Pictures arranged, scenes heard

Tables of man in the state of nature

Imagine an empty, purely conceptual space. In this space, the pure eye of the philosopher arranges the abstract figure of Man. Not a man, nor even an origin of man; but the conceptual plenitude of Man with a capital H. The eye examines this figure calmly  what does it see ? What it sees is the paradoxical picture Rousseau gives us at the start of the second Discourse :

" However important it may be, in order to judge properly the natural state of Man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, as it were, in the first Embryo of the species ; I will not follow his organization through his successive developpemens : I won't stop to investigate in the Animal System what it may have been in the beginning, to finally become what it is  I won't examine whether, as Aristotle thinks, its elongated nails were not first hooked claws I will not examine whether, as Aristotle thinks, his elongated fingernails were not at first hooked claws; whether he was not hairy as a bear, and whether, walking on four feet, his eyes directed towards the Earth, and limited to a horizon of a few steps, did not mark both the character, and the limits of his ideas. I could only form vague and almost imaginary conjectures on this subject. [...] I shall suppose him to have been conformed from time immemorial, as I see him today". (OC III 134 ¹)

The abstraction of Man is not a derealization, on the contrary : its culmination is man " as I see him today ", the most concrete, ordinary reality, the most empirical experience of what it is to be a man. But this man of everyday, intuitive experience only stands before me² as a tableau of Man taken as a concept after a long series of denials and suppressions : " I will not follow ", " I will not stop ", " I will not examine ", " I could not form ". The concrete picture we end up with is abstracted from the original conceptual space by successive deletions of images  here, Rousseau tells us, is everything that is not the Man I have before you as a figure from which to engage my discourse. See all these images, remove them from your mind, let's start again from the ordinary man, and we'll have the Man of discourse.

The effect of such a denial is that of a picture arranged for an overheard scene. A picture, or a succession of pictures (the " successive developments " of man, his origin and his becoming), must be removed to pose a face to face : emerging from the abstract space from which he frees himself through the negation of images, Man enters the scene to look at nature. The rejected image of the man incapable of looking, that four-legged Aristotelian conjecture whose "eyes directed towards the earth, and limited to a horizon of a few steps, [marked] both the character, and the limits of his ideas ", contrasts with the claimed image of Man " bearing his gaze on all nature and measuring with his eyes the vast expanse of heaven "³.

This Man is a negation of abstraction : he is not without⁴ the concrete dimension of a man of common experience. The reader is thus offered a doubly crossed-out image, as a device superimposing a genesis (the " successive developments "), a taxonomy (the " animal system ") and a blindness (" his gaze directed towards the earth "), three failings from which we must abstract ourselves so that, from the object, a gaze can emerge (" bearing his gaze on all nature "), and, from there, begin a discourse.

Man steps forward, then, his eyes boldly raised to the sky, whose vastness he measures. This is the posture of the opera actor who, as the music unfolds around him, steps forward and draws with his eye the abstract space of the performance in which he is inscribed. The gaze comes from in front of him  not Rousseau, the philosopher, looking at man at his origin, but Man, " conforming to all times ", arranged facing him and looking⁵.

This originary experience is that of the aphanisis⁶. The object of discourse is and is not before me  it presents itself to me in the imaging concreteness of a negation of abstraction. It unfolds from " embryo of the species " to " what it is ", it develops, its nails lengthen, and then it all falls back : " vague, and almost imaginary conjectures ", " observations [...] too uncertain ", neither " foundation " nor " basis ". But here is the conjecture again, in a new imaginary thrust : " as he applied his limbs to new uses, and fed on new foods "...

It's not just a question, for the reader invited to this virtual experience of observation⁷, of surprising an impossible picture : Rousseau directs our gaze towards a stripping away (" by stripping this Being... of all supernatural gifts... and of all artificial faculties... ") and towards contentment (" satiating herself under an oak tree, quenching her thirst at the first stream "), that is, towards the paradox of Psyche's gaze on sleeping Eros, whom she illuminates with her lamp : instead of the expected monster, the dazzling beauty of sex and its disappearance, the unfolding of a scene and its withdrawal⁸.

