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THE MIND-BODY STAGE
Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater
By R. Darren Gobert Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8638-6
CHAPTER 1
Mind-Body Union; or, The Cartesian Ballet
La naissance de la paix, Kungliga Slottet, December 9, 1649
The scene is the royal palace in Stockholm, Sweden, December 9, 1649. In one of a series of events celebrating the end of the Thirty Years' War, and in honor of her twenty-third birthday, Queen Christina of Sweden has organized a court ballet entitled La naissance de la paix (The Birth of Peace). Largely as a result of the war, Christina now keeps one of the most opulent courts in Europe, so no expense has been spared. Elaborate sets have been built in the new perspectival style—which guides spectation toward an upstage vanishing point—that take full advantage of the technical capabilities of Christina's salle de ballet, designed by the talented Italian architect Antonio Brunati and inaugurated less than eight months before, in April. The set design represents the spectacularly contrasting milieux of the ballet's interdependent dances, or entrées: for instance, a military camp cedes to "heaven"—every baroque set designer's dream—where Justice will dance with Mercury, Apollo, and, indeed, "all the gods" (tous les Dieux). Their choreography, as well as that of Earth, Fame, and the nine Muses, along with various crippled soldiers and ruined peasants, has been devised by the French ballet master Antoine de Beaulieu, already resident at the Swedish court for more than a decade; Beaulieu, in his grotesque mask and his costume of velvet and black lace, is to dance the key character of Panic Terror himself. Andreas Düben, the queen's German master of music, has composed music for the vocal solos that introduce each of the three acts; these solos are encomia to Peace, and indirectly to the queen whose ability to quell decades-long war the ballet celebrates. She will dance the role of Pallas Athena. A verse summary of the ballet's plot has been prepared in French and handsomely published and distributed alongside versions in German (by the court librarian, Johann Freinsheim) and in Swedish (by the celebrated poet Georg Stiernhielm). Alternatively written in alexandrines and octosyllabic meter and totaling 344 lines, the verse narrative The Birth of Peace, although unattributed in this original printing, is popularly agreed to have been written by Christina's tutor, René Descartes, who had taken up his position as a court philosopher ten weeks before, on October 1, 1649.
Descartes's early biographer Adrien Baillet notes that Descartes composed the verses while successfully resisting Christina's desire that he dance in the ballet himself alongside her, Beaulieu, and the other dancers. One wonders what role Christina imagined for the fifty-three-year-old philosopher, then just two months from his death. Was it one of the cavaliers praising Pallas—and, of course, the queen herself—at the end of the second act? Was it the double-faced Janus, who celebrates the peace that the queen has brokered while reflecting on the remembered horrors of decades of war? After all, and no doubt unusually among Christina's courtiers, Descartes had himself served as a soldier in the Thirty Years' War. Was it one of the infantry who are commanded to dance for Pallas?
The performance of The Birth of Peace at the Swedish court that December represents a concatenation of the theoretical ideas and material conditions that this book explores. In its portrayal of soldiers and civilians emotionally devastated by war, the ballet stages the relationships among mind, body, and emotion in a way inconceivable before Descartes. But, more important, the ballet also refocuses our perspective on Descartes and serves as a corrective to much criticism of his philosophy. It does so in three ways. In its plot the ballet highlights the role of memory in human emotions and reason, an underemphasized aspect of Descartes's thought. In its complicated gender politics—by situating a woman as the embodiment of the good reason that manages to end the war—it undermines critical clichés about the gendering of reason in Descartes; as I will argue, while cultural forces since Descartes have feminized the emotions and masculinized reason, Descartes himself did not. Finally, in its form as a ballet it portrays the human subject as both conscious and embodied, thus physicalizing a key Cartesian concept that is often overlooked. Moreover, that the ballet celebrates the end of the Thirty Years' War is particularly apt, for this conflict shaped Descartes's thinking, and, as Timothy J. Reiss has persuasively argued, its end made possible a new philosophical order. The relationship between this new philosophical order and a new theatrical order is the subject of this book, whose title, The Mind-Body Stage, aims to encompass both.
By wonderful coincidence, Descartes's The Birth of Peace premiered during the same month that Les passions de l'âme (The Passions of the Soul) appeared in print. After the first Düben-scored solo, whose lyrics implore us to revere Athena and to recognize Peace as the "greatest of her benefits" (le plusgrand de ses bienfaits), the ballet begins with the first of its twenty dances, the entrée of Mars. Beaulieu's choreography precedes the first dance notation systems, so we can have no idea what it looked like. But we know its thematic content. The verse summary conveys the intentions of Mars to wreak havoc, a havoc that the audience would have recognized from the previous decades of war. Mars declares:
I intend to make every corner of the Earth tremble
And to show all mortals that no other god
Ever had as much power in this place as I do.
