Having and Seeing

I What lies between having and seeing, between the system of possession and the system of appearances? Is it knowledge? Is it the logical calculus of the order of being and predication? Is this properly even a question that can be asked? Let me begin again: The language of having and possession is central to the field of property. In the field of knowledge this comes into play along with the development of private property in the Greek world of Plato and Aristotle. In certain languages of a later but related field, having also has to do with the grammar of tenses in the perfected forms. In English this is especially prevalent. In modern German we find both being and having in use, depending on the status of the primary verb. Classical Greek does not use having as an auxiliary in this way of tense formation, but there is a considerable conceptual use made of it on other grounds. Aristotles categorial treatments of being are built up in relation to having, so having traits, as things predicated of some noun or subject as substratum. The notion of being is also determined in relation to this system of having, in that the term ousia is associated with the feminine participle, ousa, of the verb to be. Here a generalized term for an adjectival use of the verb to be, as if being could somehow be linked with a thing by way of attribution or predication, is itself taken as the substratum for other modes of essential predication. This is then linked with the Platonic shift to use a substantialized predicate adjective as the principal form in the intelligible order, so the good. Normally one thinks of goodness as something possessed or had by some person or thing as a quality or attribute. Here, however, that which is normally possessed becomes that which all else is causally dependent upon. We could, of course, say that the entire world has since followed suit in a different context. The current system of property relations within global capitalism now constrains and configures all else in the organized systems of power and social relation: possession, as that which was once possessed, now possesses all. In this, something occupying the position of the Platonic good, as a conditional ground with a certain linguistic and social status, gains a sense of agency in relation to a total system. And to give an indication of how this could arise within an objective context reflected in theory, we might complete the system of analogies by returning to Aristotle and noting that ousia or being is also a word for property. But once relocated within the commodity exchange system, this meaning of being as substance also becomes a field, and sometimes even a term, for money; whereby we end by confusing the ground or substratum with the more generally accepted means to any and all ends in practical affairs, so in the pursuit of all such substantial goods. To the same degree, then, to which property becomes active as money, so being as ground moves in the direction of agency. Moreover, at the same time, the notion of substance as a common ground in early natural theory is related to the notion of money

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as the common basis for value in exchange relations.1 It is then not too much to say that the advance of the substantial concept of being within the realm of classical Greek philosophy is occasioned, if not actually caused in some more direct manner, by the advance of money in the Greek commercial and political world. And from here we might then continue by reference to the assertion of modern philosophy, substance is subject. Again, in the world of knowledge, agency invades a more static concept of ground; now, however, across time and various cultures, and by movement into a new world of monetary transformations of property. So, on the whole, very much in the order of knowledge would seem to bear on transformations in property relations and the mode and manner of having. But what might this have to do with problems of appearance in knowledge, and the relation of such to seeing and the visual field? Appearance belongs to the field of sight and seeing in the manner in which property belongs to the field of possession and having. But whereas we might be said to have or possess knowledge in some way, that which is here possessed is often linguistically and conceptually tied to terms for vision. In the metaphorical sphere, the words for sight and seeing are often used interchangeably with other terms for knowing and sometimes simply become the words for a kind of knowing or a thing as known. In classical Greek, idea is related to the perfected oida, the older woida of id and wideo. In this case the forms in play are also associated with the term for thing seen as shape, eidos, the Platonic term for form and the Aristotelian term for species. The verbal forms seem to be preserved in certain more object-oriented passives and other more definite aorist uses of the active. Here, having seen, more as somethings having been seen, is a kind of knowing. Knowing itself, however, so also the archaic Greek gne, linked at root to the English term, is tied to the field of vision by way of a broader system of recognition in kinship systems, as recorded also in the German kennen and the Scottish ken. Here one knows or recognizes ones familiars, kin or kinfolk. Plato plays with this in Republic when he moves to associate the military class of guardians with dogs, in that dogs protect and like the people they are raised with, so their familiars or the ones they know, but distrust and attack those who are foreign or unfamiliar, the unlikeas those they do not know and dislike. And perhaps part of the play here is that dogs use smell more than sight to recognize familiars. For within this presentation there is already recorded another order of assertion: The philosopher, who is derived from this militaristic class of guardians, is somehow especially akin to, and thereby naturally attracted to, the order of intelligible forms and distrustful of the lesser order of apparent forms. There may be something more divine or more extensive in vision, but it might also open up on a field that is more treacherous for certainty in
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The middle ground here is constituted by the movements linking being with substance as substratum, so ousia with hypokeimenon, as that which lies under. But this latter concept, which is particularly important as a conceptual frame for Ionic natural theory, is precisely that which is easily associated with gold and silver in the new money system as common ground for exchange. Heraclitus is reputed to have written that all things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods. Here, that which lies under becomes that which lies between. And it is in this position that it can be considered as properly active or dynamic. -2-

knowledge; somehow more open to elements of deception and illusion. Thus the ordinary order of the familiar in vision comes into conflict with something else asserted to be even more familiar to thought but veiled in such a way that it requires a reversal of the authority of the sensible world by way of a defamiliarization of such in a theory of appearances. And, from the first, this has a moral dimension, which is also carried here through the same line of imagery, though in an oblique manner. Socrates sometimes swears by Dog or by the Great Dog, possibly the Dog Star of Canis Major. In Greek the word for dog is kyn. The word is, however, gender confused, neither simply masculine nor feminine, combining various forms and endings and requiring the article to specify gender. But here we also have the play on shameless behavior, especially sexual behavior, so appearing to do the wrong things in public; and with this we encounter as well the relation to the old Cynics, who turn out to be followers of Socrates of the Dog. And to this one should always add that Socrates has something of the Satyr about him. In play is, then, not just the dog as denatured Apollonian wolf-god of the Lycians, but also the sexualized half-bock goat, the Bacchic Pan. But precisely how this moralistic element of appearances appears in its own right or arises within some older order of knowing, traced from the first in a social form of recognition, remains a problem, along with the order of reversals here entailed by Platonic philosophy. That this pattern of reversal pertains in some way to the comedic conventions of the Dialogues is probably true enough, but only pushes us deeper into the problem. For much of this relies on sexual imagery and misrecognition by way of reversal. But this much might be gleaned from the above comments: Vision itself is not necessarily conceived from the first along purely visual lines of association. Moreover, the connection of sight with knowledge is not that of a simple line of derivation; and this no matter how important or dominant the field of vision is generally taken to be for the world of knowledge: Knowing is only visual by way of patterns of recognition, while these are only securely visual to the extent necessary to count as an important instance of knowing to be undercut in some framework for possible transgression. Once within the system of vision other grounds and tools must be brought into play to interpret what is given. Neither the Greek nosis, in its relation to various terms for knowing, nor the German vernehmen-Vernunft, which makes a kind of tactile reference to taking in by way of hearing, augmented by some process of interpretation and interrogation, go back to vision and the visual field alone or even primarily. Accordingly, what it might mean to appear in any way at all in such older systems of recognition is unclear, even if still today by way of a visual metaphor for the apparent inadequacy of knowing. Here, as in so many other places, it must be noted that our metaphors always require fields for possible transference and modes of transit. And in the case of knowledge the basis for the movement or transfer is somehow trapped by sight rather than necessarily being a matter of such. In so many respects, we know before we see, not because we see. Indeed, vision may have more to do with ratifying what we already assume or suspect. And here there is a very strong relation of the tactile to the symbolic, passing by way of language and hearing. For only on this complex basis could vision, as a seat for the metaphorical extension of the symbolic order of language through writing, become the locus for a use of deception in the

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context of dialectical reversal.2 And with this we are also closer to a different accounting for the Platonic theory of reminiscence or recollection, one lying much nearer the later framework of Kantian reflective philosophy than is normally assumed to be the case. But we are also closer to a mixed field of perceptual understanding in its relation to knowing and knowledge. In the same vein we might next consider the play in English on the terms seem and seeming as versions of appearance. Very much gets crossed-up here in relation to other terms from other languages and certain frameworks for knowledge. In German, it seems to me is either erscheint mir so or Es scheint mir so. But, despite the fact that English is a Germanic
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This is a difficult point to unpack, explain or defend. What, precisely, could it mean to assert that a tactile element complicates the visual field in such manner that it makes possible the dialectical structure of reversal as a ground of the symbolic order of knowledge developed in the context of writing? Here, I would only note that there is a vast difference between the visual field of animal awareness associated with immediate patterns of perception and the extended and heavily interpreted framework of knowing that is developed in reading by way of a set of conceptually dedicated symbols. Obviously but in the mode of the virtually impenetrable speech is part of the original field of symbolic recognition. But the system seems always immediately doubled by vision. These two then operate together to give us the order of human reasoning. But these two are modifications of a tactile framework of recognition, that is linked to the entire perceptual apparatus as well as to memory. How, then, does speech remain present in the visual order as symbolic recognition? And what does the tactile register have to do with the framework of possible representation in the symbolic order? Or what is perhaps the same, how does vision invade the order of hearing and sound? The line of contact and division belonging to touch seems to be mobilized conceptually, just as the logical principle of all possible differentiation seems to be related to such a framework: literally a surface line of contact/divsion which is nothing in its own right, but makes all else possible. It is this which I would articulate variously in terms of a theory of perceptually invested interest. But there is very much that has to do with this order of interest, especially as what promotes the possibility of extending the field of recognitions and developing the order of cognition. Every order of mediation relies on a system of contact by way of division. What connects is always precisely what differentiates by way of division. So, for instance, money becomes a crucial component in the development of an institutional world that promotes simultaneously both an order of intellectual development (arithmetic via accounting) and an institutional extension of language to an order of things as wares or commodities. When humans are organized or thought under such a system, they become, as a ware or commodity, something exchangeable in terms of monetary forms, a slave or a more abstract quantity of labor in a system of wages. Again, however, something has to make all of this conceptually and perceptually possible for a system of human recognition. And it is this which is more difficult to detail or extricate as implied in all else that passes for the organization of human existence and human awareness. Here one is working at the limits of both logic and perception. Indeed, one is working on the line that separates and connects logical analysis and perceptual awareness, while working as well in terms of language and other institutional patterns of mediation. -4-

language, neither of these related terms is the same as the term seem, nor even from the same root field. In the world of classical Greek philosophy, the field of perception, aisthsis, and the notion of opinion as repute or doxa are related to the order of seeing by way of appearance. And today we speak of this entire complex as an order of seeming. In the developed tradition, knowledge in the mode of seeming or appearance is said to be less certain because it is associated variously with what is inconstant or shifting, even deceptive. Again, however, the precise nature of the hold-over in this from the older order of what appears proper and improper in some communally established pattern of behavior is difficult to ascertain. Perhaps the middle ground is reputation as what is reputed of one, so, again, doxa, as this is related to a certain mode of appearing and behaving, thus of being seen and being heard. But there is something else here: The English term seem goes back to an Old Norse word having to do with fittingness, saema. But there is here no simple line of relation to seeing and sight, even by way of the more objective shining show or look of the German scheinen, as noted above. There is only a reference to conformity, as in to be in conformity with or to something; from which we might also conclude that there is a more direct relation here with sameness and the English term same. And all of this has to do with the Platonic conception of opinion as doxa, in that there opinion is mapped onto knowledge or knowledge onto it. It is often viewed as quite similar to knowledge; virtually a double for such in certain uses. And with Plato the cause for this is not yet subjectified in a modern manner; that is, it has as much to do with the nature of the things in question as the nature of the view and the viewer. But as with seeming in modern speech, we tend to record here as well a general relation to uncertainty and unclarity that may well have something to do with a field of appearances and vision. However, in the discourse of seeming this does not belong to the negative use of the term, as with the still socially embedded unseemly, to mean the more forcefully descriptive untoward or unbefitting. And even in this pejorative use we only refer to a particular kind of appearance or action, while such a framework is much less likely to invade the entire sphere of appearances in its relation to knowledge, as was the case with doxa in the rhetorically charged framework of the Greek city-states. To complicate matters further, opinion is today of a very different order. The German Meinung, as an intended meaning, is perhaps closer to doxa in its possible association with some doctrine espoused by some person, but it leaves behind the entire relation to appearances and the field of vision and the visible. With meinen we have moved to an interior order of ones intentions and things as meant. Thus the manner in which Plato could still associate the opinable as doxa with the visible is all but lost on us today, except by way of problems of perception as problems of some order of deception. As already indicated, however, a deeper connection would seem to be there; something having to do with similarity and duplication which retains a sense of difference. There is, however, one other point bearing on seeming that should be mentioned: In certain uses having to do with modes of knowledge and certainty, this term, as if duplicating the metaphorical framework of vision, captures its subject rather than simply presenting such in an assertion that follows directly from such a subject as the agent. It seems to me, like it appears to me, is a mode of indirection by way of a problematic subjective agency. These verbal expressions have something of the passive to them.

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In some way, then, we move across or through perception to the problems of deception in appearances. But, as I have already suggested, this may be more of a socially invested result of perception than a more purely visual problem. If the rhetorician deceives, it is largely by way of tonal inflection, conjoined with gestures and phrases that have a hold on us as things seen and heard in a given context. And this context is certainly culturally determined. But there is in visual perception itself an aspect of instability and distortion, whereby something might come to be viewed as less substantial or at least less definite. This is driven further by a metaphorically extended discourse pertaining to dreams, shades and shadows, which might then be attached to another discourse pertaining to the less unusual and more firmly fixed world of everyday images and appearances, eikon and phenomena. In the image of the Divided Line from the end of Republic VI, Plato adds to this list the problems of reflection, as in the mirroring effects of certain surfaces; so an order of apparently intelligible direct inversions as reversals. At other places we are given to understand that we must also deal with refraction patterns when moving between media such as air and water. And here we are finally encountering actual modes of distortion in the visual field; so not matters that involve some primary metaphorical meaning as drawn off from some order of social practice. But in this one should always note something of the unusual nature of the experience, its exceptional quality. For instance, in the field of vision straight might appear as curved, as with so many perceptual problems of architecture; or, returning to the case of water, even where a stick might seem to remain more or less straight when inserted into water, it might still appear of a different length, while bent off at an angle from the point at which it breaks the surface of the water.3 In Greek, a related aspect or element of instability or uncertainty is then also carried in verbal forms, as is still the case today in modern languages, though to a lesser degree. So we have realigned tenses forming the subjunctive and optative moods, used to show degrees of uncertainty or doubt, especially in reported speech and everything had in some way second handor only as projected. Here, too, we mark off a movement, as if between different media of sorts; but now it is a matter of time-frames rather than spatial densities, or to be more precise, a matter of differently temporalized aspects of spatial displacement, of making present what is otherwise absent, either as past and questionable or future and possible. But in patterns of Greek philosophical reasoning, perception in general, aisthsis, also stands in a peculiar relation with phainesthai. Sensing as perceiving is bound up with how something engages one and so shows itself, as if in our order of seeming as attracted to the field of the Germanic scheinen, mentioned earlier in its relations with schauen, show as look. And, again, it is precisely this term
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All of this precision in description of various modes of appearance in Platonic philosophy is generally overlooked. This is a mistake, in that we have here ways in which distortion can literally be mapped and, at least in part, thought through or understood, as with a system of refraction and mirroring that might well be related to geometry and ancient mathematics as a whole, and more specifically to the Line Image of Republic, as an instance of such. This ignoring of ancient patterns of precision in dealing with such an important field as the visual also leads to a considerable flattening of the meaning of appearances for us today. I give an extended discussion of this, both as regards Platonic philosophy and the related problems with the philosophical tradition, in a piece entitled: Two Essays on Division. -6-

seeming that allows us to capture in English at least some of the complexity of the problem of appearances. Here we then have some kind of overall conceptual attraction controlling a discourse of sense experience as dedicated to vision. And seeming, now as a general pattern of being fitted and contoured to various things in various ways, is divided by way of distinctly different kinds of vision, sometimes controlled by different media or different sources and quality of light; whence, metaphorically, different patterns or ways of knowing as well. As noted above, modern English moves along with this differentiated logic of seeming, but also tends to mark the entire order of seeming as an interruption of some more assertive order of knowing, related more directly to sight and seeing: That seems to be true, instead of the more certain I see, to mean I now understand or know. Both, however, go back in some way to a field of general awareness, which also exhibits or contains recognitions of appropriateness, propriety, and fittingness. And just as we tend to use seem and appear as synonyms in many cases, there is here a kind of partial overcoding of this general field of awareness by the field of vision, which is especially prevalent, whenever we deal with such seeming metaphorically as a mode of knowing. In the history of philosophy problems pile up here on the objective side in terms of how a thing might show itself to us so also what it looks like to us. These perceptual problems are then always being shifted to the field of knowing, as with Descartesqualifying clare et distincte, or, as with Kant, in the distinction between Schein und Erscheinung as used in a complex dialectical inversion of the order of knowing at the level of ideas. This also tracks a movement with respect to the subjectivity of knowledge and the development of the modern subject. But on the side of this subjective activity of the viewer, one also notes from early on how seeing becomes central to the activity of knowing, as when Aristotle ties these two together by way of the pleasure taken in sight in the opening lines of the Metaphysics. Here we are dealing with a field of feelings relating to both sight and thought; perhaps even, as Aristotle suggests, relating sight and knowing in some fundamental manner. And here, as well, we have a pathological implication for thought as a kind of feeling that admits of pleasure and pain in some form and links thinking with the broader sphere of general bodily perception in something other than merely an order of sight and knowledge. And so, in just this broadened sense, we might turn again to ask how the total field of seeing is related to having and the logic of possession: One might reach out as if to grasp that which gives pleasure, or just rest in the gaze upon some scene in that presence which has always already been achieved in vision through a mode of continuous contact. But with respect to an interest in determination and specificity, something which also gives pleasure by way of learning, there is something else here, in that one sees and recognizes in accordance with determinate traits or characteristics. Very much follows in this vein. Having also has to do with ethics. Again, in Aristotle, the virtues and vices are the havings that define ones character. Habits are havings, hexeis (as if from the future of ech as hex or some older form of the root verb ) and all moral virtues are formed by way of habituation as becoming accustomed ethiz ethizein, whence ethos and ethika, as Aristotle notes in the opening comments of his most famous study, the Nicomachean Ethics. -7-

This plays again on the categorial framework of his assessment of a person as a kind of substratum for a mode of essential determination by way of traits predicated of that person. The traits or characteristics (the related use of charaktr seems to be taken from the incised surface of seals and the stamp of coinage), now as virtues and vices, get there in their particular forms and degrees, beyond mere natural aptitude, by way of habituation and so in the doing; and this even or especially as various feelings attending encounters with things of particular kinds or sorts. But, again, they get there in the sense of ethical behavior, in relation, not just to feeling, but to feeling pleasure and pain in the appropriate way with respect to the appropriate thing at the appropriate time and place. And here we again encounter the world of seeming in the sense of what is fitting and suitable ; so, again, what conforms to some situation according to some standard or code of conduct, but also as if a natural foundation for such a code of conduct. The code is thereby associated with grounds for feelings of pleasure or pain as such pertain to certain things and situations, which grounds have to be fostered and developed rather than simply created or imposed. Feeling pleasure in knowing would seem, then, to be a way of carrying an ethical framework forward into a naturally grounded field of intellection, but doing so from a more general framework of perception, now epitomized as vision, but just as obviously a matter of touch, the more forceful field for the encounter with pleasure and pain, and the ground for the entire analogical system. And there are other reasons for deriving the whole of sensation from the tactile in ancient theory, reasons that have to do with the priority of spatial configuration over temporal succession. But how all of these resonant feelings are actually housed in, or become integrated as, an active subject or person, and what fundamental relation pertains between the person as such, as if a soul in the mode of a grammatical substratum for predication, and the capabilities developed by way of habituation, is not fully explained in the same discourse. Indeed, it may never be explained beyond some system of practical demands, just as it remains a problem still today. In the mediaeval world of scholastic philosophy, we are dealing with a special problem of inherence and subsistence and a particularly thorny issue as to what belongs essentially to the soul. After all, if your developed character doesnt go with you when you die, then how will you be judged? Indeed, how even still be the same person or soul? But as regards the total field for such practical philosophy, one might also wonder how echein/hexis and ethos are related. Is the ethos itself merely an order of havings by way of habituation? And if so, what is its substratum? Is this the ethnos as Nation, as with the Germanic Volk and the English Folk as People? So a group of people who have their customs, as if things had in common, as with clans and tribes and city-states, and by extension to our world, modern nation-states and a now global corporate order? But I will pass by this for the moment and move on to a different order of concern. Property relations operate under the sign of certain key forms and terms. In our world the chief legal designator is the conceptual phrase private property. This, however, operates within the more general field of property and ownership, as some mode of control or disposal over, and ultimately in relation to even more general forms of association by way of contact, contiguity, and use. In this more original sense, as already stated, we can play between vision and possession by noting that vision can be conceived in terms of a kind of contact or an -8-

attenuated mode of touch, while knowledge, as if a kind of vision, is also often viewed as a mode of possession in various ways. In German one might then play here as well between the eye and the entire realm of what is ones own, so between Eignis/Oignis/Auge and the term eigen, which is used in Eigentum as the term for property, but is, in itself, more generally just a term for what is characteristic or specifically particular to some given thing, person or event. Eignis is then central to the scientific meaning for eventas Ereignis, literally as something that comes to appearance or comes to vision as before the eye, or again, as with Heidegger, where it is more of an ecstatic mode of being erupting into a distinctive appearance. But whether there is any deep relation linking eignis and eigen, so terms having to do with the eye, on the one hand, and own or ownness, on the other, is questionable; unless, of course, one returns to the Greek sense of determinant trait, as if thing seen, and so forces or forges a connection here for some projected set of Germanic or Indo-European root terms, having to do with eig/oig/aug/ and some term for own. Still, what is fascinating in all of this linguistic play is the notion of some kind of more original connection between having and seeing, in which vision, and, along with it, knowledge, is not so much a straightforward act of appropriation as ownership and possession, but more of a co-lateral event as in the field of appearances as a kind of beholding. And this in turn gives expression to a very much older order of subjectobject relation, which is linguistically attested variously and within which having and seeing are differently combined. Here the status of the agent relative to an objective order is not that which would promote some straightforward act of possession. One is as much held as holding. And the old base tactile framework of sense remains in place as we move through and beyond vision and modes of hearing to the entire order of knowledge as a generalized extension of all possible perception. The linguistic form of this older order of object relations is that of the middle voice. This is something which classical Greek still possessed and made considerable use of. There, all perception can be said to be middle-voiced, just as many verbs of sense, perhaps originally all, are middle-voice deponents; so neither simply active nor passive. There is often no adequate translation for this voice into modern English, but it shares specific characteristics with both other kinds of grammatical formation. It looks passive in form but is used as if active as with certain passive deponents. But it often alters the meaning of the verb. And sometimes it seems to be of the essence of the meaning of the verb, which is then altered by a movement into the active or the passive. The more modern looking active form may even be derived from it, as with hora, I see, from the older horamai, I am involved affectively with something by way of sight. And in the case of seeing, because of the complexity and irregular nature of the verbal forms, which seem to involve sound shifts linking the various root verbs (or the various forms of some root verb) , we also have indications of a lost root form, optomai or opsamai, which names the organ of sight ops and attaches all else to this. Here we have no attested present middle form, as just projected, only a future; but still we have a way of understanding certain middle-voice formations. For instance, the first person ending, by reference to the mai of an I, as if me or my, would be associated with the eye as affected or activated. This language of the activation of the eye by light is still in use with Plato in the image of the Sun in Republic VI. In the absence of light there is then no vision; not, however, only because there is no illuminated -9-

thing or field, but also because the eye itself is not affectively activated or brought to life. But as regards the general structure of the older verbal forms in play with the middle voice, one simply continues to add pronoun-like endings in the mode of person and number to this activity of the eyeor ops as relative to something which brings it into play in the field of vision. Here the person or modern subject would be associated with the organ and its field, rather than the other way around. Again, the concentration is on what is most directly in contact with and conforming itself to some thing or state of affairs. Even here, however, there is a distinction to be maintained with the passive. The sense of a co-determinant agency for a total context never completely dissolves, whether distributed through some organ or some action. In other words, there is an object for an action on the part of the person who sees, rather than a mere receptivity on the part of this subject who is affected by way of sight. So things do not just occur to one in the middle voice, as if merely or purely suffered; they occur because one does something that engages a given context, even if the something is as rudimentary as opening ones eyes, but usually something considerably more contentual by way of engagement with some object field something from which the subject can emerge as more fully active, as with the German anschauen, the directed look, which still takes shape within the more generally middle-like framework of schauen: again, both look and show or the showing which attracts the look and so constitutes what something looks like. So whatever the history of the formation of the voice as distinct from the passive and it is not at all clear whether the passive is derived from it or it from the passive, or both from some still older instrumental mode of language the involvement of a kind of agency on the side of some subjective complex remains in play. And what is perhaps more peculiar here is that Greek seems to prolong the use of the middle, even to expand upon it, while it disappears more readily both in Latin and in other European languages, where, for the most part, it is gone before there is a written record of any note. But however it dissolves or disappears, many of the peculiarities of verbal expression in especially these modern languages would seem to have to do with the loss of the middle voice. Many intransitive uses of verbs, often implying a kind of automatic subjective reflexive, are found here. More important, however, we have the status of the subject in the field of seeming mentioned earlier, where it is the object or objective sense of some matter which might contour or command the conformity, as with the expression it seems to me. The same can be said of it appears to me; also it tastes good or it feels smooth. Again, this is no regular use of the passive: for the seeming or feeling is not done to me, rather it belongs to me to do and recognize it . Here, then, the ordinary sense of a subject as independent source of action is in question, but not absent. There is an object field to which the subject might be said to belong in a manner often difficult to specify. In this regard fated actions might be conceived on the whole as middle-voiced, especially in the more original modes. But even as preserved in classical drama with its increased tension with a singular subject as agent, the older context shows through. In that older context we can suppose that there is, as it were, an agent in the mode of a kind of grammatical subject, as this functions in the middle voice to give a verb its person and number; but such is not the sole organizing force in play. Fate moves through the agent in question, returning, to itself as an organizing field for all significant action. In the classical world, we see that while -10-