Rousseau's Man is Psyche's Eros, observed and immediately subtracted, looked at but looking, and evading immediately grasped. The liminal experience of the second Discourse, this tableau disposed in denial, echoes what is at play in the castration complex, the advent, through Man's aphanisis, of a signifier of the absence of signifier, from which a discourse can begin.

In this way, we touch on Rousseau's extremely complex relationship to the spectacle⁹, which he summons as a liminal disposition, as an original stage from which to engage a discourse, but which he necessarily repudiates in the same movement, constituting the signs of his discourse from these crossed-out tableaux¹⁰. The spectacle is a set of tableaux laid out for a scene heard, i.e. a scene that is not that of the self, but rather that of the world  it's the actor stepping forward with eyes raised, measuring the sky with his gaze. On the other hand, the negation, the abstraction of these tableaux, because it articulates the emergence of the signifying game with the aphanisis of the castration complex, always radically engages the ego, in its most intimate dimension, at the heart of the conceptualization process. The voice of the ego, the word of interiority, originates in the abstraction of paintings.

What Man sees: the spectacle of nature

Rousseau always comes back to this man who contemplates the spectacle of nature : it's Saint-Preux in the mountains of Valais¹¹ ; it's Émile with Jean-Jacques in the forest of Montmorency in Book III of the Émile¹² ; it is, preceding his profession of faith, the Savoyard vicar's rendezvous with Jean-Jacques, above the Po plain, in Book IV.

In the episode of the Savoyard vicar's profession of faith, the spectacle of nature works as an interface. It comes after the story of Jean-Jacques' wanderings, his encounter with the vicar and the comparison with the latter's youthful adventures. This narrative, this encounter, this comparison lay out a series of tableaux, which must enter into conjunction for the show to be possible :

" Ah ! What sad tableaux, I wrote bitterly ! if we have to refuse everything, what good has it done us to be born, and if we have to despise happiness itself, who knows how to be happy ? " (OC IV 564)

What is the nature of these paintings ? The image is not given to us. First, it is, after what we can reconstruct from the more circumstantial account in the Confessions¹³ as the attempted rape of which Jean-Jacques was the victim, the picture of the morals of the Turin catechumens :

" He saw only vile servants subject to the infamous one who outraged him, or accomplices in the same crime, who mocked his resistance and excited him to imitate them. " (OC IV 559)

The nightmare of abjection that the young proselyte is given to see paints a picture out of our sight : the narrative suggests its image only through ellipsis and allusion.

It is then, after the allusion to the vicar's fault, " qu'une avanture de jeunesse avoit mis avec son Évêque " (p. 560), the promise of a future confession (" he made me understand that after receiving my confessions, he wanted to make me his ", p. 565) : the profession of faith supplements this confession, but remains very allusive on the adventure in question :

" my respect for other people's beds left my faults uncovered. [...] Seeing sad observations overturn the ideas I had of justice, honesty and all the duties of man, [...] I gradually felt the evidence of principles darken in my mind " (OC IV 567)

What the vicar sees, like what Jean-Jacques saw, is an obscuration, a negative image, the picture of the absence of a picture, a negation of vision. The first vision abstracts the real, it withdraws it from itself, and only this experience of pure negativity can prepare the moment of the spectacle, which reverses the negative image into a metaphysical face-to-face with the real, into a spectacle of nature.

