Ankersmit Pygmalion Blade Runner Actor

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Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the theatre and

on representation
Frank Ankersmit
a
Groningen University
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Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 7:3, 315-339
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Rethinking History 7:3 (2003), pp. 315339
Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the theatre

and on representation1
Frank R. Ankersmit
Groningen University
1 Introduction. Blade Runner
The film Blade Runner (1982) tells us the story of a number of human beings
that were created by genetic manipulation they are called replicants in the
film refusing to perform any longer the very dangerous tasks for which they
Downloaded by [Waseda University] at 03:56 04 February 2013
had been made. They decide to revenge themselves on the society that had so
recklessly exploited them. The blade runner Deckard is asked to take the
replicants out of operation, i.e. to eliminate them. This is a very dangerous
task since the Tyrell Corporation that produced the replicants had been very
careful to make the replicants out of the very best genetic human material
available, so that they truly are both physically and mentally James Bonds
equals, so to say, if not his superiors. Moreover, the genetic engineers of the
Tyrell Corporation are well aware that human feelings, emotions and
reactions are absolutely required for a human beings optimal functioning and
that the replicants therefore should also excel in these respects if they are to
accomplish their superhuman assignments in space and elsewhere. The
replicants therefore are no mere robots, with a superhuman talent for one
well-defined kind of task; neither are they mere anatomical and psychological
patchworks of a number of individual components as had been the case with
Mary Wollstonecrafts Monster of Frankenstein they are truly ber-
menschen with capacities and a human dignity often exceeding by far those
of ordinary human beings.
Nevertheless, Deckard ultimately accomplishes his task of taking the repli-
cants out of operation though only after Roy, the leader of the group of the
revolutionary replicants, had succeeded in murdering Tyrell,2 the genetic
engineer who had been responsible for their production. A sizeable part of
the plot of the book is devoted to the question of how humanity as
personified here by Deckard may succeed in gaining the victory over those
products of its own hand and intelligence that are definitely superior to itself.
Will the maker always and necessarily remain superior to his products (in
science and the arts) or not? That is the arresting question posed in this part
of the film. Obviously, insofar as the film suggests a negative answer, there is
also a theological dimension to the question. Maybe we can do better than
God, our Maker, after all.
Together with Blue Velvet, Blade Runner is ordinarily seen as the best
Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/1364252032000135283
316 Frank R. Ankersmit
example of the postmodernist film, and there are several good arguments for
this view. First, postmodernist themes already announce themselves in the
dcor against which the film has been set. The dcor is the Los Angeles of
2019; and it becomes clear that the city has transformed itself into the
postmodernist city par excellence. Los Angeles is in the film, even more than
it presently is already, one gigantic suburbia, a city without a centre; a horrid
extrapolation of the Los Angeles as described by theorists such as Edward
Soja or Mike Davis (Davis 1992; Soja 1995). If postmodernism rejects each
form of essentialism, each attempt to construct hierarchies in terms of the
important and the unimportant, this centreless city is the perfect architectural
metaphor of postmodernism. Moreover, if the huge buildings in the city
display a chaotic mixture of all the architectural styles since the days of the
pharaohs, this too is in perfect agreement with postmodernisms propensities
towards eclecticism. This stylistic eclecticism also has its counterpart in how
all the races of humanity have been mixed together in the population
inhabiting this postmodernist metropolis though the large percentage of
Asians suggests how the makers of the film requires us to think of how the
notion of the Pacific Rim will become actual reality in the near future.3
Finally, the makers of the film have clearly not intended to present our
postmodernist future as the relaxed and pleasant yuppie-world that one
ordinarily associates with postmodernism: empty warehouses and aban-
doned industrial plants drip with leaking rain. Mist swirls, rubbish piles up,
infrastructures are in a state of disintegration that makes the pot-holes and
failing bridges of contemporary New York look mild by comparison. Punks
and scavengers roam among the garbage, stealing whatever they can; thus
Harveys characteristic of this disconsolate postmodernist utopia (Harvey
1990: 310).
Nevertheless, on a closer look we can discern even here a theme much
favoured by postmodernists. For there is a striking contrast between this
desolate world constituting the daily reality of ordinary people on the one
hand and, on the other, the inter-planetary space where the replicants have
to perform the hyper-sophisticated and highly technical but extremely
dangerous tasks for which they had been constructed. The suggestion is that
this centrelessness of our postmodernist societies has driven to the periphery
all that requires our attention and that truly is of importance. Our post-
modernist contemporary societies resemble the Crab-nebula; the explosion of
the centre has thrown a ring of impetuous mass ever and ever deeper into
space, while the old centre was now transformed into thin emptiness.
Pondering this familiar postmodernist claim, political philosophers might
like to see here a metaphor of what has happened in the domain of politics.
For in a similar way the modern democratic state tends to abandon and
neglect its central tasks as inherited from the past and to devote all its energy
Rousseau and Diderot 317
and attention to a lunatic fringe of preoccupations that ordinarily are of

little interest to the citizen. Just as the postmodern city no longer has a centre
and has disintegrated into a number of suburbs and shopping malls, so did
the state abandon its interest in education, the infrastructure, public safety,
efficient and affordable jurisdiction or a minimum degree of social justice.
Since then it has invested most of its energy in the effort to obtain a foothold
in the citizens private sphere which used to be outside of politics. The
immixture in the citizens private life has now become the states preoccupa-
tion to a far greater extent than in the past. And we need think only of the
sort of debate going on between the liberals and the communitarians to see
that contemporary political philosophy serves here as the states most
welcome ideological aid: these political philosophies aim at the edification of

the citizens private self so that he will cause the state no trouble (and so there
is, ironically, a peculiar postmodernist odour around these apparently so
modernist discussions in contemporary Anglo-Saxon political philosophy
insofar as it repeats the states strategy to move away from the basics of
government to the citizens mind). In sum, politics nowadays aims less at the
solution of social and political conflicts recognized as such by the majority of
the citizenry, than at obliterating all previous clear and accepted demarcations
between what is and what is not politics. In the way that the centre of the
postmodern city is everywhere and nowhere, so is the modern state both
everywhere and nowhere. And this certainly makes the state feel so comfort-
able at present. For being invisible is the democratic states main aim, as
Tocqueville already recognized and being at once everywhere and nowhere
is, obviously, a most recommendable strategy for anyone or any institution
trying to achieve this paradoxical aim.
But most typically postmodernist is, of course, the theme of the replicants.
But before coming to this, a further remark on the conflict between
modernism and postmodernism may be helpful. We should realize that
modernism, in spite of all its anti-metaphysical rhetoric, has, in fact, always
been looking for the heart and the essence of (all things in) reality. In this
context one need only think of these two show-pieces of modernism: science
and twentieth-century abstract art. Modernism was not so much anti-
metaphysical as convinced that modern science and modern art are far better
instruments for penetrating the secrets of reality than such a hopeless and
notably unreliable discipline as traditional metaphysics. The conflict between
science and metaphysics has been so fierce since it is a quarrel between
brothers; science is, in fact, a continuation of traditional metaphysics, though
with incomparably better and more effective means (hence the difference
between Aristotle and Einstein). But both science and metaphysics had the
pretension to give an account of the nature of reality and we could describe
modernism as the kind of metaphysics arguing that science will be more
successful in this task than Stoic, Platonistic, Aristotelian metaphysics and so

