Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002) ISSN: 1525-447X HOW A FICTION BECAME THE TRUTH: FIVE THESES ON COGITO, IMAGINATION, AND MODERNITY

Nicolas Veroli

No one name can sum up the project of Modernity. No one individual – intellectual, politician, or businessman – can convincingly be claimed to have embodied its essence. That being said, it is still possible to suggest that Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the 17 ^th century French philosopher, more than any other perhaps, expressed some of modernity’s central assumptions, was caught in some of its most devastating aporias, reflected some of the most abiding tendencies that have characterized it as an historical formation. In fact, there is a long-standing tradition in the history of Western philosophy to see Descartes, in one way or another, as describing or revealing the paradigmatic experience of European modernity. Hegel was perhaps the first to proclaim the universality for our époque of the Cartesian experience and to celebrate it. Nietzsche mocked that experience altogether and Heidegger deplored it as a terrible mistake. Foucault ruthlessly dissected it. Nonetheless, all agreed that Descartes was, at the very least, a particularly convenient tool for mapping out the experience of modernity as such.¹ Could Descartes be a useful synecdoche for Modern Times?

The purpose of this essay is to take that image of Descartes seriously, to trace the ways in which it discloses the location of Descartes’s intervention into the historical conjuncture of early modern Europe, and its effects for the constitution of Modernity’s trajectory and the construction of a specifically modern public sphere. More specifically, the task of constructing an historical model of the public sphere is achieved by setting forth four theses on the cogito and on its other, the imagination. My argument is that the theoretico-historical constitution of the bourgeois subject-form on the basis of its conflictual relationship with the imagination (grasped both as conceptual category and as social-historical content) is the building block on the basis of which “the sphere of private persons gathered together in a public” (Habermas) is politically instituted. The eventual purpose of the first four theses put forward below is to clarify the dynamic structure of this bourgeois subject-form.² The consequences of this analysis are then put forward in a series of theoretical propositions on the nature and function of the bourgeois public sphere, its relationship to privacy, and to the state (thesis 5). Methodologically I aim to achieve this task on the epistemological, social, and political levels simultaneously.

1.

To get right down to the heart of the matter: there is an irresolvable contradiction at the very core of Descartes’s project. It can be – indeed, has been – stated in a number of different ways, but for my purposes the following formulation will shed the most light on its implications: Descartes extirpates from his system precisely what he must invoke in order to constitute it: the imagination. Furthermore, this imagination which he extirpates (or attempts to extirpate), he characterizes as what could never produce his system of “clear and distinct ideas” under any conditions, even though it is the condition of possibility of his thought.

The manifestation of this contradiction may be grasped at any number of different points throughout Descartes’s reasoning. To take only one example: in the middle pages of the fourth part of the Discourse on Method, ³ which establishes the metaphysical foundations of his method, Descartes makes a revealing argument from perfection. The immediate context for this argument is relatively clear: he has just established the existence of the cogito after having doubted the world out of existence. If I can doubt, I must exist. The question now poses itself to him: how to avoid solipsism? How can the subject that has just constituted itself by doubting establish the existence of anything beyond its strict subjective interiority? It is at this particular point that the argument from perfection intervenes. Descartes writes:

reflecting on the fact that I doubted and that, consequently, my being was not altogether perfect, since I could clearly see that it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt, it occurred to me to reflect on wherefrom I had learned to think of something more perfect than I; and I knew immediately that it must be from something more perfect than I.”⁴

All imperfections, Descartes argues, must issue from nothingness (“le neant”), since what is more perfect cannot produce what is less so. Therefore all perfections must ultimately be issued from a supremely perfect being, namely God who must necessarily exist since otherwise He would not be supremely perfect. This is what Kant will later call the “ontological argument” for the existence of God and which he will criticize on a number of technical and logical grounds.⁵ As far as Descartes is concerned, however, his problem is solved: superstition, illusion, fiction, phantasm – all these are the spawns of nothingness. All that is not so derived must, necessarily, be real, a potential object of scientific knowledge. All this is well-known. What is less often noticed, however, is the astounding implication of the actual movement of Descartes’s thought in relation to what he describes as the necessary movement of thought in general.

Indeed, Descartes never hides the fact that he considers doubt to be an imperfection. He says so quite explicitly in the passage I have just cited (“it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt”), and again a few pages later, in a discussion of God’s attributes: “Likewise, I could see that doubt, inconstancy, sadness, and similar things could not be in it [i.e., in God’s nature], since I would have been happy, myself, to be rid of them.”⁶ But if doubt is an imperfection, and if imperfections are issued from nothingness, then Cartesianism as a whole is based on ‘nothing’ since its first step is systematic doubt.

From a strictly logical point of view this observation should mean the collapse of Cartesian thought. The law of non-contradiction has been violated. From the point of view of view adopted here, however, the inquiry must continue. What realities does Cartesianism produce in spite of -- or, perhaps, precisely because of – this terminal contradiction in which it is embroiled? In order to answer this question another must first be dealt with: what is the ‘nothingness’ (neant) at the foundation of Cartesianism which produces it as the first philosophy of the subject? That this nothingness must have a different character than mere absence or ‘no-thing’ is attested to by its historical consequence over the last four centuries. It must be a substantive nothingness. But what?

Descartes defines it – again inadvertently – several pages after categorizing doubt as an imperfection necessarily absent from the nature of God, in an almost didactic passage that attempts to explain how it is possible for some to be blind to what should be, given his argument, the self-evident truth of God’s existence. To recapitulate the argument briefly: if all perfections must be caused by more perfect things, then all that which tends, in the subject, toward perfection must ultimately be caused by a supremely perfect being, God. And since that being cannot, by definition, lack in perfection, it must exist. If this truth, however, is so blindingly self-evident to the natural light of reason – as it must be in order to pass the criterion of Descartes’s radical doubt – how is it possible for some people to ignore it or deny it, as is so clearly the case? What, in short, is the Achilles’ heel in humans that stops them from being equally Cartesian at birth, that is from universally assenting to the same conclusions about the nature of the subject, God, and (therefore) the world, as Descartes is presently demonstrating? It is the imagination. As Descartes explains it:

But the reason that there are many who persuade themselves that there is difficulty in accepting it [the ontological argument], and even to know what their soul is made of, is that they never elevate their minds above sensible things, and that they are so accustomed to consider things only by imagining them, which is a particular manner of thinking about [pour] material things, that all that is not imaginable seems to them unintelligible.⁷

If God, then, is the supreme perfection, the imagination – the root of all error – should be the supreme im perfection. As such it should ultimately be the source of all others, including doubt. Descartes confesses as much in the first paragraph of Part Four of the Discourse:

For a long time I had already noticed that, for morals, it is necessary sometimes to follow opinions which one knows to be highly uncertain, as if they were indubitable. But because I wished to occupy myself only with the pursuit of truth, it occurred to me that I should do exactly the contrary, and that I should reject as absolutely false all that I could imagine having the least doubt in [tout ce en quoi je pouvais imaginer le moindre doute] so as to see if there would not remain, after that, something in my beliefs that were entirely indubitable.⁸

The cogito, then, is metaphysically (and metaphorically) “grounded” in an act of doubt, which is to say, an act of the imagination. Like the proverbial castle of sand, it is constructed on the basis of nothing. The imagination is the nothingness that gives birth to the cogito, which then must deny this nothingness in the name of reason. Quite “illogically” then, given Descartes’s own premises,⁹ something (the subject) is born out of nothing (the imagination). Moreover, in a supreme paradox, that ‘something’ immediately constitutes the nothingness that lies at its core as its determinate outside. Historically, the result of this “logical contradiction” is the institution of a radical division between rational cogito on the one side and imagination on the other. This, more than the mind-body dualism is the defining characteristic of Descartes’s thought. While the latter had been common currency philosophically since Plato and socio-culturally enforced in the history of European Christianity’s relationship to the body since at least the 12 ^th century, the former was far more Descartes’s own invention.¹⁰

2.

What is the phenomenal content held together by the conceptual category of ‘imagination’? Why is Descartes’s relationship to the imagination so ambiguous, treading the phantasmatic line between suppressing it and founding his philosophy on it? The two questions – and their answers – are related, but in a less-than-straightforward way. A first approximation might be to say that while ‘imagination’ functions as a figure of pervasive exteriority in Descartes’s mature thought, it also designates a series of obstacles – social, cultural, and institutional – to the nascent project of Bourgeois European Modernity he actively participated in constituting.¹¹ The imagination is thus both what should be outside the cogito and what has not yet successfully been cast out.

It is worthwhile to begin by listing the things Descartes specifies as related in some way to the imagination, as its expressions: alchemy, magic, the occult sciences, fables (history), madness, and paganism. Disregarding, for a moment, the historical signification of these phenomena in early modern Europe, what can possibly link such an odd, eclectic list, at least from the standpoint of Descartes’s text? Answering this question requires a detailed consideration of the relationship of opposition that binds the cogito and the imagination together. One would thus have to come back to the moment of genesis of the cogito itself in the Cartesian saga to truly be able to comprehend the root characteristics that organize the dynamic of this relationship.¹² It is at least worth a try.

“After the rain there must come the sun” goes the old French proverb. Similarly, “after doubt there comes certainty” in the Cartesian epic: I have doubted everything that could be doubted, and must thus come to the conclusion that the only thing I cannot doubt is my own existence as the one who doubts. But who am I? The inquiry must turn from the question of existence to that of identity: what is this ‘I’ that doubts? Near the beginning of the Second Meditation which is wholly devoted to resolving this question, Descartes warns ominously: “ . . . I must, from now on, guard against imprudently taking some other thing for myself . . . “¹³ The theoretical task, henceforth, is that of constituting the cogito, the subject, as a purely homogeneous substance that will contain no trace of alterity. ‘I’ must be ‘I’ and not another. Since, as it turns out, I can only be (with absolute certainty) a thing that thinks, a thinking thing, that is, the opposite of a material or extended thing, corporeality will be the stand-in for alterity, for the threat of heterogeneity, throughout the Meditations. In the second one specifically, Descartes’s purpose is to exorcise corporeality from his discourse precisely because he must manage to grasp thought in and of itself, as a thing that has no intrinsic relation to matter. That is why, paradoxically, he will speak so much about the imagination in a text in which he is supposed to specify what thought is aside from matter, as a pure essence, so to speak. And yet, in his own terms, the imagination is a hopeless mixture of thought and matter which constantly violates the ontological frontier separating thinking and extended substances. Once again, he will be at pains to chase the imagination away, though never quite successfully so. Why?

