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Introduction

This chapter belongs to a series of studies of different conceptions of consciousness and self-reflection in the formation of modern thought. In the first section I explore the rhetoric of ‘inner perception’ and ‘specular reflection’ associated with modern philosophy and exemplified by the Cartesian cogito. The second section analyses the presuppositions of this world-view, in particular the image of the solitary ego which this framework legitimated. In the third section the theme of visual representation and the spectatorial conception of knowledge are singled out for particular attention. Finally, in the fourth section, I suggest alternative, non-representational ways of construing experience and knowledge prefigured by dialogical conceptions of human existence in the thought of some philosophical critics of modernity. I suggest that this development involves a paradigm shift from a world-view based upon ocularcentric categories to ways of thinking grounded in social and dialogical practices.

The specular regime of modernity

If the classic thinkers created a cosmos after the model of dialectic, giving rational distinctions power to constitute and regulate, modern thinkers composed nature after the model of personal soliloquizing.

John Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 173 The aim of this chapter is to explore the role of visual metaphors in the genealogy of modern philosophical reflection. I will argue that the mirror game of the reflective, representational subject functions as a constitutive discourse for the project of modernity. Like all cultural innovations the specular model of the mind’s eye involved a repression of older paradigms of subjectivity. To forgo a very convoluted history I will assume that the Cartesian conception of the cogito’s relation to objects was constructed upon the ruins of more ancient discourses of the subject’s relation to itself elaborated from figures of the

universe as a cosmos of Forms governed by a teleological Logos. The dissolution of ancient dialogism enabled the specular monad to appear as a source of veridical self-evidence and to function as a secure foundation of objective knowledge and wilful liberty (this is also why modernity’s ‘other’ is contained within the utopia of modernization as a condition of its (im)possibility). Modern epistemology constructed its cognitive space by deconstructing the cosmos of autonomous forms of Being underlying what the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin once called ‘the official medieval picture of the world’ (1986:97). Once the idiom of specular reflection was accepted as a normal way of speaking about the self ’s relation to the other, interiority could be imagined as a quasi-visual space for outward-looking cognitive projects. Correspondingly an older dialogical view of existence was displaced in favour of a proprietorial conception of ‘objects’ constituted through acts of introspective cognition. ‘Man’ could then be posited as the ‘master and proprietor of nature’.

The origins of the mirror-game of egological reflection can be traced to changes in social relations and cultural formations following the religion and culture wars of the Renaissance and Reformation periods. Among the more important elements of the genealogical constellation of early modernity were the collapse of older theocentric and patriarchal forms of social order and authority; the revival and spread of universalist Roman legal precepts which encouraged the secularization of canon law; the expansion of markets and associated ‘market rhetorics’ of exchange and citizenship; the associated emergence of proto- capitalist forms of socio-economic practices; changes in the social organization of public space-time frameworks (the emergence of ‘public spheres’, early modern forms of space-time compression, chronotopical arguments for the centralization of political authority, and so on); the creation of modern scientific procedures; and the growth of the bourgeois state and civil society. By the close of the late Middle Ages the expansion of urbanization, commodification, monetary relations, and global markets had fostered new spatial, cultural, and ideological realignments spreading abstract concepts of personal freedom, individualism, deterritorialized mobility, and civic culture to larger groups and circles beyond the traditional élites and governing circles. The increasing velocity of these changes also impinged upon the nature and status of traditional models of selfhood and collective identity, creating deracinated experiences that actively generalized the ‘Cartesian anxiety’ beyond the borders of philosophy. The modern ‘question of subjectivity’—the paradigm of the modern conception of mind—emerged as a historical phenomenon at the intersection of many streams of social, political, and cultural change (Heller, Sosna and Wellbery, 1986). For example, the constitution of the private sphere—autonomous individuality as the constitutive category of philosophical liberalism—is inseparable from the material expansion and differentiation of both the ‘public realm’ of nation-state institutions and the changing divisions of labour and consumption patterns accompanying the breakdown of the medieval corporate order, the decay of Scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics with its theocratic conception of divine

Being, and the crystallization of bourgeois values and associated cultural forms during the Renaissance. Traces of these changes in social relations, forms of life, and virtual identities are still inscribed in the basic chronotopes of epistemic solitude, the scientific cosmology of corpuscular nature, the development of geometrical perspective, and a wide range of secular ideologies of voluntaristic self-assertion and self-reflection grouped under the rubric of modernity (Jay, 1992).