on. Of course we should distinguish between science and modernism as
defined above: for science does not need modernism (nor any variant of
metaphysics, since it is an alternative metaphysics itself), modernism is
merely sciences standard-bearer and the most enthusiast reporter of its
unequalled success story.
However, from this perspective it could be argued that postmodernism, far
from being modernisms enemy, is, in fact, its more adequate and more
convincing successor. This is so because it formulated expressis verbis the
kind if metaphysics that had always been implicitly present in modernism
already. For science has taught us that the ultimate truth about the world
cannot be found in, or equated with, some essence to be discerned in all of

reality (such as Stoic Reason, matter, the idea and so on had always
attempted to do); rather, we should accept all things in reality in their concrete
multiformity and investigate them as such. Indeed, traditional metaphysics
had always been in search of some centre or kernel, with which the essence
of reality could be identified but science has never had any patience with
these Stoic, materialist or idealist centres or kernels. Science investigated
reality in its infinite multiformity and was always prepared to see an impor-
tant secret in even the most insignificant detail (think of Leeuwenhoeck
looking through his primitive microscope at unicellulars in a drop of water,
think of Mendel in the garden of his convent, or of the biochemist patiently
unravelling DNAs secrets). Science resembles Los Angeles rather than
London, so to speak. In both science and modernism (as proposing the
metaphysical ideology of science) we can therefore observe a movement away
from these traditional (metaphysical) centres but, with the important qual-
ification, that this certainly did not in the least imply a surrendering of the
old metaphysical aspiration to penetrate into the deepest secrets of reality.
From this perspective both the anti-centrism of postmodernism and the
postmodernist thesis that reality has neither essence nor kernel are a putting
into words and a further radicalization of what had always been present in
modernism already namely, modernisms pretension to account for science.
In this way, then, it could thus be said that postmodernism is the meta-
physical (sub-)conscience of both modernism and science.
Probably because it is less balmy about the anti-metaphysical rhetoric of
modernism, postmodernism has made no bones about putting the old meta-
physical question of the nature of things on the philosophers agenda again.
Although it is undoubtedly true that because of this new anti-centrism of
postmodernism, the task of having to answer that old question again will be
far more difficult than when one was asking oneself together with the old
metaphysicians of yore, for example, the question whether matter or the idea
is realitys essence. This was a most orderly and convenient problem that one
could speculate about most agreeably. The postmodernist, however, now

decides to confront the far more refractory and disorderly problem of how
to penetrate philosophically and metaphysically a reality that effectively
resists all effort to reduce it to some centre or kernel and that can only be
encountered in a chaotic ring of epiphenomena. It is as if the orderly world
of the absolute monarch had been exchanged for that of the pitiable contem-
porary politician qui veut contenter tout le monde et son pre.
We will now be able to understand the postmodernists fascination for
aesthetics in general and for aesthetic representation and historical in
particular. For it is the traditional task of the artist (think of the portrait
painter) to discover the nature of things in reality on the basis of an indermi-
nate number of small trifles, idiosyncrasies and apparently irrelevant details.

So it is with the historian and with historical representation, especially if
contrasted to speculative philosophies of history such as had been proposed
by a Hegel or a Marx. For it typically is the (essentially aesthetic) problem of
the historian to discover a hitherto unnoticed pattern in a chaos of seemingly
incoherent and apparently unrelated details. The aesthetic representation of
reality in art and history is therefore the postmodernists best guide in his
problem to discover the nature of things not in some essence or kernel but in
a chaos of epiphenomena. From this perspective science and aesthetics have
a shared origin in their common resistance against the centres and kernels of
traditional metaphysics. And it also follows from the foregoing that if post-
modernism differs from modernism because of its aestheticism, precisely this
makes postmodernism into a better and more useful ally of science than
modernism had ever been.
2 The aestheticism of postmodernism and the notion of identity
However, the postmodernists acceptance of aesthetics as our guide (and

method) in the metaphysical quest for the nature of things cannot fail to have
its consequences for the nature of this quest and of its findings.4 More
specifically, this is where science and postmodernism as its philosophical
counterpart or expression will differ and where they even ought to differ in
agreement with the different aims of science and of aesthetics (as the main
weapon in postmodernisms philosophical arsenal). Science gives us descrip-
tions, explanations and theories about reality; aesthetics, in contrast, offers
us representations of reality. This explains why the notion of representation
must be central to postmodernism (and where it will differ from modernisms
focus on epistemology) and why a few words about representation will be
necessary in the present context (Ankersmit 2001: ch. 1).
Let us begin with recalling that according to the substitution theory of
representation as defended by, for example, Edmund Burke, Ernst

Gombrich and Arthur Danto a representation is a substitute or a replace-
ment for what it represents. Recall the etymology of the word representation:
a re-presentation makes present what is absent and can succeed in doing
this by taking the representeds place, hence by being its substitute or replace-
ment. It follows that, because of this, resemblance, or a mimetic imitation, is
not a necessary requirement for representation; demanding that resemblance
and imitation should be the logical heart of representation would bring us
back to epistemology and modernism again. For criteria for resemblance
would tie together representation and what it represents in much the same
way again that epistemology had always attempted to tie language and the
world together. But Gombrichs well-known hobby-horse does not resemble