Because the imagination is the body inside the mind.

It is worth recapitulating, for a moment, Descartes’s overall project in order to situate this thesis. The Cartesian subject is in search of “knowledge of the truth” (“la connaissance de la verite”). This is what Descartes proclaims everywhere. Knowledge of the truth, in turn, must always meet the criterion of certainty. Therefore, all representations must first be doubted in order to find out which stand up to that radical doubt. As it turns out, however, doubt itself – as strict negation of the world – is and must be an act of the imagination. One must imagine that the contents of all one’s thoughts are imaginary. Is it any surprise that, in the process of constructing the cogito out of the ruins left behind by doubt, one should continually stumble into the imagination? Is it any surprise that Descartes should alternatively conflate imagination and rational representation on the one hand, and oppose them to each other, on the other?

Descartes cannot say it enough: the imagination is implicated in sense perception. It is guilty by association of bodily excess, so to speak. The problem of the imagination, as Descartes had already pointed out in Part I of the Discourse, is that it constitutionally oversteps the limits of indubitability.¹⁴ The imagination is the incorrigibly active principle of a subject that must always will itself to be absolutely passive. The Cartesian cogito, it is well-known, must always be a spectator of the world in order to represent it as it is in and of itself, without any “external” additions. And yet the imagination continuously and irrepressibly adds a surplus to the world, one which the subject always has to negate (doubt) so as to protect the rigor of its epistemological project (its quest for “knowledge of the truth”).

Here, again, there appears the paradox that was defined earlier, namely, that in the process of negating the things that the imagination “feigns and invents,” as Descartes puts it somewhere, the cogito becomes implicated in the imagination.¹⁵ Indeed, there is no other way: if it were purely passive the cogito would never know anything, precisely because it would never think of doubting. Or rather, it might only think of it. If the cogito were a pure spectator it would adopt or construct no method. It would have no possibility for a method to begin with. That is why Descartes says – must say – in the First Meditation: “I use all my powers to deceive myself, feigning to believe that all these thoughts [that is: all the beliefs I had before doubting] are false and imaginary “¹⁶ The original sin of the imagination is the act that constitutes the cogito. “Feigning” and “deceiving” are only so many modalities of imagining in the Cartesian universe. The Archimedean spectator is instituted by an act which, from a strictly rational point of view, is utterly unintelligible.

From that point on, however, all that is bodily is active and all that is mental is passive – all except for the imagination, uncontrollable and uncontainable, but also absolutely necessary for communicating across the ontological chasm dividing extension from thought. Descartes says it over and over again: the imagination is, right alongside rational cognition or volition, an attribute of mind.¹⁷ And yet, the constitutive qualities which he recognizes in it – its cognate-like relation to sense perception and its nature as an activity that always adds to the world something that it is not (figment, fantasy, superstition) – these mark imagination’s carnal nature. A savage anomaly: the imagination is the body inside the mind.

3.

Kai Lundgren-Williams best describes the situation when he observes that Descartes’s philosophy culminates, strictly speaking, in “an exuberant moment,” namely the point at which the cogito doubts itself into existence. It is then that, for the first and last time, it levitates in good faith above the abyss dividing mind and body. Naïve sanguinarian of the first hour, the cogito freely hoists itself on the shoulders of that which it is trying to murder. But, as Lundgren-Williams remarks: “The moment, however, is opened once; and . . . forever after cemented into a foundational principle.”¹⁸ The cogito constitutes itself with the exuberance of a pure act that will transform it into the paradigmatic spectator. Its problem, henceforth, will be that of managing the imagination – that is, the image of its origin – in order to protect its own integrity from this other that is itself, to cement it forever after “into a foundational principle.” Whatever it does, however, the cogito cannot destroy the imagination: it must preserve it in order to preserve itself. And yet, it must contain it so as to assert its self-identity. At heart then, the cogito is a concept of crisis.

There are two strategies Descartes will employ to control the contamination of the cogito by the imagination. The first, which I outlined earlier, is the negation of the imagination by means of the imagination (doubt which appears, in its positive form, as the invention of “the evil demon”). The second is the mystification of the imagination by means of a denial (again, a negation) of its productive content. Thus, Descartes defines the imagination as “the contemplation of the figure or image of a corporeal thing”¹⁹ in the Second Meditation. The first strategy fails because it must save the imagination in order to destroy it. The second also fails, but for the opposite reason: in obscuring the productive potentialities of the imagination – by characterizing it as a form of “contemplation” – it conflates imagination and reason. Both must represent corporeal or physical reality.

That is why – paradox of paradoxes! -- Descartes can liken himself to a painter in Part 5 of the Discourse and elaborate his science of physics (deduced entirely from clear and distinct ideas grounded in his method) in an imaginary space. It is worth quoting the passage at length:

I had the design to understand in it [i.e., in his treatise on physics, The World] all that, before having set anything down, I thought I knew, touching the nature of material things. But, in the same way that painters, unable to represent equally well all the various sides of a solid body on a flat painting, choose one that they expose to the light of day while shading the others such that they appear only insofar as they can be seen by looking at the first; in the same way, fearing not to be able to place in my discourse all that I had in my thoughts, I planned only to expose in it rather amply what I conceived about light . . . and finally about man, because he is the spectator of it [the universe]. And even, so as to shade a little all these things, and to be able to say more freely how I judged them [ce que j’en jugeais], without being forced either to follow or to refute the opinions that are received amongst the scholars, I resolved myself to leave this whole world to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new one, if God were to create somewhere, in the imaginary spaces, enough matter to compose it . . . and that, thereafter, he do nothing else than lend his ordinary assistance to nature, and let it act following the laws that he has established.²⁰

Just as the painter cannot represent the exteriority of physical bodies on a canvas, so the philosopher cannot represent the interiority of thought with the aid of linguistic signs. Why not? Because, in both cases, the medium (the painted image and the linguistic representation) cannot capture the instantaneous nature of the real. Neither the canvas nor the text can bear the weight of their object. The canvas cannot sustain an image of all the perspectives that constitute its object at once, and the philosopher’s discourse cannot achieve a rational representation of the thought of the universe as an absolute totality. What is strangest in all this is how similar to each other imagination and rational cognition are starting to appear. They hold the same pose toward the world (contemplation), they operate the same activity (representation), and they have the same limit (instantaneity). What then differentiates them? Is it that the one (cognition) must represent the mental as well as the physical aspect of reality? But it is precisely the point of Descartes’s physics and metaphysics that the two are so well separated (following the separation between matter and thought) that one can be examined and known to the complete exclusion of the other. It is well known: in Descartes’s physics human beings, for instance, are considered only insofar as they are material things, automata composed of ropes and pulleys. The same applies to the rest of reality. But in that case what, exactly, differentiates physics from painting, science from art? The fact that one represents the real whereas the other is an object of fancy? Clearly, that is not the case since Descartes himself admits that he has constructed his whole system of physics “in the imaginary spaces” – which is to say nothing more than that he has invented it out of nothing!

In the final analysis, both of the strategies for the containment of the imagination that Descartes employs to shield the cogito from the imagination – negation and mystification – fail to fulfill their hypothetical function. In both cases the imagination continues to threaten the integrity of the philosophical subject. What is interesting, however, is that it is the very persistence of this threat that constitutes the condition of continuation of the subject. If the imagination were to be – by some incomprehensible act – entirely eradicated from the epistemological horizon of the subject, that subject itself would immediately collapse into a comatose state from which it should never recuperate. For, it is precisely the tension between the irreducible persistence of the imagination on the one hand, and Reason’s will-to-reduction on the other that bestows upon the subject the only identity that it is capable of possessing, the only project it is programmed to undertake: the rationalization of self and world. The subject’s destruction of the imagination – but how can one destroy “no thing”? – would mean precisely the achievement of its own identity: it would become the absolute spectator it imagines itself to be and, in that moment, unable to do anything further, it would be transubstantiated into a living corpse: bread into flesh, wine into blood.

It is thus the very tension at the heart of the cogito, between its self-image as rational spectator on the one hand, and its epistemological function as theoretical actor on the other, that conditions the possibility of its ontological effectivity. Without the one it dissolves into a stream of subjectivity. But without the other, it loses its purchase on the world. The subject, then, can only maintain itself as a permanent moment of crisis, theoretically and practically. Properly speaking, the cogito is a concept of crisis.

4.

That Descartes places his science under the protective umbrella of the imagination, that he must do so in order to sidestep the wrath of the Parisian theologians of the Sorbonne (“the scholars” whom he mentions on several occasions) – and therefore of the Catholic Church – in no way relieves his theoretical predicament. On the contrary, it only highlights the extra-epistemological dimension of the problematic of the cogito, the ambiguity in which Descartes’s – or rather, the cogito’s – relationship to the imagination is mired.

For, the relationship between cogito and imagination is not a purely epistemological one. If it were, there would be no need to make such a fuss over it. Imagination – or error – spawn of nothing, progenitor of nothing, should pose a threat to no thing, and certainly not to a thinking thing. But if the imagination is both the nothingness from which the cogito springs forth, as well as its constitutive exterior (thesis 1), it is also the body inside the mind (thesis 2). That is to say, the imagination marks the irreducibly exterior character of subjective interiority. And that means, in turn, that the imagination, as the heterogeneous origin of the subject, must be contained by, or even assimilated to rational cognition (thesis 3). As the “nothingness” from which rational subjectivity pours forth the imagination must be appropriated – the cogito’s very existence, along with its power of cognition, depends on such an appropriation, though this appropriation should not result in its destruction. The imagination – both as the constitutive exterior of the subject and as the exterior character of its interiority (i.e. its bodyliness) -- must be harnessed to power up the cogitative automaton.