This spectacle is first and foremost that of a projection :

" It was summer ; we got up at the crack of dawn. He led me out of the city, to a high hill below which passed the Po, whose course could be seen through the fertile banks it bathes. In the distance, the immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape. The rays of the rising sun were already grazing the plains, casting long shadows on the fields, trees, hills and houses, enriching with a thousand accents of light the most beautiful picture the human eye can be struck by. It was as if nature were displaying all her magnificence before our eyes, to offer a text for our conversation. It was there, after having contemplated these objects in silence for some time, that the man of peace spoke to me as follows..." (Emile, Book IV, OC IV 565)

Rousseau isn't just giving us an overheard scene, a sort of obligatory signature of the Enlightenment, which recurs in each of his productions and is found throughout contemporary literature¹⁴. Here, the spectacle of nature is the prerequisite for the profession of faith¹⁵, coming " to offer the text to our talks ". It follows on from the " sad tableaux " of the preliminary interviews with the vicar, where the work of negativity was deployed, and, triggering the elevation of the gaze, operates the reversal of the aphanisis : nature caught at its daily rising, disappearing and reappearing, the mountain that cuts the breath and triggers the verb, lay out the metaphysical stage of speech, which is at the same time the concrete, immediate and sensitive space of the gaze.

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As the sun rises from behind the Alps, it casts the long shadows of the objects its rays encounter across the landscape. Spectacle barré : light crosses the sublime bar of the Alpine horizon, striking objects and unfolding them as shadows. The mystical resonance of such an arrangement is not accidental. Just before the act of faith that is the vicar's discourse, the spectacle of nature visually prefigures, if not the content, at least the aim. The light above the peaks, literally sublime, is both the light of nature and the illumination of grace, which it is a matter of contemplating face to face : " Today we see by means of a mirror, in an obscure way, but then we shall see face to face " (I Corinthians, 13, 12).

On the world, this light is projected as shadow : the skiagraphia, in image theology, is shadow writing, (pre)figuration, and thereby the deceptive proper of all representation¹⁶ but in the theater, the skiagraphia is the illusion of trompe-l'œil and décor¹⁷, the very beginning, then, and the setting for the show. The screen of the mountains and its scattering across the landscape in " thousand accidents of light " is the mystical screen of the tabernacle at the same time as the natural circumscription of nature's theater.

This spectacle of nature prefigures the profession of faith, and the profession of faith supplements the spectacle of nature. The whole discourse will tend to rejoin, to bring back into the order of language, this second, sensitive and blissful experience.

The spectacle of nature prefigures the profession of faith, and the profession of faith supplements the spectacle of nature.

First, then, the arrangement of the paintings, where the negativity of the image  works; this is the first experience  then the aphanisis of the spectacle of nature, a second experience  finally, the deployment of discourse, a third experience of substitution, tending towards a return to visual plenitude. Through language, through the mind, the vicar prepares himself for the contemplation offered directly, immediately, by the rendezvous on the mountain :

" What! I can observe and understand beings and their relationships, I can feel what order, beauty and virtue are, I can contemplate the universe and raise myself up to the hand that governs it, I can love goodness and do good, and yet I compare myself to animals? " (OC IV 582)

We find here the same movement of the gaze that opened the second discourse  there is only one spectacle worthy of the name  it is that which Man commands, when he ceases to look at the earth and his feet and with his eye measures the expanse of the sky. This elevating spectacle is fulfilled in the discourse that accompanies it : a discourse of order and relationships, a taxonomic discourse that nurtures " in my mind the sublime ideas of the soul ", it institutes Emile¹⁸'s natural religion, i.e. the primary feeling of the spectacle of nature  it causes and is caused, it accomplishes and originates¹⁹.

A pedagogical device?

In the Émile itself, this experience of the spectacle is prepared for in Book III by the episode in the forest of Montmorency. Jean-Jacques has taught Émile the notion of utility :

" What good is that? That is now the sacred word, the decisive word between him and me in all the actions of our lives: that is the question that inevitably follows all his questions on my part, and which serves as a brake on the multitude of silly and tedious questions with which children tirelessly and fruitlessly exhaust all those around them. " (OC IV 446).

But it doesn't take long for the pupil to turn the restriction against his tutor  from now on, it's impossible to give him the slightest instruction in geography, or astronomy  Émile, who doesn't see how it could be useful to him, refuses to take any interest. So his tutor decides to lose him in the forest of Montmorency.