a real horse and can very well function for the child as a representation of a
real horse even if the two differ dramatically from each other and if their
resemblances are far less conspicuous than their differences. Hence, we may
expect that there ordinarily will be some evident differences between the
represented and its representation.
Now, about these differences we can say that, within the logic of all
representation, they will suggest where to find the non-substitutable and non-
representable authenticity of the represented. For, obviously, what is present
in the represented but not in its representation will show us the original,
represented objects authenticity and, furthermore, in what respect it differs
from all those other objects that may be identical with it or that could
function as its substitute from the perspective of representation. Our con-
clusion must be that from that the perspective of representation and, hence,
also from that of postmodernism it does not belong to the true and authentic
nature of the human being to have a certain length, weight or physical
appearance. For at Mme Tussauds we will come across representations of
well-known human beings that share these same properties with the VIPs they
represent. But it does belong to the nature of a human being to be a living
creature that is capable of rational thought for until now Mme Tussaud and
her heirs did not succeed in copying these properties of human individuals.
Hence, the nature of a thing is determined by what its representation is
not, or could not be, either because of a logical or of a more circumstantial
fact about the relationship between the represented and its representation.
But in this paradoxical way it succeeds nevertheless in defining a things
nature and identity. Two conclusions may be derived from this. First, one of
the reasons why we need representations is that they enable us to obtain and
to express an insight into the nature of things. That is why we have artistic
representation, historical representation and political representation. But
elsewhere representation is no less important. For representation defines
reality; and that is why we could not possibly do without it. Representation
is, so to say, the kind of lay-metaphysics that we all practise because it simply
is indispensable for our daily life and for our orientation in our social world.
However, if representation gives us these insights into the nature of reality
and of the things contained by it, it paradoxically does so thanks to its being
different from what it represents. Self-evidently, this argument is basically the
same as Dantos argument about the Brillo Boxes I have discussed elsewhere
(Ankersmit 2001, ch. 8). At stake here was Arthur Dantos well-known
attempt to define the nature of art by comparing two indiscernible Brillo
Boxes of which one was on display in the museum and the other at the
grocerys. Thus insight into the nature of Warhols Brillo Box, i.e. its most
crucial property of being a work of art, became possible thanks to its being
different from what it represents (as far as their respective locations were
concerned). The question of what something is, what its nature is, is not
answered by referring to the thing itself, but by taking into account the
properties of other things standing to it in the relation of a represented work
to its representation.
Up until now my argument did, in fact, not go beyond Dantos. But this
brings us to a second, and somewhat alarming conclusion, not envisaged in
Dantos famous reflections on what we can learn from Warhols Brillo Boxes
about the nature of representation. For it also follows from the foregoing that
representations will, to a certain extent, co-determine what something is;
hence, other things than T itself (i.e. representations of T) must be taken into
account in order to establish what T is like. There is thus a kind of flowing
over of the properties of these other things into the set of properties of T,
and thus T can no longer be said to be the sovereign lord and master of its
own identity that we naturally expect it to be. This is alarming, as will become
clear, if these things happen to be human individuals. For the implication
would be that an individuals identity would depend at least partly on what
other individuals exist, insofar as these other individuals may be said to
represent him. In law and in politics this may actually take place. Both in law
and in politics somebody may represent me and then my own identity may
vary with the person who represents me. Thus under such circumstances my
(legal or political) identity is not wholly in my own power, and is not
something as inextricably tied up with myself as are my weight or length. This
goes beyond the trivial observation that in law and politics much, if not all,
will depend on how well you have been represented by your representative,
since it is not the sameness or similarity between yourself and who represents
you in which this flowing over of properties announces itself, but in where
your representative differs from you. From this perspective you can be said
to be what or who you are not.
That this unpleasant and counter-intuitive state of affairs cannot be
avoided becomes all the more clear if we apply the foregoing argument to one
and the same individual at different phases of his own life. Individuals may
differ dramatically at one phase in their life from what they were or will be
like at other such phases. The child differs from the adolescent, and the
adolescent is physically and psychologically differently constituted from the
adult. Not sameness of properties through change, but differences as enumer-
ated in a historical representation of that individuals life, and as embodying
his representational identity are then decisive. In sum, in this context our
identity may be said to have its logical foundation in the history, in the
historical representation that can be given of how and where we differ from
our previous or later self at different phases in our lives. Once again, repre-
sentational identity has its foundation not in sameness but in difference, and
in a flowing over of properties from one thing to another thing or from one
phase in the history of a thing to another phase.
We may also observe here the affinities of historism and postmodernism
(Ankersmit 1994, ch. 7). For the greatest intellectual triumph of historicism
and where it introduced us into a completely new world has been its
readiness to grant to (historical) identity a logical priority to ontology and to
the notion of things in reality. The historicists recognized that historians often
discern identities in the past (such as the Renaissance, the Industrial
Revolution of the labor movement) in the absence of things or objects
existing prior to the use of such notions. And to the extent that we could say
that things such as the Renaissance do exist, they owe their existence to the
use of these concepts. And insofar as these concepts embody a representation
of the Renaissance and so on, we will see here a most dramatic illustration
of the postmodernist thesis expounded above of this flowing over of
properties from a representation to what it represents. In fact, things such
as the Renaissance could not even be said to exist in the absence of their
representations. So here this flowing over of properties between representa-
tion and what it represents has even carried the category of existence from
the former to the latter.
3 Replicants and ordinary human beings
Not surprisingly, the historicist/postmodernist insight into this flowing over

of representations into what they represent also has an important role to play
in such a paradigmatically postmodernist film as Blade Runner. The insight
announces itself on different levels. First, the replicants differ from ordinary
human beings in that they function for a period of only four years. A
restriction to this short period was decided on by the engineers of the Tyrell
Corporation in order to prevent the replicants from organizing subversive
activities.5 Second, as might be expected, postmodernism will tend to draw
our attention to the insight by emphasizing it as much as possible. This

expectation is confirmed by the fact that in the film such a transmission of
properties from the replicants (the representation) to human beings (the
represented) actually takes place: for one of Tyrells genetic engineers suffers
from the disease of accelerated decrepitude due to which his life expectancy
tends to become reduced to that of the replicants. Clearly, we see here this
paradoxical flowing over of properties from the representation to the repre-
sented that we discussed above.
This brings me to a difference between the replicants and ordinary human
beings that the replicants seem forever unable to overcome and which there-
fore permits a blade runner such as Deckard to identify replicants. For unlike
ordinary human beings the replicants have no personal history reaching back
into childhood and adolescence; so this seems to create a barrier between the
represented (i.e. ordinary human beings) and their representations (i.e. the
replicants) that the latter will never be able to overcome. Of course the fact
is known to the replicants themselves as well, and in order to mislead the
blade runners they try to hide it by counterfeit photographs that were
ostensibly made during their alleged youth. In this way the postmodernist
logic of representation takes another step. Having a life history is not the
crucial datum for distinguishing between representation (replicant) and the
represented (ordinary human beings) only actual proof of this in terms of
authentically looking photographs may really convince. Put differently, not a
(life) history itself, but the representation of this history (in terms of photo-
graphs) is required for the distinction. So representation (and not the repre-
sented) is itself the final judge when we have to distinguish between a
representation and what it represents.
Further, as is emphasized in the film, it follows that the distinction between
replicants and human beings has thus become infinitesimally small. For in
contrast to a real life story itself, a representation of a life story is easy enough
to counterfeit. In agreement with this train of thought the film ends with a
love affair between Deckard and Rachel (a kind of postmodernist Galathea);
Rachel was one of those replicants who understood that the fabrication of a
believable life story would be the valid passport for an entry into the world
of ordinary human beings such as Deckards. It is therefore paradoxically
the inevitable gap between representation and represented (i.e. between a
photograph and the past that is or is not truly represented by it) enabling the
replicants to successfully bridge this same gap again (i.e. the gap between
replicants and ordinary human beings). So gleicht sich alles aus, as the
Germans would put it with an untranslatable phrase.
4 Rousseau on the theatre and on representation
Many readers will now probably object that all this is nothing but idle
postmodernist Gedankenspielerei inspired by our recent capacity of genetic
manipulation and that the makers of Blade Runner have cleverly exploited
this fact. Of course there is much truth in this: it is the old question whether
the fictions devised by novelists or film-makers should really be taken
seriously by philosophers. For novels and so on inform us primarily about
human imagination and what we can envisage as being possible, and though
nobody in his right senses could possibly doubt the (philosophical) impor-
tance of this faculty of ours itself, it does not automatically follow from this
that its products must always contain something that is of any philosophical
interest.
We should realize ourselves, however, that these replicants are a post-
modernist variant on a much older and venerable theme that of the theatre
and of the relationship between the theatre and reality. For just like the
replicant the actor is not whom he seems to be, while his acting is better and
more convincing to the extent that his deceit is less manifest. In addition,
just like the replicants, the player confronts us with the problem of the
distinction between representation and the represented when we allow the
two, in agreement with Dantos method of the indiscernibles, to come as close
to each other as possible. Of course the differences between the player and
the replicant are no less striking: unlike the replicant the actor is just as much
of a human being as the persons represented by him. And his representation
lasts for only a few hours and not for the four years that the replicants so
much tried to exceed in order to become real human beings instead of
remaining mere representations. Moreover, the player should tempt his
audience to forget about the distinction between the represented and its
representation by his acting, but never surrender to the temptation himself
I shall return to this below. However, despite these differences, this flowing
over of properties from a representation to what it represents and vice versa
may be observed for play-acting no less than for the replicants we discussed
above. To a certain extent the actor himself is or becomes his role and vice
versa though much, if not all, depends on what content is given to this
phrase to a certain extent. This is what we shall discuss below.
It need not surprise us therefore that the kinds of worries the Tyrell
engineers had about their product find their counterpart in what has been
written by several authors about the theatre. Rousseau is undoubtedly the
best known among these authors who tend to be suspicious of the theatre
and of play-acting. In his Lettre sur les spectacles6 Rousseau argues that the
theatre may threaten our moral integrity since we may forget who we really
are when confronted with a pseudo-reality consisting of representation only.
For the danger exists that we will lose ourselves in these representations and
that this flowing over of properties may occur and that played such a central
role in Blade Runner. We should also recall in this context that if Sennett has
been right in his magisterial study of the emergence of the modern self,
Rousseaus worries must have been, for him and for his contemporaries,
much more than a mere academic problem. For in the eighteenth century the
theatre and social reality itself were much closer to each other than is
presently the case, or even than at any other phase in the history of Western
society. Sennett demonstrates in his The Fall of Public Man that public life in
the eighteenth century was essentially theatrical and, moreover, that it was
often experienced as such: there is a final question to ask about the public
realm of the 18th Century. What kind of man inhabited it? The people of the
time gave a clear answer to this question: he was an actor, a performer
(Sennett 1978: 107).
Eighteenth-century social life had transformed the age-old metaphor of the
theatrum mundi into a literal truth. Nowhere is this aspect of the social life
of the period more manifest than in the numerous festal days in eighteenth-
century Venice when everybody went around wearing masks hiding their own
identity or exchanging it for somebody elses. One need only think here of
the paintings by Longhi, Canaletto, Guardi or by Giandomenico Tiepolo.
And generally speaking, the eighteenth-century personality was fond of every-
thing having to do with disguise, masquerades and the theatre. This fascina-
tion originated from a vague but all-pervasive awareness that public life
consisted of the enactment of a number of social roles and that ones social
success depended upon ones talent to play these roles naturally and persua-
sively. Eighteenth-century social life expressed what one might call a nomi-
nalist conception of the self according to which there is not a real or deeper
self underlying all these roles and that inevitably is violated in our effort to
fulfil the social roles that public life desires us to play. That deep self, which
is hidden beneath the many different masks we wear, has been an invention
of Romanticism and down to the present day we deeply cherish this
Romantic self.
For it was Romanticism that postulated a self which could never
completely and fully realize itself in its social roles, for which its social
manifestation was always a painful truncation of the self and a vexing
violation of our authenticity. For what we are could never be made visible,
not even to ourselves in our public presentation of ourselves. Obviously,
psychology and psychoanalysis are the fruits of this romantic conception of
the self and as such the typical exponents of post-revolutionary bourgeois
society. The eighteenth-century gentleman would never have conceived of the
idea that his identity should be some hidden entity that only the professional
psychologist could bring to light after a painstaking, lengthy and sustained
effort. He was the person whom he was perceived publicly to be, coinciding
completely with his social role and proud of this exclusively social determi-
nation of his personality.
Since Romanticism, our social self, the presentation of the self in everyday
and public life, has been reduced to a faint and distorted reflection of all the
riches that were supposed to lie hidden in the inner and private sanctum of
our pre-social self and from this perspective one may well see, with Sennett,
Romanticism as the fall of public man. For since Romanticism the social
and public world is a mere shadow world of our private existence. Social
reality now disintegrated into a galaxy of private realities, and where each
individual knew that he was enclosed within the intimacy of his own stellar
or planetary self. The commensurability and interchangeability of all the