There are thus at least two other aspects to the problem of the imagination aside from the strictly epistemological one: first, how can the cogito enforce the structural homogeneity of its interiority so as to maintain the boundaries (inside/outside) that guarantee its self-identity? And secondly: how can it, simultaneously, subsume the originarily heterogeneous moment that propels it ontologically without entirely destroying that moment (and, therefore, itself) in the process? Each of those problems dictates a singular trajectory or vector, one that lies outside the formal limits of epistemology:

The first calls forth a political imperative: the cogito must colonize its own interior in order to attempt securing the homogeneity of its substance. Only on the condition of such homogeneity can the division between reason and imagination, inside and outside, be maintained. But also, correlatively, this homogeneity (i.e. self-identity) of the subject must always be gained and guarded by force because it is always resisted.

The second problem can only be resolved by positing an economic imperative: the ontological surplus produced by the imagination must be systematically extracted and subsequently channeled toward the rationalization of the real. The exclusion of the imagination from the subject, if it presents itself as the negation of the imagination, must also be seen as the production of an opposition between the two. The imagination, once it is excluded from the process of rationalization constitutive of the subject, keeps intruding – in its utter uselessness – on the peace of the latter. It is a “useless” or “unemployed negativity” that must be put to work, not only because reason instrumentalizes the world by its very nature, but also because the enormous energies that this useless negativity designates necessitate expenditure.²¹

Surrounded and beleaguered by an ocean of unemployed negativity, reason must either assign that negativity to its regime of labor or be swallowed whole by it.

In this context, the phenomenal content of the imagination, which Descartes mentions in a number of places throughout the Meditations and especially in the Discourse, is neither fortuitous nor innocent. It is closely related to the political and economic imperatives the philosophical subject must pursue as part of its confrontation with the imagination. Indeed, the phenomenal referents of Descartes’s concept of imagination – insanity as well as magic (both Hermeticism and witchcraft), history, and paganism – constitute some of the dominant threats to the project of Bourgeois modernity in the Classical Age. The Cartesian division between imagination and Reason, between cogito and nothingness, and between mind and body is an attempt both to exorcise these threats and to harness the power they promise for the project of capitalist accumulation. In the final analysis, the effect of this dual relationship is to maintain the cogito in an abstract opposition to the imagination while, in the very same moment, insuring that they remain concretely and inextricably tied to each other. Once again, the division between imagination and reason appears as a permanent crisis at the heart of the subject. Reason, as both the product of the imagination and as its abstract negation, must simultaneously draw its power from the imagination and repress it.

The historical complexity of the phenomena that the terms designated by Descartes’s concept of imagination encompass – ‘insanity,’ ‘history,’ ‘magic,’ ‘paganism’ -- has been richly illustrated by scholars over the last thirty or forty years. Hence, I will not pretend here to cover all the various aspects of their symbolic, conceptual, or social-historical genesis and development. Nonetheless, a few very broad reminders of general tendencies will go a long way toward clarifying the situation.

a) Primitive Accumulation as the Mirror of Colonialism

Marx observed, almost a century-and-a-half ago, that if capitalism begins with an original sin it is not that of the slovenliness of the many as Adam Smith had supposed before him, but, on the contrary, that of the wholesale robbery and extortion promulgated by the elites at the expense of everyone else.²² This he called “primitive accumulation” in contradistinction to the concept of “original accumulation” coined by Smith,²³ and developed an account of it based on two related processes: first, the enclosure of the commons – i.e. lands held in common by European peasant and serf communities for the purpose of subsistence agriculture. This enclosure of the commons and the concomitant institution of wage labor that accompanies it, the general confiscation by the grandees of the multitude’s means of subsistence, lead by way of further and further expropriation, to the genesis of massive migratory movements to the cities. But it also results in an extended mobility of the population more generally. Migration to the cities is welcome by the emerging business class, which is in dire need of wage-workers for its factories, but generalized mobility is frowned upon since it blocks the way to the constitution of a stable and properly submissive labor force. The second process engendered by primitive accumulation then, is a legal and police response by the budding bourgeoisie through the imposition of vagrancy laws and the criminalization of poverty. “Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor.”²⁴

More recently, scholars have significantly altered this picture, though not by presenting evidence against it but, on the contrary, by suggesting that its logic must be so far extended beyond its original bounds that its significance is thereby thoroughly transformed. Starting in the inter-war period, historians such as C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and more recently Eric Williams, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cedric Robinson have suggested that primitive accumulation did not have a center of gravity exclusively restricted to England or Western Europe as Marx had argued.²⁵ Rather, they point out, it began by operating immediately on a world scale. The colonization of the Americas starting with Columbus’ first voyage to Cuba, was characterized by the expropriation and wholesale genocide of Native Americans, leading to the beginnings of the African slave trade a few years later. Further, the development of naval routes to Asia by way of the coast of Africa, and the subsequent institution of Portuguese and Dutch Empires in South East Asia, followed by the British and French Empires a few centuries later – all this was part and parcel of the process of primitive accumulation, as Marx had begun to perceive, if not to theorize, by the end of his life.²⁶

Nor was colonization a process purely external to Europe. The creation of cultural codes of racial difference, of ideologies of racial superiority, and of institutional systems based on the operation of racial hierarchy – plantations, but also marriage laws, residential segregation, missionary ventures, implicit occupational codes, etc . . . – all this had enormous consequences for the construction and reconstruction of cultural, racial, ethnic, national, civilizational, and even geo-historical identities. The power of naming the Other is one thing. The necessity of re-naming oneself after having exercised that power is its insidious, invisible ramification, one that is neither incidental nor negligible. “You are a nigger. You are a kike. But, then, what am I ?”

b) Enclosure of the Symbolic Commons: Grammar, Thought, and Clarity

The necessity of constituting White, Rational, Civilized, Occidental, Masculine identities that results from the process of exterior colonization – that is historically simultaneous to that process – produces one more moment in the process of primitive accumulation, one that is distinct from, though related to, the realities described by Marx (enclosure of the commons, criminalization of poverty). Scholars such as Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich, Caroline Merchant, Martin Bernal, and Maria Mies have elaborated at least the beginnings of a history of what an interior colonization of the West-Asian peninsula might look like.²⁷ Here again, the vastness of the subject permits only a few broad strokes to indicate a general outline rather than an exhaustive examination.

The 16^th and 17^th centuries were not simply the times of Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, of the Renaissance and of “the Age of Scientific Discovery” as common historical wisdom used to have it until not so long ago. The “enlightenment” of humanity, as all pedagogical ventures, had its costs, and they were by no means slight. Illich, for instance, recounts the genesis of what might be called the “will-to-grammar” by telling the story of Elio Antonio de Nebrija, the first bureaucrat perhaps, at any rate the first man who ever wanted to establish a grammar of a living or vernacular language. “While Columbus sailed for foreign lands to seek the familiar – gold, subjects, nightingales – in Spain Nebrija advocates the reduction of the Queen’s subjects to an entirely new type of dependence. He presents her with a new weapon, grammar, to be wielded by a new kind of mercenary, the letrado.”²⁸ It is the same gesture of supreme content, of unfathomable arrogance that leads the European bourgeoisie to confiscate the commons, Columbus to plant the Spanish flag in Cuba, and Nebrija to suggest the effective confiscation of language, its colonization by professional intellectuals intent on standardizing its use for the purposes of nation-building. More to the point however, there is an element of profound anguish involved in the project of the grammatical rationalization of language. This anguish manifests itself on two fronts simultaneously.

On the one hand, the emergence of printing technologies at the end of the 15 ^th century – “the Gutenberg Galaxy” as Marshall McLuhan memorably called it²⁹ – opens the way for a new, unheard of, range of expression in the multitude of vernacular dialects that are rife throughout Christendom at the dawn of modernity. Polyglottism as a “norm” of social existence – that is, the absence of bureaucratic or centralized linguistic norms – has not yet been eradicated by the post-Babelian order. As Illich observes: “[t]he humanist [Nebrija] proposes the standardization of colloquial language to remove the new technology of printing from the vernacular domain – to prevent people from printing and reading in the various languages that, up to that time, they had only spoken. By this monopoly over an official and taught language, he proposes to suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading.”³⁰ At stake here is the collective cultural autonomy of pre-statist social formations, the communities of solidarity that would enable extensive resistance to the ascending rule of the bourgeoisie in 17 ^th century England, almost pushing the revolution beyond the latter’s control.³¹ Also at stake are the diffuse, but nonetheless visible, efforts to construct an Atlantic proletariat by European, African, and American sailors during the same period, whose calls for democracy could not be ignored by the likes of Locke and his consorts, even if they could be distorted beyond recognition.³² Control of grammar, control of language in this context is vital for the construction of political and class hegemony. To establish rigid boundaries between languages, to insure that people have access to only one language defined by the boundaries of the emerging nation-state – whether French, Spanish, or English – is to insure that they can no longer communicate with each other, that struggle itself can no longer communicate.

On the other hand, and this is perhaps a point that Illich does not emphasize enough, the project of the grammatical systematization of the vernacular evinces a deep anguish over the question of cultural identity that comes along with imperialist designs. To quote Nebrija himself, this time, writing the concluding paragraph to the introduction of his Gramatica Castellana (1492):

Now, Your Majesty, let me come to the last advantage that you shall gain from my grammar. For the purpose, recall the time when I presented you with a draft of this book earlier this year in Salamanca. At this time, you asked me what end such grammar could possibly serve. Upon this the Bishop of Avila interrupted to answer in my stead. What he said was this: “Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people will stand in a new need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the vanquished, and the need for the language we shall bring with us.” My grammar shall serve to impart to them the Castilian tongue, as we have used grammar to teach Latin to our young.³³

In 1492 the Christian elites are still marginally concerned with “barbarians,” i.e. outsiders. Soon, however, it will be “savages” and “natives” that will become the predominant objects of their concerns. Grammar, as an essential tool in the civilizing mission of the incipient West is more, however, than the Bishop of Avila and Nebrija himself knew or avowed: as much as it is an instrument for the colonization of the Other, it is also one for the constitution of Self. Indeed, if it is granted that the process of civilization has little to do with scientific progress, rational Enlightenment or any other teleological concept of history, and a great deal to do with the centralization of all forms of power in the state and the standardization of all activity (whether economically productive or not), then it must also be granted that the overwhelming majority of the people living in Europe in 1500 are as much in need of being “civilized” as any African or Native American slave.³⁴

The project of colonization, just as that of primitive accumulation, must have a universal compass, even if the different populations being colonized play different parts in the scenario being rehearsed. In order for there to be an Other there must be a Self, and neither of the two can be taken for granted. By reminding Queen Isabella of “the barbarians” who will soon be placed under her yoke Nebrija is implicitly calling to her attention the fact that her own subjects -- those who, after all, will have to maintain that yoke – are themselves only tentatively in her power. Spain, it must not be forgotten, is, in 1492, one of the most repressive regions of the European peninsula. The laws of blood of 1446 that had excluded Jews from state-office and the Inquisition chasing their descendants into Portugal at about this time bespeak the difficulties surrounding the project of nation-building which is the necessary basis for modern Empire-building.