" At last we sit down to rest, to deliberate. Emile, whom I suppose raised as another child, does not deliberate, he cries ; he does not know that we are at the gate of Montmorenci and that a simple copse hides him from us ; but this copse is a forest for him, a man of his stature is buried in bushes. " (OC IV 448-9)

The beginning of the experiment is, once again, an obscure tableau. Émile sees nothing, can see nothing : a simple copse, however, steals his view of Montmorency, where room and board await him. The coppice acts as a screen, stealing the image  the initial experience is one of vision prevented, blocked. Jean-Jacques then puts Émile on the right track:

Emile's first experience is that of a blocked vision.

" It's noon ? This is precisely the time we were observing the position of the forest yesterday from Montmorenci. If we could similarly observe from the forest the position of Montmorenci ? ...
Emile.
Yes ; but yesterday we could see the forest, and from here we can't see the town.
Jean-Jacques.
That's the trouble... If we could do without seeing it to find its position...
[...]
Emile.
That's true  all you have to do is look for the opposite of the shadow. Oh voilà le sud, voilà le sud ! Surely Montmorenc is on this side  let's look on this side.
Jean-Jacques.
You may be right ; let's take this path through the woods.

The spectacle of the city unfolds after the defeated shadow, turned against itself to point the way. The enjoyment of the spectacle is the enjoyment of this ambivalent relationship with the shadow, which refers back to the primary obscuration of the gaze and at the same time opens up to the mastery of places through the use of acquired abstract knowledge. Enjoyment in nature, at the end of a long walk whose exhaustion has been skilfully programmed by the preceptor; but also operatic enjoyment, in front of the sight change of the scenery, making appear, in the engraving after Moreau le jeune²⁰, the familiar steeple behind the threatening shadow of the forest. 

The spectacle here is again that of an apparition-disappearance, a aphanisis, from which a discourse becomes possible : " astronomy is good for something "  a certain scientific discourse becomes audible for Émile. So it's not just a matter of working with the negativity of images, an initial experience of blurring and obscuring that makes the show possible. This negativity, these empty or disappointing pictures, must have been arranged according to a certain project²¹ :

" Or be sure that he will not forget the lesson of this day for the rest of his life ; instead of if I had only supposed all this to him in his room, my speech would have been forgotten by the next day. One must speak as much as one can through actions and only say what one cannot do. " (OC IV 451)

It is the preceptor who has prepared the reports²² that Émile establishes to find his way back : it is these reports that prepare the conclusion Émile draws, that astronomy is good for something. Émile is caught in a device, whose pedagogical effectiveness is far more powerful than that of discourse. But this device, in itself, is not specifically pedagogical. It's the one in which every show is caught and pursued, unfolding into a thought experiment.

In the same way in Book IV, for the vicar, the spectacle of nature leads to the perception of relationships : without relationships, vision remains a fragmentary, scattered image  there is no spectacle :

" To see two objects at once is not to see their relations, nor to judge their differences  to apperceive several objects apart from each other is not to number them. I can have at the same time the idea of a large stick and a small stick without comparing them, without judging that one is smaller than the other, just as I can see my whole hand at once without counting my fingers. [...]
Whether we give this or that name to the force of my mind that brings together and compares my sensations  whether we call it attention, meditation, reflection, or whatever we like  always it is true that it is in me and not in things, that it is I alone who produce it, although I only produce it on the occasion of the impression that objects make on me. [
I am therefore not merely a sensory and passive being, but an active and intelligent being, and whatever philosophy may say, I will dare to claim the honor of thinking. " (OC IV  572-3)

It's necessary to move from fingers to hands, from arranged paintings to the heard scene. Whether or not a preceptor organizes this passage, the advent of the spectacle, the oceanic apprehension of the visible presupposes beforehand the active perception of the relationships between things and, to give them meaning, the intense activity of the mind. The experience of the spectacle therefore not only conditions the production of discourse  it comes about through " this force of my mind which brings together and compares my sensations " and constitutes the form of thought.