social roles that one had played in the theatre of the ancien rgime had
now been exchanged for the incommensurability and the irreplacable unicity
of our private self that, much like an oysters pearl, was hidden beneath all
our social manifestations. The notion of the equality and that of the inequality
of human beings now exchanged the domain proper to each of them. Since
Romanticism, our private identities are radically and totally unequal; but
because of this inauthenticity that we all share in our social manifestation,
we are basically all each others equals in our public role here we are mere
actors all hiding our real selves behind our interchangeable social roles; this
is then the fundamental fact about us, a fact that is no less true of you than
of me, or of anybody, and that thus suggests our basic equality. Under the
ancien rgime one coincided with the social role one played, and the
inequality and diversity of these roles were no less than the unlimited
inequality of the roles that the playwright might imagine for the dramatis
personae of his play, whereas behind all these social roles a completely
uninteresting and stereotyped character was hidden. A stereotyped self of
which the contents were defined by religion and our relationship to God, or
by the Enlightenments philosophical anthropology and the passions, desires
and fears described by it.7
Rousseau, who had an unparalleled talent to endow his own personal
problems with such world historical proportions that everybody having read
him now felt obligated to turn into his inner self in order to discover there
the same kind of problem this Rousseau has, as is well known, contributed
more than anybody else to Sennetts fall of public man and to the cult of
that romantic, private self which would persist up until the present day. The
emancipation of a still embryonic individual self into the enigmatic universe
that it became since then, and the depreciation of the public realm as a
domain of mere appearances where nobody has the right to consider himself
better than anybody else, resulted to a large extent from Rousseaus personal
incapacity to feel at ease in the highly sophisticated and artificial social world
of eighteenth-century France. And since this social world seemed to him to

be dominated so much by the theatrum mundi metaphor, it was obvious to
him that in play-acting lay the key to his own incapacity to adapt satisfac-
torily to society. It was, he felt, play-acting that corrupted the authenticity of
the individual and on behalf of which he had to go to war with the social
realities of the ancien rgime. In this way Rousseaus psychopathology is
undoubtedly part of world history, and the historian investigating it studies
a topic no less important than liberalism or social democracy.
What is the talent of the play-actor, thus Rousseau, but the art of
dissimulation, to play the role of another person than one really is, to appear
differently from what one feels like, to feign passion while one is indifferent,
to say other things than those one really believes as easily as if one sincerely
believed them, and to forget about ones own place in order to take somebody
elses (Rousseau 1762a: 134). Indeed, all the things that the self-conscious
Rousseau was particularly bad at. But no less interesting is how Rousseau
sought to rationalize his discomfort with eighteenth-century society. His
argument is that play-acting must necessarily effect in the actor a dissociation
of the person he really is from the role he is expected to play and vice versa
and this he considers the main moral danger of the theatre and of play-
acting. For the result might easily be that one forgets ones original, authentic
self (though it must be added, of course, that Rousseau first had to postulate
the existence of this authentic Romantic self, before he could make us worry
about the actors maltreatment of it).
What state of mind must the play-actor assimilate because of his profession?,
he asked himself and the answer is: a mixture of inferiority, of deceit, of a
ridiculous arrrogance, and of an undignified soiling of ones soul, and which
enables him to impersonate everybody, except the noblest amongst them, that
is, of the self that he has so iresponsibly forsaken.
(Rousseau 1762a: 134)
The representation, the role played by the actor, the simulacrum, thus gains
a preponderance over the individuality of the actor itself. Put differently, the
derivative and artificial world of the representation obtains a priority to the
represented, or to the real.
There is, obviously, a striking resemblance between Rousseaus argument
here and the historicist/postmodernist claim discussed above, that identity
should not be located in some unchangeable essence but in the many different
ways in which something manifested itself in the course of time. But, equally
obviously, in both cases the assessment of this datum is completely different.
What is for the historicist the basis of all historical insight, is for Rousseau
the road to inauthenticity. Apparently Rousseau was already sufficiently a
Romanticist in order to anticipate the historicist conception of identity (as
the representation of difference), but still too much an exponent of the