Nebrija’s bid for becoming the first drill-master of the emerging Spanish nation will fall through. The Queen, according to Illich, has too much respect for the symbolic commons of her subjects to consider encroaching upon them. Alternatively, it might be said that the Spanish state at that particular historical conjuncture did not possess a sufficiently developed administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure to impose language education to any significant extent. The situation does not change overnight but in France, for instance, by the time the 17 ^th century rolls around, the question of the wholesale reform of the vernacular has become a significant topic of discussion among the intellectual and political elites. Maria Tsiapera and Garon Wheeler have summed up the situation quite well in their study of the all-important Port-Royal Grammar:

As France worked to forge a national identity, there had been many French language texts in the 1500s that had tried to study and clarify the native speech. The lively discussions and arguments over the role of French, its vocabulary and spelling, and the mechanics in general of the language went along with the unsettled affairs of the nation and resulted in what could be described as “creative anarchy.” The early 17 ^th century saw a continuation of these conflicts in both politics and religion, as well as more attempts to “correct” and “purify” French . . . What resulted were exaggerated attempts at achieving clarity . . . Syntax vocabulary, and spelling were examined and attempts were made to regulate them.³⁵

It is during this period that Cardinal Richelieu, one of the most prominent politicians of the age, established the Academie Francaise (1635), in order to “clean the language of the rubbish it had contracted [contracte], to establish a particular usage of words, to labor for the purity of our language and to render it capable of the highest eloquence.”³⁶ The Academie is, in short, Nebrija’s dream come true: an institution chartered by the state, composed of a board of literati empowered to legislate over the proper usage of the national language. As one of the articles of its statutes put it: “The principal function of the academy shall be to work with all care and diligence possible to give set rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences.”³⁷

Descartes himself would play no small part in this process. Educated at the College de La Fleche, itself part of a network of Jesuit schools chartered by Henry IV to train France’s budding commercial aristocracy (the noblesse de robe as it was known) in its bid for hegemony over both the state apparatus and the national market, he would become one of the first French philosophers (preceded only by Montaigne) to publish a text in the vernacular rather than in Latin.³⁸ Indeed, it might be said with no great exaggeration that his criterion for truth, “clear and distinct ideas,” is of one cloth with the grammarians’ project to “purify” the vernacular, to standardize it, to unify it into a “mother tongue” cleansed of all dialectal deviations. Nor is it an accident that Descartes was educated in a Jesuit college. The Jesuit Order, especially in France but in other European countries as well, was tightly wedded to the secular hierarchy and was fulfilling an important function in the creation of the nation-state: namely, that of creating a uniform bourgeois public that would give substantive weight to the nation’s claim to cultural universality. By the end of the first third of the 17 ^th century, the Jesuit schools had about thirteen thousand students in the area surrounding Paris alone.³⁹ When he innovates by writing philosophy in French, as opposed to using Latin, then, it must not be thought that Descartes places himself in opposition to his preceptors, but rather that he is preceding them along a common path. What Descartes labors to purify, however, is not language alone, but knowledge as well. His “method for rightly conducting the reason” is nothing but a grammar of thought, in spite of his protestations to the contrary.⁴⁰

Now, the clarity and purity of language upheld by the French theoreticians of grammar during the first half of the 17 ^th century was interpreted from the standpoint of a usage-based prescriptivism. The two main figures in the history of grammatical theory during this period, ClaudeVaugelas and the poet Francois de Malherbe, strenuously campaigned against any linguistic innovation and for a strict adherence to “good usage,” basing their definitions of ‘usage’ on the linguistic habits of the Absolute Monarch’s court (i.e. foreign diplomats, the high aristocracy, and the royal family).⁴¹ Only words and syntactical structures used and approved of by king and court (the subject of grammatical propriety being avidly discussed in the famous salons of Madame de Rambouillet and other aspiring ruling class literati) were to be considered a part of proper French usage according to prescriptivist doctrine. Even the classical tragedians Corneille and Racine had Vaugelas review their plays for grammatical “errors,” i.e. for what would be considered improprieties by their public (once again, king and court). In this manner, the prescriptivists fully articulated the theoretical underpinnings of Nebrija’s project for a national language controlled by the elites but imposed universally on the national (and, soon, colonial) population.⁴²

Descartes, in his explanation for publishing the Discourse in French, appeals to the same public: “And if I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than in Latin, which is the language of my preceptors, it is because I hope that those who use only their natural reason in all its purity, will better judge of my opinions than those who only believe in Ancient Books.”⁴³ In other words: Descartes has little faith in the theologians and other Latin-wielding scholars of the Sorbonne to give him what he would consider a fair hearing. He therefore writes his Discourse for the use of the rising gentry and the court nobility whose allegiances have less to do with Catholic ideology or even with religious orthodoxy and are far more oriented toward nation-building. As one commentator has remarked:

Descartes’ aim was to make ideas accessible not only to scholars but also to an educated public of men and women. By the end of the seventeenth century Cartesianism was closely associated with the new ‘science.’ Public lectures on Cartesian physics, such as those given in 1665 at Toulouse by Pierre-Sylvain Regis, a follower of Descartes, drew large crowds of townfolk, scholars, magistrates, clergy, and even ladies.⁴⁴

Interpreted in this context, Descartes cannot be thought to emancipate the modern subject of knowledge from arbitrary social authority, as has so frequently been claimed on his behalf by his admirers. On the contrary, he attempts to constitute the modern philosophical subject in a relationship of subordination to the emergent national state (in its absolutist form). What Descartes does is to shift relations of ideological subservience from the setting sun of the old Medieval Church to the dawning one of the Absolute Monarch, tied up as he is with the crystallization of capitalism and the free market.⁴⁵ From a political standpoint, the conflict between “arbitrary authority” and emancipation in 17 ^th century Europe cannot be mapped out along the lines of antagonism opposing “Church and State.” There is nothing particularly emancipating to be found in Absolute Monarchy or in state authority more generally. Rather, if there is a relevant opposition in terms that can still be deciphered today it is that between what might be called the monolingualism of the elites and the polyglotism of the multitude. Descartes – whether he writes in Latin or in “French” (i.e. in the particular dialect of the Parisian upper crust) – stands squarely on the side of the first. In fact, he provides the philosophical justification for the monolingualism and, more generally, for the enclosure of the symbolic commons that the institution of the modern state necessitates. In the modern universe the invention of which Descartes’s work participates in, monolingualism and monoculture become, from having been tools for the unification of an administrative apparatus (the medieval Church), instruments for the domination of entire populations.

c) Enclosure of Subjectivity

Indeed, largely in tandem with the enclosure of the symbolic commons by the likes of Vaugelas and Malherbe, Descartes (along with Bacon in England) opens the door to the enclosure of knowledge. Madness, but also witchcraft and magic become crime, violence, anarchy, and superstition impinging upon the onto-epistemological territory of Reason. All of these phenomena are considered threats that must permanently be confined to the hospitals and prisons of Europe that start to emerge in the mid-17 ^th century. The “great confinment” that Foucault so memorably described in the chapter by that name of his Madness and Civilization is but the other side of the enclosure of the commons Marx had denounced in Capital.

Confinement, this massive fact of which we can find the signs throughout all of 17 ^th century Europe, is an affair of “the police.” Police in the very precise sense that term is given during the classical age, which is to say the totality of measures that make work both possible and necessary for all those who would not know how to live without it…

Before it had the medical sense that we give it – or that, at the very least, we like to suppose it has – confinement was required by something altogether different than the concern for curing. What made it necessary was the imperative of labor. Our philanthropy would be delighted to recognize the signs of a benevolent outlook toward illness where there is only the mark of the condemnation of idleness.⁴⁶

More than the “terroristic laws” and actions Marx had decried however, what Foucault describes is the material constitution of alterity. The institutional confinement of the poor is not simply the political concomitant of the enclosure of the commons – though it is that too. It is a part of the process through which subjectivity becomes reconfigured socially and ontologically in order to verify the epistemological division between Reason and imagination. The founding of the Paris General Hospital – six years after Descartes’s death – is a strict superimposition of theoretical categories and practical creation. Unreason – madness, poverty, crime, -- is both extirpated from the body of society and, in the very same moment, formally incorporated by means of royal decree (Louis XIV -- him again -- orders its allocation and organization⁴⁷ ). Thought and extension must both come under the compass of central authority. Simultaneously, and in a complementary manner, the chaff must be separated from the wheat and brought under the control of the state-machine. The political imperative defined by the institution of the philosophical subject is the colonization of its interior, the purification of both thought and society from swerving elements, from everything that threatens the fledgling rational order of the absolutist state. Madness, surely a symptom if there ever was any of the absolute alterity of the imagination from Descartes’s point of view, must be brought under the purview of rational organization. In short, madness must be compelled to work in all senses of that word (i.e., both to function and to produce).

The postulation of the “evil genius” and the radical distinction that is drawn between sleep and insanity in the first meditation – in spite of all the aporias it entails – are both means of “guaranteeing Reason against madness,” as Foucault puts it.⁴⁸ They are ways of insuring the purity of thought and the containment of the imagination, its confinment to an exterior of society that is, in a spacially paradoxical manner, interior to it. The logic of the General Hospital, of the asylum, and later of the prison, is to impose moral agency and, more importantly, moral responsibility on the recalcitrant bodies of the rebellious.