Oedipus decides, what he decides, whether by way of ignorance or later by way of knowledge, is still in conformity with what is fated. And while this is hardly the whole of what is there, it remains important, especially as regards its extended political implications. For us, of course, Fate must itself be a subject, so an agent. For the Greeks, however, even though it can be personified in a name, it seems to be the total subjective context that counts, the person in the context of the community, the gens and the family. On the whole, then, we are always looking at a problem of subjectivity, but one in which there is a divided subject, which we can now only conceive as two subjects or no subject. Indeed, to produce Greek tragedy, one needs the tension of this duality that cannot quite separate; that is, one needs not just the older forms of fated determinism but this as still asserted in relation to an individual now as viewed within a new shared political context of meaning and responsibility. And it is this doubled subject which has a very long history, a kind of history of separation. Once separate, however, that is, once there is the sense of a subject as fully distinct or independent from the general field of action and the community and here Socrates seems to be on the dividing line as regards such a subject there is no tragedy in the ancient sense.4 Everything has to be reworked from the standpoint of a single agent, even if doubled by some universal subject as God. So what goes missing with the middle voice may be very much more than a grammatical form. Evacuating a center in the field
4

The last classical tragedy of any note that we possess is Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus which is produced posthumously only a few years before the trial and death of Socrates. The Platonic account of Socrates is measured against these tragic accounts, especially those of Sophocles, but has also much of the comic tradition about it. In any event Socrates is a kind of pivotal figure, never a truly tragic figure, save in the mode of some other kind of tragic view. Indeed, he is the instance for the modern theory of irony, first projected by Hamann in his Socratische Denkwrdigkeiten, which was dedicated to no one less than Immanuel Kant, along with another figure named Behrens, with the following statement: an Niemand und an Zween, to No One and Two, and intended to rebuff their overly rationalistic Englightenment patterns of reasoning. But, again, this form of irony is not tragic in the ancient sense, but proto-Christian and in the case of Hamann purely Christian, because it does not move through ignorance to knowledge, but through knowledge to a more profound ignorance, and thereby supports something else by way of faith. Oedipus thinks he knows, but he doesnt, and thereby he comes finally to a kind of knowledge that also achieves the fated end and is attendant upon it requires it. Socrates thinks he doesnt know, but he, seeking now in the Platonic account to prove the Oracle wrong in its assessment of him as wisest (no one is wiser than), proves only that his knowledge is partial and inadequate even to his understanding of his own end; thus demanding always a practice by way of inquiry and asserting this to be a kind of human wisdom. In other words, Socrates remains ignorant in an important sense, no matter what else we want to say about him on grounds of some supposed Platonic doctrine. Moreover, one can readily argue on such grounds that there is no secret doctrine in Platonic philosophy, delivering true and perfect insight or true and perfect happiness. Nor is there an end that involves a truly disastrous fall. Plato, in fact, spends much of his time in this regard, trying to show that Socrates death is not tragic, not even horrible, but something that must be understood as appropriate to his principles concerning the nature and pursuit of knowledge. -11-

of agency, once this field has been extended and developed in important ways, leads to a new framework for desire, something to be occupied variously by everything from the Holy Spirit to the intersubjective framework of culture at large; so not just the world of religious doctrine and belief but the civil and juridical orders as well. In this extended sense, and as bearing decisively on the concept of property, we might begin again by considering the object field of commodity exchange and money. In later classical Greek, I make money or I profit is the middle chrematizomai of the otherwise active I do business as I get or take wealth, chrematizo. What happens when the complex associative structure of the middle voice is somehow overwritten or subsumed for us by the simple active? And what might this linguistic shift reflect by way of institutional development? The modern English I make money is a kind of bizarre metaphor, which hides both its relation to the commodity form generally and that of the older order of wealth as the things of the arm, chremata, together with the loop out through the world of other goods and other people. Making money sounds rather innocuous when compared with terms that still have resonating meanings associated rather directly with everything from labor to the seizure of goods, as well as the seizure of people as slaves. But all of this was still part and parcel of Aristotles wealthgetting art, chrematistik, which is clearly from the realm of chrema-chrematiz. But here the middle-voiced form seems to represent some kind of advance, rather than some kind of original, as with the verbs for perception and thought. So we seem to pass over into the middle voice and then pass out of it again on the way to our own world. In the first transition, however, the agent seems to have been developed to the level of mercantile activity that moves out through the world and returns to itself, without lifting a spear or marshaling a band of marauding raiders. There is more mediation by way of money but less direct action on the part of the merchant. Of course, spears are lifted, just as navies and armies are enlisted on the side of commerce, but something in the context for action has been altered. So the question remains as to why the middle-voice form seems to require the presence of money in the new exchange system. It is as if money had somehow interposed itself on a line of division within the subject as the one-time agent in a more direct form of action. Consider, for instance, the difference between a merchant and a plunderer such as Odysseus. Moving now beyond the economic sphere, but as equally important for the institutional modes of a middle that bear so heavily on the subsequent development of the universalized modern subject, we have also to consider the political order of the democracy, where the ruled rule and active and passive are conflated in various ways having to do with modes of direct involvement as well as representation. Again, we have here a movement beyond the heroic world of princely pirates and plunderers. Moreover, with Rome this political middle, having been developed in its own way along with a universalized sense of plunder and gain, goes again to active-passive in the most forceful manner: Rule, at least in part by the ruled, goes to the rulerruled dichotomy of the Empire and what follows immediately upon it, only to be slowly undercut by the complex contractual frameworks of feudalism, becoming eventually something more modern. So, again, we seem to move first into and flesh-out a middle realm of political thought and action whether a realm of the middle voice is sometimes difficult to say only -12-

to lose it and pass over into something else, which, however, bears traces as institutional effects of the earlier development. And here, if we follow the most famous treatment of the loss of the political realm, we are dealing as well with the generation of Christianity on the basis of a distended Stoical Consciousness in a world of collapsing structures of civil authority and meaning. Standing, then, beside this, but now in that order of ancient theory which somehow becomes modern by lengthy stages, one might also note that Aristotles dynamis, our potency, power, or potential, is from the quasi modal deponent middle or passive dynamai5, carried over into the more generalized third person dynatai, which seems always to determine how a thing might become what it already somehow entails, but do so as its particular moving force as a kind of fixed possibility. Energeia as completed state or enacted event seems already implied, but only at the level of a kind of web or configuration that functions like a fate to unleash the movement or change and guide it to its proper end. What happens when dynamis-dynatai is subjected to the modern framework of active-passive, as cause and effect? In thought this is only supported by the simplest of metaphorical frameworks, that of technology and making generally, where a plan or form might be said to be imposed on some material. However, all ancient craft makes by working more with the material as co-determinant than by simple
5

Technically, dynamai is usually considered a passive deponent which translates our modal I can. This has to do with the aorist form for I could, which is from the passive-type formation. But it is difficult to comprehend how such a term could have a passive origin, without involving one in the field of the middle-voice. Why use the first person passive to say: it is effectable or doable by me? Somehow the agent must be moving in relation to some effect that follows upon some action, as implicated in advance or within the very context of the action. If it is middle-voiced, then the effect has an affective status at the level of the subject as codeterminant agent: Literally, one can or might be able to do it because the it in question enables one or promotes one to do it. This is a kind of solicitation to action on the part of a object-context or event. The total context for this Aristotelian use of dynamis, so both the physical and moral-ethical framework of causation, has not been dealt with in a unified manner since the time of Herder and Hegel. In the Phaenomenology of Spirit we see the prefiguration of the ethical presentation of the Master-Slave dialectic in the preceding section on Kraft und Verstand, or Force and Understanding. Everything here has to do with treating the reciprocally structured potential-actual relation in terms of the problems of the modern field of cause-andeffect reasoning. What comes forward with cause-and-effect reasoning is the priority of willed actions, within this older framework of reciprocity and problematic causal determinism. What is only implicit in physics becomes explicit in the ethical field as the problem at the center of all moral action. There is an important recognition here: cause-and-effect is not a true principle of physics, rather it is a principle of moral action imposed on the physical universe by modern patterns of reasoning about matter in motion. When this breaks down in the problem of reciprocity in Newtonian gravitational theory and in all manner of subsequent field theory, the sciences are forced to return to a less atomized context of causal action. In cause-and-effect action, the problem of the end is always being dragged along in such a way that it is somehow implied, but only as projected. It is a framework consistent with the field of desire. It is also a framework consistent with an economy of force driven by desire, as in modern capitalism. -13-

imposition. Here one should think of wood-working and the grain and figure of the wood, especially as this refers to what becomes the generic word for material or hyl. But there is also the complex relation between dynamis as used for the moving or efficient cause and the later metaphysical expansion of the field for the development of the concept of the will; so an expansion from the field of doing, not making, where rational activity is involved from the first in a more integrated manner with the material field in question. Indeed, dynamis has more to do with the developed reasoning concerning the field of what is today called willed action than any understanding of the Greek ethel, as some mode of wish, which is always being cited as if an effective origin for such a complex speculative development. Wish, of course, can be related to desire, whence its privileged modern position; but Will is always more negatively charged and, at least originally, more closely aligned with discretionary reasoning. Here, by way of the objective institutional prototype for Aristotles framework, the dynamic or moving cause of the polis is the actual organ of government or politeuma, which has to do with the councils and assemblies of policy debate and decision making. So we have, as it were, the rational will of the state, which can be shifted into place as the rational will of the soul on the basis of the Platonic analogy of psych/polis. The other aspect of willed action, so the irascible as from the thymos or blood soul of Republic IV, takes us in a different direction, back into the affective framework at the level of the passions as these become our emotions; now reacting so as to ground a movement out from us. And this Platonic discourse is also the first framework for the sublime, as the fundamental reaction is to a civil appearance of death, which stymies the emotional transformation, in that the reaction has no way to escape directly into the field of the other, and, accordingly, no where to go but back into the soul. Again, however, even this reactionary power wants to side with reason according to Plato. But returning to dynamis, it should also be noted that money is likely to be involved here as well, especially in framing the general concept of potential and power, just as it was involved with the notion of substance and property from early on: for dynamis also refers to monetary value or worth, while keeping its meaning of possibility linked with power as capability. Indeed, one might say that this connection with power as possibility, as enforced by the return of the money system within the general civil framework that always now organizes death by controlling all lines of flight, eventually becomes the fundamental meaning of dynamis, as in modern commerce, where all capital only has meaning in that it is meant to be invested in order to realize its potential, so fully actualize itself in a mode of now continuous increase and as a driving force directed at profit as the single permitted line of flight. (Cf., Deleuze and Guatarri on line of flight.) And finally, returning to the general topic of the affective framework of the middle-voice, there remains the old problem of perception and knowledge from which I set out. Here the mediaeval and early modern priority of the active-passive framework eventually gives way again to a heavily reworked framework of the middle, absent the grammatical voice. And this gives us another important way to approach the entire problem context from the standpoint of modern philosophy. In German philosophy this final point bears on very much by shaping the meaning of Kants apparent use of the Greek aisthsis-aisthanomai aisthanomai is the deponent middlevoice verb for perceive or sense to develop his peculiar concept of the vector-sum relation of perception. Here, of course, there is a shift toward a modern, more fully alienated subject, -14-

with a more pronounced sense of sequential causal agency, but the close relation to the objective order is preserved by way of the subjective enclosure of appearance. One is thus affectively present in the object field or in the very form and mode of the object to be experienced. And this also relates to the manner in which one often attempts to translate the Greek middle voice today by way of subjective reflexives. The play here is, however, quite significant: I myself sense something becomes I sense something by way of myself in the mode of the object as a thing of possible experience. In a broader context, however, to speak about the Transcendental Aesthetic in terms of the categories of relation which appear later in the field of the Analytic of Concepts and the field of the Understanding most proper, we might say that here, beyond the agency of cause and effect, we have a world in which causality is a matter of affect and the subject and object are held together from the first in a mode of reciprocity. This field of reciprocity, again in terms of the object relations specified in terms of the categories of relation in the Critique of Pure Reason, is a matter of agent-patient relations this is what Hegel redevelops socially and dynamically but it is equally an order in which the subject is itself only defined by way of what it is in relation to. Literally, without some object-field, there is no subject. In Kant, even God, or the absolute projected subject, is always so positioned as to be thought in relation to his world, and so constituting with this world an entirety or whole.6 The shift here is such as to thoroughly complicate the Cartesian framework of the barren ego or I something which was in fact never as barren as it was often made out to be whence we arrive at Fichtes das Ich of the Wissenschaftslehre and the later Geistof Hegelian philosophy. In the former we have the field of reflexivity brought to center stage and used to privilege the active sense of subjectivity in all object constitution as a mode of practical action; in the latter, we have the relation of self and an-other regrounded in a complex social dialectic, most famously, Master-Slave or Lord and Vassal, and the attendant dialectic of cognition (Erkennen) in the mode of recognition (Anerkennen). With recognition we return to Platos Republic and the dogs, passing, however, by way of the categorial logic of Metaphysics, VII, 3, where Aristotle rounds off a
6

Cf., Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B-112. Here the point is to pass beyond the confines of the category of cause and effect. The statement is in the negative: so if thought through only cause and effect der Weltschpfer mit der Weltcould not be thought as a whole. Taken into the context of Kants peculiar use of disjunctive judgement, always associated with this category of reciprocity, this means more properly that the Deity can be thought in itself, by way of reflective separation and fixing, even though it must also always admit of being thought in relation to the world. The connection must be simultaneously affirmed and broken. As will appear later this is actually an instance of the old affective logic of touch. It is also always worth noting that if one uses only the concept of reciprocity, where the cause moves to the center of the relation itself, then the creator and the creation cannot be thought apart from one another, even by way of the implied priority of the agent, save by a sheer and unsupported act of reflective separation. By using both cause and effect and reciprocity simultaneously, so reciprocally or in the mode of a Wechselbestimmung, one is then able to organize the field of a totality under the framework of a strengthened subjective agent as substantial ground. Asserting that one must think this way, will yield some version of Fichtes absolute subject, just as it organizes the movement through the system of object relations in the First Critique. -15-

particularly important treatment of the meaning of being as substratum, wherein he utilizes reductive patterns of negation to dismiss the priority of the material conception of being as central or definitive for the notion of being in its total field of referents an argument that ends with the major assertion which opens the entire train of reasoning in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik with an analogy concerning mathsis or the method of learning, which relates praxis and knowledge, while using two distinct but related terms for knowing in the mode of the knowables. The first of the terms in the realm of knowledge, the one used to link up with the practical sphere of doings, has to do with knowledge as recognition, gnriz and the recognizables as gnrima. The personalized version of the latter is gnrimoi. This is also the term for the recognized first figures of the community. In the social dialectic from Hegels Phnomenolgie des Geistes, we would have, anerkannt als Herrn oder Knig, so recognized, and thereby acknowledged, as Lord or King. But what is for Aristotle an analogy linking praxis and theory at the level of a similar mode of advance with respect to different kinds of knowables, becomes for Hegel a mode of integrating cultural history with knowledge, as well as a way of positioning the force and structure of modern practical reason at the center of the theory of knowledge. Here analogy is breaking down into a logical process of subsumption and transformation of what mediates from the first, as this refers to reflectively divided terms or fields. We move from the gnrima to the gnsta, from the familiars to the knowables most proper, so also the framework of recognition to the framework of cognition, in both orders of reasoning, but we move in very different ways. To be more explicit, the fact that knowledge arises out of systems of recognition, means that it has a social form even when it becomes a more purely cognitive product. Therefore, what seems to be held together only by formal analogy in Aristotle, becomes a matter of a dialectical tension and advance in Hegelian theory, where the latter is always predicated on objective institutional developments. What is more, for Hegel, the system of recognition has now become a matter of conflict with an extended and contested acknowledgement, rather than merely some expanded familial or tribal order of shared beliefs or experiences. In other words, he has shifted the form toward a field that might generate the individual as distinct from the group, and shifted in such a manner as to take in the groundwork for much modern political and economic theory, especially that which pertains to Hobbes and what follows upon him in the English tradition of self-interested theories of morals and action. And while this might accord well enough at one level with the ancient views on honor and face, it seems directed more to a kind of political subterfuge that is used now to deal with both the loss of the ancient democracies in the Roman world and the rise of Church and Nation State as mediated now by the economic realm of Civil Society, all of which pertains to the field of Ethical Life or Sittlichkeit, as the objective or institutional centerpiece of Hegels theory of history and his socially grounded theory of knowledge. Especially with this Hegelian system, then, it is not by way of some simple absence of the middle voice and the attendant increased tension of the active-passive framework that we progress in the order of knowing, but by harnessing the reciprocal order of relations and subsuming these within the field of Kantian subjectivity, extended to the social world, to be extracted later in a more purely theoretical use.7 Indeed,
7

There is an attendant point here that has to do with the movement from a world of middle-voiced activities across an evacuated center to the framework of an intensified active-16-

Hegels absolute subject is middle-voiced throughout, whence the hyperbolic use of reflexives throughout his System. And in this regard it should always be added that Hegel was an extraordinarily gifted and insightful reader of Greek texts, especially the texts of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the entire literary and conceptual tradition as it reaches down to Roman times and passes over finally into Christianity. Accordingly, his systematized universal subject can be understood as standing in the position of an organizing first principle as Fate, moving through cultures and individuals, forming cultures and the very consciousness of the individual, but all as if an act of a universalized subjectively projected sensibility and perception, reflectively presented in the field of culturally housed objectivity, the appearance of Spirit as the institutional field of the ethos. The Phnomenologie des Geistes, with its own more objective center in the field of Sittlichkeit or ethical life, carried forward into a world of Bildung or culture as religion and belief, is, in this sense, the inheritor of the Kantian redeployment of the middlevoiced aisthanomai within the more modern subjective field of agency. And just as Kants subject causes itself to be affected in certain ways pertaining to the sciences and instrumental to setting up a system of moral autonomy of the will, Hegels absolute subject, causes itself to be and to be affectively related to itself by way the entire order of objective and subjective relations pertaining to nature and the human world. But it must be remembered here that it is precisely this sense of causing oneself or itself that is a product of a more original kind of subjective

passive context. In Hegelian philosophy this has to do with the development of the field for desire in terms of conflict and the mediating structures which are eventually redeveloped at the institutional level as well as at the level of the modern psychological subject. However, this is a difficult development to trace in relation to language, especially since it is not commented upon as such by Hegel. Whether it is there as stated above requires that one re-invest the Hegelian system with an interest in language that links classical Greek with modern German, and does so in light of certain institutional developments that go along with such a system of transformations. What is being asserted in the present piece is that the passions themselves undergo a certain order of change, not simply as things suffered, but more as things affectively developed in another sphere of interest the interest of knowing, as a mode of having. But an institutional order of development always belongs with this change. For instance, the development of the modern sciences can only be understood here in terms of a certain order of affective interest that always belongs to the development of the modern state and the modern corporate and financial system. But this order of interest is itself not something that can be understood without the evacuated center of the middle-voice framework of perception. Again, however, it is the relation to language that is most difficult to present: What does it mean to think affectively in a different way? What does it mean to treat thinking itself as an affective state, as with Platos pathmata en ti psychi, which house dianoia and nosis, understanding and reason, along with image production and perception? And then, finally, what does it mean to shift from middle-voice to active-passive systems in just this context? In an institutional context, this might be associated with the problem of shifting from a democratically charged political world to a non-democratic imperial and then feudal order. But, again, what is important is the shift after the fact of the earlier development. So a kind of loss is involved. How does this loss register both institutionally and psychologically? This, then, pertains to the framework of desire and will. -17-