Enlightenment to be able to accept it.
Rousseau therefore expresses his complete agreement with Platos distrust
of everything having to do with the arts, with rhetoric and with the aesthetic
representation of reality in general. Representation and simulacrum are
condemned by both Plato and Rousseau on behalf of reality: representation
and simulacrum give us mere appearances, while only reality can provide us
with the solid and unshakeable basis for our knowledge of reality: The art
of representing things is quite different from that of acquiring knowledge of
them. The first merely pleases without being informative, the other informs
without pleasing us, says Rousseau. This so doubtful and scorned faculty of
representation is denigrated even further by a most ungenerous Rousseau

(whose literary reputation nevertheless owed much to the numerous and
immensely influential representations in his own literary production):
the representations made by painters, and that are devoid of all reality, achieve
mere appearance with the help of some idle shadows and with some suggestive
simulacra that he wants us to take for the real thing. If there were to be any
truth in these imitations, he ought to have knowledge of the objects he imitates,
and then he should have been a scientist, a craftsman or a physicist before being
a painter.
(Rousseau 1762b: 6, 7)
Thus says Rousseau in this bitter and merciless indictment of the theatre, of
art and representation.
5 Diderot and the paradox of the actor
Diderots conceptions of the theatre are the exact opposite to those of

Rousseau: his views of the theatre are not an attack, but, on the contrary, a
celebration and codification of the eighteenth centurys love of and sympathy
for the theatre. When expounding his views in his essay Paradoxe sur le
comdien, Diderot presents us with the following paradox of play-acting.
The paradox of the actor is that he will only succeed in properly expressing
the emotions of the person or persons whose role he plays on the condition
of not identifying himself with that person or role. Needless to say, this is a
paradox. For we are naturally inclined to suppose that in the heart of the
actor a kind of re-enactment ought to be achieved (to use Collingwoods
well-known terminology) of the emotions that his role designs him to have.
The best interpreter of Othellos role would, within this Collingwoodian
conception of the theatre, be the actor who succeeds, at the appropriate
moment, to ignite in his heart the fire of an all-consuming jealousy and who,
next, is most successful in expressing this overwhelming sentiment on the

stage. Only then, as we tend to think, will the requirements of an optimally
credible representation on the stage have been met for it is only in this way
that this goal of an identity of the represented and its representation can to
a certain extent be achieved. And is there anything more to be desired if this
goal has been realized?
But Diderot has not the slightest sympathy for this Collingwoodian view
of the actor. He points out that everything having to do with the theatre
necessarily is artificial and unnatural and that, therefore, the silliest demand
we could make upon the actor is that he should present us with such a
Collingwoodian accurate copy, or mimesis, of how people generally act under
the kind of circumstances that were devised by the playwright. If ever the
actor were tempted to satisfy the Collingwoodian demand, the result would
not be an effect of naturalness on the contrary, he would be utterly
ridiculous:
but take to the theater-scene your normal conversational tone, your simple way
of expressing yourself, the way you behave at home, all your natural gestures,
and you will find out how utterly unconvincing and helpless you are. You can
do your best to shed tears, but you will be ridiculous, one will laugh at you. It
will not be a tragedy, but a farce that you will be playing. Do you really believe
that the plays of a Corneille, a Racine, a Voltaire or even those of a Shakespeare
could be enacted with a conversational tone and with how you speak when
sitting around your fire-place?
(Diderot 1968: 314)
The reverse is no less true: whoever chooses to behave like an actor in daily
life will be the laughing-stock of his family and friends:
Are you Cinna? Have you ever been Cleopatra, Mrope. Agrippina? Why care
about these people? The Cleopatra, Mrope, Agrippina, and Cinna of the
theatre, have they even been historical realities historiques? No. They are
imaginary phantoms of poetry; and this is already saying too much; they are
the spectres dreamt up by this or that poet. Leave these strange monsters on the
theatre scene with their pathetic movements, their exaggerations and their cries;
they would cut a foolish figure in history itself; and they would even make
people in society burst out with laughter. One would whisper in each others
ear, is that man out of his mind? Where does this Don Quixote come from?
Whats the place where such strange stories are told? What is the planet where
people talk like this?
(Diderot 1968: 315)
The paradox of the theatre therefore is that a certain and well-considered

kind of unnatural behaviour is required in order to achieve a natural
presentation; whereas a natural presentation would make a most unnatural

impression upon the audience. It is, hence, as if theatrical representation
effects a dissociation between two kinds of natural behaviour the natural
behaviour that we display when sitting around our own fireplace, and the
quite different kind of behaviour that is natural on the stage. To each context
corresponds its own variant of natural behaviour or, rather, of behaviour
which is experienced as such. Because of the caesura or discontinuity between
these two contexts of action resulting from the notion and the practice of
representation, the actor must possess the talent to bracket, so to speak, his
proclivity to transpose what is natural within one context to that of the other.
For an ill-considered transposition of normal behaviour to the stage may
endanger the credibility of his play-acting. This does not mean, however, that
the actor should at all times refrain from what is our natural behaviour in
ordinary life. For this line of conduct could also result in exaggeration and
in an unnatural presentation on the stage. It is crucial that the actor is at all
times aware that normal behaviour is an insufficient, though not necessarily
in all cases misleading, compass for what the audience will experience as
authentic and natural behaviour on the stage.
Diderot expresses the idea in the following interesting manner:
a great comedian is neither a piano-forte, nor a harp, nor a clavichord, nor a

violin, nor a cello; no accord is exclusively natural to him, but he will strike the
accord and the tone that is required for his role, and he knows how to adapt
himself to all of them. I have the highest regard of the talent of great comedians:
it is a rare talent, and perhaps even a greater and rarer one than that of the
poet.
(Diderot 1968: 347)
And when Diderot would have lived in our time, he would have been
deeply impressed (as I am myself) by the loudspeakers in our stereo-boxes.
For what is so absolutely fascinating about these most praiseworthy of
modern inventions is their capacity to reproduce just as easily the sound of a
piano, a harp, a harpsichord, a violon or a cello, without there being any kind
of sound that is peculiar or specific to the loudspeakers themselves. There is
no sound that is typical of the loudspeaker itself, and this is where the
loudspeaker differs from all these musical instruments whose sounds it knows
to reproduce so surprisingly well. For though it is true that a clarinet some-
times come quite close to that so typically rumbling sound of the bassoon,
and that organs, in some of their registers, sometimes may uncannily resemble
the sound of a violin, we nevertheless remain aware at all times that these
deviant sounds are not really proper to them. One could well imagine a
philosopher living prior to Edisons invention of the loudspeaker and who
gave us a completely convincing a priori argument that such things as
loudspeakers could never exist. This philosopher would have argued, with
Rousseau, that each potential source or producer of sounds must sui generis
have its natural affinity with a certain type of sound and must therefore
inevitably be less successful in the imitation, reproduction or representation
of other types of sound. It would follow from this ostensibly so very plausible
line of argument that such things as loudspeakers simply could never exist.
Yet science has succeeded in producing this kind of instrument deemed
unthinkable by a priori argument.
Speaking generally, it would be worth the effort to take stock of what
things could not possibly exist on the basis of some kind of a priori argument
while nevertheless their construction proved to be possible in actual (scientific
or social) practice. Such a list would certainly be an interesting and instructive