“Whomsoever refuses to obey the genral will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than he shall be forced to be free,” Rousseau would proclaim triumphantly in the 18 ^th century.⁴⁹ Indeed, if work is a function of responsibility, and if responsibility is the condition of freedom, then to compel someone to work is to force him or her to be free. Capitalism itself, which is to say the sundering of people from their means of subsistence and the appropriation of those means for the purpose of commodity production, insures, tendentially at least, that the only social definition of freedom available to anyone lies in wage labor and, by extension, in the institution of private property. The General Hospital is thus not just a means of imposing the discipline of wage labor, but also a means for the production of moral agents, i.e. of subjects. In short, if it is at one level part of the Great Confinement of the Classical Age, it also participates in what might be called the “Great Refinement” of capitalist modernity, namely that complex of institutional, cultural, and political transformations which Norbert Elias used to call “the civilizing process.”⁵⁰

d) Modernity and Historiophobia

It is that refinement, guaranteeing as it does Reason from imagination, that will also insure, at the level of social being, the division between European and savage, between man and woman, between bourgeois and commoner. The outline of such divisions is incipient in Descartes’s text. For, the imagination encompasses more than the concept of ‘unreason,’ madness pure and simple. History, as well as paganism, and the occult sciences (Hermetic magic and, one may also surmise as will be argued shortly, witchcraft) also figure on the imagination’s side of the Ontological divide throughout the Discourse.⁵¹ History, on the one hand, and magic, on the other, each embody a distinct and significant threat to the cultural and political apparatus of Western Bourgeois Modernity. Each must be, for different though related reasons, exorcised from the interiority of the subject. Both forms of knowledge must be expurgated, by all expedient means available, from the constitution of Modern Reason.

The hermetic magic of the Renaissance, for instance, spearheaded by such figures as Giordano Bruno and Marcilio Ficino during the 16 ^th century, puts forward a conception of the historical origins of Civilization that is deeply indebted to those who would rapidly become the other par excellence for all the nascent and rising colonial empires (Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, England, France). The Africans, whose labor was rapidly becoming necessary for the American expansion of the European empires, were supposed to be -- in the Hermetic and, more broadly, Renaissance interpretation -- the originators of everything that their enslavers held to justify their bondage. Indeed, as such scholars as Frances Yates and Martin Bernal have noted, it is Africans, and particularly Ancient Egyptians, who were widely held, during the Renaissance, to be the inventors of culture, an idea that was in large part propagated by the canonical texts of Hermetic Magic, the Corpus Hermeticum. This conviction, or so Bernal argues, held for many well into the Enlightenment. In spite of Isaac Casaubon’s attempt in 1614 – i.e., when Descartes was 18 years old – to debunk the claims to Egyptian authenticity of the Corpus Hermeticum, the principal text on the basis of which those claims were made,⁵² many would continue to believe in the original priority of Africa in the historical constitution of human civilization. From Lorenzo de Medici’s deathbed order to Ficino during the 1490s that he translate the Corpus before Plato’s dialogues to Napoleon’s insistence on taking a team of Egyptologists with him on the way to conquering Egypt in the early 19 ^th century, there can be no doubt that the priority of alterity haunted Early Modern European consciousness.⁵³ Indeed, the historiographer of philosophy Lucien Braun, has observed that modern historians of philosophy until Hegel were in the habit of tracing the origin of their discipline back to Egypt, if not to ante-dilluvian (i.e., pre-Flood) times, rather than arbitrarily stopping with Greece, as has become the habit since.⁵⁴

Descartes’s can be read as the first pre-Hegelian philosophical attempt to erase if not destroy the African origins of European Modernity. But while Hegel would have the cultural power at his fingertips to reconstruct the whole narrative of World-history according to a strictly Eurocentric canon of interpretation, Descartes does not.⁵⁵ Every situation permits only of certain kinds of means. One does not do or think the same things after three centuries of successful colonial imperialism and after only one centuy of still-fledgeling efforts. In short, while Hegel in 1822 can revise World-history to incorporate it into his system, Descartes in 1637 can only suppress it, shield his thought against it from fear of contamination.

Besides, fables make one imagine many events possible which in reality are not so, and even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this fact it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source, are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knight-errants of our novels [des Paladins de nos romans], and form projects beyond their power of performance.⁵⁶

Historiophobia does its haunting in Descartes, not inappropriately, through the figure of that great “Knight-errant” of the 17 ^th century, Don Quixote.⁵⁷ Fiction, art, imagination are all collapsed into each other in the process of condemning History to the dungeons of Reason. All of them share at least this in common, namely that they lead to “extravagances.” History is fraught because it may draw the subject into a hopeless fight against windmills, may force him to cancel himself as the epistemological foundation of the scientific project, as the absolute spectator. Action is the death of Reason, and so must always be an extravagance, driven by folly and bound to failure. Since, for Descartes, the limits of the possible have regressed to the point of being contained by the boundaries of the actual, all actions that are aimed toward the destruction of the actual are condemned (nothing comes from nothing in Cartesian ontology). The cogito must isolate itself from everything that can incite it to the aspiration of acting in the socio-political realm, especially if, like history, it seems to illustrate the potential of such activity. Hence, the famous gesture of the Third Meditation: “I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will call away all my senses, I will erase even from my thoughts all the images of corporeal things, or at least (for that is hardly possible) I will esteem them vain and false…”⁵⁸ History, undoubtedly one of “the images of corporeal things,” must be shut out of the subjective interiority of the cogito. “Undoubtedly,” because, at mid-17 ^th century, it still defines for many the all-too-clearly hypocritical nature of the modern imperialist project, and the possibility of transforming it. “Paganism” -- what others might have called the wisdom of the Ancients – is, unsurprisingly, similarly condemned as a source of ethical doctrine. Descartes favors over it his notorious brand of atrophied ethics of temporary-verging-on-permanent accomodation to the status quo and absolute conformism to the behavior and uses of the elites (linguistically and in every other way). However ludicrous the claim of a “First Philosophy” to metaphysical priority might be, Descartes’s thought must drape itself in it because, unlike Hegel’s, it cannot afford to be the Last One. While Hegel can terminate World-history with himself at its pinnacle, Descartes must insure that it be permanently erased from his project. His modernity is, in short, as much an attempt to suppress the past as a glorification of the New.⁵⁹

Similarly, Descartes’s condemnation of the occult sciences (all the Hermetic disciplines: alchemy, astrology, chiromancy, etc.) to the no-man’s-land of the imagination shields the subject from any possible connection with the African slave. It erects a barrier more potent than any physical one between the Plantation owner and the African immigrant him- or herself. Eventually, with the rise of the cults of science and technology amongst broader strata of the European populations from the 18 ^th century on -- at the same time that the Egyptophylic memories of the Ancient world were being systematically erased – that condemnation would become a stereotypified opposition between the rational European and the savage racial/colonial Other (the “noble savage” being characterized by spontaneity, sexual promiscuity, and artistic creativity, all of which are subsidiaries of the modern concept of imagination).⁶⁰

e) Cogito and The Brotherhood of Men

On the other hand, Descartes’s condemnation of magic can also be read against the background of the systematic witch hunts that characterized European history from the 14 ^th to the 18 ^th centuries. Indeed, it was not infrequent, during the 17 ^th century at least, for leading intellectuals to throw in together “sorcery” and “cabbalism, naturalistic psychology, astrology, alchemy, and the doctrine of the world-soul” because of their heretical nature, i.e. their deviation from strictly defined canons of religious and political orthodoxy. Marin Mersenne, for example, an influential scientist of this period, published a series of treatises in the early 1620s meant to shield the mechanistic philosophy, so central to Descartes’s entire intellectual project, from the threat of being assimilated with magic.⁶¹ It is thus not unlikely that Descartes’s own repeated condemnations of magic in the Discourse might also have been aimed at witchcraft, as well as at the Hermetic disciplines. Descartes himself, in fact, was suspected of sorcery in 1623. As Michael Keefer observes:

And on Descartes’ return to Paris in 1623 he was himself briefly suspected of being one of the Rosicrucian “invisible” over whose supposed arrival in the city to spread their “atheistical” and magical doctrines writers like the Jesuit Francois Garasse were trying to stir up alarm. For Descartes this was a dangerous situation: in 1619 Giulio Cesare Vanini had been burned at the stake in Toulouse for “atheism,” and there seems to have been around this time an epidemic of sorcerer-burnings in France, one of whose victims in 1623 was a man executed at Moulins for the crime of possessing a copy of that sixteenth-century encyclopedia of magic, Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia.⁶²

This is not the place to speculate on Descartes’s psychology. Nonetheless, it would be hard to believe that such a close call with the pyre would not have been traumatizing, especially given Descartes’s notorious trepidations about his relationship with Rome. At least part of what Descartes may have been doing then in condemning “magic” and “the occult sciences” in his published writings was to shield himself from any further such close encounters with The Law.

Though neither Keefer nor other commentators on the history of Hermeticism in the 17 ^th century make any explicit connections between the occult sciences and witchcraft, the research of feminist scholars such as Caroline Merchant leaves little doubt about at least two things. First, aside from any possible internal connections between the two phenomena, they were on the same side of the political-theological division between orthodoxy and heretical doctrine in early modern European society. In 1644-45, for instance, several hundred women were identified as witches and executed in England. More generally, the systemic patterns of witch-trials in Europe from 1300 to the 18 ^th century left tens of thousands of casualties in their wake.⁶³ That Hermetic intellectuals received similar kinds of punishments as witches and were similarly categorized, at least in legal doctrine, further reinforces the thesis that witchcraft and Hermetic magic were caught in a polysemic web of relations that made them cognate-concepts, that blurred any rigid distinctions that might have been drawn between the two, at least from the point of view of their detractors. The second point that research by such scholars as Merchant makes clear is that the executions of witches were far more frequent than those of Hermetic magi. From such a standpoint it could be argued that it was thus far more important – or, at least, just as important – for Descartes to distance himself from witchcraft than from Hermeticism. The persecution of witches was a systemic social phenomenon, after all, while that of Hermetic magicians was more of an individual occurrence, a series of “causes celebres” such as the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno at the end of the 16 ^th century.