activity, rather than simply being that original ground or basis, even though it is just this original basis which remains in question precisely because of its involvement with this reflective process of development. In other words, this is the reflectively reconstituted view of such a basis, which basis cannot be freed from its involvement with this active cognitive structure, as if requiring always an objective development adequate to itself in the mode of a system of intersubjective, linguistic and ethical, existence. The precise status of the so-called Hegelian Absolute is thus very much dependent on the ethical framework as historically achieved. Aristotle had the citystate passing over into a new form of empire; Hegel has the nation-state verging on what we now know as the corporate world-empire of capitalism; where, in our version, the economic form in question has already produced, and is currently reabsorbing its antithetical moment here the movement through socialism, fascism, and communism . But whatever we do with our own involvement in such a System as an order of realized reflection in social format, the form in play can be conceived in relation to something coordinated with the linguistic development of the Greeks. Here we return to the historical progression of the middle voice in the field of vision as reflected in the history of knowledge: It is as if all were a matter of moving from the objectively dominated optomai to the more pronounced subjectively active hora across the field of the affective fusion of subjective and objective elements in horamai and the world of Platonic phenomena in the order of phainesthai, the world of appearances. Eventually the middle drops out of view almost entirely, disappearing into the field and meaning of the modern Cartesian subject and the modern views of sequential causality privileged so thoroughly by the time of Hume; whence it is resurrected in an abstract and formal manner within the confines of the Kantian subject and its new subjectively universal order of appearances. What, however, belongs with such a movement in the broader cultural field of ethics and the institutional order of having, is the kind of question which opens up again the problematic center of Hegelian philosophy in a two-fold historical sense: first, getting to the Greeks, and second, getting from them to the present. It is then in this general field of transcendental philosophy, with its various ties to the more originary world of Greek philosophy and its complex linguistic forms, that we also finally encounter the full form of the problematic relation of property and appearance as regards the modern world of knowledge. Both concepts function in an indirect manner that sheds light on the general meaning of ideology in contemporary critical theory. In Kantian philosophy, appearance is not actually about that which can be seen; rather it is about the conditions of possible visible, whence sensible, existence. Here the relation is to patterns of knowledge in modern physics. Nothing in the Kantian system actually bears on the more ordinary world of sight and seeing in any direct manner. Indeed, one would have to return to Plato and the ancient Greek world of philosophy to recapture even a partial relation to the field of actual vision as controlling the order of theory itself by way of a direct, rather than a modern, instrumentally interrupted, perceptual optics. But despite this problem, the systematic development of the theory of appearances gains a foothold in some more ordinary field of truth and belief by use of the very term the term appearance or Erscheinung. Further, the old base term in German, Schein, is now fully subordinated to the general notion of spectral show as a framework of illusion and the illusory, and in this form is associated with a particular use of ideas, literally an attempt to -18-

realize such ideas in a kind of figurative or imitatively sensible and imagistic manner. This use is then discharged by way of the critique of the inadequacy of sense experience to rational conception, where the latter refers us to the non-figurative meaning of ideas as used in the moral field proper or in the moral component of the world of knowledge, the ought structures of knowledge or the framework of regulative principles. In this non-sensible, more properly Platonic meaning, ideas give expression to a relation between moral purpose and the drive to totality and systematic completion in the sciences. But whatever the inner workings of Kants transcendental philosophy, the general point is that mentioned earlier: Appearance is here everywhere about knowledge and not appearances as such in the actual visual world. In this we have realized the old Greek metaphorical field linking sight and knowing. But we retain the affective middle-voiced force of the actual world of sight as seeing in some appropriate way and field. It is this pattern that is then repeated in the field of property relations under the general concept of property, understood or categorized now always as private property. One notes in all cases a shift to a powerful sense of agency in the mode of causal relations: Cause and effect goes with a new world of private property. It is not an accident that such appear together in the 17th and 18th centuries, just as all of this pertains to the priority of the Will in Protestant theology. But, again, the guarantor for this agency is not from the new order of the causal agent, the modern subject. The force actually comes from an older framework. And just as cause and effect depends on another notion of cause and causality, which implies an older aesthetic framework of affects built out in relation to the logic of touch and reciprocal contact, so private property takes its sensible or psychological power from another field of property relations, having something to do with another notion of having. What, then, is this older framework of property or having as that which belongs with the middle-voice world of seeing and knowledgeas recognition? Is it simply a matter of belonging with, next to or beside? Or is it something that establishes the relation before the fact, so a mode of subjectivity before the subject; a pattern of consciousness before the self? But private property is not a mere psychological state in its own right. It is, rather, something that operates upon some related psychological state, itself less separable from the objective institutional order than normally supposed. And it is to this objective institutional order that one turns to gain some historical sense of reference for any such more original way of being related to the world. But it is equally unlikely that one can somehow decipher the meaning of this other reality, without recognizing something from the problems of and with knowledge in relation to appearances as just expressed. Private property is not about some more original form of property or ownership any more than the Kantian theory of appearances is about the world of actual vision and visual experience. It merely organizes something else under the sign of property as ownership. It organizes the subject of having by way of radical patterns of selfinterest. But this same subject is the one who knows in the mode of appearances, the subject of modern patterns of self-consciousness. And as the objective idealist doctrine runs, it is in this form that the universal subject appears as the world. Whether we believe today in this absolutized subject or not, the appearance remains and remains in force, as does the theory of appearances in modern philosophy, despite its almost complete disappearance within a new scientific positivism driven by technology in league with corporate reality. All of our thinking is here -19-

reshaped in important ways, especially that which thinks itself free of such social determination. But, of course, private property is an almost complete legal fiction, while its hold on thought stems from its combined effective and affective force as an organizing principle of social relations and the social psyche. And here it is thoroughly institutional, having been instituted, however, by no person, being, law-giver, or assembly of so-called free citizens. Today, more so than even the State, it is God on earth; and its history, to use Hegel again, is Gods step into and march through the world. There is, however, an issue of residuals. And this refers us to more than a social theory of labor, even if to something that can be effectively collated with such.

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II

It should now be apparent that there is more than an incidental analogical relation between the organization of property and the organization of knowledge. But property relations do not simply turn themselves into knowledge, rather they move through an intermediary institutional framework for habituation, returning, as it were, to a more complex framework of having. It is in this context that we also encounter the theory of appearances as a peculiar product of reflective reasoning. But precisely what such a theory pertains to in the institutional world is at first unclear, beyond a certain general order of effects related to the money system of commerce. Here things become both a means to and a veil for the motion of money. Things become commodities, while remaining things in a different sense. The world doubles in a manner specific to the money system of exchange. Money, however, becomes progressively an ever purer commodity: a thing which borders on formality and for which there is only one essential attribute, number. It is then this new kind of radical force which is recorded in the world of philosophy by way of the general framework of appearances, ancient and modern. But what else is here? For instance, the lasting effect of the Kantian theory of knowledge relative to the sciences may have very little to do with the advance of the physical sciences as such, but everything to do with a reordering of the cultural or ethical dimension of knowledge; a point consistent with the Marxist appropriation of the Hegelian expansion of Kantian philosophy. In short, the effect of Kantian philosophy has everything to do with the ideological force of capitalism, as it is today displayed across a broad reach of institutional modes of theory and analysis. The sciences, in fact, continue to operate for the most part on the psychological views of British Empiricism, complete with most of its flaws, but the view as to what such knowledge has to do with the ethical, social and political configuration of a world now thoroughly dominated by the corporate order of business and finance is only to be understood by thinking along lines that would take seriously the interface between such knowledge and some order of appearances. And this is hardly just a view as to the more recent technological seizure of the Kantian notion of constitutive formation of some objective order as in the general field of media or computer sciences or the older forms of propaganda as advertising and the movies. Rather, we are dealing with an extensive practical employment of some other set of suppositions, invested now as an institutionally housed framework for supporting habituation and modes of reasoning. Here we encounter the business form of society itself; something which has been coming to power for several hundred years. Everything is now housed within this framework, which must, however, be viewed as a kind of radical replacement of something else, owing to the artificiality of the central mediating structure of exchange, money and the money system. But does this radical replacement and transformation account for or constitute an order of appearance without also laying claim in some way to the erstwhile world of vision and the visual? And the problem here, insofar as there is still a problem beyond the level of practical affairs of policy and action, has to do with the fact that reasoning itself has an affective element which is caught up in this transformed institutional order, just as it is tied to the promotion of various changes in the visual field. And that very -21-

affective element, as it relates to the totality of the visual field, is blocking all access to any other basis, as well as supplying the only connection with such a general field. We might still like to think that such things as the formal structures of reasoning are somehow independent of the social world within which they are housed, but this very mode of thinking the framework supporting this desire to think in this way is itself not independent of this broader context and the affective framework of human reason; and this, no matter what the presumed or actual status of the more fully formal structures in play. So it is not just desire and its object that is here constituted, but the entire system within which this desire operates with respect to any number of possible objects, only one of which touches upon the positioning of formal structures within a certain framework of reflective reasoning. Again, something is being constituted by way of but in addition to both desire and its field of possible objects, and it is unlikely that this can be understood in terms of patterns of formal reasoning alone. As just indicated, it is more of the order of a housing for the general relation of all such formal reasoning to the perceptual field taken together with the more directed practical modes of understanding. This may then be called the field of interest, as that which breaks up into any number of directed activities, relative, for instance, to the erstwhile transcendental framework of possible knowledge, which underwrites such classical divisions as that of desire and reason in the field of the will. Again, however, there remains here a question of appearance and the total visual field in its relation to the affective order of sensibility. And knowledge is the general signifier for the field of this problem, whereas vision is the principal metaphor for knowledge, to say nothing of its expanded use in the current world of images and screens, and its age-old relation to symbolic modes of expression. But this topic is difficult to approach in its own right, without losing sight of the shifting context of economic and political institutional formation; just as it is difficult to move the other way around and so think it possible to lose oneself in objective institutional analysis and then find ones way back eventually to the order of thinking more proper in its relation to some affective state. Today there is then no adequate framework for discussing such worlds simultaneously: Or what is the same thing, we seem always to encounter a curious division which is difficult to treat in a fused or undivided manner, where such fusion would mirror the order of interest in question, while remaining something else by way of critical insight and a capability that might somehow operate independently of the frame. And it has been a long time now since a demand was made that thinking pay attention to itself in its affective relation to various kinds of subject matter, that is, pay attention to itself precisely while it is here by way of the old subjunctive or optative be or should be paying attention to such subject matter, especially such material as constitutes all historical and cultural studies; or, as what is even more difficult, that thought develop itself by means of such studies, rather than only in some abstract or formal field of study to be applied later and externally in some manner to all other material. The idea that this other kind of formal or methodological thinking can be fully separated from its housing, rather than having constantly to be rethought in its relation to such and as always arising within it, has been especially prevalent in British and American patterns of reasoning ever since the Enlightenment. It now promises to become that which is promoted by every mode of reasoning, as such is exported along with the expansion of first the British and then the American empire of commerce. And, indeed, one might well ask if this view is not itself a peculiar product of an -22-

institutionally housed order of thinking, where all aspects of that institutional context come to be thoroughly dominated by the abstract and near formal quality of capitalist economics, buttressed by the limiting pragmatism of the business ethic. But whatever one makes of this problem that is, the extent to which the system of recognition and development is to be integrated with the system of cognition and formal patterns of reasoning a certain aspect of the problem cannot be avoided, save by direct suppression and, as such, as something which always calls for explanation. For it is not the purely formal aspect of reason that is here principally at stake, however it might be developed in its own right, but rather this form as moving in relation to some field of affective relations more properly understood as a general order of interests. And since one is always dealing with modes of thinking in dealing with affective modes of interest, just as thinking is always present in some way in modes of feeling and action, what should long ago have become clear is that it belongs to this middle ground of affective sensibility as thought to divide into precisely those facets of experience which then seem to confront one another as somehow exclusive; this being a central tenet of the dialectical philosophy of reflection. Accordingly, it is our own order of diction and patterned understanding that here confronts us now in a highly developed form that can and has been studied, but is so often still forgotten and thereby left to operate as if some immediate and unchecked context for ordinary perception. On the other hand, one look at the fragments of the pre-Socratics, or even at Platonic philosophy, would tell us a different tale: It is here that people begin to build out a certain kind of double language: fire moving to become both the thing of sense and the principle of consumption and universal transformation, but still embodying, rather than merely referring to, the older order of purification, its use in ritual sacrifice and in certain rites of the dead views which can then be carried all the way through the modern theories of oxidation and radiant energy as peculiar forms of such erstwhile perceptually embodied fire or in the Platonic case, visible shapes being transformed and metaphorically shifted into a world of linguistically housed meanings as invisible morally invested ideas pertaining to the level of a purely intellectual knowing but still carrying relations to an older order of socially invested recognition in the field of piety and thereby investing in turn the meaning of transgression and balance, all of which was then to be rebuilt at the level of a theory of justice in a new political context. So, again, it is a here that a world begins to fall apart and be rebuilt by way of a specific kind of duplication and transformation that bears on what will eventually become our world, rather than another version of some older or just other order of such doubling as constrained and shaped by a different order of mediation. But it is also right here that property is becoming private for the first time, the first democracies are being formed and continuously reformed, and coinage is progressively transforming the order of commerce. Indeed, everything that still divides us today from everything else that ever was, or still in part is, happens here in the ancient world all at once and in a way that is still quite unclear. In fact, however, all at once is a matter of some hundreds of years. It is just that we do not even know when to start counting. We only know when the Greeks started to count in a new way: by our reckoning in 776, BC; by theirs, counting backwards to and forwards from the first recording of the Olympic Games, as something standing out on a divide separating various peoples, loosely unified in a new context, from what increasingly becomes a past-tense world of fallen fortress palaces and tribal invasions. But we -23-

have long ago stopped asking why this date should itself have counted at all for something new in some other sense. After all, it seems little more than some way of cross-dating things that belonged to the Greeks of what we now refer to as the classical age. Virtually every city-state had its own ordering to go with this. It is, however, a date which also commemorates a reintroduction of writing in a new and less sequestered format, together with the appearance of the first tyrants; so the recognized end of the older order of kings, even as already demoted again to tribal chieftains and leaders of certain clans pertaining to a tribal aristocracy, and thereby a way of instituting an ongoing instability in patterns of rule and attendant social formation. And here one should also remember that all such organized games may well be derived from funeral games. So we have the recognized end of the kings as divine instances of authority, where the end is displayed as the elevation of Zeus, now on the back of the cult of Hera, to whom belonged the oldest extant temple at Olympia and the one that was so sacred that its columns were taken down and replaced one at time in different diameters reflecting the wooden originals to the level of King of the Gods, but a king now largely in the mode of the universal type for the tyrant. In Athens, for instance, it is the time when the archons first break free of the intermediary but still hereditary hold of the Metonids, operating already for some hundreds of years as a kind of regency; so, a movement which already involved an earlier falling away from true religiously invested royal power and the authority of some actual order of kings. The form of this full order of transformations is very peculiar. Indeed, it may well have the form of all truly radical social transformation; but as such it may also be highly specific to only one order of change. It thereby has the form of something which is rarely discussed today: the form of necessity in the mode of the singular event and judgement, rather than as something pertaining merely to the particular as this relates to the form of the general as the universal.8 Hence, it appears, on one line of analysis, almost as if nothing had happened. But scarce two
8

In the modern order of thinking, necessity seems always to pertain to that which is common or universal, so an order of sequenced events that is replicateable and found to be constantly repeatable in the same manner; this is the German theoretical Nachvollziehbarkeit. But there is another pattern that pertains to the unique as the singular event or occurrence. Here conditions might have something to do with what is common, but the event itself has no regular or knowable antecedents. In older patterns of reasoning this has much to do with what is fated. Transposed into the later world of transcendental philosophy, it has to do with the necessity that attaches itself to the concept of freedom, outside of the normal context of causal sequence. The full development of the apparent conflict expressed here is dialectically resolved by asserting that the kind of necessity pertaining to freedom is the inner truth of the more general form of necessity pertaining to mere causal sequence and cause-and-effect patterns of reasoning about such. In effect the true form of necessity is the form of the singular free action or event, something generally reserved for the field of moral action. This remains always the undeveloped or differently developed, but in either case the constantly referred to central structure of the Kantian critical system: the idea of freedom, which, when dialectically fractured and displayed in the order of natural appearances, breaks down into sheer singular spontaneity, opposed to absolutely rigid sequential causal necessity. -24-

hundred years later, it appears as if everything most important for all subsequent change must already have happened. Today, as already with Marx, one would like to say that money was involved from the first and this, in part because money duplicates speech as an order of mediation in an objective or commodity context, just as number, which is promoted along with coinage in the systems of counting and accounting, duplicates writing and originally makes use of the same symbols. But what seems more likely is that something which would empower a new world of money-form commerce, once coinage actually appeared and was spread about, had somehow already been put in place or at least made possible by other social changes. Everything points at a change in the order of having or property relations, but one that is not easily understood on modern paradigms. Nor is it likely that such a change could take place without a reciprocal transformation of the entire framework of authority. It might even presuppose such to a degree, even if in some other context, less easily identified. Indeed, how does one talk about private property before monetary exchange and fuller patterns of radical alienation? And how deal with any of this without asking into the frameworks of rule, social custom and the like, which would authorize such? Perhaps there are merchants before money and perhaps the older clan-oriented landed aristocracy is already falling apart in some important manner. But without grappling with just such problems, one is apt to transit here too quickly in reverse from the more fully formed political world of antiquity to a world of mere plunder and some inadequately defined kind of tribal organization. Integrated cultural structures in transformation on other grounds than those we are today familiar with are much harder to deal with. One needs to recognize many things here, some of which bear on the tribal aspects of Greek culture and particularly the relation of such to the councillor and assembly framework of democracy. But other occurrences seem even more elusive: What, for instance, allows the family to break with the gens or clan, even to the degree to which it does in antiquity? Today, the patriarchal family has itself been exploded by the pressures inherent in both industrial and finance capitalism; but the analog to this in the first age of the private family and the coming of private property has more to do with the fragmentation of the phratry-like gens and a mixing of social forms. But in relation to this, what promotes new patterns of division, such that one does not end up with only a new order of commerce and trade but also a transformative mode of reasoning to go along with a new complex ethics? And here simple economic determinism, as we find it so commonly employed today, fails entirely: The Phoenicians may give the Greeks a new more democratically oriented mode of writing to go along with an expansion of the merchant economy, but they do not give either them or the subsequent world at large democracy itself; and this even to the extent that one might wish to entertain such a thesis on the basis of certain democratic elements in the derivative Carthaginian state-form, as recorded by Aristotle. And, again, the key difference that goes with the formation of the democratic form is found in the fact that despite all of their commerce and trade, these same Phoenicians do not give us the first development of the physical sciences and the related movements that ground critical reasoning in relation to rhetoric as it becomes logical theory and moral idealism. Again, the difference between Phoenician roots, as reported connections by way of lineage for Thales and other figures, and subsequent Greek developments, as with Ionic natural theory as a whole, as well as all other modes of theoretical development, is crucial here. And perhaps in this singular cultural difference, one does begin eventually to sense the importance of the political transformation as that which becomes -25-

somehow instrumental for radicalizing everything from commerce and the money system to philosophical reasoning. But, even so, this political transformation is itself housed in what seems to be shifting, while it is difficult to point to any political world of note in the 9th century, or even the 8th . There, the form of the change, as already mentioned, is rather barren and only negatively given to us as the progressively recognized end of the remnants of the older order of so-called Achaean or Mycenaean kings and queens; and with this end some shift in the nature and meaning of the tribal aristocracy and the general organization of the clans and families. Here we come again to the first tyrants. But tyranny is virtually one with the rise of the ancient democracies, because the tyrant lacks the legitimation and the limitations of the older kings, or even that of the clan leader or aristocrat. Indeed, tyranny is the sign of the instability of the new order of rule. But why such instability in the first place, especially as a continuous force, unlike a mere dynastic change as with Gyges and the Lydian line of kings? A point to which I will return later, and one made more significant by the fact that Plato refers to this Lydian transgression, as if dealing with the original of, so the very form of, tyranny, in the famous devils advocate argument from the beginning of Book II of Republic, where he begins an extended presentation by way of the statement, a certain ancestor of Gyges.. And we then add what Plato also obviously knew: Sardis, the Lydian royal city, is the fabled birthplace of coinage, whence the whole of the ancient money system and the world of retail trade. But, again, rather than simply losing oneself in the speculative history here, it is important to keep something else in mind, even as more and more historical material is introduced: Between having and seeing may well be the original place of knowledge, but as having has to do with property relations as well as ethics, while seeing has to do with a radicalization of appearances in relation to a problematic development of knowledge, something else would seem to stand between all manner of things that might serve both to hold matters together from the first in relation to various systems of recognition and to permit or promote some set of changes in these other realms. As with the political framework mentioned above, one suspects that this has to do with ethical structures and institutions as modes of having that combine seeing and hearing so also writing and spoken language in a manner that still makes use of paradigms of tactile force in the field of recognition and knowledge. This sense of having would then move in relation to transformations in property relations in the broader social sphere. The question, however, is whether and how it might also move independently of such? And with this other ethical framework, there would seem to belong a way of constituting thinking and some self-referential view of a thinking subject. Perhaps it is just a reflex of modernity, but it would appear that the curiously divided sense of agency belonging originally to the middle voice is more than just the author of the theory of appearances. It is certainly something before and beside the Kantian subject and the Hegelian theory of subjectivity, though these are telling developments which point the way for any pertinent analysis of such. And there is also something here in modernity that has to do with just this German theoretical grasp of the otherwise more fully developed English theory of self-interested action; something, as well, still before or beside the more contemporary French theories of the subject, understood only in terms of desire, rather than in relation to the complex notion of rational will. Private Property and Appearances somehow go together, and this beyond the analogy pertaining to patterns of modern ideology; but -26-

precisely how, across what middle and to what end, is unclear. Indeed, even the proto-forms of property formation seem to promote or pertain to certain kinds of perceptual dualism that existed prior to, and persisted alongside of, the theoretically developed order of appearances in Western philosophy. But, again, why should property, especially the privatization of property, have such an effect? That is, have such an effect in the affective order relating to knowledge? Something seems to be operating even beneath the levels of formalization and duplication introduced by money-form exchange. Something makes the money system possible in such manner that it will function to promote the theoretical discourse of appearance: the discourse of being and the appearance of the beings, both in themselves and for perceptual understanding. As already indicated, private property is not property in any simple use of the term, just as it is certainly not about what is ones own in any more original tactile framework of knowledge. It is, in fact, this very tactile sense that is so often violated by the demands and excesses of the modern world of property relations. Private property is precisely that which can be fully alienated; so separated entirely and in advance, as it were, from some person or group, rather than held in perpetuity by some familial or clan-structured self, even while admitting of being seized or destroyed as in some older economic framework of warfare and plunder. No one, for instance, can conceive of a homeland on the basis of private property alone, or even principally or, at least, no ancient people of the order of the Greeks or the Persians, or any other people with tribal origins still intact and functioning. At the same time, however, a certain fusion takes place here in both the legal and psychological sphere that promotes a new order of social cohesion which is inter-reflected as an intensified sense of self, whence a self that seems to construct itself across some new kind of divide that measures and doubles other divisions between people. Accordingly, private property is a cultural construct that is about the ability to transform property into the framework of something that looks like knowledge in the mode of pure selfinterested reciprocal action and appropriation; action which turns the middle-voice formation into a kind of subjective reflexive, but only does so for some universal subject or system that can always then be accessed or used by some more singular subjective agent, empowered by the same system. There is something here that does not go with a king and his court, any more than with a emperor and his advisory council. In these systems the distance between agents and patients is too great and too rigidly defined. Rather, it goes with the old Aristotelian play of oligarchy within democracy, especially as this is up-dated to a more modern setting involving the expansion of the field and meaning of corporate interests. And it is also in relation to this that we run into versions of the problem of appearances, first in ancient idealism, but more especially in modern philosophy, where so much seems to be built-out around a radicalized framework of reflection in the context of the resurgent demands of the modern forms of democracy. But especially this modern act of reflection is anything but simple, just as it enfolds a number of older variants that it returns upon and reworks. And here one has the entire framework and scope of Hegelian philosophy to indicate precisely what is involved from the first. There, knowledge itself is a matter of interest; and the self that goes with this interest is generated along with the specific kind of knowledge that gives us the economic and political field of self-interest in the modern world. But try as one will to derive this self from the economic world along with the organized patterns of self-interested activity, something remains hanging and resistant. Why should private property -27-

