Spectacles, Political Education, and Democracy: Re-reading Rousseau’s Letter to M. D’Alembert

Abstract

In his writings on aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues that Rousseau’s criticism of the theater in The Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater is significant because it calls into question the possibility of the uniform transmission of the artist’s knowledge to the spectator. Despite this important point, Rancière largely adopts the commonly accepted reading of the Letter that Rousseau finds the theater politically pernicious because it separates and isolates audience members, turning them into passive spectators. According to this reading, Rousseau proposes to replace the theater with the ethical immediacy of the festival. Situating the Letter in its historical context and reading it with Rancière to argue against his own reading, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that for Rousseau the theater is problematic because as a spectacle that calls attention to its difference from what it represents, it invites the spectators to actively engage with the performance, preventing the uniform transmission of the artist’s ideas to the spectators. For Rousseau, this democratic potential of the theatrical spectacle transforms it from a possible means of moral instruction to a risk to the existing social order, which relies on a distinction between those who should instruct and those who should be instructed. Insofar as the spectators refuse to act as passive recipients of knowledge and do something they are not supposed to do, including taking part in the idle pleasures of the rich and judging the quality of the plays, they reconfigure the distribution of the sensible. Rousseau’s alternatives to the theater, the marriage ball and the public festival, seek to close off this possibility by carefully concealing their representational status. By presenting the representations of an “ideal” community as the immediate expressions of the community’s truth, these spectacles achieve, or so Rousseau hopes, what the theater fails to do, the effective delivery of moral instruction.