Not even he [i.e., Jupiter] who unleashes thunder.
His lightning and fire cause only a little fear,
Whereas my cannons and other machines,
My mortars, my petards, my fire-bombs and my landmines
Bring death along with terror everywhere.
These verses foreground the ballet's thematization of war and the emotions. Note the central distinction that Mars makes between himself and Jupiter: one manages a little fear (un peu de peur), the other terror. It is a critical commonplace that Descartes, whatever his claims to have begun a new method deracinated from the classical tradition, used Scholastic concepts as needed. Here, as would have been expected according to the style of the day and as would have been dictated by Christina, the classical gods appear. But they are finally subordinated to the ballet's interest in the passions and to its central personifications: the titular Peace and her antagonist, who is not Mars or even War but Panic Terror. Mars takes credit for unleashing terror, but it is revealing that once Terror arrives, she does not acknowledge this lineage. As we sometimes experience in our day-to-day lives, emotions have a life of their own, quite divorced from their precipitating causes.
Introduced in the key third entrée, Panic Terror echoes Mars by noting that she makes not the earth but its people tremble (trembler). She boasts:
It is wrong that Pallas and Mars
Brag that among hazards
Their power is incomparable,
Mine is much more formidable.
It takes them much work
It takes them much equipment:
Powder, horses and arms
And men to call to arms [vont aux alarmes]
To submit for a single fight
* * *
When I intend to bring terror
To a million warriors,
And trample all their laurels,
I need only a chimera,
A dream, a faint shadow
That I send into their brains.
And they tremble like calves
They flee, they turn pale
And often they throw themselves
Into evils they should fear more
Than those they try to avoid.
The passage is particularly Cartesian, as captured in the wonderfully ambiguous phrase "vont aux alarmes." The term is military, of course, and Panic Terror refers to the men who would answer alarm calls and submit to battle. But as early as the late sixteenth century, the word alarme had come to connote worry and fear, and to answer an alarm meant to submit to these emotions' perturbations. (For example, Racine, whose Phèdre illustrates the effects of such submission, uses the word alarme in this psychological sense twice.) As the libretto makes clear, terror rattles the brain, disordering the body and impelling it to subsequent action, to throwing it into "evils." In The Passions of the Soul Descartes describes precisely this process: how an emotion can cause physical perturbation in the body (and particularly in the brain, a physical organ) before the mind, which is immaterial, even begins to apprehend the emotion, to identify it and possibly to allay its effects. That is, the physical changes in the body—disordered brain, trembling calves, blanching faces—affect the mind, or, put another way, the mind submits to a body perturbed by emotional stimulation.
Descartes emphasizes this much-misunderstood causality when he asserts that the passions of the soul are just the actions of the body understood from a different perspective: "the Action and the Passion never fail to be the same thing, which has these two names because of the two different subjects to which we can relate it." That these actions and passions are "the same thing" testifies precisely to the union of mind and body; we cannot conceive of the soul's passions independently of their corporal effects. Thus, in the summary of Deborah J. Brown, "the relationship between actions and passions is an expression of the experience of unity each of us has with our bodies." It is the role of the mind to assess the passion being experienced by the soul and, depending on the context, to counteract or augment the actions of the body with an action of the will: when I am scared by a mouse, my mind stills my jitters; when I am scared by a car careening into my path, my mind hastens my legs' flight.
Of course, to say that terror is caused by a "chimera," as The Birth of Peace does, seems to overlook the genuine terror presented by certain stimuli, especially in war. But the ballet means to emphasize the role of Panic Terror over the role of Mars, to highlight (as in Descartes's theoretical writings) the central role played by images in the brain during the disturbance of the body. The brain's role in the emotions is complicated, and an analysis of how it unfolds according to Descartes repays careful attention. He writes in Article 35 of The Passions of the Soul:
If we see some animal coming toward us, the light reflected from its body casts two images of it, one in each of our eyes, and by the mediation of the optic nerves these two images form two other [images] of it on the inner surface of the brain, facing its hollows. Then, by the mediation of the spirits with which its cavities are filled, these images radiate from there toward the little gland which these spirits surround, in such a way that the motion that composes each point of one of the images approaches the same point of the gland which that motion approaches that forms the point of the other image representing the same part of this animal. By this means the two images in the brain compose only a single [image] of it on the gland, which, acting immediately on the soul, makes it see the animal's shape.