demand or engender a specific new kind of self as that self-interested subject that makes certain new patterns of knowledge possible, especially those patterns that support the rise of the sciences? A new more alienated self may well belong to more radical patterns of alienation in property relations, but this does not, in and of itself, inform us of why such a self should be involved in the generation of the panoply of theories that mark the modern patterns of reflective theory and the resultant elements of, for instance, the Kantian theory of appearances. Perhaps, in fact, property itself does not actually make this demand, but is only a certain kind of condition for such a demand, as this arises on another related basis, more closely associated with an expansion in causal patterns of reasoning. And here we might then encounter the political world of the democracy as a kind of radical cause more than a mere attendant development of economic grounds, first in antiquity and then again in modernity. In any event, either we universalize on this demand in the mode of the modern subject or we universalize on it in the mode of the modern objective system of economics and the sciences. But in neither case do we arrive again at that from which we set out. But, again, historically speaking, we do not know from precisely what we set out: Not because we do not know about older or other systems of tribal society and so-called high civilization, but because we no longer come directly from such older or other modes of social organization, especially as regards the cultural history of the dominant forms of economics and government. Regarding the actual origins of our world today, the world of global capitalism with its theoretically saturated hyper-technology and systematic pressure for certain forms of political reform relating to parliamentary democracy, all we know about origins is something of the when and where for the fact that twice upon a time authority passed over into a more complex democratic framework, while property became private, presumably in different but related ways, all as a part of a set of interrelated developments which gives us now our progressively alienated contemporary self, along with our self-interested theories of everything from politics to the economy and the so-called economy of knowledge. We tend, then, to naturalize this strangely doubled origin for all manner of things; an origin which is anything, however, but natural, especially by the standards of any other known mode of social arrangement, economics and government. No other single culture, no other collection of cultures by way of empire or confederation and a history of such, moves, or has ever moved on its own, to become our world, or even the substructures of such; and this even when sharing elements of the ancient origins in Greece and Rome. There is only one peculiar order of development here, linking ancient Greece, via Rome, with mediaeval and modern Europe, and continuing by way of the corporate, financial, and governmental forms of the Dutch and the English to become virtually everything else. Everywhere else, everything stops short of just those conditions which seem necessary to get us to where virtually everything now stands: The theoretical frameworks, the financial frameworks, the property systems and the governmental systems, all fail to make a certain transformation; and this, again, even where certain relations to the same ancient cultures seem to pertain. Indeed, without this move to north-western Europe, even the resurgent merchant city-states of Renaissance Italy seem to come to a stop, both in political and intellectual development. And blaming this on religion and the continued force of the Catholic Church is like pointing only to that which had to be altered, without explaining why it was not so altered, as it was in Holland, England, and parts of Germany. Moreover, for all of this, the key may well have something to do with the peculiar nature of appearances, as this relates to a complex order of -28-

theoretical development, ancient and modern. For nothing quite like the Platonic view of appearances appears anywhere else until it appears again in a strangely twisted version in modern philosophy: a view, not of some dream-state or of an illusion, whatever the metaphorical appeal of such, but of an order of reality linking perception with knowledge in such a way that one must advance by way of it to something else as ground and cause, something already prefigured, however, precisely in just that order of appearances, while being productive of it as well in both its older objective and more modern subjective sense. The degree and kind of separation between cause and affective order would seem to differentiate between the Platonic and, for instance, the Kantian versions of such a theoretical framework. But it is precisely the fact that both are of the nature of a theoretical framework , rather than a more purely religious or mythological one, that unites them; just as it throws the one view forward and the other backwards, as if across some unified ground. But is that ground properly a matter of scholastic metaphysics and the mediaeval world? Where, for instance, does the problem of appearance double-up on the field of political rhetoric and the democracy in the cultural structures pertaining to scholastic metaphysics? And where does it recapture the problems of the natural sciences in this world, even to the extent necessary to deal with the effects of ancient natural theory or Platonic philosophy, to say nothing of the rebuilt versions of such in later Cartesian and Kantian theory? Again, it is the complex nature of the doctrine of appearances that somehow plays into the very development of theory itself in the Western tradition; at first undergirding and then reemerging from the mediaeval world, along with such things as the money-system and the patterns and problems of democratic forms of government. And while this order of appearances would seem to have much to do with just this money system, ancient and modern might even reflect in some way the shift from coinage to paper and complex notes of exchange it does not seem to be reducible to such, anymore than it is strictly reducible in its format to the difference between direct and representative democracy. And while it seems to have been carried along in a related format in scholastic philosophy, where knowledge is always being secured by reference to some set of divine archetypes born of the first-order system of transformation, it is unclear how it returns upon itself in modernity in such way as to house a more dynamic subject as well as a more fully dynamic objective order of social affairs, as well as a more dynamic view of nature. We say the appearances become subjective, but, in fact, they become more fully objectively determined with respect to the sciences and all moral theory. And just as the modern person becomes more powerfully imbued by way of a more abstract framework of property, a more formal system of currency, and a more attenuated, more heavily mediated mode of democracy, so also the subjective development of theory actually introduces the full development of modern technology and the sciences. But it should be added that the modern, become contemporary subject eventually drops the framework, as if a mere byway of development, allowing it to drift off into the realm of aesthetics, where the beautiful, as its own order of appearances, becomes saturated by references to death and decay, while the sublime becomes a new field for expansion in various directions. And so we forget to think what it might mean to say that something is always between oneself and the world at large, as well as between oneself and oneself, just as language is between people and money is between all institutions themselves and the people who inhabit them. But over and over again I come back to the field of private property as this effects the entire social fabric of economic relations, as if its historical appearance is significant -29-

for a change in the very view of all possible vision and the more objective correlate of this in some system of theoretical appearances; so as the sign for some order of transformation or some kind of radical break that has long since been erased or subsumed in some way that makes it virtually invisible as anything more than a simple break. Again, however, something here in the field of knowing itself points the way to other factors that may well have helped revolutionize the order of property and ownership; something having to do as well with authority and the rise of the state. But this second point, which thereby confuses and distends the discourse on property and economics, is for us today counterproductive. And so it seems to be like idealism, when viewed from a more consistently Marxist, and now generally modern or contemporary perspective. To repeat, then, private property is not some original form of ownership, nor even a form of ownership that can be easily derived from some other or older mode of ownership, whether communal or personal. It is something more of the nature of a revolution in the conventional structure of society itself. When it appears today, generally by imposition wherever it has previously been absent, it seems always to cross some barrier that has kept it from developing its institutional form and context for thousands of years. But one always crosses this barrier in such a manner as to eradicate even the memory of just such a barrier. Thus it seems to develop along some cultural fault line that also pertains to the socialized psyche of the people of the culture. In any guise, however, ancient or modern, the nature of having and possession has to change shape and become more elastic in order to accommodate a more abstract framework that borders on formality. Rather than concentrating matters merely with respect to some physical-sensible being as a person, this physical-sensible being has to become more abstract and formal in its own right to go along with the evacuated reality of the order of objects as these become commodities. On the side of this person or subject, we eventually encounter something called after the Latin name for a theoretical construct of Greek materialism, the individual, from the Democritean atom, as the uncut, whence the undivided not-two or not not-one. In such a format this being is linked with other kinds of artificial beings in the course of a lengthy historical process and is made into a formidable legal force and principle by way of a set of institutional changes. It is only by way of such transformations as this that one can end up with modern corporations as legal persons with interests which fuse corporate forms with personal desires. And only after the fact, then, do we encounter people with similiar interests and desires, similar to these legal entities. Indeed, we have no real persons in our civil legal system to start with today, only place holders for highly abstract property relations. And while this looks similar to something belonging to an ancient system of clan or gens interests, it is essentially different. The person in question is no longer a function of the clan, rather the clan has been redefined so as to become a mere function of the private family and the abstract person. Again, however, this does not end in the person, except such as place-holder or persona in some organized Hobbsean field of power. And it is the beginnings for this entire complex, as taken together with the development of new patterns of knowing, that we now associate with the Greeks; all of which is then somehow doubled by the modern world. So whereas the world is at first remade by empowering some collection of singularized people in relation to city-states and private families still linked with the ancient gens or clan, and thereby with the more original -30-

property relations of the culture, it is remade with a similar modern empowerment, which, however, involves an attendant and concomitant second-order development of corporations, that eventually serves to evacuate the earlier meaning of such individuals as fully empowered economic and political agents. Adorno was already bemoaning the loss of certain aspects of the 19th century bourgeois subject, especially in the realm of aesthetics. Here, however, there is also an enormous expansion of the field and framework of real power. And one suspects that this has something to do with what mediates the ancient and the modern world, as well as creating the first working framework for the evacuation and replacement of the actual person within the first field for the individual, here the form of all subsequent corporations religion in the mode of the Catholic Church. The modern world, however, returns to the oligarchic by way of the Protestant oligopoly as more productive than the Catholic monopoly, just as it returns to the democracy as more productive than the monarchy. But this takes us far afield and merely repeats, by reconfiguring and democratizing, certain aspects of the Hegelian presentation of history. Moreover, without some Hegelian absolute subject as the residue of some great king in the mode of the father-god of Christianity, the causal ground for such transformation in the institutional order remains in question. What is required is then an understanding directed at and by a denser and more internally complex social context for the coming into being and development of certain crucial institutional structures. In a more straightforward historical sense, this new system of property relations first enters the world progressively, and in a limited form, with the Greeks of the 7th, 6th and 5th centuries, BC. Whether and in what forms it might be said to be there even earlier is a much contested point. Marx, as already noted, argued briefly in Capital (Vol. I, Part I, Ch. 2, opening) that its conditions had to do with the advent of the commodity exchange system tied to the collateral advent of money in the mode of coinage. The argument is compelling but incomplete, also as previously noted, in that a number of other conditions had to be on hand to create the first world of private property, the grounds for which are generally ignored or poorly understood with respect the kinds of results that require explanation One had to have both a weakened clan or gens system of land tenure and property relations generally, together with a fragmented system of centralization and authority, which system, even so, maintained some relation to a kind of fixed center of authority for the polis or city-state and its new and less rural, central commercial market, the agora. And this total complex, which also seems to establish the very possibility of democracy, is something difficult to explain and historically account for in its own right; not in the simple form of some kind of city with a market, but as the city-stateoutside of the old clan or dynastic system of rule. And it is this specifically Greek version, especially the Ionic and related Athenian version, that counts for so much that follows. But be that as it may and I argue this at some length in other places9 there remains the patterned relation governing the field of property generally and the world of private control or ownership. Here we see some kind of transference: Among other things, the old patterns of use, both of the land and certain things as implements, tools, or even aesthetic devices (magical implements), are carried over into a new world of market mystification in the commodity exchange system. Indeed, we still live under the spell cast by this
9

See in particular, my earlier work: On the Political Cause. -31-

Greek world of money and market exchange, even if all is newly minted in the modern world; and this far beyond the world of coins. Marx was able to demystify the commodity by way of a discourse involving labor, but he was less able to demystify money itself, as something at the heart of the entire conventional system of exchange. And, again,, it is also from this Greek world, especially the world of the Athenian democracy and its commercial empire, that we derive much of our system of knowledge, especially the entire critical configuration of legal and ethical reasoning, and a good deal of our language and understanding of appearances, both as such and in relation to the system of mathematically figured and configured monetary exchange.10 Now it is obvious that there are many different topics posed here: historical topics at the very origin of our own concept of history and questions of causality pertaining to a new view of causal sequence and types of agency; topics bearing on the relation between knowledge and economics, the mathsis ( patterned procedure of learning) that becomes mathematics, via money and counting as accounting; and topics bearing on all of this in relation to the appearance of democracy. Part of this has then to do with the way the Greeks borrow certain developments measuring and coinage, counting and writing, architecture and administration but substantially change them by a new kind of systematic development and practical redeployment. But there is always something odd and, like the democracy, difficult to account for in just this new systematic grasp and deployment. And with this an entire world changes shape and direction. All of this can then be carried over into modernity in a potentialized manner. Here we meet again an order of institutional changes matched with a host of theoretical, so mathematical, physical and moral/ethical transformations; while everything takes place this time on the basis of foundations that have already been substantially altered by earlier developments proceeding from the classical world. In this context, something might then be gained from a cursory statement of some of the more peculiar results of this second-order transformation, as such might then reflect upon earlier changes as well. Here, for instance, we eventually encounter such interesting problems as the synthetic vision of mathematics in Kantian philosophy. With this we have a view which puts a certain divide in place between ordinary systems of identity as equality and more problematic concepts of conditional arrangement and systematic definitional determination in other words, we have a view which opens up a certain space between 7 = 7" and 5+2 = 7"; indeed, a space between all of these mathematical equations, which play off of the meanings of gleichen like(n), similar, same, as equals and the assertion that x is x or 7 is 7. Something is standing beside this systematic mathematical view of functional equality. There are modes of synthesis here, as if dependent on distinct and separable elements. For Kant, numbers seem sometimes to behave like experiences of distinct qualities, to be synthesized, however, outside of any pattern of external experience. But it has never been clear why this should be the case; nor even if it is really the case. However, number is also defined as the pure schema of magnitude; as if to say in Kants
10

Here see my earlier work: 1968 : A Political Reflection on Money, Number and -32-

Affect.

temporalized framework that it is some strange discrete form of time and, as such, a fundamental mode of inner experience or subjectivity. Still, with such a space in place and operative on the edge of the very field of formal equality and identity, a door begins to open upon certain possibilities for thought generally, all as opposed to the more purely analytic structures of the entrenched and still more ordinary patterns of modern understanding: Identity is not really a given, only a peculiar kind of construct something that gives us pause to wonder about earlier versions of the problem, as with the problematic concept of being as the one while equality might just be some kind of formal convention, if not precisely adopted, still somehow constitutive only in a limited sense of an alignment of certain elements in a number system, such that we can actually have such a system for certain purposes and uses. To speak in the language of the older metaphysics, we are here only directed to think 7 + 5" in accordance with a peculiar kind of end, which yields or defines 12". This end has something to do as well with the functional notion of equality. But what if we change the end in play along with the so-called logic of predication pertaining to the old verb to be: Can 7+5" become 14", if the end is no longer one of mere counting? Does mathematical being have a hold on the is in a manner that can keep other verbal structures from replacing it, even though such replacement is possible in ordinary language? How much looseness pertains to this formal order of conventions? Will this violate some innate code of reasoning, such that it cannot even be thought? A condition that puts one in mind of the paradoxical Parmenidean injunction on speech and thought, holding one back from saying the not of not being, which cannot be, for thou couldst not know what is not, nor utter it. Here we are playing with the fundamental principle of determination and distinction as in what is is what cannot not be, and thereby we keep arriving at Aristotles formal definition of adynaton, the impossible, as that, the thinking of which, involves a manifest contradiction in terms, but now arriving at this in terms of the verb to be itself. Or, returning to the case of equality and the problems of adding and subtracting as just laid out, would such variation just sound odd in going against the grain of formal reasoning, as with a note played off key? But what if we need and so want 7 + 5" to be 14? That is, what if we want to play off key? Indeed, what if we want to play before the key and thereby put the authority of the key in question? How objective is even the rational framework of mathematics? What kind of possible system would then allow us to add and subtract in some new way, or even just ignore the way we might still add and subtract in one system, while doing something else in another, under a similar but shifted order of operations? Is this like returning to a still older way of thinking more by way of less as always across some shifting middle of similarity and the same? And what might here count as an original experience of formal equality or identity? And here it is best to be as outlandish as possible, to sense what might be at stake in some more refined sense to go along with what already now appears as the modern world of creative accounting. So, if one no longer has anything to count up like potatoes or even coins, dealing rather only in shifting values with assigned numerical amounts, must one continue to use the same old system in the same way? Does the system of counting become more absolute or less absolute when it loses all objective reference beyond the reality of number itself? Note today how people seem to play fast and loose with billions and trillions in economic matters, so when dealing only with numbers which have almost no other field of secure meaning. And having once -33-

admitted variability in formal patterns, even if only at the extremes of some transcendental field, what might happen if we somehow lost our way back to the other order? Do we live in a world saturated by theory, or is it a world carried along at the level of a kind of metatheory, with theory itself standing only in some middle station, but one which is itself only subsequently projected from a place at which we arrive by way of the same mediate structures which produce the theories?11 Are we really hard-wired so as not to be able to lose our way here as we move between alternative views? To revisit Platonic problems in more contemporary contexts: Do we, and must we, recognize equalityin the same way, whenever we see it, as if always in some adumbrated form of itself as more properly an idea? Or do we have to learn this in some specified manner, along with the limits of the conceptual form in play? Does thought contain or constitute this idea of equality to go along with the problematic concept of being itself? Or is it rather that it contains something else that permits us to think in this way under certain conditions? The shift is mirrored above in my initial use of language in entering into this perusal of modern Kantian problems: We now have possibilities for as opposed to mere structures of. Or what is more the case, structures come to be increasingly controlled by possibilities as one extends the practical sphere of reasoning, rather than the other way around, as with the so called certainties of the old moralistic arithmetic. Along with all of this, it is again always to be noted that we also see in modernity a reinvention of everything from physics and history to the democratic state-form; whence our modern world of representative democracy with its peculiar, and apparently quite elastic, concept of equality. Is this more of a belief than its mathematical cousin? And if so, what is fused within it and how fused? Are we dealing here with some original Leibnizean synthesis, prior to all possible and subsequent analysis? Or is it the case that the original synthesis is neither as original nor as necessary as we suppose? And again, it is in just this more worldly sense of the problems of democracy and political equality, where we note that a shift in property relations seems to be foundational. Indeed, something at the origins of our own world seems to remind us now of something that might have taken place in some other way long ago in the world of the Greeks. But we cannot assume a simple pattern of doubling. So, for instance, we come upon the expanded and dynamically ever expanding system of private property to go along with the new system of representational currency and the world of commodity exchange, all as more recently
11

This is the position of theoretical knowledge or Erkenntnis in the mode of a Kantian presentation of structures of possible experiential knowledge, as found out and presented in Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/95. Here theory opens up on practical knowledge, but only in such way that the division between the two orders is shown to follow from a more consolidated fundamental framework; one which divided in such manner as to yield the theoretical framework of reflection in the first place. In an important sense, this makes Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre the first true metatheory of modernity. Even Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft is too much dedicated to its own theoretical position relative to possible experience to count as such an explicit metatheoretical work. Kants First Critique conceals its own movement, rather than making this into the topic of a new kind of knowledge. This is why so much begins again with Fichte as the bridge between Kant and Hegel. -34-

potentialized and driven by ever more advanced financial instruments. Here we have currency that only represents a value and a new world of appearances which are substantial in their own right as constituting a system of reality for thinking. If, indeed, once upon a time, simple tools were magically invested, what is now to be said about complex financial instruments? And what conclusions do we draw as we look back on the older orders of transformation? But, again, as is obvious, there is much too much here, at both ends of an historical process; and so let me return to the problem of the metaphorical transference at the heart of property relations in order to begin again in a more measured manner. There may, in fact, be no real, whence realizable, metaphor here at all, merely the place for one occupied by an act of realization of some other kind. Still, two different orders seem to be involved, however they are related.

Property, then, becomes private by association with the individual, but only that individual determined as operating within a certain system of conventions embedded in and defining a given institutional world. No doubt, ones shoes are ones shoes in any system of property, even if only ones sandals or moccasins. Indeed, in older systems they were probably even more ones own, since so much was fitted to the person in the very making. Contiguity, fitted to fields of the immediate in use and so related again to the logic and meaning of touch as foundational for the entire order of sense experience, is everywhere in such older orders of existence. But once such things as shoes become radical commodities, property relations shift in important ways along with the institutions defining ownership in relation to use. But here the problem for ordinary patterns of awareness is that of the continued force of the older patterns of association within a new system developed or designed for very different purposes and governing very different kinds of entities: so, for instance, various real abstractions as financial instruments and a world of real-estate instead of goods or wares and land as place or home. In the first movements towards such a context we would presumably also run into the generation or recognition of the formal concept of equaltiy, to go along with the new systems of counting and accounting, piled now on top of the older systems of recognition having to do with the like and unlike and reaching perhaps as far as symmetry older structures which are still recalled by Plato, though in an inverted format, and used in relation to the new more formal ideas of sameness as the equal, isos, pertaining to linesegments and triangles. So, again, to go with kith and kin, we would have that older order where we would find similarity in the appearance of sticks of a certain length, rather than merely an adumbration of formal equality and a world of geometrical relations. But it is very unclear as to whether this total system of developments results from the invasion and transformation of the older notions by the newer, thus a kind of historical and cultural dialectical negation and sublimation, or whether the two different fields of recognition, for instance, the different fields of property relations or the different orders of equality, simply coexist, allowing for a considerable confusion to arise in the mind, and, more broadly, in the culture itself, at given moments. In the ancient world this would also seem to have to do with the original force of rhetoric and certain kinds of wordplay. For shifts take place across lines of equivocity in meaning; and, as is still the case today, commanding the slides here, especially in an emotional register, counts for very much in courtroom argument and other sophistical modes of political -35-

presentation. Again, however, one has to have a courtroom or an assembly, and so some place and framework to empower this new rhetoric and establish its authority in a culture at large. Otherwise, it may be restricted to some councillor form, where it might well develop quite differently in a different environment; so, for instance, like politik behavior at court in the 16th century, or mere cunning behavior in tribal council or some other mode of pressing discourse as in contemporary corporate boardrooms. But to return to the more formal field and the peculiar lines of development that such invests and makes practicable, we might ask whether we are here promoting certain patterns of immediate fusion and a particular form of mystification in or as an order of immediate switching: a kind of extreme transference in the mode of what Fichte once referred to as a fundamental Wechselbestimmung at the heart of all ego constitution, so in the very field for the development of self-consciousness and reflective patterns of reasoning. And this has also something to do with the new schaffende Einbildungskraft, or creative imagination of modernity, as opposed to the older reproductive and mimetic imagination of antiquity. Imagine, then, if one could load the seams of such a switching function, so as to produce a certain kind of fusion on demand! Here a kind of advanced, but still foundational rhetoric of knowledge in the mode of image production and all that goes along with this in a new human universe dedicated to projection in the mode of scientific-technological development and whatever might conceal itself by means of this edifying phrase. But then one must first identify just those seams. And this very process of identification by way of recognition may well have something to do with property and the way it became private; became private twice over in the long run of something now called Western History. Here one could presumably study the actual transformation of such a system of property. It is just that it would always be difficult to get the required information. For instance, as noted earlier, the Greek world shifts away from a system of tribal and clan property towards a new system of private property, tied to a new order of more independent privatized patriarchal families and a new world of semi-privatized male citizens. The shift will never be complete by either modern or contemporary standards, but still it is related to what creates a new world.12
12