Thought and paranoia

The spectacle as a form of Rousseauist thought : the formula may seem paradoxical, when we think of the strong condemnation of the Lettre à D'Alembert, even if, as we shall have understood, this spectacle there, of and in nature, has nothing to do with a critique that targets the moral spring of plays and the worldly use of urban entertainment venues²³.

Or it is indeed the same scenario that repeats itself from text to text. At the beginning of the first dialogue of Rousseau juge de Jean Jaques, Rousseau develops before the François the allegory of an ideal world whose inhabitants provide him with the model of himself, author of Émile and Héloïse.

" Figure, then, an ideal world similar to our own, and nevertheless quite different. Nature there is the same as on our earth, but the economy is more sensitive, the order is more marked, the spectacle more admirable  the forms are more elegant, the colors more vivid, the odors more suave, all the objects more interessans. All of nature is so beautiful that its contemplation inflames souls with love for such a touching picture, and inspires them with the desire to contribute to this beautiful system, the fear of disturbing its harmony, and from this is born an exquisite sensitivity that gives those who are endowed with it immediate pleasures, unknown to hearts that the same contemplations have not aroused. " (OC I 668)

To bring reality into representation, we must begin by denying reality  " Let us begin, then, by discarding all facts ", proclaimed the introduction to the second discourse (OC III 132)  " Figure, then, an ideal model " constitutes a sort of replica and echo. Allegory places one or more images before the reader's eye, but at the same time denies them, bars them as unreal : " I search uselessly in my head for what there can be in common between the fantastic beings you describe and the monster we were talking about earlier ", the Frenchman will soon grumble. A world " similar to ours, and nevertheless quite different " : the allegorical world refers to our world, and at the same time differs radically from it, distorted by the hypersensitive apprehension of reality shared by its inhabitants, or rather its unique inhabitant, Jean-Jacques. From this impossible, unassimilable world, Rousseau sets up the ideal focus of an admirable spectacle, a tableau laid out for immediate enjoyment. Shapes, colors, smells, objects blossom in the negative frame of an unreal allegory, itself elicited in reaction to the abject liminal evocation of the " abominable man ", the " soul of mud ", the " perverse man ", the " moral corpse ".

The ideal world emerges as the negation of negation : an unreal allegory in counterpoint to an abominable portrait, it returns to the real through this double reversal, this aphanisis. This is where a certain language is made and recognized, the style and distinctive signs of Rousseau's language :

" Beings so singularly constituted must necessarily express themselves differently from ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not bear in the expression of their feelings and ideas the imprint of these modifications. [...] It is a characteristic sign which initiates recognize among themselves, and what gives great value to this sign, so little known and even less used, is that it cannot be counterfeited" (OC I 672).

Language is made visible in the spectacle of allegory. It manifests itself as a trace, an imprint of the modification of the real by which allegory is defined, that is, of the difference that the spectacle makes work, of the double negativity of the image that turns and turns on itself. In the Dialogues , this imprint, this difference by which Rousseauist discourse and thought are constituted from the allegorical spectacle, takes on the dramatic dimension of a paranoid schize, splitting the subjective instance into two antagonistic fragments, " the Author of Books and the Author of Crimes " (p. 674), Rousseau and Jean-Jacques. But this psychotic split was always already there  of the real man and the metaphysical man, of the mystic and the renegade, of the man of desire and the impotent, of the allegorical angel and the perverse monster.

The show, by orchestrating the interplay of relationships that thought establishes, reconciles this ever-present split with the enjoyment of a unity held at the edge of the abyss of aphanisis. Only the detour of fiction, its lure and its clouds, can enable this marvelous exercise in lucidity to unfold its signs and discourse above the abyss of a psychic collapse that always lurks.

Notes