It is the Renaissance period where we witness the full retreat of older dialogical concepts of being-in-the-world. Earlier paradigms of political friendship, sacred communality, and ethical experience were replaced by a conception of self as a visible site within consciousness. For the moderns knowledge was refigured as an order of visual representations located in a cognitive subject. The mind becomes an inner theatre of cognitive representations:

No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore the whole of this world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, representation… All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.1

To summarize a complex history: the invention and dissemination of new paradigms of deterritorialized, detraditionalized identity was both a product of and an intervention within a specific constellation of socio-economic, political, and intellectual changes which laid the foundations of modern bourgeois culture. The outcome of these transformations was the emergence of the constitutive language-games of European epistemology celebrating the autonomy of cognitive consciousness.2 _{While controversy will continue about how to best}

characterize the epoch of early European modernity, most interpreters agree that the two centuries between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment marked a paradigm-shift in relation to the dominant religious cosmology inherited from the philosophical tradition of antiquity and medieval Christianity. The outcome of this revolution was a ‘man-centred’ vision of nature and reality as a totality of objects. This presented a stark contrast to Scholastic images of self and world. In the philosophy of an Aquinas or Thomas of Erfurt, for example, the ‘act of intellection’ was understood as one mode of created being—a realm of ‘rational intellect’ or ‘intelligent soul’—reflecting a divinely ordained Cosmos. The ens rationis was viewed as an integral part of the divine order of ratio (ens reale) and not as a private ‘space’ of cognition separated from Being or God. From this perspective the exercise of Reason was primarily a religious vocation externalized in public rituals and sacredotal performances. Human reason contains a spark of ‘divine light’ guiding the soul beyond its animal existence towards a coherent vision of the hierarchical Universitas.

If the coming of modernity can be characterized as a revolutionary shift from a theocentric cosmos to an androcentric world-view, then the paradigm case of this change occurs in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Discourse on Method we find traditional ontotheological hierarchies self- consciously levelled in favour of more ‘democratic’ forms of identity: scientific evidence is separated as an autonomous sphere from faith; ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are cut loose from the divine cosmos and conflated to form the ‘consciousness’ of the thinking ego; intellect is separated from the corporeal body; the indivisible spirit is distinguished from the visible plenum of nature; and the autonomous subject begins to relate to its cogitationes as the representational mirror of the world (Rorty, 1979). Not surprisingly the modern patriarchal schema of the ‘thinking, conceiving mind’ divorced from a feminized ‘world of receptive nature’ made its appearance in a number of European languages during the early part of the seventeenth century (for example, in the writings of Suarez, Erasmus, Montaigne, Luther, and Descartes). Protestant and reformed Catholic vocabularies of the mind in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in particular helped to determine a philosophical programme by extending the secular rhetoric of mechanical science to the ‘unexplored realms’ of internalized conscience. Just as the Galilean scientist maps and objectifies external nature, so the exhaustive mapping of the physical world should be completed by a rigorous cartography of the mechanisms of the mind and the workings of moral conscience. Knowledge of the self could now be secured by ‘looking inward’ into an autonomous sphere of ‘subjective ideas’. The self was disembedded from its traditional sites and projected as an autonomous, all-seeing ego (in French seeing (voir) and knowing (savoir) became all but synonymous); the language of ‘value’ was transformed into a calculus of utilities and exchange-values; and social and political order could be troped in contractual-libertarian metaphors as an aggregate of ‘acts’ centred in ‘calculative individuals’. Expressed in another way: visual images of mind and nature helped legitimate the idea that the limits of objectivity coincide with the a priori limits of visual representation. Finally the seventeenth-century idiom of ‘inner ideas and thought’ was ‘transcendentalized’ in the tradition of German idealism from around 1770 to 1830 to construct the ‘transcendental ego’ as the ground of reason and the constituting consciousness of the world.

While it is well known that the rise of the Western self and the visual metaphysics of modern philosophy have definite religious, literary, and aesthetic antecedents, limitations of space force me to restrict my remarks to the Cartesian celebration of reflection as the most distinctive human capacity. The subjective turn is the characteristic move made by Descartes (and in all essentials repeated by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and the philosophes of the Enlightenment) in his quest for absolute certainty within the reflective ego he called the cogito or thinking substance—the realm of clear and distinct (relation of) ideas (‘omne illud verum est, quod, clare et distincte percipitur’ or, in Locke’s idiom, the ‘connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of our Ideas’).

The rationalist norm of certainty is in turn determined by the methodic ideals of mathematical reason and experimental science which formed the twin pillars of Renaissance humanism and the Scientific Revolution. Descartes essentially fused the radical idea of subjective certainty with the methodic ideal of modern physical science to create not merely a new framework of scientific metaphysics, but what can be called the videological sensibility of the modern age. For Descartes’ successors the philosophical prototype of introspective privacy remains the Meditations on First Philosophy (Méditationes de Prima Philosophia, 1641) which proudly enunciates the Archimedean fulcrum of modernity, the a priori presence of the cogito or mens: ‘je pense donc je suis’ (‘I think, therefore I exist’)—in the interior of my conscious life I am a being which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, imagines and feels. The secular stance of the latter half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century is condensed in the first sentences of the Meditations:

It is some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences… Today, then, since very opportunely for the plan I have in view I have delivered my mind from every care [and am happily agitated by no passions] and since I have procured for myself an assured leisure in a peaceable retirement, I shall at last seriously and freely address myself to the general upheaval of all my former opinions.

(Meditation I) Following Descartes, the contemplative ‘I’ is made the focal point of its cogitations, just as the mercantile bourgeois formed the fulcrum of commercial transactions, and the Prince the centre of Renaissance courtly life. Descartes’ ultimate aim was to destroy the ‘philosophy of the Schools’ in order to build a new philosophy ‘from the ground upward’. And the spirit of the new metaphysics is animated by a vision of the transcendental subject.