Here, it should be noted that certain changes in property relations do not become the free-standing grounds for something like democracy. Rather, in ancient Athens, which is really the only early democracy of note that we have any detailed knowledge of as regards such crucial factors, much of the movement to the classical democracy actually involves the drive to restrict just such changes. The Athenians, perhaps as early as Solon, but certainly by the time of Kleisthenes, restrict the ability of citizens to alienate certain kinds of older gens-oriented property, such as land. Rights to certain offices and activities also go with this at first. For instance, the order of metal-workers and skilled stone-masons have a kind of hereditary basis that also involves property and place. This creates another problem having to do with ever increasing numbers of people outside of the older tribal system of deme designations. And no one is really very sure how the so-called private family evolves in the midst of all of this, or to what extent it ever actually does evolve. -36-

This change seems to be taking place around the time of Solon, so at the beginning of the 6th century BC. But it is terribly unclear from surviving material what was there at the time, as well as what was there earlier and even later. How exactly were the Ionic and Aeolic Greeks organized after the fall of the Mycenaean world of Kings and Queens, Princes and Royal Clans? Indeed, are the Aeolic and Ionic Greeks the same peoples as the Achaeans of Homeric fame? Are even the Achaeans the Achaeans of Homeric fame? The older system, to be sure, had something more to do with a distributive economics operating within a caste differentiated population, than with a radical system of exchange fitted out more properly for the class differentiated democracy. Here we also have the more tribal nemein or distribution, which contains still the geras or appropriated greater or elders share of the king or tribal and clan leader, rather than the later and more generally contested isonomia or equal distribution of the political world. From what we can tell from ruins as well as tales, this older order was at least partially palace-central. There were strong matrilineal clan structures still at least partially in place along with some kind of caste differentiation that divided the world into the palace and the villages. Indeed, the matrilineal transformations and the conflict with the new or as some believe, a resurgent patrilineal system seem recorded everywhere in the intermediary world of Greek mythology and the tales of certain prominent houses, royal clans and dynastic lines. It is, however, always unclear what the mythology pertains to; for here we have an endless array of bastard children and disputed claims of lineage relative to some seat of authority. But this is likely to be an amalgam of the earlier order with what follows upon it. Moreover, in the older palace-central system there are almost certainly no free merchants, just state or clan sponsored raiding and trading missions. Or if there are such merchant forces, they are coming from somewhere else on the edge of things, as still projected along peculiar lines of tribal association, as with mining and the movement of certain metals along extensive lines of trade or transport. In effect, however, such a Mycenaean system is not even as internally mediated by way of exchange as the later mediaeval feudal system of Europe. It is equally not as tribal as even the later world of Vikings. But it probably still bears a resemblance to some version of the tribal world out of which it arose; so also some resemblance still to just such a mediaeval world of Viking raiders and princes, with their own kind of trading empire. But Post-Roman is not PrePersian, even when one is dealing with liminal cultures and their development. So, again, how exactly did the Greeks hold and divide property in the 8th and 7th centuries BC; to say nothing of the 14th century BC, and so long before they had become our Greeks or even their own somewhat more unified Hellenic civilization? Here one can read George Thomsons work on the primitive Aegean civilization: Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean.13 But even this will leave one wondering what to do with Aristotles statement from Chapter 2 of the Constitution of Athens, that debts were secured on the person or body of the debtor in the earlier period of Attic history and especially that period immediately prior to Solon. Were the Greeks still living in a tribal variant of some feudal system when Solon abolished the mortgage
13

This work was first published in 1949 in Great Britain, published again in 1954 with minor revision, and then finally in 1961 by Citadel Press in New York. It is arguably the best single text on the early Greek world ever written. But it was heavily suppressed, especially in the United States, and especially within classics departments, because of its Marxist orientation. -37-

debts by removing the mortgage stones from the fields of the populous in 590 BC? Or had they already somehow miraculously shifted to some new money-form of private property, so a world of virtually modern mortgages? And here it should always be recalled that Solon was an Aristocrat turned merchant, also credited with introducing a more properly Athenian form of coinage and thereby associated with a kind of revaluation and shift from the Aeginetan to the Euboeic standard; thus moving away from a powerful competing merchant state, by means of a standard relating to another once powerful order of some kind, but one that had already been largely reduced and rendered harmless in its own right. Indeed, once upon a time only a hundred or so years before Solons reforms something like the Trojan War was supposed to have occurred by way of the battle for Euboea, or the quasi-mythical fight for the control of the horse-breeding plain of the same, the Lelantine War, where we hear about a strange prohibition as to the use of arrows and other missiles: So a war where the rules for the combatants force them to face-off like up-dated Homeric Heroes. Again, however, how far removed from this quasi-mythical world is Solons Athens? And how understand the property rights and laws of such a world? One might then do somewhat better studying the various forms of feudal property in what became England and France in the run from 800 to 1600. But precisely when and where land holding in particular became a matter of fully alienable private property might still be rather elusive. There were even Dutch quasi-feudal holdings, transferred to the English system, in New Amsterdam or New Holland and later in New York in the 17th and 18th centuries. And these are the two most radical countries involved in the modern development of private property, the corporations and the modern commercial system as a whole. So, again, when and where exactly did property become private in modernity? Before the English Revolution of the 1640's, the monarch could still attach property and give it out in various ways, just as there were still massive landed feudal estates existing beside the new order of landed gentry. Again, as just mentioned, even after this we see that New York was a kind of fiefdom belonging to the Duke of York, later the King, as leading up to the second or Glorious Revolution, the one that gave the term its modern meaning, even if by way of the least violent of the order of events here signified. But, then, perhaps this is precisely where the real takeover took place. John Locke came back to England, with his theory of property relations and political rights, along with William of Orange. Still, even now the state can claim property. It is just that it is today fully subservient to the order of corporations and the corporately protected new rich, rather than some world of warring dukes and earls and some king. So, is private property a myth or a metaphor? And if such, is it subject to a linguistic analysis in the mode, for instance, of Barthes early essays on second order signification systems as Mythologies?14 In any event it has a power that now exceeds the various state and governmental forms framed in relation to it. And at least part of that power seems to be derived from the claim it makes on just these older orders and devices of myth and metaphor. But this is hardly the whole of the basis for its power.
14

See, Roland Barthes, Mythologies, originally 1957, selections tr. A. Lavers, 1972 (Hill and Wand, New York); especially the essay on Myth Today and the section on myth as a semiological system. -38-

Everything here is subject to convention. But the kinds of conventions in play are all institutionally developed and housed.15 It is this institutional element, so the complex ethical housing which supports systems of the old Aristotelian affective habituation, that makes so much contemporary analysis into meaningless abstract game playing. But there is now also the problem that the very forms of analysis are themselves ingrained within and controlled by some aspect of the dominant system. One need only ask into the apparent purposes of a social and governmental order which permits certain patterns of knowledge to be promulgated within its educational field while prohibiting others. And the patterns of prohibition and promotion are anything but simple, since these bear on the way in which thinking is itself always subject to institutional control, even when in apparent opposition to such control. Moreover, who or what is in charge of just such purposes and all manner of attendant institutional policies is also something which is not likely to become an essential inquiry as a required part of the permitted and fostered system of higher education. In other words, rather than being integrated into the foundational modes of analysis and critique, logical and sociological, such work will be left as a matter for some subsequent, more isolated treatment, and thereby more or less disposed of by being referred to an increasingly market-driven and so controlled universe of presses and publication.16 The fact that there is no real edge in contemporary capitalist society, rather only being over the edge, complicates matters yet further. Is there a world to be had in free-fall? And if so, is it more than just this kind of brief aside? Can one organize a critical discourse from such a non-place, such a utopian field and perspective? But pushing this aside and it is certainly an important question left standing as this also relates to the new world of computers and internet communication and the war presently taking place for the full corporate control of such there remains the necessary inquiry into the substructures of such a system of institutional power. And, again, it is the manner of and means

Here we encounter what was made compelling again in a more contemporary setting by Foucault with his various works on shifting epistemes and orders of conventio. In particular the work on the massive shift from the late mediaeval and Renaissance world into and through the relatively brief Enlightenment age of representation comes to mind: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Pantheon, 1971); Le Mots et les choses (Gallimard, 1966). The full analysis here would have to take into account the simultaneous reduction of traditional publishing houses and the well-funded rapid growth of right-wing institutes for the production of policy papers and political action groups. This would then go with the more traditional control exercised through funding on the older humanities-oriented colleges and universities, as well as the growth of community colleges. Education at every level has been seized by the corporate world and rendered harmless by being rendered inadequate to any largescale critical project at the level of the culture as a whole. Fragmentary discourse can hardly challenge organized corporate power; all the more reason for the pressure now being exerted to control any means of unifying such fragments in the world of internet communication. -3916

15

to the hold on ordinary consciousness which makes out the problem of greatest importance. That it is institutionally housed and developed is now rather obvious. That it is legally and economically supported and enforced is equally obvious. But, still, how does it get to and then function within the more delimited subjective psychological space, that space which has itself been discovered and advanced within the confines of the development of the self-same socioeconomic system to full power in the course of the last century? Here I also differentiate between the classically developed modern subject and the more contemporary psychologized version of such, but only in such a way that one must move back and forth constantly between the two to deal with the contemporary person and what is now a subject in any sense at all. Or if one prefers the historical version: There was once an Enlightenment subject, with a neoPlatonic soul of decidedly Christian cast or hue; but this was beset and displaced in the second part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century by the psychological subject, pertaining more to the full-order rise of capitalism with its advanced patterns of alienation. And here, again, in the institutional order as well as the subjective or psychological, we have to deal with one system overtaking and displacing another. What is the order of fusion and/or confusion? The institutional housing here is then easy enough to describe, but, again, becomes no less powerful for being so exposed.17 And it is this latter finding that points at the problem of
17

I have given various expositions of this. The following presentation is perhaps the briefest; and here I edit it to make it yet briefer. It comes from the piece noted earlier in relation to Plato and the Divide-Line, Two Essays on Division, from the second essay, On the Line : And now the question becomes one of understanding precisely how two systems of mediation and division [language and money] operate when they are placed, as it were, next to one another....Of course, language and money do not come together without people and institutional settings. But whereas we are used to thinking of the interface between language and such institutions as the family, the state, religion, etc., we are not used to thinking all of this as doubled both objectively and subjectively by money and the money system of contemporary global capitalism. Further, there is yet a third order here in the mode of a kind of synthesis of the two older systems of mediation. This third order is the new techno-form of language, information. I suggest, however, that information , by virtue of the framework within which it occurs, both the technological and the institutional, is best understood as money-form language. For there is something about the reductive and repetitive framework of commodity exchange that shows up here; and something which, as such, points to the interior of the sequencing procedures, whereby we seem to encounter that which is, again, a reduced use of number number reduced to the form of principles of division and mere sequence. .... Now the problem here is that human beings have an interior psyche that is, as it were, constructed in such manner that it can be penetrated and altered at core by loading the functional seams of the -40-

understructures for meaning. What is more, these connectors or patterns of mediation in the mind, are not simply given. Humans are only very partially hard-wired at the level of the understructures of consciousness and mental activity. And even much of this is likely to be mutable over the course of time, as with its initial development in childhood or its extensive decay in old-age. But between infancy and decrepitude, there is a vast field of development and finetuning, all of which takes place within institutional contexts. Moreover, these contexts are themselves countable as different media: so, to return to the imagery of the divided line, we are, as it were, always moving between media. Difference and the meaning of difference is/are largely constituted here in and by means of an habituation process which involves learning to move both in various institutional contexts and back and forth between them. So the state is both internally complex and, as a whole, is different from, even if analogically similar at points, to the gens and the family; the military different from the political functions of the state but similar to its hierarchical patterns of office and authority; the religious configuration different from and similar to all of this; the economic order different and similar again, etc. And accordingly, it is not surprising to find that patterns of reasoning are born along with changes in patterns of organization in given societies; and, further, that remarkable differences, such as the advent of the patterns of reasoning that ground the sciences, the modern economy, the modern state, and various patterns and kinds of religion, flow from historical moments when and where older systems are doubled by new ones.... To get to us today, one must add the extensive redevelopment and redeployment of the moneysystem, the extraordinary development of commerce and financial institutions; and the penetration of the singular form of money itself to the center of every institution and its presence as connecting externally as well as internally every field of possible and every actual institution, both domestically and internationally. It is here that one sees the problem: money and its techno-form of language, information, saturate and encase the human being from birth to death, by means of saturating and encasing the institutional context itself and as a whole. To put it then bluntly, the business format of existence, which entails precisely this reduction to and constant work with the money-form commodity transfer of all things money itself becoming just another commodity, labor as commodity, real property as commodity, all saturated and measured by the reduced conventional and highly formal structure of money offers no resistence to a unified pattern of consciousness produced in such institutional uniformity and duplicated, yet again, linguistically in the order of information ... There is, of course, much more to this story. The introduction and development of the corporation, something with Roman roots and mediaeval Catholic understructuring (the Greeks have only partnerships), as an organizing principle beyond either family or state, and the obvious redevelopment of this pattern of economic organization built up alongside of the rise of the self-same money -41-

the interior workings of the old field of consciousness and the various orders of interest controlled by belief. But, again, these two terms, interest and belief, make out a good deal of the problem; just as the relative problem of the first, being hidden somehow within the framework of the second, also points up something of note. Interest, after all, seems to be rather indefinite and harmless, by comparison with belief and the related order of faith. However, if I move over and say private interest and interest bearing accounts, matters suddenly become denser and more apparently important, both before and after the word-play that pertains in English. Still, philosophically speaking so trying to keep up with the old ideological footing for modern analysis in relation to the Schools Humes use of belief as the product of something like the Aristotelian ethiz, as becoming accustomed, and his attempt to put this under the entire edifice of cause-and-effect reasoning, thereby pulling much of the total project of modern knowledge into the field of the practical, seems to open up on much more than even the Kantian theory of Appearances. But what does one do, even in thinking, with this practical opening? Of course, one might at least note that underneath custom and becoming accustomed in Humes analysis there was always another order of self-interested behavior at the level of general instinct.18 Still, we need to look to the interplay between fields to take the measure of the problem in the proper context. And here some material from the first world of appearances seems in order, by way now of complicating our understanding of the second, especially as this pertains to theory and the advent of critical reasoning of the Enlightenment sort.

system and the financial institutes, themselves become largely, if not entirely corporate, and together with this, the now virtually seamless movement between the corporations and the state, all of this provides for and so constitutes the political as well as the socio-economic dimension of the new system of uniform power: not power in the form of a single institution, as with the old-fashioned empires of the Pharaonic or Persian variety, but power in the mode of uniform system. Linguistically, one would say, a single variegated code: the code of profitability and capital expansion, into which is now grafted the older orders of organization and hierarchical frameworks of power, disposal of labor and general abuse of one part of the populace by another. It is the money-form itself, as given power by means of this institutional configuration, that destroys difference. In formal terms, difference is destroyed by being reduced to the principle of difference itself, reductive equivocal double negation the dream world of the thinkers in which content is form and then reproduced as an organizing principle that invades every aspect of institutional existence, all of which aspects must be used to build reasoning and consciousness through patterns of habituation. ... &Tis interest that gives the general instinct; but &tis custom that gives the particular direction. A Treatise of Human Nature, BK III, Part II, section X. -4218

Belief as pistis or trust is the affective force insinuated by way of a significant transference and thereby used by Plato in his image of the Divided Line to connect the field of principled knowledge and geometrical demonstration, so the field of dianoia or understanding, with an order of things both thought about and perceived or seen. This is a complex point even just in terms of the image as presented. There we have a system of middlevoiced affects or pathmata en ti psychi, affections in the soul, matched to an order of various kinds of knowables and sensibles pertaining to possible fields of experience and knowledge, all as set in a geometrically configured relation to one another. Pistis properly goes with the ordinary field of perception and the more ordinary things of the perceptual field as dominated here by the principal metaphor of vision and sight. But because of the geometrical structure of the Line-Image and the order of ratio there presented, the section having to do with principled knowledge, which has its own affective state as dianoia or understanding, actually equals in length, so clarity and force, the section immediately contiguous with it at the level of ordinary experience, which is thereby presumably governed in some way by it and so by its more properly knowable principles. But conversely, the ordinary world of knowledge, even as a more extraordinary world of geometrical knowledge, seems to share in the peculiar order of certainty that substructures all of our ordinary consciousness of the world. The image of the Line is still something as seen, and, as it were, trusted virtually instinctively as seen. This transference is behind what is often referred to as the natural attitude. In Plato, of course, it is difficult to say what precisely is lending certainty to what in this complicated order of trust and belief, since the entire sense world would presumable decompose into the radical flux presented in Theaetetus, without its inherent involvement with rational structure at the level of forms, thereby, its participation in formal reality. But the basic point here is not so much concerned with which order of certainty is the more certain a question which one is today always settling too fast, especially with regard to Plato, since the two orders are equally certain and uncertain according to the image itself, and there is a considerable flaw in believing in geometry as if some fully adequate order and the measure of truth for Platonic theory in its extension to all objects of thought rather it has to do with the fact that these orders seem to share a sense of certainty with respect to appropriate things. In perception one is sure that one is seeing a tree while one is looking at it. In geometry one is made sure of some principle or finding, precisely in that it can be, and in a certain sense as still with Kant, must be demonstrated. One sees the truth established before ones eyes, even if it is then claimed to be a matter of seeing everything in some other order of thinking beyond any mere schematized exemplar. What is more, one understands in the same way that one perceives which is to say that in both cases one is only directly aware of the content-laden field or product of the activities in question. One sees things, not seeing itself, just as one understands things, not understanding itself.19 And very much has been made of this peculiar overlapping order of
19

To continue in the train of the image from Republic, which is itself in the mode of understanding as well as that of a kind of sensible image, one might well say that at the extremes of the image, where we deal with reasoning most proper and imagination or image production, this kind of unity is not present in the same way. Indeed, one might very well reason about understanding by way of its objects, just as one might be said to imagine and dream by -43-

certainty, often with rather surprising results: Descartes, for instance, once he starts doubting and rejecting perceived things, cannot stop. The doubts continue to proliferate right into the principled world of geometry and mathematics. One might even say that it does not stop until he arrives at a rather questionable version of the identity principle, something which, as already noted, was already in question, from the first, in the older metaphysical tradition of the Greeks, under the name of the meaning of being as the one. Indeed, there is an extraordinary field of confusion in argument that takes shape on and around the principal line of division in the great geometrical image of understanding from Republic. For this is a schematic presentation of the line of contact/division linking and dividing sense and reason. Again, however, because of the duplication process in the order of subordinate divisions on both sides of the major division, the two adjoining middle segments are equal; and in fact must even appear so, if the image is correctly constructed. And it is always that equality that must be explained, rather than ignored or explained away by the convenient assertion of the priority of thinking to experience. And much of this convenience disappears as soon as it is realized that the Line-Image itself can be taken at base from more ordinary modes of sense experience, rather than merely treated as some pure geometrical construction, drawn in the sand or on paper, and so having or demanding only this quasi formal or abstract mode of presentation for demonstration. One must only push a stick into a still-standing pool of water to some approximate point of equal division to see the distortion in length appear in the refraction pattern. The second system of divisions in the same ratio as the major division, now as a second order system of division established in relation to the

utilizing the things of sense perception. That the things of reason as nosis are also called ideas would seem to complicate this presentation; but only in that here something hidden in the field of the intelligible objects of understanding as these pertain as well to the sensible things is brought forward: this thing or element, to cite Kant as well as Plato, has to do with purpose or end. However, as regards the principled world of understanding itself, there is something else here as regards the presentation of equality. For it is only by way of just such a geometrical construction that we encounter the idea of equality rather than merely its semblance. The idea is presented now on the basis of the construction. The two middle segments should not only look equal, they must now also mean equality and be equal.. For no matter what the initial division, as long as the subsequent divisions are said to be made in the same ratio, we end up with an equation as regards the central segments: again, the equation is the geometrical form of equality itself, and not just a picture of it. This kind of form is the logon of the analogon. But we do still meet with this on the basis of the presentation in words as referring to the image as sketched. It is then this kind of peculiar pattern of demonstration that Kant still refers to as subject to the forms of sensibility as such and necessarily instrumental for all geometrical knowledge. For we could not proceed in this discovery of equality itself were we not to begin by drawing or thinking as drawn a divided line, upon which to operate by way of subsequent division. In the Platonic version we then add one other interesting fact. We move towards equality by laying down an unequal division that is then replicated in a proportionally equal manner. We say, the same proportion. And by way of operating on the basis of a presumed sameness, we construct the equal. And this refers us to the logic of appearances and the entire framework of the problem of justice and injustice from BK II (see note 20). -44-

appearance of different lengths owing to the refraction so now an original difference as pertaining to what is admittedly a distortion is only a necessary addition for the sake of the geometrical demonstration as a kind of return to the assumed truth, not of the appearance but of something else hidden in the appearance, namely, an initially projected but now absolutely equal division at the center, something now also preserved for the interior segments relative to any format of initial division . The fact that this further set of divisions is also used to divide-up the powers of the soul might be interesting but is not necessitated by the optical field of the image in its own right, unless we wish to extend the analysis by way of noting the differences between shadows and reflections on the one hand and refraction patterns on the other. Indeed, the fundamental problem is what permits all of this to hold together and function in two orders at once; this being the problem of the relation of thinking to the world in the sciences to this day. And in this all that becomes apparent is that we can use a perceived distortion to advance to a different kind of knowledge of truth relating to the distortion. However, if we are unable to divide the stick equally to start with, even though the demonstration will hold if the same ratio of any initial division is used in subordinate divisions, we will be uncertain as to what truth we have returned to by way of the total field of the demonstration. If all we know is appearances if, as it were, we never see, so know, the stick out of the water, but only as apparently unequally divided by the water, thus beginning as does the Line-Image itself with this unequal division as a given then we are lost as regards this interior logic of equality, until we discover this strange truth controlling the order of the distortion itself.20 Moreover, and in the
20