chapter in the history of the book of philosophical prejudice. For example, if
one would have explained to a Kantian philosopher in the days before
Daguerre and Nipce what kind of thing a photograph is, he may well have
given us an at first sight completely convincing a priori argument demon-
strating that such things are simply impossible. And when examining our
philosophy undergraduate students upon Kants notion of the unity of
apperception we might ask them to develop such a Kantian argument against
the possibility of cameras and photographs in order to find out whether they
have correctly understood Kants argument. Or, to take an example from an
entirely different field, if we could have explained the working of our contem-
porary democracies to a political philosopher who lived prior to 1800 and
asked him, next, to explain why such democracies are impossible, he would
undoubtedly have been quite successful in doing so. For example, in agree-
ment with the kind of fear of democracy generally shared at the time, he
would have pointed out that such a democracy would immediately result in
the grossest injustices and abuses by the majority against political minorities.
And perhaps he would even have conceived of arguments that contemporary
political philosophers, though well acquainted with the workability of
contemporary democracy, would have the greatest difficulty in refuting by
means of purely theoretical argument. In this way the wonders of history and
practice may often exceed what the mind can think of in even its most
ambitious dreams. On the one hand, nothing is more satisfactory and hopeful
than this but, on the other hand, who would have believed in the possibility
of the Holocaust prior to 1940?
6 Rousseau, Diderot and postmodernism
Let us return to the disagreement between Rousseau and Diderot. This

disagreement is all the more interesting since Rousseau, no less than Diderot,
realized that unnaturalness is a condition of convincing play-acting.8 Yet they

derive entirely different conclusions from this shared insight. For Rousseau
discerns here the poisoned source from which the theatre (or representation)
may succeed in a corruption of reality (or the represented). The necessity to
achieve on the stage the effect of the natural by means of the unnatural is,
according to Rousseau, the explanation of why and how truth and nature
may become corrupted by deceit and falsity. This explains, again, why the
theatre can and must have its pernicious effects on the morality of the actor
himself and that of his audience.
It may perhaps surprise us that against precisely this background Rousseau
is closer to postmodernism than Diderot. We must recall that the problem
addressed in a postmodernist film such as Blade Runner concerned the fading

away of real and interesting differences between the replicants and ordinary
human beings. In this way the film raised the problem of what consequences
this fact should have for our conception of the represented (i.e. for human
beings). In our discussion of the film and of representation in general we
found that properties originally belonging exclusively to either the repre-
sented or its representation tended to flow over into the other. At the end of
Blade Runner it was suggested that the replicant Rachels life-span could now
exceed the four years that had originally been allotted to replicants whereas
the genetical engineer Sebastian became infected by the replicants disease of
accelerated decrepitude. Now, one may well say that this flowing over is a
mere whim of the makers of this film; but this is obviously different from
Rousseaus similar observation for his replicants, i.e. actors. It is far from
being an implausible assumption that the actor may in the end become
uncertain about his own identity because of his having to impersonate so
many different persons and characters, it is no less plausible that at least part
of the personality of the actor himself if only his talent for play-acting
will be present in how he plays roles. We will never forget that we have been
looking at Sir Laurence Olivier even though he played so brilliantly the role
of Henry V. In sum, what looked far-fetched in Blade Runner seems to be a
completely correct observation in the case of Rousseau.
But what both arguments had in common is the suggestion that there
should be some kind of navel or spindle which connects the represented to
its representation. Thanks to this navel or spindle the represented and its
representation, or the person of the actor and the roles played by him, all
tend to turn into communicating vessels when coming sufficiently close to
each other. More specifically, thanks to this navel or spindle, the domain of
representation and of mere appearance may get a grasp on the domain of the
represented i.e. on reality itself. And having thus got a hold on reality itself,
representation will distort it and thus achieve the alienation of the self from
its true and real self that Rousseau found so utterly repugnant in all
representation and in the theatre in particular. From here, however, Rousseau

and the postmodernists diverge. Rousseau considers this alleged loss in our
sense of reality to be extremely dangerous and a source of moral corruption,
whereas postmodernists prefer a somewhat more laconical view of the matter.
In fact, they rather seem to fancy this undermining of realitys cognitive and
moral authority. They like to flirt with the idea that reality could never be
more than an illusion, or than a specific representation of reality to which we
have become deeply attached, for one rather arbitrary reason or another and
that therefore we have arrived at substituting for so-called reality itself. The
claim that there should be an objective reality out there apart and inde-
pendent from all representation, a reality hors-texte, they like to scorn as an
old-fashioned and positivist atavism. That such a careless and frivolous

dismissal of the belief in the existence of an objective reality deeply shocked
their so grave and serious-minded opponents (and not only positivists, by the
way), will be easy to understand. In this way postmodernists and their realist
and empiricist detractors are both living in the same philosophical world even
though they inhabit completely different parts of this shared world.
However, with Diderot we enter a completely different world. For none of
this, neither a Rousseauist fear of a corruption of reality by representation
and the theatre, nor postmodernist frivolities, are to be encountered in
Diderot. Diderot has a robust sense of reality and he never experiences any
difficulty in clearly distinguishing between reality or the represented on the
one hand, and its representation or the theatre on the other. Therefore, unlike
Rousseau he never fears the corruption of reality, and especially of the
psychology of the actor, by representations or by the roles the actor has to
play.9 For him there are no navels or spindles to turn reality and its represen-
tation into communicating vessels and that would allow them to mix in a way
that desecrates both. That such a desecration could possibly take place at all
would have been to Diderots mind just as weird as the suggestion that the
Mont Sainte Victoire itself might undergo unexpected metamorphoses
because of the many representations that artists have made of it.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. For why did Rousseau, wittingly
or unwittingly, embrace this communicating vessels model, whereas Diderot
so graciously and effortlessly avoided becoming ensnared in it? The explana-
tion is that Rousseau, precisely due to his unconditional devotion to truth,
authenticity and reality, denied to representation and the theatre any
autonomy in its relationship with the represented and social reality. For
Rousseau the representation should have no presence or existence outside its
being a mere shadow of the represented and reality. For him the representa-
tion should come so close to reality and the represented as to be wholly
indiscernible from them; for him the smallest difference between a represen-
tation and what it represents should immediately awaken our suspicion with
regard to the representation. But whoever argues in this way gets involved in
a strange inconsistency. For, on the one hand, it is emphasized that there is
nothing outside reality or the represented (the realist counterpart of Derridas
(in-)famous dictum), whereas, on the other hand, it is no less emphasized that
reality and the represented are incapable of offering any effective resistance
against the pressure of representation. Paradoxically, Rousseau thus betrayed
rather than served the cause of reality with his requirement that representa-
tions should have no autonomy with regard to the represented and should
therefore be as indiscernible from it as Warhols Brillo Box from a real Brillo
Box. Thus theorists like Rousseau, who begin with denying the autonomy of
representation, will, in the end, find themselves undermining the autonomy
of the represented and of reality. In this way the theorists who believe
themselves to be the staunchest defenders of the interests of reality prove in
the end to be realitys worst traitors.
If, on the contrary, we grant with Diderot to both reality itself and its
representation their own autonomy and do not fear the differences that might
exist between them as insufferable distortions of represented reality, we shall
never be seduced into confusing reality with its representation and then we
need never fear (with Rousseau) the infection of reality by its representation
or to feel free (with the postmodernists) to rob reality of all resistance against
its representations. As Diderot was very well aware, the paradox is the
following. Precisely the person who respects reality so much that he requires
its representation to be as close to it as possible, and that it should be a mere
mimetic imitation of it, precisely this honest and devoted worshipper of
reality as such will see how reality lose its contours in its representations. If,
however, we are not inclined to see in great (with Rousseau) or small (with
the postmodernists) differences between the represented and its representa-
tion an insidious attack on reality and its representation, if we recognize the
autonomy of each of them with regard to the other, only then will a robust
sense of reality be our reward. Just as in Diderots Paradoxe du comdien the
unnaturalness of play-acting is a condition of both the naturalness of play-
acting and of represented reality, so is the recognition of the autonomy of the
represented and of its representation a condition of both a sound sense of
reality and of good representations of reality.
7 A final word: Plato and Aristotle
The debate between the postmodernists and their critics has an even more
illustrious ancestor than the debate between Rousseau and Diderot
expounded above, namely that between Plato and Aristotle. Within Platos
idealism reality itself is already an imperfect reflection of the world of ideas
alles Vergngliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, as Goethe succinctly summarized