There can be little doubt that the witch hunts were a significant element in the social processes of nation-state formation of early Modernity. Maria Mies, for instance, has argued that the colonization of women’s bodies effected by the eradication of the knowledges (of abortion and birth control techniques among other things) that were most likely available to witches (i.e., midwives) constitutes a crucial step in the formation of modern capitalism.

The persecution and burning of the midwives as witches was directly connected with the emergence of modern society: the professionalization of medicine, the rise of medicine as a ‘natural science’, the rise of science and of [the] modern economy. The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.⁶⁴

Women, the producers of labor-power – that keystone commodity without which the whole edifice of capitalism would instantly crumble – were the focus of one of the most intense campaigns of primitive accumulation starting in the early modern period, a campaign that has not yet ended even if it has changed forms over time.⁶⁵ On the one hand, the vernacular forms of knowledge developed by Western women throughout the Middle Ages were swept away by the witch-hunts. On the other, starting in the 17 ^th century women’s labor was domesticated – or “housewifized,” as Mies puts it – through a whole series of political and cultural mechanisms that insured it did not appear as labor. The institution of the modern individual as the basis for the social contract and of the split between public and private spheres that is its corrolary are all so many steps in this process, which has been identified by Feminists as modern Patriarchy.⁶⁶

Though I will come back to the problem of the public sphere shortly, it is worth briefly drawing out, first, Descartes’s own relationship to modern Patriarchy, if only because it is not at all explicit in his text. Indeed, unlike a Rousseau, or a Locke, Descartes never mentions women or the proper relationship men and women should have to one another in his philosophical texts. In fact, as I have been pointing out throughout this essay, this strategy of ‘invisibilisation’ – that is, of making alterity invisible – is precisely what characterizes the procedure of the Cartesian text in general, in all its relations to the ‘external world.’ In a sense that is the whole point of the cogito’s appropriation and mystification of the imagination. By normatively dictating the ideal-type that all identities must strive to achieve – itself – the philosophical subject of modern humanism insures for itself a monopolistic access to the imagination, i.e. to the power of defining the identity of the world – its being or lack thereof – including the entities that inhabit it.

In this context it is interesting to note that in spite of his philosophical emphasis on the primacy of the mind, what interested Descartes the most was the body. In a sense that has been little remarked upon, his interest in medicine as a crucial scientific concern is somewhat novel. Though it is true that enthusiasts of the scientific revolution have been at pains, for the last 200 years, to interpret Descartes’s intellectual contributions in the light of the “discovery” of modern science that characterized 17 ^th century philosophy in general, much less has been said of the significance of his interest in medicine in particular. And yet, in a sense, Descartes stands to the development of modern medicine as Nebrija did, a few centuries earlier, to the development of modern grammar: both are intent on eliminating peoples’ autonomous access to the means of their cultural self-reproduction, Nebrija by standardizing and centralizing language-learning and Descartes by professionalizing the access to medical knowledge. By restricting legitimate symbolic creation and manipulation to the state, and knowledge of the body to doctors, the two achieve the same effect: the subordination of autonomous social and communal activity to transcendent bureaucratic instances administered by self-appointed elites. It is these same elites that thereby gain a significant control over the means of social representation and bio-spiritual maintenance that had previously been directly accessible to the people that use them. Even if it is true that the situation is not quite as unprecedented in the case of Descartes as it is in that of Nebrija – there were other bourgeois intellectuals, such as Harvey, who were becoming interested in the topic at the same time he was – Descartes gives medicine an extra cachet of philosophical “respectability.” More importantly, however, Descartes lays down the conditions of possibility for a properly scientific medicine. They are the well-known rules for his method of reasoning and need no rehearsing here. Nonetheless a comment or two are in order.

Indeed, what is most striking about Descartes’s method for medical investigation (and scientific inquiry, more generally) is how much it stands in contrast to the practice of community medicine of the witches and “wise women” (the literal translation of the french term for ‘midwives’ – ‘sage-femmes’) that can be inferred from extant sources unearthed by Feminist scholars. In particular, while scientific medicine requires a relationship of absolute exteriority to the phenomenon of illness that is defined as its object, the community medicine that seems to have been practiced by the witches and wise women requires a position of social integration into the networks that constitute the “patient-practitioner” relationship. In other words, while the medical doctor’s relationship to his patient rests on legally sanctioned criteria of expertise that constitute the legitimacy of his relationship to illness in general and on rules of ethical behavior guaranteed by an official professional association, the wise woman’s relationship to her “patient” (neighbor, acquaintance, friend, baker, etc.) is grounded in autonomously, community-generated patterns of interaction, cultural, intellectual, and social affinities.⁶⁷

The body, as an object of investigation for the Cartesian scientist/doctor, however, is shorn of all its social relations to the world. Moreover its different parts seem to acquire a life of their own, independent of each other, independently of life itself. In fact, metaphysically speaking, the body is a cadaver with a soul trapped inside of it. Or perhaps, to follow Descartes’s own metaphorics, it might be more accurate to say that it is a machine. And, as every machine needs its mechanic, so the body needs its doctor, the one who will be empowered to tinker with it until it can, once again, rejoin the chain of production. In any case, just as with Nebrija the vernacular became the assumed property of the literati and grammarians, so, with Descartes does the practice of healing become the property of a professionalized medicine with its own rules of engagement, its own epistemological dictates, entirely unaccountable to those whom it professes to heal. In both cases, a radically heteronomic relationship is established by force between a segment of society and its means of subsistence (understood in the broad sense⁶⁸ ). This relation is heteronomous because the mediation of an elite (grammarians and doctors, in this case) becomes a necessary moment in the back and forth between community and its processes (symbolic and physical) of reproduction.

In this context, Descartes’s epistemological eradication of magic as a figment of the bodily part of the mind puts him squarely on the side of patriarchy in terms of early modern European cultural politics, even if he speaks nowhere throughout the corpus of his work about witches or witchcraft. What he participates in advocating and legitimizing are a series of institutions that will, over time, provide the ideological framework for the subordination of women’s bodies to the needs of men. Scientific medicine and the invention of modern heteronormative sexuality it has engendered, the normative “rule of the brothers” it presupposes through its interdiction of access by women to their own bodies are so many examples of this subordination.⁶⁹ Nor can the concept of patriarchy itself be subordinated to those of ‘capitalism’ or ‘industrialism.’ For, while the formal description of these phenomena may be similar in some respects (creation of an heteronomous relation between a social group and its means of subsistence), Patriarchy functions differently as a mode of political rule than does capitalism. Indeed, strictly speaking, capitalism does not necessitate the heteronormative bourgeois family. Human beings have reproduced in substantially large numbers under quite different conditions. Furthermore, under modern conditions labor power – for the purpose of surplus production – has been mobilized by a number of other means besides family-structured reproduction (e.g. the slave trade, colonialism, forced migrations, etc.).⁷⁰ In fact, the nation-state, in the construction of which Descartes is actively participating, can be understood as a joint venture between the capitalism and patriarchy: it is, on the one hand, a means of containing class-conflict, of creating the proper conditions for the endless expansion of surplus value production. On the other, it is a highly centralized apparatus of sovereignty grounded in a highly diffuse biopolitical regime of rule in which the individual control by men of women and children functions as a system of mirrors distributing the centralized power of the state to all segments of society in such a way that subordination is universalized. In short, if the nation state functions only within the horizon of the capitalist mode of production, it can only survive on the condition of a patriarchal form of social organization.

f) The Practico-Ontological Productivity of Reason Understood as an Attribute of the Imagination

But all this – primitive accumulation, interior and exterior colonization, the eradication of witchcraft and the criminalization of the working class – is but one side of the cogito’s relation to the imagination. It is that which the cogito negates, the externalities of epistemological doubt. It is what I called earlier the political moment in the history of the subject, which is to say the moment of its constitution as a homogeneous self-identical substance. Such a process can only be achieved via the destruction of all forms of autonomous subjectivity, of everything that could prove to be a shelter for subversion, contestation, or even insurgency against the dominant socio-ideological order.

The other aspect of the cogito’s relation to the imagination, the one that drives Descartes to establish his physics in “imaginary spaces” – the one that leads him to compare the physicist to a painter and, eventually, to conflating inextricably imagination and rational cognition – can be properly defined as the practico-ontological construction of the real founded on “indubitable” scientific knowledge. This practico-ontological constructivity of reason is driven by an economic imperative: once the subject has founded its own existence on the epistemological mystification of the imagination and on the political subordination and eradication of vernacular subjectivities, it still must find a means of draining off the permanent ontological surplus of reality produced by the imagination, the enormous sums of energy contained in the activity of the hundreds of millions of human beings whom it has just subordinated.⁷¹

The twin inventions of industrial technology and of the ideology of technical progress – that is to say, the power to invent novelty that characterizes the “spirit” of modernity (i.e. its self-image) – are the cogito’s historical means of conforming to the economic imperative of mandatory expenditure with which the imagination confronts it. Reason, the organizing model according to which the real is reorganized in the image of the modern subject, is thus not the opposite of the imagination, in spite of the fact that the subject’s self-image demands that it appear so. On the contrary, reason is the continuation of the imagination by other means. The subject is a representation of order founded on an image of reason as both its principal analytic faculty and as transcendent structure of the real as such. Only on such an assumption can the idea and project of modern technology ever make any sense. The standardization of the production of commodities and, later on, the standardization of their consumption, as well as the enormous reorganization – or “rationalization” as Max Weber called it – of pre-existing environments (ecological, but also urban, rural, cultural, institutional, etc.) that it entails is Reason’s answer to the enormous economic imperative of energetic expenditure with which the imagination confronts it. In the final analysis, everything – every thing – must be made to work as efficiently as possible, in such a way that it is utterly exhausted of all energy, purged of all heterogeneity – i.e., of all desire.