This is a position which bears on the total framework of the presentation in the context of the argument in Republic and its own principal object, the idea of Justice. Justice, in Platonic philosophy as in Greek democracy, implies always an understanding of equality. The problem is complicated by way of appearances. In Bk. II we have the famous presentation of inversion and reversal by negation : seeming just but being unjust :: being just but seeming unjust. Here the language is actually that of doing justice and injustice and being reputed to do such. The image of the Divided Line underwrites the problem at the level of equality, again, divided by the problem with appearance, though of an ontic order rather than the conventional and linguistic order of doxa. If we assume an actually equally divided stick thrust into the water to the point of division, then we end up with a replacement of terms: seeming unequal but being equal. The other aspect of the argument, seeming equal but being unequal belongs to the one who would know how to command the logic of the distortion inserting the stick to that point of division where the refraction pattern would produce the appearance of equality above and below the surface of the water; or to return to the framework of appearances and the problem of justice, this would count for the logic of the consummate rhetorician in the political arena. This reading of the Line-Image from Republic will also allow one to understand its importance for Aristotles discussions of proportional equality and justice, again with reference to systems of division, in Bk. V of the Nicomachean Ethics. There is also an aspect of the attendant resolution of a fourpart analogy into a three-part continuous syllogism with a complex split-center, as this bears especially on later patterns of dialectical theory. And, as stated immediately above in the text, this pattern of reduction, central to the Line-Image, pertains to an important reduction in Kantian philosophy, by which understanding and perception collapse inward upon one another, where we -45-

same context, immediately prior to Hegel in the history of modern philosophy, and famously following Humes lead here, Kant picked up this Platonic structure and carried it a bit further by giving a modern, subjectively housed version of the curiously hidden equality at the center of the Platonic image of the Line, in that he asserted, by way of the aesthetic and categorial framework presented in the First Critique, that we actually are warranted in our beliefs concerning the world of experience as regards the appropriateness of our physical knowledge of such, at least as appearances and we have no direct access to anything else here by way of the order of perception for Kant because we put the structures, which eventuate in the principles used in physics and various other systems of knowledge, in play from the first in the very construction, not merely of the particular appearances as such, but rather of the possibility of any such appearances as experiential in any manner at all, so even as regards such things as the very form of their particularity as appearances. This amounts, again, to a kind of collapse of the world of perception and the field of understanding, now by the agency of the new order of temporalized imagination, all in the service of a partially hidden movement to the higher realm of ideas and reason; where we again, in Platonic manner, introduce a moral component by way of this movement to ideas. Again, the four-fold division becomes a three-fold division by way of a split center having to do with the interface of perception and understanding. But the very same terms are in play in both versions, Platonic and Kantian: on the side of powers, imagination, perception, understanding and pure reason, the last with its added moral component. The actual appearances, as real and for actually existing human beings, remain somewhat mysterious, as those physiologically conditioned things seen or otherwise felt, owing to other elements in play, both from the side of the things and as regards the structures of our own bodily existence as physical rather than purely intellectual or spiritual beings. But still, at the so-called transcendental level, governing all reflective awareness as well as all general awareness, including our apparent awareness and knowledge of all physiological conditions of and for bodily perception the point which differentiates Kant from any more ordinary empirical version of his theory still today we are warranted in having trust in the relation between this entire physical world and our scientifically enhanced experiential knowledge of it. In this, interestingly, we again seem to have reversed the implied direction of Humes more ordinary pattern of inference and its development within both the Treatise and the Enquiry. With Kant, we do not move from experience to knowledge in founding such a notion of trust, even by way of intermediary impressions, but rather from a field having more to do with the inner workings of knowledge itself back to an understanding of experience. It is not without reason that there is a difference between Idealism and Empiricism in this regard. The locos and causal ground of our trust shifts: In Kant it is given through us to the world as appearance, rather than the world giving it to us by means of its own order of appearance. So, with Kant, we trust the world because it is our world, our possession, following or organized in accordance with our conventions. Even if we are just passing through, as it were, we still constitute it as our own

again encounter the split centerin question here. In all cases, however, it bears on the problem of equality and its suppression or necessary distortion. One must always deal with that necessity, precisely as the necessity of a distortion, whether in thought, nature, or political affairs. -46-

in much the same way that we, by way of our institutions, constitute the field of private property. But actually all of this is subject to a different kind of co-lateral relation, as mentioned earlier with respect to the Greek middle voice, thereby having much to do as well with the original Platonic version of this idealism, so also the actual locus of the source of all trust, both in things as seen and principles as known. There is an object field here which seems to divide to give us various versions of the famous problem of Subject and Object. It is only that we come at all of this by means of systems of knowledge profoundly effected by developments in our order of affects. And it is here that the other term comes into play, the innocuous term, interest. What kind of affect is interest? Is it, perhaps, the affective mode of understanding itself? But it is a long road that must be taken here to bring this forward in a meaningful manner; a manner, for instance, which can somehow stand in as standing finally between having and seeing in a manner that might presage more than merely a social critique of epistemology and the sciences. Next, one notes that perceptual faith runs under the assumption that perception itself, as an activity of sorts, disappears into the appearances. Again, as stated earlier, we see something, we do not see that we are seeing something. Understanding does an even better job of disappearing from view as it operates. So whereas understanding can comment on perception as sight, it has a harder time commenting upon itself as a mode of thought set opposite its own peculiar subject matter; this being more a matter of reasoning about understanding in relation to its own proper objects; something which also gives some added content to the Platonic extension of the image to the field of nosis. Thus understanding operates as an even more immediate form of perception. Its objects are inherent to it as an activity of thinking. Its objects are it, minus only the so-called activity of a doubling of recognition as cognition. And this, too, is marked by something odd in the Platonic Image of Understanding, the Divided Line. The metaphorical content of the image as image belongs only to the bottommost segment of the Line. Indeed, as soon as one hits the perceptual field of ordinary vision, the division between things seen and seeing begins to collapse. In my understanding, as a result of the middle-voice formation of perception, but on other grounds as well. Objective reference to a world of things, beyond the eyes but still in some mode of contact with them, is all that remains. And by the time we get to understanding more proper, it is virtually impossible to establish the difference in the status of the activity and its contents, without importing a view taken from the more ordinary field of perception, something that tends to stabilize the Platonic view that the soul or mind belongs with its own objects in another universe of sorts. One can talk about dreams, as if something in the field of ordinary vision is being altered and distorted, but one cannot talk so easily about any given instance of sight as a distortion of the things as actually seen in that instance. In fact, it is right here that one would likely import the discussion of reflections re-presentations or dreams to make a point about some total order of partial deception, i.e. appearances. So also in the field of understanding itself, what precisely could be wrong with a geometrical demonstration as such, that is, as correctly presented? And if incorrectly presented, this becomes precisely what is presented and thereby made apparent in the demonstration. But even more important: Where precisely are the objects of understanding, if not somehow with the activity itself? So it is that understanding or dianoia is only called into question by reasonor nosis -47-

as an inverted version of eikasia or imagination, while its actual relation to the things of perception is left unspecified, save by saying or assuming that the principles inhabit and make possible the things as well as their bodily perception through sensation. But in the tradition, pure knowing is intuitive; as if to say, seen clearly in a waking dream of sorts, because it is never a matter of ordinary experience as given. As with Descartes and so many others, a position or point is often actually said to be understood first and so is said to become clear in a dream. And in antiquity dreams are a link with the divine order, precisely because they pass beyond the ordinary field of visual experience by way of some form of significant play with the latter, most often involving some kind of distortion of the ordinary framework of vision. And this is a point that is rarely considered in the assessment of the Platonic Image of Understanding, save by comparison with Kants transcendental system. For deception itself becomes a road to a higher truth, when the deception in question is based in part upon something else which is taken in its own right to be in part deceptive. For Kant, ideas correct understanding, as well as producing errors in its own terms; terms which are, however, admittedly a partial falsification of something else to which the ideas point, as if indexing a higher order truth. And so for Plato one also suspects that dreams, images and reflections tell us something about another order of distortion governing the relation between understanding and the things understood by means of its principles in the ordinary order of perception. Geometry itself introduces an order of illusion with respect to knowledge, even while explaining other kinds of perceptual illusions. But what could this possibly have to do with property relations and the order of having? How can one get at such a problem? What is it that one is getting at? Does the interest expressed by knowing, as in theoretical physics or some other system of understanding, erase the self of self-interested modes of having or does it give to this self its full scope and power, precisely in the mode and manner of the erasure or effacement? And is there some other mode of interest possible, something that implies some other aesthetic framework or conceptual form, and, accordingly, something to play against the now developed field of formalized property relations? But now, in order to get at any of this with the required precision, we must continue to unpack the complex relation to orders of trust and faith, separating and linking different worlds, ancient and modern, and different systems of interest pertaining to knowledge and understanding. In the first place, then, there are a number of important differences between the Platonic concept of belief as trust and Humes notion of belief crafted in the wake of the Christian order of faith as fused with the general field of habituation; and this despite Humes apparent dislike of religion and especially of scholastic patterns of reasoning. Platonic belief is not Christian faith, and this principally on the issue of time and the kind of certainty of belief. Platos world is controlled by an expansive present-tense order of time that has a very strong relation to the past, so the various past tenses, and a past-tense hold on even futural projections as well. Indeed, as in our own simplified verbal systems, play with the uncertainty of futural projection is often carried by use of past-tense forms to shift moods. In Greek this often has to do with shifts between primary and secondary endings for verbs and various alterations in the stems. However, while we still use the subjunctive for uncertainty, the Greeks used both a fully inflected optative -48-

and the subjunctive for different kinds of uncertainty relating to different orders of temporal displacement. Christian faith is decisively counterfactual, but it has no real or permissible world of conjecture attached to it. The more original conjectural aspect simply collapses into a peculiar kind of literal meaning. Christianity, like modern logic, has then no place for the conjectural aspects of the conditional field, unless, of course, one speaks of suppression and its various effects; while it is difficult to ascertain the nature of a logical suppression, unless we mean somehow a suppression of reality itself by way of some formal order, pertaining only to thinking and a restricted order of things thought. Still, in formal logic we do not deal properly with even our own subjunctive or with reported speech. And beyond this there is the linguistic wish of Christianity, which is such as to turn reported speech into fact and analogy into reality: Here, this is like the truth becomes this is the truth. One slides from fable and parable form toward expository literal form and judgement in the mode of assertion. Even here, however, one can still sense the movement towards the collapse when a quasi-optative is used: this may or should well be the truth. And here all manner of transference takes place across the space occupied by that curiously divided subject, already alluded to. It is then a seemingly short step to a new order of assertion and a new subject in which the I begins to function in new ways, as with, I am the truth. Indeed, here one can feel the increase in affective power, the rhetorical surge in affect, as an aspect of difference, framed in the conditional moods as playing across the evacuated space of the old middle-voice configuration of reciprocity and relation, suddenly collapses upon itself so as to establish a new immediate order of contact. And while, with all of this, we do get a new rhetoric of power in the mode of subjectivity, we also get one in which the entire discourse of seeming transits to become an order of assertion. Indeed, we always end up in revelation. And, again, all of this assertion now stands in the way of the conditional structures of the Platonic world of reasoning, just as it forces a temporal displacement in the field of a trust in either perception or the reasoning about it. But one should not really say that this displacement is purely futural. It is rather something out of which we have developed a more contemporary pattern of projection as real, assertion as a given, truth as a maxim or even a mere slogan, rather than a problem. But the problem remains, even for the Enlightenment framework of Hume. There, the constitution of a fundamental inference comes to depend upon a past, but only with respect to a projected future. Thus the complex attenuated present of Platonic philosophy, like the ancient field of the continuous past verging on the present tense in its various moods, has been split and divided against itself in a new manner.21 If, in Humes universe of
21

The most important subsequent instance of this may well be the use of n, the continuous third-person past of the verb to be, conjoined with the indefinite form or infinitive of the verb to be, einai, in the expression which is generally translated as essence, to ti n einai, as in the categorial or central books of the Metaphysics: that which it was and remains to be; especially in VII, 3, where it is played off in relation to the problems of the hypokeimenon or substratum, and associated with the field of form, eidos as both morph and idea. Again, we also feel something of the effects of the commodity-form money economy here. Now the thing or being is that which remains in place as it was before it was converted into a mere or sheer commodity and so a money value. Again, this is relatable to what has already been mentioned about substance as substratum. The being or thing is substratum in one sense, while money -49-

discourse, we believe in things because they have happened before, one thing with another or one thing following another, it is only because we also will come to believe that they will happen again in the same way and order. And it is precisely this that must be learned from experience. But all of this is taking place at a level that literally constitutes the field of belief itself as an inference related to causality, rather than merely at the level of some particular inference. In other words, this learning is constituting the form of temporal inference itself: for Hume, the world of cause-and-effect reasoning. In Platonic theory a fundamental structure of inference, even if not precisely in the mode of cause and effect, is already inherent in any given framework of experience. But again, this is the case only because that framework is always middle-voiced. The inference is spatial rather than temporal and more of the order of direct reciprocity; but it also breaks up in various ways. If we had to present this in terms of Humes notion of temporality, it would look more like a peculiar mode of final causation, literally pulling the present into a future that had already occurred in some past. It is the context of a return, that is, however, dominating some sense of the future. Still, here one lives inside the inference from the first. It cannot be learned, as if something made up or newly fashioned; it can only be found out or remembered as if always there from some past which makes the present case meaningful. Hume is therefore working very close to a logic of scientific projection and verification, so the experimental method of Galileo, Bacon and Hobbes, verging now on the more contemporary patterns of technological projection and production. Plato, on the other hand, is working out of a logic of meaning that saturates the culture in its various linguistic forms, coming down upon it from its virtually timeless past. The ability to derive the modern scientific perspective from the older logic of meaning is then precisely what belongs to the socalled antipode of all modern science, or Christianity. But this is a position beyond Hume and one which still requires all the maneuvering of Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes to present. And there we also find that between language and thought, in any form, there is always another order: the intersubjective realm of culture and the total field of the ethical or customary, the world of Sitten and Sittlichkeit or customs and the customary order of ethical life this and a movement through and across this as a specified middle that now constitutes history. But even before moving on towards all of this in relation to the problem of some fundamental view of interest, there is still more to consider, just in relation to the Platonic use of language. There is something to the optative that is difficult to comprehend, especially in its extended uses.

Here, indeed, our desires are controlled by a wish for the better, whence the old good as ultimate end and final cause, still reflected in our seldom used, would that.... Indeed, the optative might well be called the Platonic mood as it functions in all later philosophical discourse, especially Kantian discourse, where it becomes the more forced soll eigentlich. or ought. But what is the meaning of the conditional lack of simple or even formal certainty marked by the peculiarly indirect versions of the futural projection? This is very much a matter of something being implied under a certain set of conditions. But the conditions are modal and

becomes the substratum for the organized system of things, the later making out again as well the relation to early Ionic natural theory as already expressed by Heracleitus. -50-

seem to enfold the order of assertion within a field of completion that has been interrupted in advance, but remains in force even so: if ever he were to ..... or the more normal, if he should ..... then he surely should/would also.... Again, for the optative as a whole, we say wish to cover a host of problems which bear on the possible meanings of will, may or might, would and should.22 But wish and will collide and change shape with Augustine in the later Roman world. Platos universe in which the optative rides along with a system of conditional reference, matched often as well with the middle voice, is neither as indefinite or open-ended in its field of desires, nor as definite in the asserted determination of some absolute object as end and end of all time. The old Platonic Good is thereby always curiously already here, even if inadequately understood or enacted. It is thus present in a mode of partial absence in something akin to the recovered position of Being in Derridas always already there; so there as if before, but always within, some fundamental erasure. It is just that the erasure itself has a different character than either the older, more straightforwardly tribal and Hebraic prohibition in expression, or the later and clearly dependent Christian versions. It is therefore not the kind of thing which will miraculously appear or re-appear only at the end of time or to the specifically privileged point of view of some prophet. Especially Socrates, that reported upon character par excellence, never has more than merely conjectural certainty concerning the exact status and meaning of the Good. And the very framing of the Platonic dialogues often multiplies the complexity of any ordinary pursuit of such a topic.23 Still, this Good is always already there in the middle-voiced fields of affects, and so reciprocally operative along with all else in all manner of recognized, hence, known, determinate goods, now always as if instances of some unifying ground. When this active pursuit of such a unifying ground has to be rebuilt in modernity, it occurs always within the framework of the will, which drives all in the direction of the temporal dislocation of Humes world of cause and effect. This is not a matter of a mere theory or view, but of a shifted order of affective desire driving all such theories as views. Everywhere there is a strengthened sense of direct agency to go along with a new perspectival grid, used quickly for more than Renaissance painting. Soon enough people like Descartes and Kepler are plotting motion on a line and analyzing curves and arcs and even new projected elliptical orbits. But, again, the development of the will is no mere theoretical task, even if it has a long history of relation with such. Subjective agency, as still projected beyond the human order, is coming to organize perception as the understructure for knowledge of nature. And so one learns as well to read again with added attention the curious opening of Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, with its heres and nows and ever advancing theres of Fichtes Da-seyn and its Erscheinung as the world and the world of everyday consciousness. Here, again, we march forward to challenge the natural attitude and the hold of sensibly

The middle set here, and perhaps a good deal more, is governed by the field of dynamai (middle-voiced or passive deponent), whence Aristotles dynamis and our world of potential. Thaeatetus, for instance, interposes at least five frames of reference between the hearer-reader and the event or the conversation in question. Here we have the ultimate in problems of indirect discourse, at least as designed and projected as such by an actual author of a text. And most remarkable, one hardly even notices that the frames have been put in place. -5123

22

enshrined patterns of belief, now understood as figurative thinking at the level of ideas. But this time, time itself has already been privileged along with Christianity and its willed end. And to this we can now always add that private property, together with Hobbes world of contracts as compacts and covenants that demand future payment for goods always already received, has settled in more thoroughly and in a new and more elastic way as well. But, again, what does all of this have to do with a system of general interests? To be sure, as human beings we remain interested in the good, especially as an apparent order of betters over worses, and, to move forward historically, we still live, if not precisely in, then still in the wake of the world of reflective consciousness, so the world of representational thinking and immediate division by way of objective reference. And in this all connection is by means of division itself, so some actual form and some reflected principle of division and its attendant opposition. The Kantian word for object is Gegenstand., that which stands over and against. And so here one need only provide some view of the self as a subject to state or understand what this object is over and against. But do we still live in the world where reflective consciousness grasps itself as productive of this Gegenstand? And this single advance marks the difference between ancient and modern theory, and must, in a certain sense, be instructive of a difference in the perceptual register of all possible understanding, if not all possible perception itself. Here is a short, very famous passage from Marx on the Fetishism of the Commodity: Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values. 24 Now even in English translation one notes here that object is being used in the sense of that which has been constituted in an organized system of relations. The relations are no longer merely interior to and projected by thinking, but, by Hegelian institutional expansion of the Kantian framework of appearances, now belong to a general social system which functions to define the meaning of various elements in play. The exchange system connects various things via money, creating them as commodities. They are no more commodities outside of this system than turkeys are footwear. But the second point is that the very same thing that connects them is that which divides them, again as commodities. Value now stands for meaning in the older ontological framework So each is a determinate thing, so a determinate value, only as exchanged within the money system. What is actually constituting this value as equateable with something else within the monetary exchange system remains hidden here, so the entire field of labor as related to use and configured in relation to need and want; but within the system itself all determinate value is fixed in exchange relations, rather than some older distributive system or system of direct use. The kinds of things now in question are therefore
24

Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Fr. Engels (New York: International Publishers), Vol. I, Part I, Ch. I, Section 4., p. 83. -52-

all commodities. And as such, they no longer confront either each other or us as things independent of this system. They now speak an object-language instrumental to capitalist exchange. And we belong to this language as more than merely the wielder of terms. In other words, our older patterns of object determination have been superceded by a new objective order of reality in which the conventions in play are not merely those of some natural language whatever this might entail, as, for instance, in some Enlightenment discourse but now involve us in the commercial universe of commodity production and consumption. Systematic philosophy has become systematic economics and the older world of naturally found and developed use-values in relation to the purposive teleology of meanings has been superceded by the new world of money values and the entire modern commercial, technological and industrial transformation of society. But what happens to residuals in such a transformation? Use value seems progressively to disappear, as with the external teleology of final causes in the sciences, in the objective field and functional language of capitalism, along with any concern for some absolute system of need, save as a field for extortion; while labor remains entirely trapped within the commodity form, also to be extorted in various ways at various levels. We are not necessarily dealing with physical labor, even primarily, save insofar as every job, like virtually every human activity, depends in some way on the control of the body. And in the contemporary world the structures of the Kantian Aesthetic are deployed right here as well: one spends x amount of time constrained within some space or place of work, even when this is merely in front of the computer screen. But more to the point, this total system has now been chronicled in terms of the development of finance-capitalism. From the time of Engels recognition that the stock-exchange had become the principal means of producing wealth, both in general and of the nation,25 to the present order of Global Capitalism (no more global in projected terms than in the 1880's or the 1580's), the field of use, not in itself but as a determinant of value in some system of recognized human needs, has been sliding along into oblivion.26 Oblivion, however, is a deep and dark hole, which is indeed difficult to see into or climb out of. It may, in fact, be some variant of the now famous black hole at the center of Baudrillards spiraling, orbital system of capital exchange: For something must be used to produce the negative space at the center of the accelerated system of capital exchange an accelerated order that is now approaching the speed of light in the real universe of automated stock transactions. At some level, then, without attending to the older orders of need in relation

See, Engels Supplement to Capital Volume Three, Section II, The Stock Exchange. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers) Vol. III, p. 908. It may actually be more appropriate here to speak of the expansion of use by way of the universal means as money. In any event the ordinary field, linking use and need together in a productive system of labor, is nowhere the dominant feature of the new logic of financial capitalism. Indeed, the financial system looks more like the world of art, in that no simple or direct relation to need and usefulness determines value, either aesthetic or financial.. -5326

25

to labor and use-value, the intellectualized superstructure of finance might just collapse inward upon its otherwise hollow center. Money, in itself, is, indeed, nothing real. It is so thoroughly unreal, or real only as conventional, that its sole essential attribute, as already mentioned, is number. And numbers do not exist in anything but the idea-space of thinking, and, like language, between the people housed in some social system. Money must, therefore, barrow what reality it has beyond that of number from its institutional housing by way of some modification of perceptual categories of consciousness. And this institutional housing is the field for habituation; while what is habituated is in the mode of some order of interest. Still, this interest is developed in relation to what money can buy as well as what money is in its own right. And human interest is a broad field for the play of both conception and desire, while the field in which it plays is defined, so delimited, by institutions and their interstices. Now it is fascinating that so many key words here so conception as well as interest seem to double up on multiple systems of meaning and different fields of desire. Here we also have the famous terms for value as worth and the crossovers of intercourse, so also the play on traffic and trafficking in English, as well as on Verkehr in German. Then there is the play already in the ancient Greek world on the sexual perversity of usury: Aristotles money begetting money upon itself,27 the principal having compounded intercourse with itself through the son or interest. (The Greek word for interest is a word for son, tokos, just as principal can also be a term for head, as with Kephalous, father as head of the merchant household in Platos Republic, or our capital out of the Latin for the same.) And, of course, this was all carried into Christianity, via the language of Fathers begetting Sons with only the nominal stand-in of some necessarily materially receptive Virgin Mother; all of which necessitated a good deal of work for the intermediary Holy Spirit read, more originally, money in the Graeco-Roman world. So everywhere money and sexuality seem to cross up with one another, even or perhaps especially in a world of religion enshrining older systems of exchange. And this kind of exchange seems to have something to do with the inner workings of the psyche as well as the social field of commodity exchange as a mode of intercourse. What then is the meaning of this sexualization of commerce and the reciprocal commercialization of sex? Here, however, I do not presume to enter the lists with psychoanalytic theory, rather I am interested in the very order of reciprocity pervading the various systems of desire and commerce, and presented above in the order of terms and their interchangeability. To use Kant, I am here interested in the possibility of such exchanges, as constitutive of the field of interest itself, before attending to some specific field for the play of such, no matter how crucial or determinant for organizing every extant real system of human relations, as with sexuality. In this regard, that relating now to what determines my own interest here, as well as part of the general field for the contemporary use and meaning of the term, we note that interest seems to have developed or grown up between the world of the passions more proper and the fields of trade, commerce, and politics. And one suspects that it was functioning here in some way from the first. What is
27