Platos idealism at the end of his Faust II and with the aesthetic represen-
tation of an already deceitful reality we will be even removed from the home
of Truth. This is why Plato found the representation of reality no less suspect
than Rousseau and probably even more so.
Aristotle, however, is closer to Diderot, first, because both he and Diderot
consider art and aesthetic representation to be a most valuable supplement
to existing reality. Second, just like Diderot, Aristotle endorses the courageous
and at first sight so counter-intuitive opinion that the whole value of the work
of art lies in the fact that mimesis or aesthetic representation is not an exact
facsimile of the represented. Illustrative is Aristotles compact assertion:
accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable

possibilities (Aristotle 1460a: 26). The idea here is that we have in art and
in representation a different regime of what is natural and unnatural than in
reality itself; for within that regime something may seem natural and even
recommendable to the poet what is impossible in actual reality.10 It is
precisely thanks to this different regime of the (un-)natural that representa-
tion may give us access to a higher truth. For as Aristotles editor Butcher
argues: poetry, he [i.e. Aristotle] means to say, is not concerned with fact,
but with what transcends fact; it represents things which are not, and never
can be in actual experience; it gives us the ought to be; the form that
answers to the true idea (Butcher 1951: 168). This higher truth is a truth
about the nature of (represented) things that can be disclosed thanks only to
their being represented in the way indicated above.
Aristotles notion of the true idea must therefore not be associated with
an ethical imperative (as the ought to be in the quote seems to suggest), nor
with an approximation of Platos ideas, but in a strictly aesthetic sense. It
refers to an aestheticist perfection of how things present themselves to us in
actual reality (Butcher 1951: 151). It was no different for Diderot: for Diderot
there is not some Platonic truth about human behaviour that the actor should
always try to approximate as much as possible. The playwrights intentions
should be his guide, and he must often deliberately exaggerate even these in
order to achieve a truthful representation of human behavior: what is Truth
on the stage? It is an agreement of action, of speaking, of facial expression,
of voice, of movement and gesture with an ideal model that had been
imagined by the poet, and that often should be exaggerated by the actor
(Diderot 1968: 317).
Next, whereas for Plato the idea precedes reality, Aristotles true idea is
only given to us with reality and the things it contains: for him it arises out
of the multiformity of reality and presupposes this multiformity. And, once
again, this is in agreement with Diderot. For Diderot insists that theatrical
perfection and the ideal in play-acting can be achieved only on the basis of
conventions determining what we happen to experience as a natural pres-

entation of passions and emotions in the theatre: the representations of
human passions in the theatre are not these passions themselves, they are their
deliberately exaggerated portraits, their caricatures subject to the rules of
convention obtaining in the theatre (Diderot 1968: 337; see also pp. 372,
373). Hence, the ideal does not precede actual human behaviour (as the
Platonist would have argued) but is a conventionalist synthesis of the
manifold of human behavior respecting the latters logical priority.
In this way, then, Rousseaus and Diderots disagreement about the theatre
has been an eighteenth-century re-enactment of Platos and Aristotles dis-
agreement about representation. And in both cases the best realist was the
one who worried least about representation or, to put it differently, the one
who was prepared to grant to representation its own authority and authen-
ticity next to represented reality. The fear of representation betrays a lack of
trust in reality itself that is, in one sentence, the paradoxical lesson we may
learn from Aristotles and Diderots aesthetics.
Finally, all these same patterns repeat themselves in Platos and Aristotles
disagreement about rhetorics. And in this way the problem of representation
(and of the theatre) can even be said to be linked directly to the birth of
philosophy itself. For as we all know, philosophy originated in its rejection
of and its emancipation from rhetoric. For when Plato provided philosophy
with its agenda down to the present day, he did so by defining philosophy in
a direct confrontation to Sophist11 rhetoric, as it was taught by Gorgias and
Isokrates. He accused the Sophist rhetorician of extolling idle talk above the
sublime quest for truth. And Plato was so successful in his attack that still
now a Sophist is a person deceiving his audience with his rhetoric, instead
of being his audiences respected and resourceful teacher (Vickers 1988: 149)
which was the original meaning of the word Sophist. On the face of it, at
least in Gorgias case, Platos accusation seemed to make sense. For had not
Gorgias explicitly stated himself that truth is of no concern to rhetoric?
However, it is often forgotten that, when saying this, Gorgias wanted to
emphasize that rhetoric has to do with how to speak convincingly and
persuasively; and it was his point that we should never forget that the axis of
being persuasive versus not being persuasive does not coincide with the axis
of truth versus falsity however much we may regret this state of affairs.
Gorgias sought to remind us of the fact that persuasive remarks can be said
in favour of false claims, whereas truth may sometimes hide itself modestly
behind a poor presentation.
Paradoxically, therefore, it was not Gorgias but Plato who eliminated the
boundaries between persuasiveness and truth. It was Plato, not Gorgias, who
mistook the dress of thought, to use Quintilians metaphor, for thought
itself and who could thus claim that the use of rhetoric inevitably infects the
issue for which it is used. But Platos is a paranoic view of rhetoric which, in
fact, irresponsibly weakens truth in its relationship to rhetoric. For rhetoric
may serve the cause of both truth, and falsity, and using it does not auto-
matically change truth into falsity and vice versa. By not recognizing this, the
unintended effect of Platos argument has precisely been to extol rhetoric
above truth. For Platos argument suggests that truth is strangely helpless in
its confrontation with rhetoric: as soon as rhetoric enters the scene, truth exits
in confusion. Aristotle saw this quite clearly when writing that if it is argued
that the rhetorician who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great
harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things
except virtue, and above all the things that are most useful, as strength,
health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a