Descartes here describes visual perception in the same terms he had worked out years earlier in the Dioptrique (Dioptrics), to which he makes explicit reference in Article 13. (Descartes's diagram of this process is provided as Figure 1.1.) Two retinal images are transmitted by the animal spirits—his term for the smallest parts of matter, "very fine air or wind" and "very fine parts of the blood," that produce muscular movement—in such a way that the image is apprehended by the soul, which he situates in the pineal gland. The proximate cause of a perception is therefore not the seen object itself but its image as transmitted by the animal spirits, an image finally as chimerical as a thought. But the animal spirits do more than facilitate visual perception. They also facilitate passionate perception by causing whatever physical perturbations they are accustomed to causing. (For Descartes, all emotional responses are conditioned by past experience, hence the importance of memory, which resides partly in the body insofar as the animal spirits respond without the mediation of the mind.) As Descartes writes, during the state of fear the animal spirits proceed "toward the nerves that move the legs to flee," but they also "cause another movement in the same [pineal] gland by means of which the soul feels and perceives this flight—which can in this way be excited in the body merely by the disposition of the organs without the soul contributing to it."
Distinguishing mind from body, Descartes distinguishes his model of the soul from the Scholastics', asserting that there is only one rational soul with no diversity of parts. Aristotle assigned the soul nonrational activities such as the vegetative activity of sustaining life or the locomotive activity of sustaining movement, and Plato opposed the agencies of reason and desire within the soul in his tripartite model with its appetitive, spirited, and rational parts. While Plato's Republic could therefore imagine a poet calling forth the worst elements of the soul and nourishing them, Descartes insists on a vision of the soul that does not allow for contradictions. He elaborates this point by means of a theatrical metaphor: he castigates "the error that has been committed in having [the soul] play different characters." All impediments to reason he situates outside of the soul. The soul does not do battle with itself, as in Plato's view; rather, the body may do battle with the soul, whose seat Descartes located in the pineal gland after reflecting that all other parts of the brain are, like the external organs, doubled. In other words the pineal gland, like the soul it houses, is uniquely singular and incapable of duplicity. Thus Descartes contrasts the soul to the sometimes unwittingly duplicitous body, whose doubled eyes (for example) can sometimes deceive and whose animal spirits convey multiple messages at once. Passions may pose a problem not because they oppose reason but because they are expressed as actions that are sometimes counter to reason. This difference is not trivial. Something frightful is seen and its image recorded on the retinas; something frightful is experienced by the legs, which have begun to flee. These actions of the body equate to a passion of the soul: fear. Whether this fear is rational depends only on the fearfulness of the stimulus according to the standards of good judgment, the difference between a mouse and a careening car as emotional stimuli.
Descartes calls the process by which the animal spirits convey these messages "representation." That is, both visual perceptions and emotions are signs—and insofar as they are fabricated in the brain, we might call them chimerical—that are transmitted between the soul and objects in the world. As I discuss in later chapters, this characterization has important consequences for how Cartesian ideas are taken up in theatrical practice, since emotional representations share critical features with the theatrical representations—for example, actors' gestures, theatrical designs, dramatic poetry—that mediate between stage and audience. The proscenium arch, ascendant in the mid-seventeenth century, becomes an aperture that works like an eye's lens; it initiates the translation through which the object becomes a representation. (Think, for example, of the resemblance between Descartes's diagrams of visual perception and theater plans of the late century, after the previously rectangular spaces of the jeu de paume theaters developed proscenium arches and rounded amphitheaters. See Figures 1.2 and 1.3.) Descartes had aligned the process of visual perception with the process of thinking in the Dioptrics of 1637, in which he explained how visual perception involves the conveyance of images to the mind by the animal spirits. In the Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy) of 1641, too, he had articulated how thoughts are "images of things" (rerum imagines) transmitted from the mind to the body. (For this reason, dreams, such as those Descartes describes at the beginning of that book, can unsettle us, as can our own terrible imaginings—for example, when we contemplate the death of a loved one.) Eight years later, in The Passions of the Soul, Descartes built on this picture. And while explaining the similar representational processes that constitute the emotions, the book makes apparent how utterly pervasive these representations are. The picture it completes is one in which our visual perceptions, our thoughts, and our emotional responses coexist in a cocktail of mental representations with which we are literally suffused, as the animal spirits convey them through our brains and bodies. As Susan James puts it in her book Passion and Action, we experience not only our bodies but the entire world as part of an "ever-changing kaleidoscope" of representations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE MIND-BODY STAGE by R. Darren Gobert. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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