Aristotle, Politics, Bk I, ch. 10, 1258b 1-8. -54-

more, it seems then to have developed along with everything else in the lexicon of reason and commerce, democracy and the sciences. And all of this development takes place beside or along side of the play with sexuality; perhaps even as breaking off from or superceding some more original system in which sexual difference and exchange by way of sexual relations was all differently related to economics and trade. The passions, much like use-value in relation to needs, operate in some form of immediate transference of drives and other more animal mechanisms of defense or attack. The transference has to do with the difference between the sheer animal drive and its more properly human form. This already involves a certain demand for difference that is difficult to untangle. Indeed, even its animal forms are highly articulated. Bataille spent a very long time trying to decipher just this kind of demand, the need not to be animal in a world of so much otherwise animal imitation; imitation, itself, thereby becoming a loaded operator linking culture and individual psyche. But and here is the crucial point the shift from some more fully enthralled affective state to the freer modes of modern interest is of a different order. Both the affective relation to the culture by way of the imitation of the natural and the order of pursuits that mark this relation are different. The sciences, from the time of the Greeks, do not proceed in the mode of desire as passion; but neither do they proceed simply without desire and the passions. They belong to the development of some order of middle; something analogous to the position of money in commodity exchange and custom in the field of the social organization of sexual desire. This middle realm must also have something to do with language in general, as this is still the fundamental field of mediation, so division and connection, for all things human; a something that may well come to the fore in the old middle voice. But here with language all seems to become unclear. Indeed, it is unclear even as the principal field and structure of psychoanalytic theory, as any acquaintance with either Freud or Lacan would show. Everything depends upon the way in which language operates. But how, precisely, does it operate to construct our general field of interest beyond or beside our organized fields of desire? Is this a dialectical difference within desire, so organizing desire itself, or is this difference between desire and something else: a mode of dividing that alters the entire field of desire by altering the relation to all possible ends, constitutive of any possible subject or self? It is at this point that I will then move back upon the discourse of property and appearances by means of a principal assertion: Interest develops in the institutional context for the mode of transference used to establish the language and the fact of private property. Here it is, as it were, doubling itself in some other form, as the double quotes now properly indicate. In the field of knowledge we deal with the language of appearances as it leaves the actual world of vision behind as all but an anchor for the affective hold on sense and our trust in the sensible world. We have no original interest in our present world of knowledge, anymore than we have or possess things in some original or primordial mode of private property. However, our interests do belong to a field of middle-voice affects that have been distended by the modern commercial and property system, and the modern forms of communication in the mode, first, of print, and, ever since the invention of the telegraph, of electronically transferred information. This middle-voiced field of affect is then all that remains of the entire more original universe of having and seeing, as such existed and was known as felt and/or understood before the rise -55-

of science and commerce, private property and the new forms of the state initiated by the Greeks and since developed in the course of Western Civilization, and more recently in terms of its expanded effects on all other cultures and modes of civilization. But even though this is the case, it does not follow for that reason, that the elements out of which these older systems were generated are absent along with those systems. To point forward, we still sense and reason in direct reciprocity, one with the other, across a significant line-divide of contact/division which defines the fundamental field of touch, just as this also grounds the more original system of aesthetics and knowledge at the very basis of our own present patterns of thinking. This is the old logic of the middle voice that we still use without the voice in place and without the semitribal civilization that was built up around it. It is also of the order of the logic of knowledge in Aristotles Metaphysics, just as it is something subtending and determining the possibility of Hegels dialectical redevelopment of such a logic of knowledge in the mode of Kantian subjectivity. The above paragraph makes out or delineates a considerable project. Indeed, it would seem to be more than the concept of interest can bear so bear-up under and support by way of some organized discourse. And part of the problem in this is that few seem aware of the manner in which this innocuous term has been used. For instance, Habermas once wrote up a telling analysis of modern, become contemporary critical theory under the heading of Erkenntnis und Interesse or Knowledge and Interest (Knowledge and Human Interests). This was an influential book of the late 1960's and early 1970's, published in English translation by Beacon Press, when that press still stood for some kind of progressive critique of capitalism and the related field of the positivistic modern sciences. But even in this work, interest itself was not really in question as it might have been; rather there the world of knowledge was being divided up into certain kinds of interests: knowledge constitutive, pragmatic, reflective, and all as referring to a fundamental problem with contemporary patterns of scientific thinking now effecting so much else.28 Behind this work, however, was Hegels complex expansion of the Kantian use of
28

Here the essential problem was the rise of positivism, defined later by Habermas in the 1971 Preface to the English edition as the disavowal of reflection. So a kind of reason, certain of itself in its own framework, which is then unshakeable with regard to this or anything else, despite a complex history of partial competitors. The book, however, is largely about the elements of positivism retained variously in the other cognitive fields of interest which continue to utilize aspects of reflective theory: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Peirce, Dilthey as principals. The whole treatment then takes off from Hegels critique of Kant and, in a restricted sense, it returns to the movement between Kant and Hegel as initiated by Fichte. But there is obviously more at stake here than a retrospective as regards the Geisteswissenschaften and their fate in the modern scientific-technological world-order. The work in this regard is supposed to be a prolegomenon to a future critique of such scientific knowledge as inappropriately extended to other subject-matter than that of physics or the current life-sciences, so a way of reconstituting a kind of critical sociology with a decided interest in epistemology and its involvement with the broader framework of the human world., the old subject-matter of ethics and politics. It is in this broader context that the issue of Interesse, especially as some field of fundamental human -56-

Interesse in both moral and aesthetic theory. Indeed, the entirety of the Hegelian System is grounded on a vorausgesezte Interesse or presupposed interest, which is played out in relation to the field of Bekanntshaft (familiarity) in relation to Vorstellen (figurative representation) and Erkennen (Kantian cognition), and finally Hegels own notion of Begreifen as fully active conceptualization returning upon the field of touch as a grasping now in the mode of property and ownership.29 And the very fact that this notion of interest is taken necessarily to involve the self, as in the assumption of self-interested economic activity, is there put to use within the framework of the theory of self-consciousness. But few people today seem even passingly interested in the very notion of interest that constantly comes to the fore, as in this very statement. An entire world of the sciences and of everyday concerns the universe of modern business and government has then been built up around a kind of general acquaintance and a directed pattern of thinking (phronsis) that might not have existed in tribal society, and certainly would have existed there only in a truncated and differently oriented manner. But for this to be even partially meaningful, so conceptually graspable, to use Hegels term, it is required that one understand that patterns of cognition are affective states rather than mere conceptual patterns, and as affective states they shift and develop in accordance with the world they are reciprocally related to. It is not the hard-wiring alone of some projected logical grid that saturates our fields

interest, remains least settled: Are the sciences even partially projected today on the basis of an ethical interest in knowledge? Indeed, is even ethics, as studied most often today, still invested in a practically grounded epistemology? Is there any place at all for the likes of Kant, Hegel, or even Plato, to say nothing of the general run of subsequent European philosophy, in a critical theory of knowledge? What does one do with the history of knowledge, even as the history of science? And how does all of this bear on the now crucial alliance between the physical sciences and the institutional order of economic power? It is especially in relation to the last point that one must today begin, as it were, with the question of the relation between interest and self-interest: the relation of knowledge to power as mediated by money. But this is, again, not the topic of Habermas early work on Interesse, though it might provide an opening on such. G.W.F. Hegel: Enzylopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), 1: Philosophy can, therefore, properly presuppose a familiarity (Bekanntshaft) with its objects, indeed, it must presuppose such, just as straightaway it presupposes an interest (eine Interesse) in the same; and this because consciousness by way of time makes representations (Vorstellungen) of such objects before it comes to concepts; whereby the thinking mind or spirit (denkender Geist) only progresses by moving first in through and then out from such representations, turning finally to thinking cognition (Erkennen) and fully actualized knowing (Begreifen). Here, of course, we also see the roots for the framework and the very title of Habermas work, especially when this is all driven back into Kantian philosophy and its critical project. But here one can go just as easily by way of Hegel as Habermas. And while in this way we might miss much of what has happened since in the world of thought, we might still gain something else, as regards the past generally and the connections of Kantian philosophy with the past history of idealism and the critical deployment of theoretical reasoning. -5729

of activity, but rather the manner of being attuned to, held and directed by, some field of actions and its objects. Indeed, even all present-day positivistic scientific knowledge would tend to indicate that the affective relation with the social environment invades and alters aspects of the hard-wiring relating to human cognitive and logical capabilities. And none of this force need be a matter of only the emotions or the classically defined passions. Rather, as Plato indicated in Republic, dianoia is itself a kind of affect, so a way of feeling as attending some mode of contact with its own proper objects, even if these are not properly sensible things but only related to just these sensible things in some curious way that penetrates to the very hold they, too, exercise over the mind or intellect by way of perception. But, again, here I am circumscribing a broad field of human activity in terms of patterns of consciousness that tend to elude our conceptual grasp, precisely by being defined and presented in terms of just this conceptual field. As already noted, in a manner that far exceeds the degree to which we lose track of our problematic self-presence in the act of sensing all manner of things as we sense them, unless we make a kind of reflective gesture to think about such sensing and whereby we arrive at perception most proper, we are generally not aware that we are operating in the developed patterns of understanding, unless we use some pattern of reflection to push this very field of understanding to the fore, whereby it, too, gets understood as something beyond its double in perception. For Plato, especially the progression to this second field would seem to have something to do with a method associated with nosis proper as a condition for what has always been called an intuitive insight, or the method of dialektik as that which controls the movement from understanding to pure reason, to use the English version of Kants rebuilt Platonic language. But what follows from this dialectic at the level of understanding itself, rather than in the projected field of pure reason? What does it mean to understand understanding? which, of course, was a supposed principal topic of the Enlightenment, but one which was always getting confused with a movement back into perception, on the one hand, or over into pure reason, on the other, even if only in its practical employment. At the level of ideas, Plato seems to hold in reserve some other mode of more immediate knowing; Kant, of course, seems to bar the path to a related mode of intellectual intuition. But the mode that Plato holds in reserve may not be the one which Kant so heavily circumscribes in relation to the history of Christian Platonism and scholastic metaphysics, precisely because the basis in understanding is different. Still, sensing that one senses, like understanding that one understands, is of a different order; and this has its own problems. Consider the difficulty of actually grasping the meaning of Leibniz distinction between perception and apperception: Apperception is the easy part. What precisely is perception, not as a specific mode of sensing as in the Greek aisthsis, but now as a mode of being connected to absolutely everything? This is more like the Greek configuration of Fate than some modern conception of sensation as perception. Consciousness falls into this problem as well. It is known almost entirely in relation to self-consciousness or self-awareness, never in itself as mere or sheer awarenessor even as defined by a field of content to be organized somehow objectively and so set against the self. Indeed, considering how much has already been written in this vein, even if in a more restricted format, so all of the more modern modes of phenomenology, and then noting how all of this has somehow gone off in its own directions with its own purposes, but never been able to come back to itself as more than self-referential and so as its own mode of a reflectively produced being in the world, forces one to wonder if such is -58-

not an impossible task, now undertaken with respect to an il-conceived, and economically overdetermined mediating term of interest. Again, what is interest without, or just beside, a secured field of self-interest? What is property without or beside private property? What is appearance without or beside knowledge of/as appearance? And finally just as another directional indicator, since meta does not mean principally beyond, but rather next to and amongst, what, then, might metaphysics mean, when not a matter of the old play on writing and the scrolls filed next to the Physics? Is Aristotles Metaphysics, even as an incomplete collection of curious texts, a work next to everything physical, in the manner in which thought seems to stand next to sense and the sense world of direct perception.? In any event metaphysics is only a name given later to first-order philosophy. But even the position and meaning of the subsequently derived concept relative to everything else might have been understood differently by those who first used it. As with Platos image of the Divided Line, everything actually proceeds from the initial division at the center, as both off-center and precisely again equally divided as regards the prescribed central segments, the realms of sense and understanding. Physics would then be an extension of sense that uses reasoning in a mode of understanding. Ethics might well be an extension of understanding by way of a use of affects or a manipulation of an affective aspect of reason itself. Between these two fields, as unifying both, would be a realm of understanding in its own right with its own peculiar subjectmatter: what we tend to call logical form, but such form with reference to a content, taken from its housing in language and sense experience; and all of this as now doubled by and invaded, two and three times over, by money and information technology. And if we say that metaphysics becomes or perhaps even is from the first and so from before the name the place for the intersection of physics and ethics, as it seems to be already in Platonic philosophy, then we have also very nearly defined the position of Kants Critique of Pure Reason in modernity as well: again, a study between disciplines; but this time said to be underneath everything else or fundamental, rather than over the top or beyond and so Divine. But for all of this, if in the middle, why is this interest not a matter of general human interest or, let us say, only a a matter of such general interest with respect to a beyond that is always taken to be Divine and so always comes to stand in a relation to or with religion and its principal object? One can, of course, affirm this; but then it might still require a justification of sorts. And even if in the midst or amongst, as with Hegels Geist as unter uns in the mode of language, still this interest seems to maintain itself as on the edge or next to everything else. Again, however, this is the position of Aritstotles strange God ,when taken figuratively as related to the organized sensible but eternal kosmos or universe. It is also the position of the Kantian self of the radical unity of self-consciousness, taken, however, with respect to only the Leibnizean appearance of the universe. And so we have once more sketched out the path by which human beings have found out the meaning of their God as their own power of thinking as projected, first as objectified in relation to the world of sense, and then as constrained within the inner world of sense experience as an appearance. Returning, then. to the first world-order by way of natural theory, in a mode reminiscent of Hegelian philosophy, this same communally housed and expanded mind or spirit seems now continuously to seek to know itself as everything besides itself; so to load itself as thought into nature, only to find that it cannot find itself adequately expressed there. In the modern sciences, so in and by way of nature, it thereby -59-

seeks only its own infinitude.30

30

This line of reasoning was developed in the Phnomenologie des Geistes in the section on reason as observation or beobachtende Vernunft. There, human reason is driven into the things of perception in order to find itself in their characteristics, precisely as things. What reason actually finds is then the things as appearances; which is to say it finds itself in the things, but does not yet know this nor what it might mean, and so cuts itself off from knowledge of itself as well as a more fully adequate knowledge of the natural order. There is, however, the other problem, mentioned above, that might still be said to pertain to the sciences: What this rational power seeks in nature by way of the things and their organization, it can never find there in an adequate form. For what it seeks is the infinitude of the self-reflective power of reasoning itself and this in its own fully adequate expression. And even if the power is, as it were, presented, the adequate expression is not. It is then in this context that Hegel writes that Reason in this mode of observation seeks only its own infinitude. (Phenomenolgy of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford Press, 1977, p. 146. ) Without a further finding, namely that the entire practical or moral order is the more proper field for the exercise of reason that this is in fact presented in the Kantian philosophy of appearances and so in relation to natural theory but still in the truncated manner mentioned above there is no possible road to this absolute end of adequate selfunderstanding. What follows from this is then the expansion of the project of knowledge by way of the middle of the book, the field of Spirit as Ethical Life, and with this the introduction of a framework for historical and cultural studies as necessary and central to the theory of knowledge, rather than a mere addendum or some separate field of endeavor. But it is just this unified project that becomes the problem in so many respects. And just because the philosophers as critical theorists might now have given up on this, does not mean that the people at large will. The present problems with religion should be enough to demonstrate this to all concerned. The merger of religion and natural theory in the manner of cosmology is a more sophisticated version of the same problem. Here, however, science functions more as an ideology of the middle-class. Here the more absolute demands of human reason are thus submerged and allowed to operate without any substantial criticism or control. And finally these two aspects confront one another as the dialectical couplet for the total ideology of modern capitalism: Religion and science are not separable, save in some form of analytic judgement. And what is more, they are now both modes of doing business in the modern money system, just as they both promote themselves variously on television by means of the new information technology, as in their institutes and by way of direct corporate influence on government. More profound connections between the two have always now to be rethought in this more contemporary context. Whether one can then side-step or adequately address such an issue with a rhizomatic theory of consciousness and human action, by way of displacing the radical or root form of analysis belonging to the more absolute patterns of a theory of interest, such as that of Hegel or Marx, remains a question of some note. Here, we have the work done by Deleuze and Guattari, especially that collected up as the second part of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, under the title of A Thousand Plateaus. But it would appear that this must be integrated in some way with the very dialectical positions which it opposes. In particular, a demand can be made that it take cognizance of the peculiar course of that same -60-

But here, returning to my more restricted and variously doubled framework of human interest, there remains the prospect of following Habermas back to Hegel and thereby into a rebuilt context of the middle voice as this operates in relation to an objective world order, which is itself constituting the very consciousness which supposedly is implicated, via Kantian philosophy and its Hegelian expansion, as constituting it. Unfortunately or fortunately as the case may turn out we have no new Kant, so no powerful subjective field of idealism to balance the contemporary objective order of custom, convention, and constraint. Our contemporary order of British Empiricism is, as it were, more positivistic and more absolute. But our world is not that of the Enlightenment, either in inception or development. Thereby, we have only ourselves as the ever emptier alienated subjects of post-modern capitalism; selves that have developed or been undeveloped, as it were, along with that world which now separates us from and connects us with even the framework of Habermas work from that now symbolically significant year, numbered 1968. And with this newly distended and dirempted self in place, all interests seem to be reducible to one field of meaning and one structure of mediation, business and money. Habermas world of cognitive interests, linked with hermeneutical and psychological studies the afterglow of the universe of the Frankfurt School merged with other elements of the Geisteswissenschaften seems to have all but disappeared into a reaffirmed hyperbolically extended scientific-technological positivism, retooled and expanded by the digital world of information and computer sciences. So neither our selves nor our world seem capable of supporting even the analysis of interest as the principle structure of contemporary consciousness: not so much because we do not live in a thoroughly self-interested world, but because the self involved seems now, as just indicated, incapable of keeping up its end in the constitutive relation with that world. All we have is a world defined by the collision of interests, without any secure field for some self. Still, something might be said in the light of the concepts just presented as bearing on the complex relation of Platonic and Kantian philosophy. Having and seeing have not yet been completely exhausted by way of the institution, the metaphor and the myth, of private property and the field of contemporary knowledge with its wealth of appearances turned out in terms of information technology and all that goes with this in the new universe of image-production for immediate consumption. Moreover, now that we have all but emptied the self or had it emptied for us by our world of only monetary meaning, even if in a manner of distention that leaves it all too slack, so stretched too far, to recover some other more original shape, what is there left to clutter up the field of interest itself save this very distension? We may not be able to return to this interest purely in terms of the most powerful developments of the self in modern philosophy, so in the assured mode of that grandly erect and soaring medieval phallus, leveled out to point the way, like a herm, back down the street whence we came by way of the Academy and thence to the council hall of the agora and on to the meeting place of the ekklsia, or even in terms of the most telling modes of the dissipation of such with the 19th century onset of the age of decay, but perhaps the view offered has finally been broken and laid out to the extent necessary to see a bit more of a

Western History that gives rise to the positions being advanced, along with the sciences and the specific forms of religion related to them. -61-

middle, even if little that is more original and would, as such, inevitably lead us ever further down the way of sexual imagery to the vulvar world of the tholos and the tombs of yet older kings and queens. In place of these richer realms of vision, braided with desire and sunk into the travail of birth and death, we have here only a sparse provisional knowledge of a line-surface of connection and division, from which everything seems to have proceeded, even from before it was reconstituted in language, reason, and all the rest. But this, again, only as revealed within the very transformations that formed our own world. To be interested before reason is to be like a lizard moving to eat a fly. But there have been many other systems of rational interest, some of which seem still to persist, even within our own order and world This, then, by way of a methodological consideration to go with the earlier interjected comments on a direction.

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III

To be interested, then, is to be involved with something; but not in the manner of being enthralled or thrown under, so subjected to something, as in the passions (passive voice) more proper, nor in the manner of a generated desire for the simple possession of some commodityform thing as in consumer capitalism, the new field definitive of the active voice operating in the older order of affects defined in relation to desire, as in I want x. With the field of mere interest the self and thing object or other self are in parity. They are involved in some kind of dance, prior to the full exchange that might mark off a relation with the modern economic meanings of the term or the older sexual connotation of consummation. The necessary presence of the self, as in the common expression self-interest, is thus not some simple reflexive doubling that always returns a profit to only one member in a transaction at the expense of some other. This meaning, so a passage of the self through an objective world in order to return to itself with said profit, belongs substantially to that world inaugurated by the middle-voice meaning of the business transaction as already noted with respect to the later classical Greek chrematizomai I profit by means of being involved in the movement of the things as commodities, chremata. (These same chremata are then notably also the things in the famously reported reported by Plato Protagorean saying, man is the measure of all things.) The fact that by the time of Kant this more self-interested version of matters of fact had become, as it were, the fundamental meaning of interested behavior, indicates precisely how reduced the conceptual field of interest had become under the influence of the developing business ethic of modernity. But in this we must also forget that Kant can also be said to have been interested in the fate of metaphysics and so of all human knowledge in relation to all possible actions.31 And with this recognition we then replicate something of the line taken up by Hegel. Understood in this way one can give something more than merely an extended meaning to the other implied and much looser use of the term interest in the field of pure reason in its moral deployment. Indeed, it here becomes a way of indicating that self and other can also be in a relation of mutual use or even respect: so self in relation to or with another self. But this relation cannot be transferred to, or now derived directly from, the primary field of speculative knowledge, as in the Critique of Pure Reason, where we have the world of the object as merely natural, so only an object of the sense-oriented appearances pertaining to the modern sciences. And here, again, we already feel the power of the new order of technology linked to the new economics, in that nature had become a field of sheer use, and as such came increasingly to

Cf., K.d.r.V., A-676 B-704, speaking of reason by way of ihr spekulatives Interesse, which takes it beyond what it can deliver through its own more restricted Einsicht or insight. Again, one senses the relation to the practical sphere and thus to a kind of non-pathological desire for something that is apparently absent, but not completely unknown or unrecognized as a possible object for thought. -63-

31

function now as a means to the abuse of other human beings, either as laborers or consumers.32 In all respects we have here a primary dislocation, which might lead also to acts of suppression to go with the order of direct oppression. In other words, in so far as interest was restricted to the field of knowledge as directed only at physical objects, it was easily tracked to the notion of radical self-interest that still belongs to our vocabulary and the entire modern, become contemporary, business ethic. In this ethic our present institutionally habituated practice human beings dominate other human beings as well as dominating all of nature. But they do not necessarily do this with a good conscience, to cite elements of a discussion inaugurated in another context by Hegel and carried forward by both Nietzsche and Sartre. In Kantian terms, treating other human beings as mere natural objects is to reduce them to an immoral field of use: to use them as a means, so as mere things, rather than as ends in themselves. And, of course, the field of the means was now also the field of the commercial measure as money. But if, as with Fichte, we follow the practical understructure of Kants entire theoretical project,
32

