more than words, as passwords enabling us to enter a new life. We’ve seen so many spectacles boasting of being no mere spectacles but ceremonials of community. Even now, in spite of the so-called postmodern skepticism about changing the way we live, one sees so many shows posing as religious mysteries that it might not seem so outrageous to hear, for a change, that words are only words. Breaking away from the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectator turned active, knowing that words are only words and spectacles only spectacles, may help us better understand how words, stories, and performances can help us change something in the world we live in”(280).
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