wanna die
About the time Rousseau was meditating on the original men
in the forest of St. Germane, in the 1750s, the French government was beginning
to assign numbers to buildings in various cities. This was a two-fold process.
According to David Garrioch, it was not only about assigning a number, but also
about a great loss of names: the names of houses. For before the number
address, houses were found by their name on the street:
“In the cities of early modern Europe the houses and shops
almost all had names and signs. There were red lions and golden suns; names of
ships, trees and plants; figures of history and myth; every conceivable saint.”
Garrioch questions a history that sees these names solely in
terms of identifying marks. Firstly, the names could be, and were, changed;
secondly, there was no system to the marks. There was no succession of suns, for example. While they may have
played a role in identifying the house or shop, the name or sign played more of
a role in expressing something about the possessor of the house or shop, from
the owner’s loyalties to the owner’s family:
“Yet the signs and house names, like heraldic symbolism,
might have more than individual significance. They might act as links between
generations, between the namer of the house or the fhounder of a dynasty and
that person’s descendants. This is exemplified by the arms of Albrecht Duerer,
the painter, which bore a door. The sign outside his father’s workshop in late
fifteenth century Nuremberg had been an open door, an obvious pun on the family
name, itself a traslation into German of the name of the village the family had
come from, Atjos, meaning ‘door’ in Hungarian.” (Garrioch 33)
The Ancien Regime, we are learning, did not fall with the
French Revolution. Even after the system of number addresses – first decreed in
“military’ towns in France in 1768 – was normalized all over France, including
Paris, in 1805, the house names and signs continued for a while. But that
advance of numeration had an organizing effect on the city, much like the
Prussian method of ‘organizing’ forests by culling certain species, taking out
dead wood, creating allies between trees to allow for cutting, etc.
Recent research has shown that the numeration devised by the
Revolutionary government had two functions: one was to fix a correspondence
between the house and taxes, and the other was to fix the house on the street
for police purposes. In fact, the Ancien Regime attempts at numeration often
left the system of numeration as confusing as the system of names. The father
of the modern system of addresses in France was a certain Ducrest, who
submitted a memoir on the subject to Fouche, Napoleon’s minister of the police,
in 1804. In his memoir, he touted the
system of numeration (for identity cards, houses, etc.) as an instrument of
total observation, a police dream: “The objective of the project is ‘to be able
to follow, so to speak, step by step all
citizens.”[Quoted in Vincent Denis, Entre Police et demographie, Actes
de recherche en science social, 2000]
The great bonfire of the names of the nobles, which has
always been seen as one of the most important symbolic moments in the
Revolution, was paralleled by this other bonfire of the names – a slower one,
granted. In Milan, the Parisian system of numeration by the street – instead of
numeration by the city quarter – did not start until 1857. But the point is
that it did get started.
Evidently, to balance the forest against the address, which
is symbolically pleasing, is not exactly accurate. And yet, it does give us, at
least as far as we use this to understand Rousseau’s sense of the individual, a
good starting point for understanding the nature of Rousseau’s great objection to the social. It was, I think, an objection
to its tendency to totality: its non-intermittance.
The thematic that brings this out is solitude. In an essay
on the romantic writer as victim, Eric Gans adduces Rousseau as the prototype,
quoting his remarks from the Reveries: “Here I am, then, alone in the world,
with no longer brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself. The
most sociable and the most loving of humans has been excluded from society by a
unanimous consent.” Gans is quite right to interpret this as Rousseau’s claim
to being a victim: the solitary and the victim are jointed together in one
semantic field in Rousseau’s work, and, in fact, in society at large: to make
solitary, to put in solitary, was, even in the 18th century, a form
of torture inflicted on certain prisoners. At the same time, from Rousseau’s
viewpoint, it was characteristic of the corruption of the society that he wrote
to ‘improve’ that it could imagine solitude in no other way than as a
punishment, even as it was beginning to imagine the individualism that
corresponded to the private sphere of exchangers.
The thematic of solitude that winds its way through
Rousseau’s autobiographical works is, as well, at the heart of the Discourse on
Inequality.
The first human beings, in fact, are natural solitaries,
according to Rousseau. He imagines their state as one in which the natural and
the voluntary are joined in a life form that is pre-social. True, Rousseau’s
grasp on this state goes in and out of focus, just as his periodizations have a
tendency to become misty or contradictory as he wants to make this or that
observation about the course of human socialization. Language and other
collaborative human things – religion, for instance, and, importantly, division
of labor – are absent at this point. The Discourse then provides a sort of
kaleidoscopic analysis of how the social came about, which is equivalent to the
rupture with the first, natural solitude and the first, natural sense of the
self.
Since forests are my theme, here, it is interesting that one
of the aspects of the emergence of the social and of inequality, for Rousseau,
comes about with the fall of the forest:
“ So long as men are content with their rustic cabins, so
long as they limit themselves to sewing skins together with thorns or with
bones, to ornament themselves with shells or feathers, to paint their bodies
with diverse colors, to perfect or embellish their bows and arrows, to carve
fishing canoes or awkward instruments of music out of tree trunks with
sharpened stones, in a word, as long as they apply themselves to what a single
man can do, and to arts which have no need for the help of several hands, they
live free, healthy, well and happy, as much as their natures allow; and they
continue to enjoy with each other the sweetness of commerce. But in that
instant where one man has need of another; in the moment that someone perceives
that it is useful for one person to have provisions for two, equality
disappears, property is introduced, work becomes necessary, and vast forests
change into smiling fields that it is necessary to water with the sweat of men,
and in which one sees germinate slavery and misery, which grow with the
harvest.”
Rousseau is, perhaps, the first European thinker who can
truly imagine backwards – but he requires a reader who can imagine backwards,
too. It is easy to think of the primitive man of his description as a
self-conscious individual. But this gets Rousseau’s conjectural history utterly
wrong. He is, rather, an unself-conscious solitary. He does not know the
contours of his individuality. His independence is a lack of need, not a
principle. The individual of modern theory only emerges when the primal state of
solitude is broken. The individual can be consciously independent, but in
having that awareness of dependence and the social tie, even in rejecting it,
the individual exists in a society which has taken a turn against primal solitude.
The new solitude, the touchy solitude that emerges in a society that is
organized according to division of labor, and thus of work, and property, is a
different kind of human being:
“It is reason which engenders self-love, and reflection that
strengthens it. This is what folds man back upon himself; that separates him
from all that discomforts and afflicts him. It is philosophy that isolates him.
It is by this means tht he says in secret, at the look of the suffering man: “perish
if you want to – I’m safe.”
This, as Rousseau sees, is one of the hidden mottoes of
civilization, a canon that nobody can afford to ignore – and survive.
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