Of course, we should note that this rhetoric of seeing/knowing was not the exclusive property of the historical person, René Descartes. The good Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley, was equally adept in its use:

It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by the help of memory and imagination— either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.

(Principles of Human Knowledge: 1) In fact a survey of the philosophical literature of the period—through Leibniz, Malebranche, Spinoza, and beyond—reveals parallel rhetorical tropes and motifs depicting the disembodied, spectatorial subject and its introspective world. Here the metaphor of the relationship between seeing and the seen proves irresistible. To witness the truth the reader, like the author, must actively disengage from the world, experience the full force of scepticism as a necessary propadeutic to reviewing the universe in ‘objective’ terms. ‘Ideas’ located in the soul then become the sole ‘object’ of philosophical concern. Descartes combined the fixity of the ancient concept of mind with the divinity of theological substance to produce the paradigmatic modern dualism of mind and body. Of course, Cartesian scientia.—what Leibniz would call mathesis universalis—still inhabited a world of autonomous substances. Cartesian method placed its faith in the mathematical mind as the avant-garde of scientific progress—not empirical observation and experiment but pure intuition and rational self-determination. In Dewey’s words, Descartes’ pensée ‘is the nous of classic tradition forced inwards because physical science had extruded it from its object’, just as Locke’s universe of simple ideas is the Greek ‘Idea’, ‘Form’ or ‘Species’ ‘dislodged from nature and compelled to take refuge in mind’ (1958:229; cf. Rorty, 1979: 44–5). The overdetermined word ‘idea’ functions as a visual icon which dialectically joins and separates the philosophical aspirations of Ancient and Modern thought. It is no exaggeration to say that the dualist grammar of Cartesian metaphysics has influenced the direction of philosophical and social thought to the present day. Descartes is certainly a revolutionary and a modernist, but only in the qualified sense of transforming and fusing the rhetorical possibilities of inwardness articulated by the classical Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy of the Nous and the Scholastic language of substances with the language-games of modern subjectivity forged by Renaissance humanism. What is new about the subjective turn of modern thought is the fusion of self-reflection and will. It is the egological will to knowledge as a forceful envisioning of the world as a world subject to androcentric domination that is such a singular feature of modernity.

The mind as a theatre of representations

I see clearly that there is nothing which is easier for me to know than my mind.

Descartes, Meditation II In traditional histories of philosophy Descartes is usually named as the source of the philosophy of reflection and, therewith, as the ‘father of modern philosophy’ and prototypical thinker of modernity. The theme is a constant one from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. From a logological

standpoint, however, Descartes is primarily an innovator in a literary genre or rhetoric of self-reflection. Descartes quite literally wrote the novel of modern philosophy as the mind’s heroic quest to witness the truth of Being. Not surprisingly we find the Meditations structured around the mythological ‘hero- journey’ with its moments of separation (from Scholastic orthodoxy, tradition, common sense, etc.), initiation during the course of the six Meditations, and return empowered by the salutary principles of the ‘new philosophy’. The inner sanctum of the spectatorial ego stands opposed to the ‘corporeal’ demands of ‘natural existence’ (itself a legacy of the Augustinian dualism of the word and the flesh, culture and nature). Only by wilfully withdrawing into the theatre of the mind can the rational soul master itself (or its ‘passions’ in the idiom common to Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Rousseau, and Condillac) and prepare the way for autonomous moral action and the rational domination of nature. The universe is reduced to ‘representations’ ordered by the will of the mathematical intellect.

Two figures of Cartesian thought are particularly significant in this context: the mind as a theatre of ideas and nature as an extended realm of substances. Both images were drawn from the masculinist rhetoric of the ‘new science’. ‘Nature’ is envisioned as a realm of extended substance, the adversary of civilized selfhood which, like a threatening wilderness, needs to be brought under the jurisdiction of the rational self. Nature’s vagrant body is to be disciplined by the combined work of scientific analysis, mathematization, and technical control. The ‘mapping’ of physical space by means of the rules of Renaissance perspective inspired the eighteenth-century passion for geometricizing landscape to create a ‘mindscape’ of Reason and Order where the bourgeois Ego might find the signature of its own untrammelled powers. We are to envision the rational subject in control of the passions, the mind dominating the body, spirit ‘mastering’ recalcitrant matter. Historically the idioms of ‘reflection’, ‘speculation’, and ‘introspection’ are derived from images of the mind as a mirror of nature and theatre of impressions. In the cool gaze of inner reflection, the reflecting Ego turns to spectate the mental contents of its own thinking processes. By means of the faculty of cognition or ‘mental seeing’ we have access to states of mind whose ideational referents are grasped in the mode of indubitable self-evidence. Descartes’ claim is that the source of apodictic knowledge lies within the sphere of subjectivity. Theoria in modern thought carries the connotations of first-person, present-tensed disinterested spectating, a timeless, placeless, distanced relationship to a world of visible objects. Kant would