Desire, in fact, must be extirpated as far as possible from the body of the multitude (“the mob”) so that it can become, in theory, the property of the elite, and of what, for a long time (until the mid-19 ^th century), will remain its domain: the private sphere. While the duty to labor must become the universal imperative of the multitude, desire itself – and its gratification in luxury commodity consumption as well as in “domestic bliss” – becomes the monopoly of the Bourgeoisie.⁷² The institution of privacy, however, while it seems to delineate a realm away from or outside the strictures of work, has the paradoxical consequence of further refining the division of labor for it is women who are made responsible for the labor of consumption (reproduction of the household) as well as for the work of maintaining the appearance of non-work for the benefit of their husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons.⁷³

In the final analysis, however, both aspects of the imagination which Descartes attempts to divide – on the one hand, its practico-ontological form as constitutive of modern scientific-technological activity and, on the other, its phenomenal content as those forces that continually contest the project of modernity – cannot simply be articulated in a relation of opposition to each other. On the contrary, they are complementary: reason is the spawn of imagination, one of its possible expressions. In order for the division between imagination and reason to function as it is instituted by the philosophical subject, then, a permanent state of crisis must be in effect. Reason must continually threaten to annihilate the imagination while stopping short of doing so in order to preserve itself. Rational cognition – the paradigmatic activity of the subject – must constantly both draw its substance from the imagination while, at the same time, the subject itself must constantly negate the reality of the imagination, externalize it. If the subject simply destroys the imagination it destroys the foundation of its being in exactly the same way that the capitalist destroys the basis for his social being if he refuses to pay his workers any wage or the slave-master to feed his slaves (or to purchase any new ones). But if the subject were, per chance, to embrace the imagination wholeheartedly, it would shatter itself just as certainly as if the capitalist were to, suddenly, embrace the workers and give them the keys to the factory. Either one of those solutions destroys what drives capitalism forward, that on which it is based, that without which it could not survive for an instant: the class struggle.

The Cartesian subject -- and after it, the Modern bourgeois Subject in general – must confront the reality of this crisis and the necessity to manage it as its prime imperative, its moral duty so to speak. Indeed, the institution of a division between imagination and reason, rational and mad men, master and slave, mind and body, subject and object, scientist and wise woman, and, last but not least, white and black races is no less real because it is imaginary. That the cogito mystifies the ontological power of the imagination in an effort to ‘ground’ modernity in no way constitutes a negation of the imagination as such. Obscuring the ontological power of the imagination is not simply a negative act or a false representation of the “really real.” It is not a mistake. Its actual effect is to harness the power of the imagination in order to create a regulatory lattice of micro- and macro-power relations that ensure its normative expression as an endless series of transcendent propositions. The main function of these propositions is to manage the permanent crisis entailed by the subject through an articulation and legitimation of the project of capitalist-white-patriarchal modernity.

5.

If God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the bourgeois class-subject took somewhat longer to re-create it in its own image (a job that can never be entirely completed, at any rate) – and never thought of resting in the process. As Louis Althusser once put it: “historical experience demonstrates that it takes time, in some cases a great deal of time, before a dominant social class, that has taken power, manages to create for itself an ideology that finally becomes dominant. Consider the bourgeoisie: it did not take less than five centuries to achieve this goal, from the 14 ^th to the 19 ^th century.”⁷⁴ Descartes’s project, then, even if it is taken here as paradigmatic, or at least, as symptomatic in the highest degree, of modernity, and more specifically of philosophical modernity, is only one contribution in the overall history of the bourgeoisie’s quest for ideological and political hegemony. Some elements in it are condemned to desuetude somewhere down the road. Others, however, are there only as seeds.

For instance, Descartes mentions the concept of ‘public’ only incidentally and to no great effect.⁷⁵ Nonetheless, it is constitutively entailed by the crisis-ridden nature of the cogito. Indeed, it may be said that the division between public and private spheres in general is the material framework for the preservation of the modern subject’s ideological and political integrity. Simultaneously – and this will be the second component of this last thesis – the subject is also the foundation of the public sphere.

Though it is a difficult task, as Jurgen Habermas has pointed out, to define what, exactly, the public sphere is, and how the geography (social, cultural, ideological) of its relationship to the private can be mapped, the following can be put forward as a relative approximation of its self-image:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private persons come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publically relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: peoples’ public use of their reason (offentliches rasonnement).⁷⁶

The public sphere is, historically, the space in which the social contract between the bourgeoisie and the state is negotiated. The presuppositions of this public sphere have been laid out in the previous section of this essay: they are the social, cultural, political, theoretical, and economic modalities according to which bourgeois subjectivity imposes itself as the paradigmatic form of legitimate experience. As Habermas himself suggests there can be no public sphere without private persons, i.e. without rational subjects. But grasping that the subject-form is constitutive of the public sphere does not throw much new light on the historical significance of bourgeois publicity, aside from rehashing the theses of one of its main theoretical architects (Kant).⁷⁷ In fact, in order for this public sphere to be instituted, sometime towards the end of the 17 ^th century, as Habermas suggests it was, several preconditions must be fulfilled:

the enforcement of private property as a legal relation of production by means of systematic expropriation on a world-scale. No “private persons” without private property. No private property without enclosure of the commons.

The creation of a symbolically, politically, and economically unified Nation-state and national market. Without a symbolically homogeneous cultural horizon, the bourgeoisie has no audience to which it can represent itself as universal. Without a politically unified state power, public – i.e. bourgeois – opinion has no addressee for its demands, no appropriate instiutional mechanism to mediate the conflict between its social interests and those of everyone else. And without a national market (usually complemented by a colonial market) there are no rules of exchange to be discussed since none can be homogeneously enforced.⁷⁸

The invention and institutionalization of “rational norms,” uniformly and universally applicable. This is what I called earlier “the enclosure of subjectivity.” The “public use of reasoning” can have the effect desired – i.e. universal assent to rational judgments without having to resort to direct coercion in every instance in order to enforce that judgment – only if thought itself has been standardised, only if all competing schemes of legitimation and identity-formation have been eradicated. In short, the whole of society must be composed of citizen-subjects if Reason is to fulfill its function as supreme arbitrator of social interest.

Given these preconditions and the historical processes which their fulfillment entails, some corrections must be made to the self-image that the bourgeois public sphere presents of itself. Only on the basis of such corrections can its function as an instrument of subordination be grasped. Only thus can the historical effects of its institution be accounted for.

First, it must be said that the enclosure of the economic (predominantly agricultural), symbolic, and subjective commons suggests – against Habermas and against liberal political philosophy more generally – that the public sphere is not a place (virtual or actual) in which “private persons come together as a public.” It is neither the ‘common’ which can simply be opposed to the ‘private’⁷⁹ nor the critical public that stands in opposition to state-power in order to gain its representation by the state according to the norms of the social contract (the juridical Constitution). Rather, the public sphere is itself the condition of possibility of privacy (understood as both private property and subjective interiority) and the extension of the repressive state apparatus into the domain of culture. It both justifies and necessitates the state’s intervention at every level of social life, whether as an instrument to enforce the rationalization of communicative action down to the most intimate instances of interaction (through such institutions as the Academie Francaise at first, and then through military service and universal schooling later on) or as the most general social field through which the legislation and production of social identities (who gets to vote and who does not, who is a slave and who an indentured servent, who is a worker and who is not, who is crazy and who is not, etc.) is articulated. In short, the public sphere, as the complex institutional instance through which the bourgeois subject invents and reproduces itself, necessitates the interpellation of everyone else as subjects, but as “subjects without ___”: without private property (workers), without reason (women), without history (slaves, and more generally, the colonized), etc. This project – the articulation of dominant social and cultural categories on a homogeneous field of interaction that constitutes the public sphere – can only be accomplished with the assistance of the state, and not in opposition to it.

The second point that should be made is more specifically about the private sphere. Indeed, not only is the public sphere the condition of possibility of the private one, but also the private sphere itself materially sustains the existence of the public one and of capitalism more generally. Only on the basis of the reproductive and subsistence labor provided by women – free of charge – can the wage-form be socially sustainable to begin with. In order for men to enter the sphere of exchange with labor-power to sell they must be supported by the uncommodified and private labor of women in “the home” (though this does not mean that most women do not also have to sell their labor power). This means, furthermore, that when women have to enter the labor market to become workers as well as domestic laborers, they are immediately at a disadvantage precisely because their activity has already been coded as normatively domestic so that their wage is systematically underpriced. The simple fact is that if all women worldwide were to be paid for their domestic labor capitalism would collapse. Notwithstanding this glaring fact, the apparent opposition between private and public spheres must be taken seriously, both on its own terms and on the basis of its actual social function. The private-public split ought not be interpreted as a simple ideological veil thrown over an underlying material reality. It is an ontological redefinition of the conditions under which social identities are produced according to particular (but historically and geographically fluctuating) gender-norms. Simultaneously this sexual division of labor can and should be seen as part of the international division of labor. In other words, the split between public and private spheres ought to be recognized not so much as that between two polar opposites but as a division between two branches or sectors among many others in the capitalist division of labor.

At the formal ideological level, it is the role of the philosophy of the subject to produce and reproduce the identitary divisions that enable the normative functioning of the public sphere. The philosophical subject must be at once the universal audience to which the public sphere can represent itself as the only legitimate space for transparent and rational communication between formally equal individuals and the platform on the basis of which ontological divisions between “subjects” and “subjects without ___” can be articulated. In short, the complex ontological activity through which the definitions of particular social identities are produced, reproduced, and altered is provided by modern philosophy. Whether the subject is grounded in a rationalist epistemology or whether, as it will be later on, in an empiricist one, makes no difference from this perspective.⁸⁰ In both cases its function remains one of policing identity and of monitoring those phenomena that can legitimately be discussed within the boundaries of the public sphere.

No miracles and no negroes need apply will trumpet Hume famously; “no savages” for Locke, and so on: these are well known examples, but they are only symptoms of the broader structural function of philosophy from Descartes to Kant, Hegel, and beyond.⁸¹ Epistemology, the dominant philosophical discourse of Modernity, continually proposes and reproposes a topography (e.g. Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant) or a geography (e.g., Montesquieu, Hegel, Freud) of the subject. In either case, the point of philosophy’s labor is to retrace certain basic divisions between subject and object, between the different faculties of the subject (reason, understanding, judgment, etc.), or between its regions (the unconscious, the preconscious, the superego, but also China, Greece, and Europe as its World-historical stages in Hegel’s case). The issue is never one of exactly which distinction is drawn: the imperatives for remolding the boundaries of the subject and its structure are historical as much as they are systematic. The point is to draw a series of limits (between the knowable and the unknowable, desire and duty, imagination and reason, will and judgment, but also art and science, philosophy and history, and so on ad nauseam) whose justification (“foundation”) is always as nearly tautological as possible. This is what philosophers are fond of calling “self-evident truths” or “first principles.”