right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly
(Aristotle 1355b: 17). Not rhetoric itself, but the use that is made of it,
determines whether truth will suffer by it. And when Platos extremist rever-
ence of truth made him oblivious of this, the unintended result of his
argument was an inflated notion of the powers of rhetoric and an irrespon-
sibly weakened conception of the powers of truth and of reality itself. By
putting all their cards on reality and truth and by condemning representation
and rhetoric, Plato and Rousseau are like that apprehensive miser in the
famous Chinese story who had hidden all his riches in one strong-box; so that
when the great thief finally came, he only had to take the whole strong-box
in order to secure for himself all the misers riches in one go. On the other
hand, theorists who, like Diderot and Aristotle, do not fear representation
and its autonomy with regard to the represented are the true partisans of
reality and truth.
Notes
1 Pygmalion was King of Cyprus and a talented sculptor. One day he decided to
make the statue of a perfectly beautiful woman. But even before the completion
of the sculpture he fell in love with it and gave the name of Galathea to it.
Pygmalion, who had always been a confirmed bachelor, now implored Venus to
breathe life into the sculpture and he promised the Goddess he would marry it
after it had come to life. So when on a certain day he pressed the sculpture to his
breast, some of his own bodily warmth was transmitted to the sculpture and when
he pressed kiss after kiss on the delicately sculptured lips they suddenly became
soft and warm under his touch. And so the object of his passionate desire could
become his beloved wife. See Ovid, Metamorphoses. Translated and with an
introduction by Mary M. Innes, London: Penguin Books, pp. 231, 232.
2 In an intelligent discussion of the film Bruno points out that the replicant Roy
kisses his maker Tyrell before murdering him. This seems to suggest an inversion
of the murder of the primeval father as presented by Freud in his Totem and
Taboo; for in this account the adoration of the father began only after his having
been murdered by his revolting sons. Bruno concludes that in this respect the
replicants have a psychology different from ordinary human beings. Obviously,
this may invite all kinds of interesting, though rather idle, speculations about the
nature of this difference and about how it should be accounted for. See G. Bruno,
Ramble city: postmodernism and Blade Runner, New Left Review 146 (1984):
5392.
3 The implication would be that the black population is not even given the honour
of being part of Americas future problems. The Asians are postmodern, whereas
the blacks are apparently a mere ethnic irrelevance this seems to be the message.
4 This obviously raises the question of the relationship between science and post-
modernisms aestheticism. What both share is their common resistance to
traditional metaphysics (as explained above). But whereas science presents itself
as the ultimate and exclusive alternative to metaphysics, postmodernism, being a
philosophical defence of science, remains within the domain of philosophy. And
here it combines aestheticism as a metaphysical doctrine with aestheticism as a
philosophical method whereas the methods of science are epistemological in
nature. Both science and postmodernism oppose aestheticism to traditional meta-
physics, but from then on the two diverge.
5 This period of four years is of interest since in almost all democracies the electorate
also chooses its representatives (its political replicants, so to speak) for a period
of four years. And here the idea is also that going beyond that period may give
too much autonomy to the representative with regard to the electorate represented
by him and that this might tempt him into activities that could be considered
subversive from the electorates perspective. There seems to be something
curiously magic about this period of four years; apparently after this period this
flowing over of properties from the represented to its representations or represent-
atives is feared to take on proportions that might threaten their being different
from each other.
6 This is how one often refers to (Rousseau 1762).
7 For a very erudite exposition of this philosophical anthropology, see H. W. Blom,
Morality and Causality in Politics, Ridderkerk, 1995.
8 When speaking about the theatre, Rousseau wrote: la scne, en gnral, est un
tableau des passions humaines, dont loriginal est dans tous les coeurs: mais si le
Peintre [i.e. the playwright] navoit soin de flater (sic) ces passions, les Spectateurs
seroient bientt rebuts. See Rousseau, DAlembert, p. 30.
9 In contrast to Rousseau Diderot holds the actor in high esteem. He refers to his
profession as une profession que jaime et que jestuime; and he tells us that he
had hesitated in his youth entre la Sorbonne et la Comdie. See Diderot, Pardoxe,
pp. 348, 349.
10 See also Butchers commentary on the passage I quoted above from the Poetics.
Butcher begins by quoting the following statement by John Henry Newman: Miss
Edgeworth, says Newman, sometimes apologises for certain incidents in her
tales, by statiing that they took place by one of those strange chances, which
occur in life, but seem incredible when found in writing. Such an excuse evinces
a misconception of the principle of fiction, which being the perfection of the
actual, prohibits the introduction of any such anomalies of experience. And Butler
agrees here with Newman: the strange chances here spoken of, the anomalies
of experience, are in fact the improbable possibilities which Aristotle dis-
allows. For chance with its inherent unreason is as far as possible banished by him
from the domain of poetry, except indeed where the skill of the poet can impart
to it an appearance of design. See S. H. Butcher (ed.) Aristotles Theory of Poetry
and Fine Art. Translated and with Critical Notes by S. H. Butcher, New York
1951: 183.
11 For a lengthy and detailed exposition of Platos attack on rhetorics, see B. Vickers,
In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford, 1989, pp. 83148.
References
Ankersmit, Frank (1994) History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ankersmit, Frank (2001) Historical Representation, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Blom, W. W. (1995) Morality and Causality in Politic, Amsterdam: Ridderkerk.
Butcher, S. H. (1951) Aristotles Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans., New York:
Peter Smith.
Davis, Mike (1992) Prisoners of the American Dream, London: Verso.
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Sennett, Richard (1978) The Fall of Public Man, New York and London: W. W.
Norton.
Soja, Edward (1995) Postmodern Geographies, London: Verso.
Vickers, B. (1989) In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and

Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the theatre and

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Rethinking History 7:3 (2003), pp. 315339

Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the theatre

1 Introduction. Blade Runner

316 Frank R. Ankersmit

Rousseau and Diderot 317

and attention to a lunatic fringe of preoccupations that ordinarily are of

welcome ideological aid: these political philosophies aim at the edification of

318 Frank R. Ankersmit

successful in this task than Stoic, Platonistic, Aristotelian metaphysics and so

cannot be found in, or equated with, some essence to be discerned in all of

Rousseau and Diderot 319

could speculate about most agreeably. The postmodernist, however, now

nate number of small trifles, idiosyncrasies and apparently irrelevant details.

2 The aestheticism of postmodernism and the notion of identity

However, the postmodernists acceptance of aesthetics as our guide (and

320 Frank R. Ankersmit

representation as defended by, for example, Edmund Burke, Ernst

world together. But Gombrichs well-known hobby-horse does not resemble

Rousseau and Diderot 321

322 Frank R. Ankersmit

3 Replicants and ordinary human beings

Not surprisingly, the historicist/postmodernist insight into this flowing over

Rousseau and Diderot 323

our attention to the insight by emphasizing it as much as possible. This

324 Frank R. Ankersmit

4 Rousseau on the theatre and on representation

Rousseau and Diderot 325

326 Frank R. Ankersmit

or planetary self. The commensurability and interchangeability of all the

Rousseau and Diderot 327

of eighteenth-century France. And since this social world seemed to him to

328 Frank R. Ankersmit

the representation of difference), but still too much an exponent of the

representation is denigrated even further by a most ungenerous Rousseau

5 Diderot and the paradox of the actor

Diderots conceptions of the theatre are the exact opposite to those of

Rousseau and Diderot 329

next, is most successful in expressing this overwhelming sentiment on the

The paradox of the theatre therefore is that a certain and well-considered

330 Frank R. Ankersmit

presentation; whereas a natural presentation would make a most unnatural

a great comedian is neither a piano-forte, nor a harp, nor a clavichord, nor a

Rousseau and Diderot 331

or social) practice. Such a list would certainly be an interesting and instructive

6 Rousseau, Diderot and postmodernism

Let us return to the disagreement between Rousseau and Diderot. This

332 Frank R. Ankersmit

realized that unnaturalness is a condition of convincing play-acting.8 Yet they

addressed in a postmodernist film such as Blade Runner concerned the fading

Rousseau and Diderot 333

representation and in the theatre in particular. From here, however, Rousseau

old-fashioned and positivist atavism. That such a careless and frivolous

334 Frank R. Ankersmit

7 A final word: Plato and Aristotle

Rousseau and Diderot 335

alles Vergngliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, as Goethe succinctly summarized

accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable