Portrait of the King PDF
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LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley published titles Nonnan Bryson VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze Teresa de Lauretis ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES (editor) Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s Alan Durant CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETI: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Peter Goodrich LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis Paul Hirst ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY Andreas Huyssen AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism Nigel Leask THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT Michael Lynn-George EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD THE TALKING CURE: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language (editor) Louis Marin PORTRAIT OF THE KING Christian Metz PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics Michel Pecheux LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY Jean-Michel Rabate LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS Jacqueline Rose THE CASE OF PETER PAN OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION Brian Rotman SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter CIRCULATION: Defoe. Dickens and the Economies of the Novel THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry forthcoming titles James Donald THE QUESTION OF EDUCATION: Essays on Schooling and English Culture, 1790-1987 Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES: Collected Writings Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?': A Conceptual History of Feminisms Peter Womack IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands Portrait of the King Louis Marin Translation by Martha M. Houle Foreword by Tom Conley M Macmillan Press The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges translation assistance provided for this book by the French Ministry of Culture. First published in the USA (University of Minnesota Press) 1988 First published in the UK (Macmillan) 1988 Copyright © 1988 by the University of Minnesota. Originally published as Le Portrait du roi, copyright © 1981 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in the UK by Macmillan Press Ltd., Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Marin, Louis Portrait of the king.-(Language, discourse, society series). 1. Monarchy-France-History-17th century I. Title II. Le portrait du roi. English III. Series 354.4403' 12'09 JN2369 ISBN 978-0-333-46391-8 ISBN 978-1-349-19061-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19061-4 Contents Foreword: The King's Effects Tom Conley vi Introduction: The Three Fonnulas 3 Overture: The King, or Force Justified. Pascalian Commentaries 16 First Entrance: "The State Is Me," or the King's Narrative The King's Narrative, or How to Write History 39 Interlude: The Discourse of the Flatterer, or the King's Eulogy 89 The Fox's Tactics 94 Racinian Strategies 105 Second Entrance: "This Is My Body," or the King by Sacrament The Royal Host: The Historic Medal 121 Interlude: Royal Money and Princely Portrait 138 Third Entrance: "A Portrait of Caesar Is Caesar," or the King in His Frame The King and His Geometer 169 The Prince's Palace 180 The Magician King, or the Prince's Fete 193 The King's Portrait 206 Finale: The Legitimate Usurper, or the Shipwrecked Man as King 215 Appendix: Donkey Skin 239 Notes 257 Bibliography 273 Index 285 Foreword The King's Effects Tom Conley Le Portrait du roi is a hermetic book. Readers familiar with Louis Marin will im mediately recognize its role in the evolution of his writing. Many of the articles, seminars, and projects included in this book develop from the sparkling research he initiated on ideology and space in Utopiques: jeux d'espace (1973) and La Critique du discours (1975). In the former he takes up the relations of ideology, politics, and topography in culture from the time of Thomas More to what he calls the "desperate" Utopias of Disneyland and Disneyworld. In his first book, collections of art, literature, cartography, and city planning inform his views of imaginary kingdoms. Three years later in the Critique du discours, Marin en gages a protracted dialectical study of the central roles that Jansenist rhetoric and Pascal's logic had played in the formation of modem world-views. The two books underscore how the power of official modes of representation - whether in the logic of reason our times have inherited from schematic thinking in the wake of Descartes or in the spatial allegories of contemporary cities-work through human subjects when they practice their most innocuous activities. A person on foot in a modem city is no less indoctrinated than anyone writing a dissertation following the laws of usage that chart the frame of common sense. Portrait of the King develops the methods and conclusions of the two former books to produce the most forceful, indeed accessible, of all his studies of the paradigms of power that the modem age has inherited from the archaic orders of the age of Louis XIV. A patient reading of Marin's work-and it does require patience and time - yields the conclusion that in the arts of representation are found the real origins and organs of social control. vi FOREWORD 0 vii In this respect Marin's work will find positive reception among followers of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Louis Althusser the political scientist, and Ernest H. Kantorowicz, a historian of theological rituals. Geertz discovered that in pre-modem and non-Western societies power is defined and managed through the relations held between a figure who produces a representation of itself and those who imitate it. Between the leader who makes displays and those who en gage in them is established the difference separating a monarch from his subser vient bodies. For as long as subjects admire by imitating the orders put to them in fields of ritualized life, a continuity of social distinctions can be held. Althus ser, the political scientist whose austere readings of psychoanalysis and Marx in spired much of the ferment of May 1968, argued that the power of a society is often controlled by those who know how to handle ideology. By that term he meant not, as Webster has it, a science of the history and evolution of human ideas, but rather the state of idealism in which subjects bathe themselves in their everyday lives. Marin engraved Althusser's definition at the cornerstone of Utopiques. "'The representation of the imaginary relations that individuals of a given society hold with their real conditions of existence' " (Utopiques: 18, quot ing Althusser) might also figure at the beginning of Portrait of the King. Who ever institutes a collectively imaginary order monitors the desires and dreams of multitudes. Power is therefore enabled as much or more from control of ideas about life as from that of military forces or other visibly repressive agencies. Aesthetic displays bearing no ostensible relation with politics become instru ments of force ensuring the strength of an order. Althusser labeled this an "in stitutional" mode of representation, one that historian of archaic behavior Ernest H. Kantorowicz studied in The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: 1957). He showed that the medieval conception of royalty used the Catholic theology of the Corpus Mysticum to elaborate juridical practice, to define the meaning of the crown and pattern ritual displays of kingship. Power was constituted through the "effect" of the Catholic mass when subjects unconsciously absorbed them in the secular areas of political life. As in the areas studed by Geertz and Althusser, an aes thetic activity grounded the shape and practice and power. Marin's work develops from similar sets of matrices. A precious document for any study of the relations that have been held between art and power, it dem onstrates that the West since the seventeenth century has its beginnings not only in the growth of capital economy but no less crucially in the "hidden" persua sions of public medias. Not that Marin is a Vance Packard: a logician in the line of the religious figures he studies, Marin suggests that France made decisive changes in the pageantry, literature, theater, and other archaic modes of display it had inherited from the medieval church and the dazzlement the Valois lineage had cultivated in the sixteenth century. In fact, with Colbert and Le Brun are the origins of the logic of contemporary medias. The correlations are so obvious and viii 0 FOREWORD forceful that even the formal craft of Portrait of the King seems to mask the im plications of its hypotheses both from itself and its readers. Although closed in its design, the book's symmetries reveal much about the order and substance of its contents. The hermetic shape is arguably its own ide ology. The book implies that the prismatic history of the "effects" of Louis XIV's aesthetic productions are extensions of our own relations with television, magazines, the fine arts in our best museums, and other phenomena that embody the range of popular and elite culture. Here the author appears as a staunchly Freudian historian - perhaps in the line of Michel de Certeau' s last two chapters of L'Ecriture de /'histoire (1975)-by determining that our obsession with the past allows us to write of the present through the opening of an abyss of time at the basis of any historical investigation. What was then allows the here and now to be born of a return in movement to and from an imaginary object produced in the action of disinterring. For this reason the age of the Sun King of Portrait of the King is fraught with fear of the return of a totalitarian dictature. Clearly the order of Louis's age fascinates the author; he vivifies it through formal dis courses of semiotics and psychoanalysis, but he also keeps it at bay, protecting both its aura and his obsessive identification with it from the tarnish of historical fact. It remains as a partial object, a wound of sorts, that the author caresses. He holds the force of its conclusions in the imaginary field of the seventeenth cen tury that he unearthes and creates for us. In its own synthetic shape are englobed and reflected the forms of power it studies. Three formulas, Marin asserts, dominate the logic of reason in seven teenth-century France. Soon after Louis XIV acceded to the throne on March 9, 1661, the king's motto was circulated. "L'etat, c'est moi"; no better expression could be forged to bear the stamp of its own self-willed authority. And no doubt because it rings and rhymes with both the Christian maxim of the Eucharist, Ceci est mon corps (hoc est meum corpem) and the Port-Royalists' utterance reflective of both the Gospels and numismatic style, "Le portrait de Cesar, c'est Cesar" (in chapter fourteen of the second part of the "Art of Thinking"). The three maxims are mutually self-informing. Their quasi-identity invokes the enigmas of power, of representation, of violence, and aesthetics of a world, although only 300 years past, that only appears to be light years away. It remains distant in its mix of medieval and archaic practices, to be sure; but Louis's world is uncannily near because orders of force used to produce human subjects and social contra diction have changed little in the passage from Louis to the modern state. Marin superimposes the three formulas to connote how such an alignment produced a triadic symbolic identity of state, truth, and god. Whatever pertained to one or der was also of the others. Symmetry is sovereignty. The tautology of each statement (or in terms of speech-acts, of their performative functions) incites exasperation and frustration mixed with admiration. They elicit a mix of contradictory responses which mo- FOREWORD 0 ix mentarily immobilize those to whom they are directed. (They are not unlike media-slogans which resound and redound with the same self-legitimizing circu larity: "The Right Choice"; "We Do it Right"; "The World Is Going our Way.") All are forms of metadiscourse, expressions which produce their own truth in the closed symmetry of their formulation. The self-containment of "L'etat, c'est moi," "Ceci est mon corps," and "Le portrait de Cesar, c'est Cesar" achieves what one century earlier, in the time of civil war preceding Henry of Navarre's ascendancy, was coined as the wish for a centralized and uni fied France: "Un roy, une loy, une foy" [one king, one law, one faith]. By the time of Louis XIV the orders of kingship, legislation, and religion, which had been only tentatively aligned at the tum of the century, are stamped into one. They become the basis of an official aesthetics. In the wake of the vanguards of its early years, our century has been taught to spurn the idea of creative dictatures which impose on masses the ways that they must play, obey, live their public and private lives, and even imagine themselves in history and science. A careful reading of Portrait of the King will leave us with the uneasy feeling that, as in the Age of Louis, our entire lives are determined by institutional models of representation. Poetry and fantasy may indeed be aporias in the fearful symme tries of the discourses producing our names and bodies, but their creative ele ments are nonetheless contained within the overriding order of "dominant" modes of representation-that is, signs which are so pervasive that the distinc tion between dominant and dominated modes no longer has currency. Whether of 1660 or 1990, all modes ofrepresentation are dominant, and no less than the ways ideology, because it is unconscious, pervades all symbolic activity. For this reason the hermetic order of Portrait of the King seems to pre-empt its conclusions. The reader is free to enter anywhere and everywhere but will inev itably be led back to its imposing triad of state, religion, and art. Each of the three maxims is used to subtitle one of the sections. Over the portal of the first "entry" is "L'etat, c'est moi"; this section (roughly a third of the sum) deals with the writing of history immortalizing the young Sun King upon his accession to the throne. In this first third of the book Marin examines Pellisson's "Rapport a Colbert exposant un projet de l'histoire de Louis XIV," a blueprint for an aes thetic biography destined to yield "immortal effects." Before the advent of the secular state, historiography created itself through encomium. Epideictic rhetoric assigned itself the task of immortalizing its patron by comparing the king to myths wrought in complex symmetries and geometrical figures. Emblematic and heraldic combinations of language and image gave moral substance to contin gency. Placed in simultaneously logical, tabular, discursive, and allegorical con figurations, facts were carved from orders where design could lend a stable and hermetic appearance to the confusions of contingency. Future events could be in cluded in the pregiven structures divinizing the king's human origins.! In this way the historical project depended upon an almost entirely visual frame of nar-
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