Philosophy enables, through this work, the subject of the public sphere (the bourgeoisie) to designate the world self-evidently as its property. More than simply effecting the naturalization of a certain historically malleable situation – as is the function of juridical, pedagogical, or other specific ideologies – philosophy naturalizes nature. It is prior to ideology, not in the sense that it can grasp anything that is pre-symbolic or pre-ideological, but rather in the sense that it provides the conditions of effectivity of ideology. The principal power of modern philosophy is that of naming the world. Whereas that power had been attributed to theology in Medieval Europe, whereas it is distributed according to different institutional axes in a number of non-European societies (though not all of them), with the institution of the modern public sphere and of its instances of biopolitical domination (the family, the asylum, the prison, etc.), it is philosophy which inherits – or perhaps, which constitutes for itself – the function of ontological arbiter. This task, it performs in a more roundabout way than Medieval theology had done previously.⁸² Rather than directly legislating on the reality or unreality of certain phenomena or establishing ontological hierarchies mapping out the greater and lesser reality (or perfection) of objects, modern philosophy attempts to legislate what can be known (by the subject). In short, ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ replace ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ as the dominant categories of cultural control within the bourgeois public sphere. It is not so much that philosophy is the only instance through which the representation (i.e. naming) of the Real actually occurs in the bourgeois public sphere. After all, poetry, literature, and other forms of aesthetic representations frequently articulate – or counter – philosophically grounded distinctions. Rather, it can be said that in the modern public sphere philosophy produces, via the subject, the very form that legitimate representations must adopt: truth. Though art can and does produce representations as well, it can never claim for them the form of truth that philosophy bestows upon its progeny.⁸³ To paraphrase – and historicize – Althusser’s famous thesis: In the bourgeois public sphere there is no outside to philosophy.⁸⁴ The philosophical subject is thus the – social and logical – conditio sine qua non of the public sphere. The subject of modern philosophy is the foundation of the public sphere.

At the same time, however, it is the public sphere, on the basis of the institutional nomenclature in the context of which it must operate (the private sphere and the state), that keeps the permanent crisis at the very core of the subject from shattering it to smithereens. Indeed, I have argued throughout this essay that, in essence, the subject is a contradiction in terms. It is founded, on the one hand, on the ontological power of the imagination (the power to produce social and conceptual identities, including its own self-identity), while on the other, it depends on the monopolization of this power by its “rational faculty” which it, in turn, defines as the opposite of the imagination. This opposition, the keystone around which the structure of the modern subject is constructed, incessantly gives rise to aporias at a variety of levels – epistemological, but also social, scientific, institutional, etc. . . – that must constantly be managed so that the whole edifice does not collapse, though without being entirely suppressed.

At the level of the public sphere the subject’s constitutive contradiction manifests itself as an opposition between two imperatives: on the one hand, the public sphere must be the official space in which the universality of the subject-form manifests itself at all levels: (political) equality = (ontological) homogeneity. All citizens are equal vis-à-vis the state. All humans are (potential) bourgeois subjects. On the other, it must insure (again, through its institutional structures propping it up: the state and the private sphere), the production and reproduction of social divisions along any number of historically available axes (racial, religious, national, gendered, class, ethnic, cultural, etc.). If the subject-form cannot be maintained in its universality (i.e. enforced practically while being presupposed in theory) the public sphere loses its status as the only legitimate theatre for the arbitration of conflict (of any kind). Politically speaking, this means that the bourgeoisie loses its hegemonic hold over society. But if the public sphere fails in its function of producing systematic social divisions, then the bourgeoisie is confronted by the danger of having to fight an ever-growing coalition of social fractions or formations that are ever-more able to contest its monopolies over political, economic, and social power. Only on the basis of the public sphere’s ability to fulfill both of these imperatives simultaneously can it insure the management of the modern subject’s fragile identity.

Historically, the dual task of enforcing universal homogeneity and ensuring the production of systemic social divisions is conceptually articulated on the basis of the social contract. By insisting that all salient social relations (familial, political, and economic) be represented as property relations (i.e. contractual relations) the public sphere insures the imposition of bourgeois subjectivity (everyone can enter into a contract, even if they have only their labor-power or sexual services to offer). But as Carole Pateman puts it: “in contract theory universal freedom is always an hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the form of relations of domination and subordination.”⁸⁵ The dual relationship produced by the contract – a fictive, though quite real, representation of equality and the relation of subordination that follows from it – insures that both or all parties to any social relation are preliminarily interpellated as subjects (with rights, but also duties and responsibilities of their own). In other words, the social contract enforces the ontological homogeneity of all subjects by requiring that they accept their ‘subjectness’ (that they “take responsibility” for their actions) the moment they budge a finger. Indeed, the social contract becomes normative not when everyone “signs” onto it but, rather, when it can become enforced as the hegemonic presupposition of all interactions.

Historically speaking of course, parliamentarism is the political system that inscribes the social contract, in the most economical and ideologically successful manner, onto the whole of society. Though it is true that other forms of political rule have established a specifically bourgeois social order (principally Absolutist monarchies and military dictatorships), only parliamentarism has been capable of sustaining that order – precisely because it is able to constitute and enforce the hegemony of the social contract at the institutional level. The social contract between the individual and the state (alienation of individual sovereignty in exchange for collective sovereignty materialized in the state) is itself grounded in the multitude of contractual relations through which the individual is implicitly and explicitly mobilized from the moment of birth to the death-bed. The two – the social contract and all instances of contractual interaction – mutually sustain each other, form a hermeneutic circle.⁸⁶

On the other hand, the social contract as well as the state – which both embodies one of its poles and guarantees, through the use of violence, all the particular instances of contract – must invoke another sphere, separate from the state and counterposed to it, its counterpart, with which the contract can be formed. In short, the social contract requires the constitution of a subordinate partner for the state, one from which it can draw the legitimacy for its domination. This partner, its counterpart, is the private sphere. Indeed, conceptually and historically the institution of the private sphere requires the existence of pre-parliamentary state-forms (Absolutist or dictatorial depending on historico-geographical location within the capitalist world-system). It is not as though parliamentary democracy could be created without the social violence engendered by such formations, though it must appear as if their historical succession were only incidental. The private sphere itself is constituted by means of the privatization of all pre-existing forms of social, economic, and cultural production. Only a coercive apparatus based on the absolutist model can insure the occurrence of such a process. But only the parliamentary-democratic model can sustain its continuation.⁸⁷

The private sphere and its politico-cultural expression is the necessary counterpart to the state in the elaboration of the social contract. Furthermore, the private sphere, as both product of and distinguishable from the state, institutes the field on which political subjects can be interpellated just as modern philosophy establishes the conceptual plane (epistemology) on which rational subjects can be interpellated. But whereas philosophy polices identity at the level of representation, the private sphere, as the counterpart of the state in the enforcement of the social contract, is the field for the application of juridical power and, eventually, physical force. In the relationship between the private sphere and the state, embodied by the social contract, are instituted the mechanisms through which social divisions are constructed and maintained – between property owners and workers, men and women, and slaves and masters.

Simultaneously, however, because the social contract structures the medium through which the relationship between state and private sphere can be socially and politically articulated (i.e. the public sphere), it insures that only the bourgeoisie can have normative access to it. Through this medium – the public sphere – the bourgeoisie can present itself as “public opinion” and represent itself as universal. Because of the privileged relationship to the state that this self-expression as public opinion provides it with, the bourgeoisie experiences privacy as a protective shell. This shell functions by preserving the bourgeoisie’s integrity as a class subject. It is a barricade shielding the bourgeoisie’s modern experiences of intimacy and subjective interiority from the ever-more ruthless interventions of the state. For everyone else, however, the private sphere is at best a guilded prison (the wives and daughters of bourgeois men) and at worst the realm of their subordination to the entirely unaccountable will of the plantation or factory owner (guaranteed, once again, by state-power via the collective demands of the bourgeoisie expressed at the level of the public sphere). In any case, the bourgeoisie’s monopoly over the means of representation that is constituted by the private/public split insures that the contradiction between the particularity of bourgeois subjectivity (what enables it to be a successful form of class domination) and its normative universality (what enables it to represent itself as public or universal opinion) can be managed or contained in such a way as to preserve its ideological and political integrity.

The ontological division between private “subjects without ___” and public (white, male, rational) subjects politically enforced by the state, and theoretically grounded in the epistemological discourse of modern philosophy is formed and maintained between the end of the 16 ^th century and the beginning of the 20 ^th . From beginning to end, however, it is never uncontested. A multiplicity of social agencies constitute themselves outside of it, on its boundaries – or even, though far more rarely, at its very center – and attempt in various ways to subvert or overthrow the bourgeois order altogether. Maroons, marannos, mystics, luddites, feminists, abolitionists, and working class militants all, in one way or another, rebel against the legitimacy of the private/public split and the control over state-power which it enables the bourgeoisie to maintain. More than that, as time passes, the revolt against bourgeois modernity gains in power and in effectivity. From Palmares to the Saint Domingue revolution, from the 17 ^th century communist sects to Chartism to the modern Union movement, and from 16 ^th century witches to the revolutionary women’s groups of 1789 to the modern Feminist movement starting in the 19 ^th century, a continuous series of challenges to the bourgeois social and political order are constituted which progressively gain in strength and breadth.⁸⁸ Eventually, the growing power of these challenges will force bourgeois rule to radically transform the modalities of its domination, thereby bringing into question the viability of the private/public split and the division between imagination and reason that grounds it theoretically.

References

Adas, Michael. 1990. Machines as the Measure of Men. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Althusser, Louis. 1994. “La transformation de la philosophie.” In Sur la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard.

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