It is here, in terms of this collateral reduction that makes nature always a means to the abuse of other human beings rather than some free-standing order of beings to be treated as a subject in its own right and so in its own manner, that I would attempt to draw out a fundamental distinction, necessary to correcting the more straightforward views of the environmentalists. There is much too much concentration here on a mythologized tribal attitude; no real attitude of any tribal people before being overrun by current patterns of modern civilization. In fact, actual tribal existence contains precisely those fissure lines necessary to call into being the entire further development of civilization with all of its abuses, again of everything from other humans to all things natural, as if human. We will, accordingly, never repair the natural system without first attending to the abuses operative purely within the human order. The necessary road to all environmentalist interest runs, therefore, through a renewed Marxist critique of capitalism and its contemporary corporate configuration. Without this, the idea of saving the Planet is as meaningful as saving the Hudson River, so that it can become a more desirable field of realestate waterfront property for a group of Wall-Street investors. There is no getting together, rich and poor alike in a charade of real universal interests. This was already something which did not work, save to extend the rights of a new merchant-class, at the time of Solon. Nor is there here a secure middle-class interest that is not fundamentally tractable to the interests of the wealthy and privileged. Therefore, there will be no universal interest in this or any other world to come without a mastery of the cultural and institutional structures of radical selfinterestin the capitalist world. And while politics and the political world remains the road to this, still, and just as of old, those who seek real power, political or economic, will never be trustworthy to wield it for the common good. Their common good is never the common good, and always all the less for being thought by them as if all the more. If this makes out a real dilemma for the beleaguered consciousness of the contemporary person of whatever occupation or class, it is to be immediately noted that it is no more a dilemma in thought than in fact. The political resolution of such a problem is the resolution of the problem in thought. To expect thinking to solve this practical problem on its own, and so without recourse to its actual institutional and social apparatus, is like expecting theory to solve the worlds problems simply in thought and solely by means of its own critical self-analysis. -64-

rather than only its announced format, then we end up recognizing this entire naturalized order of object relations that which relates to the business-order reductions of all objects to the field of radical commodities as well as to the world of a technologized nature as a secondary product of a more original and fundamental ethical field and its attendant order of relations. To put it simply, and to turn to the field of historical development of socially embedded patterns of consciousness at the level of affects, once upon a time human interest was such that human beings treated natural things as if human rather than humans as if merely our present natural things. Here then is a principal order of inversion. The fact that people had to devalue humans in order to devalue nature belongs to this as a further point. And with this we begin a return to the order of having and seeing that belongs to a field, not simply at the origin, but rather in the middle of things; so the developed field of the Greek middle voice, as it bridged a widening gap between semi-tribal and more consolidated modes of political organization and commerce. The Greeks, of course, also give us the first real expansion of what we can still understand, outside of any tribal or more caste-oriented imperial or feudal context, as slavery. So we have here the beginnings of the most radical reduction of the human being to the commodity form to go along with the culture supportive of an apparently universal humanization of the field of possible knowledge. But in this procedure there is a problem beyond that of having to deal with the kinds of inversions mentioned above; that problem already found out in relation to other Enlightenment treatises which use a hypothetical past as conveniently presented, always only in part, by some order of so-called more primitive people: namely, that the view taken of the past is always a construct of the present culture. And what is more, such a view is now only conceivable under the paradigm of dialectical patterns of reflection. In other words, one has deposited some kind of opposite to the present state of things in the position of the past as that which is original. Today, in our culture of radical reflection, wholly and generally unaware of itself as such, this pattern has reached an extreme: In the Enlightenment such use of the past was still hypothetical; today it is virtual fact. So, of course, it is now easy to assert that once upon a time having and seeing were not only not as we have them today, but also in some dramatic opposition to what we have today as configured within institutionally supported private property and the field of contemporary image production. Simultaneously, since nothing will truly shake our present faith in the sciences and technology at the level of the affective hold on consciousness in the mode of ideology, so our order of belief and trust in such things as cause and effect reasoning and the temporal displacement of hypothetical conditionals as structures of discourse which still belong in the subjunctive in ordinary language but seem all but useless there today so, too, the return to some original is fraught with difficulty in every field or endeavor. In philosophy, as in politics, it is a near absolute disaster, as one still notes by studying the problematic relation of Heideggerian philosophy and German Fascism, and, accordingly, the complex dance or the more straightforward transformations inherent in the re-appropriation of such a thinking by Derrida and earlier by Sartre and Lacan. But since our own more prevalent order of positivism in knowledge supports our own hyper-fascist contemporary world in which one should always note that a still dominate we kill as many people in a year around the world as the oldfashioned Fascists managed by way of the entire Second World War (some 60 million) and -65-

whereas today all is now more clearly causally linked and related by and as the Global System of Capitalism, it is obvious again that there is no solace in simple oppositions. Still, there is something to some other order of interest and some other way of having and seeing. What is more, the Greeks are not merely some more primitive people, as was claimed in the Enlightenment discourse on the tribal peoples. They are, again, something between the tribes and everything else, having already themselves been something else in their earlier Mycenaean period.. And so they become for us as well something intermediary rather than something original. Indeed, they become something with a fractured view of origins in their own right and, as such, a culture with a problem from which developed a new view of causation along with a discourse of having and seeing in a decisively different manner from which so much else was to follow.

Now the theory of interest which I wish to put in play here depends upon a set of well rehearsed structural principles. First and foremost, one has a foundational framework involving an immediate divide which just as immediately unites. It is precisely the play on this line-surface of contact/division that refers the entire framework to the field of touch, as well as by schematic reduction to the fundamental principle of all logic: a/a by way of a and/or b, where the / becomes active as negation and the pattern of conjunction is extended beyond simple reflexive identity by way of a disjunctive postulate of difference. But with the middle-voice expansion of the sense world of affects, this line of contact/division begins a long history of expansion to become the field of general mediation that comes to define, among other things, modern systems of knowledge and modern fields of exchange and action. Here we also have the world of intentions, as well as various recognitions concerning mediation; as, for instance, when Nietzsche compares the whole history of intentional reasoning to a kind of disease, a pleurisy, in which the linings of the lungs, which normally slide immediately over one another, become infected, and so spread apart.33 But this can also be understood in the related field of the objective economic order, where the line, as direct interface of barter in simple exchange, is occupied and distended or significantly extended and warped and then dirempted or emptied of all older substantial meaning, by the invention and use of money in new orders of business, whereby increasing numbers of people are housed in a world of mediation beyond that of ordinary language a world of numbers, accounts and legal transactions. Of course, we have also to note here the rather significant fact that there never was a system of simple exchange, save as invested by and so backlit for thought by the advent of the money system; still, the older orders were differently articulated in accordance with a host of social practices. In the world of touch, however, the movement to the field of vision and the line is easier to see in some more direct sense. The line is then not merely a conceptual line as such, as lifted up into geometrical patterns of reasoning pertaining to the analogon, but here only a line as seen, and seen as if always from the side, as when two fingers are pressed together or, as extended to the plane, when two surfaces meet and are viewed as in immediate contact. Such can then be carried into a further field of vision, as when one considers the surface of the water as the planar
33

Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, 16. -66-

surface that divides two media, the water and the air, and the edge-line of the horizon, as when the air meets the sea at some distance in the gaze from the shore. And this, in particular, as mentioned earlier, is important for understanding the complex imagery, as well as the probable optics, of Platonic philosophy, where we also have the line as the stick thrust into the water. But it is not this complex Platonic meaning that concerns me at present, even though I will have cause to keep returning to it at various points in what follows. Rather, it is the cultural field for such a meaning and its institutional housing and support that is of importance. And it is here, for instance, that we encounter, as already noted, the effect of the new monetary system on patterns of reasoning and orders of affective relation. The Greeks are the first people to substantially alter the conceptual order of knowledge by way of seeing ordinary things, not merely in two ways at once which is common enough in any religious or mythopoetic framework but seeing them in such a way that one order begins to unhinge the other, as it were, from the inside out; so actually seeing everything as mediated by money, hence, in commodity-form, and only then as thing. It is also for this reason that it is only in the context of the new money system that we encounter the new form of slavery.34 The person does not become a slave, in the sense made more famous by the Romans, until they become a commodity, something to be bought and sold as a mere thing, whatever the persons more specific qualities or traits. Other modes of ancient slavery often include clan structures and whole peoples, and refer one always to caste systems rather than to the understructures of a new and subsequently developed class system. In any event, this filter of money is then doubled in various ways in systems of knowledge, theoretical and practical. But it does not appear by itself as a principal force, even from the first. It is always housed in the state-form, even when it comes to mediate between city-states and empires. Perhaps before or beside this, one can speak of a system of multiple strata or dimensions, as with Deleuze and Guattari. But the fabrication of the binary system of reasoning in its own right, something needed to cognize any such general system of reasoning beyond some mythological or religious pattern of mere use of oppositions, seems always to belong preeminently to these classical Greek thinkers and what follows upon them. Here for the first time we begin to deal with what we would today call functional negation.35 It is equally the case that these same

Here it would be particularly useful to read or re-read George Thomsons work on Aeschylus and Athens, which deals, among other things, with the rise of slavery, and his second volume of the already cited Studies in Ancient Greek Society, entitled The First Philosophers. But these books are now long out of print and remain unavailable to me at the moment, even in this internet age of supposed immediate access. The seizure of otherwise free texts by people or persons trying to reissue them under a false copyright or new copyright has forced the books into an antiquarian market. This is like being forced to look for Marx Capital in original editions only, in used-book stores and university libraries with closed stacks for all but the chosen few. Of course, all one has to do is spend more money to buy information. In this regard one should look carefully at Aristotles original presentation of systems of opposition in chapter 10 of De Interpretatione. It is largely from here that the later mediaeval square of opposition is derived. But in Aristotles presentation various patterns of immediate inference are presented in relation to a double use of negation: both to determine otherwise -6735

34

Greeks, especially the Ionic Greeks with whom the Athenians are always associated, invented or developed that first world of private property in such a way as to introduce a new system of division/connection between people; something which had much to do with a new kind of family and an extensive division within the field of law that is with us to this day, public versus private or domestic. Again, it is these lines which figure as the seams of the social fabric which are stitched together or otherwise occupied by money. And finally, all this is attended by, and in part caused by, a fundamental transformation in the order of authority that still goes by the name of democracy. And in the last case, to sense quickly the importance of this new middle in relation to the old middle voice and all it governs, one need only note again what was mentioned earlier in this regard: namely, that this is a system of rule in which, at least to some degree having to do with a significant portion of the male citizenry, the ruled rule; and this beyond the manner of the older tribal organizations of warriors and councils, owing to the fact that the fabric of the society at large had already been subjected to greater degrees of distinction and difference pertaining to the ruler-ruled dichotomy of the Mycenaean palace-central society. It is, in other words, and from the perspective of later theories of causal agency in the mode of agent-patient relations or structures of active and passive, a mode of government in which there is a fusion of passive and active. The more immediate the fusion, the more absolute the pattern of direct democracy. The more attenuated the relation, the more it comes to involve time in the notion of turns, as in the ruled rule in turn in the common Aristotelian designation of political rule. And with the expansion in the practical demands of the latter, one begins, as well, a movement toward representative patterns of rule; which movement comes eventually, but in no straightforwardly simple historical manner, to define the whole of modern representative democracy. Here the play is between direct mimesis and representational replacement, where the same space has been articulated by a new sequential framework, altering the older, more repetitive conception of time. Time, in its representational modes, beginning now with the Athenean boul, of the presiding representational council of government, the prytenaia, comes to refer literally to a series of different people, chosen from the various districts by lot, meeting in the same place in a regular order of replacement. This is something beyond

unspecified terms as with man and not-man and to shift between such simple oppositions and a propositional calculus of negation, not-man is not white, etc. Here, for the first time, everything beyond the mere statement of some term or name is built up by uses of negation. Some is already being presented as not every. While none is is being presented as every is not All difficulties arise in relation to the movement between is not and is a not-this. What is more, there is now an indication that we are beginning to encounter the use of double-negation in something other than the more normal intensifying use in ordinary speech. Here we have the negation taken with respect to itself, as if a functional operator. In this regard it should also be noted that in these treatments of propositional terms and statements we are operating outside or beyond any system of class logic as in parts of the Analytics. This, then, ties the treatments in De Interpretatione with the Categories and the so-called central or categorical books of the Metaphysics, where the problem of negation is handled by reference to formal determination, the tode ti of the to ti n einai, and in relation to change and development by expansion of the concept of dynamis. -68-

any tribal assembly and any more normal council of some royal court. Modern parliamentary government will extend the scope, if not the exact form and meaning of this temporal structure, to the framework used now for the assembly of the democracy, originally more direct. But now one also senses the difficulty in connecting and/or associating such elements in some unified field for human awareness and endeavour. Why refer to the whole of this as somehow definitive of or derivative of a notion of interest? The fact that our representative democracy is always a matter of the clash of interest groups is itself interesting, but hardly at the level of the problem necessary to bridge the gap between these two uses of the term. Thus, and in terms of a broader problem that has defined the difficulties of the present piece from the first: how, indeed, does one put together a structural analysis of perception and knowledge with an analysis of the economic and political field of human action and decision? Hegel, like Hume, used a general expansion of the field and meaning of ethics to such an end. Here, they both followed Aristotle by way of developing the middle realm of praxis or doing as something between making and contemplative thinking, and something subject to habituation and traditionally developed institutionally supported patterns of behavior and thinking. But we cannot follow Hume for reason of his reduced perceptual psycho-centric framework for knowledge. Nor can we simply follow Hegel for reason of problems with the manner of the subsumption of the subject-matter in question by a particular kind of subjectivity and a certain order of results. Still, we cannot be far away from this latter kind of presentation and its field of meaning, precisely because of its institutional component and the use of historical transformation of such institutional structures. Kant is, then, between these two, but his theories lack this historical-cultural expansion, which is crucial to understanding anything today beyond mere formal analysis, and even this in its own problems of ideological housing. But there is another problem here with its own attendant position, while related to the previous point. Everything today seems increasingly to eschew a concentration on the specific problem of how any of the present patterns of reasoning became more than merely possible in the first place. One ranges out to bring in more and more by way of a fully differentiated cultural mode of presentation. But the central viewpoint remains in force, despite all expansion, and even when under attack. So-called Western patterns of reasoning are the bedrock for the knowledge that goes with the capitalistic expansion of what was once only a matter of Western Civilization. And that civilization cannot be freed from the context of its very specific development, no matter how diverse and complex. It is therefore interesting to note, as does Deleuze, as does Guatarri, that capitalism seems to be something which is continuously becoming possible only never to have developed in various other lines of cultural transformation belonging to past and present orders of tribal culture and high or imperialistic civilization. However, it is the kind of thing that would only be said by someone whose patterns of reasoning have already been mastered in advance by the civilization that gave rise to capitalism and thus by someone who reasons from within its institutions and epistemic structures. Still, the fact that it may seem to have become possible, while never having become actual, is something which calls into question the very nature of the so-called possibility being asserted. And in a broader context, the self-referentiality of contemporary patterns of reasoning is the one thing that continues to call for an exposition that cannot be freed from its past historical location. Again, however, this does not resolve some -69-

problem with interest, it merely helps to position the problems with such a term and push it back upon the subject-matter already discussed in part in relation to philosophical patterns of reasoning that seem still crucial for understanding what might be at stake here. It is, after all, the self-interested age of the Enlightenment that gives us so much by way of our present world, including the governmental forms of modern representative democracy. But, again, how proceed? In the first place, then, and as already presented, matters are held together variously in language. In the second, the whole of what goes with this linguistic display of patterned reasoning in relation to an affective order linking sense and more calculative modes of thinking, is precisely what is definitive of self-awareness and self-conception. Again, however, the kind of division/connection in play seems to lack a name of its own. One suspects this has something to do with what makes the name and naming possible from the first; even though it is not with this from the first that we are here concerned, but rather with some crucial mode of subsequent development. That we are operating on or across the place for mediation and at the site of dialectical reasoning might present itself here; but does it present itself with a force that would define a new kind of self which will eventually become the subject of philosophical discourse and the agent of both the economic and political world? Will interest be that which is somehow defined by such fields and their intersection? Or to return to the first question posed at the head of this piece, now in a somewhat fuller context and by way of a projected answer: Does interest stand between having and seeing, standing as well in the position of the political subject of the demand for equality in the name of justice and the economic subject progressively related to ever more of the world of both things and people by way of money and the commodified language of information? And if such is the case, then would it be possible to track the parallel developments in the fields of property and knowledge by way of the crossovers in consciousness which take place in just such a general field as displayed by way of an order of appearance so between drive and desire, on the one hand, and desire and rational will on the other? This is, again, an old-fashioned way to speak: that is, in terms of drive desire and rational will: Trieb, Begierde, Wille als Vernunft. It is just that rather than having replaced or surplaced any of the terms and their conceptual structure, we have merely lost interest in them of late; just as we seem to have set aside the entire problem context of appearances as once developed at the heart of the idealistic tradition of reasoning. And this, too, might tell us something about the field and meaning of the notion in question; at least by way of what else seems to have failed and failed to appear more recently in our own world. Interest, of course, always also involves the self. Even Husserl found this out when he had to remake his neo-Kantian musings on logic and symbolic structure by way of Fichtes Wissenschaftelehre in his Ideen, returning upon this project later in his Cartesian Meditations. But as already expressed, this interest and this self need not break down directly into modern patterns of radical self-interest. It need only be maintained in a field which allows some order of self-awareness and reflective capability to ride alongside of a world of other feelings and activities; so beside a world. But this becomes the site of a considerable problem: When does this self emerge to become the self of modern theory and modern patterns of self-interested -70-

action? Is this an eternal structure of human consciousness, even just as a possibility? Or is it the product of a rather specific kind of world of political and economic determinations; so, a social and conventional construct in the mode of another order of synthesis which has other possible forms, some more original, some yet to be projected? Indeed, has this self already been dissolved, even in the midst of present-day patterns of institutionally enforced self-interest? If, in other words, only institutional and corporate interests are represented in the current system of money and power, is the self empty or full, absent or present, in any meaningful sense, along with the institutions? Already the language of this self has dissolved and disappeared; and this so much so that even this piece of writing must appear to many as if from some other world, some other time. Has this self thereby become merely the ghost of what it once was, functioning along with so much else in that now famous satyr play, following the dramatic presentation of consciousness shaping its world? And in every form, what precisely does this history of self-interested interest, matched always with another mode of curiously disinterested interest, depend upon? Again, this disinterested interest is the world of the arts, as well as of knowledge in the mode of understanding and the sciences: not a world of the passions, but still a world of a partially driven desire operating in a close relation with the development of reason; especially as the latter comes to be supported in modernity by organized corporate interests, first civic then more purely economic.36 In an historical sense, much of the problem is then contained in the finding that whatever our views today, they seem never to go back further than the classical Greeks; thus reaching only to a kind of turning point in history, rather than to the always projected beginning of human existence, and therewith to some version of the whole story. We, as with most people, prefer this whole story. We remain interested in this, so drawn to it; but again for us today all of this is in a rather disinterested manner, suitable to television and general fiction. But even as such, this tale the mythos of origin remains in the position of the much more tenuous order of analysis, one which is always only reconstituted from some middle ground which we normally fail to attend to or grasp. And, again, in our case that middle ground is first constituted in and by the world of these Greeks; the world from which the most basic frameworks for our patterns of thinking and our writing of history come. And the first thing to note here is that we use a Roman collective designation, albeit drawn from the actual name of one tribal grouping, to name these people from another time. We are decidedly not them, even in our general linguistic approach to them; but our world has been thoroughly transformed by them, as was the world of Rome before so much else that has since come along. Indeed, even other cultures only more recently enfolded within the broadened framework of Western Civilization by way of the force of capitalist expansion and its attendant modes of imperialism, seem now only to displace and duplicate this problem by adding their own version of being tensed between an older and a modern system of fundamental belief and experience, having to do with their own cultural
36

This disinteressed interest is, of course, an expanded version of the unintereseierten Wohlgefahlen of Kants theory of the beautiful in Art from the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Here the object remains famously sehr interessant (Analytik der Schnen, 2 and note ) It is featured by Hegel as a more forceful direct contradiction, as an interesseloses Interesse. -71-

substructures. Moreover, we never have more than even half the story with respect to the Greek world : the half that becomes us rather than everything that was them and thus stood already in a tensed relation with so much else that was around these first politicized people in those other and older cultural spheres of tribes and high civilizations. But, of course, this also means that the entire framework of reflection, as we have it that is, as developed in European philosophy in modernity and especially in and by means of German idealism and later critical theory is itself an historically produced framework of reasoning, just as it is this order of reasoning that resurrected so much of the world of Greek philosophy and aesthetic development. So, the once much noted hermeneutic circle is anything but merely an epistemological problem in the more abstract meaning of such a term. Indeed, and as noted above, without returning to something of the order of Hegelian philosophy with its hold on the combined historical, cultural-institutional, aesthetic and theoretical framework of understanding, there is no way even to present the problem in its developed form. Our subsequent ability to add significant material to that particular presentation, so also the ability to use Marx and Nietzsche and Freud, and a host of other theorists and frameworks to complicate the presentation, does not result in any ability to pass beyond the framework in question. We may be able to truncate this presentation by denying it the right to expand backwards or forwards across all other forms and patterns of social existence, the tribes and organized high civilizations of prior and subsequent history, but we are still bound to the middle in a certain restricted sense. What we can hereby see is then only a highly refracted order of thinking, that reveals certain problematic but fundamental structures of knowledge and action, merged with certain affective states. Even to call these states of consciousness thereby becomes a problem. For the most part, as already noted, we are not consciously aware of any of this, except under an extraordinary pattern of educational development that pertains still only to a hand-full of people relative to the culture at large, albeit belonging in a manner that is no longer that of some earlier kind of caste-fractured society; and even then it only doubles-up on the same patterns of remaining virtually and simultaneously unaware of all such affective relation to the present and always forcefully invasive cultural world. In a manner that recalls the status of Kants transcendental unity of apperception, we are at best only able to call up this entire universe of reflective thinking as something that doubles our ordinary patterns of experiencing our world. Accordingly, to write here about patterns of seeing and having that are before, beside, or beyond the developed framework of the property relations and the controlled environment of our present imagistically saturated universe of vision and action, is always only to call on this other order, as embedded somehow still in just that vision, by reference to modes of having that still subsist along with everything else. Interest is then a field which also permits a kind of parallel presentation, precisely in that it remains possible to be interested in things in something other than a self-interested economic manner, even if not necessarily in some older or earlier manner of encountering a world, natural and/or human. And one thing that also becomes certain here is that all projected versions of how older orders of culture or other civilizations viewed the world are likely to miss, and so misconceive, patterns of self-interest that already existed there or have existed from time out of memory. And this is usually a problem, not only of not understanding the general mediation systems in play, but of missing things that are much more direct in the order of mediation itself. Touch, for instance, might be extremely powerful in general; thus so forcefully invasive that -72-

we have constrained it within complex conventional boundaries. But at the same time, certain fields of touch might be virtually unrestricted by our standards in some other culture and thereby extended into the so-called general economy of knowledge. Again, the nature and context of the mediating form the divide that connects that which establishes some order of two, no matter how curiously conjoined or broken-up, in the midst of the one as some more continuous whole is likely to be differently present and cognized. But as for us, we can no longer even recognize the force of the problem in the metaphor, as when Aristotle connects the highest level of thinking to itself as immediate object by means of a word for direct contact as touch, literally thought fingering itself as thinking with the uncallused hands of a refined sense of touch; and this at the heart of that passage with which Hegel closes off the entire philosophical treatment of knowledge in his Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften . Indeed, the English think and thing, like the German denken and Ding, as well as the Greek thigganon here in question, are all related terms having to do with the field of touch, while touch itself points beyond the middle-voiced Greek haptomai to the word field of what happens by way of chance and luck, tych/tychan; whence also the notion of destiny and fate. Hegel, of course, had not missed the connections, whatever else was afoot from top to bottom of the ancient ordering of the senses and their affective states, so uniting sensation and ideation in one self-divided unity, now in terms of his own order of tactile imagery as the active grasp of begreifen.37 Again, however, the key here follows upon the recognition that what is for us a division, natural and human, so also Hegels world of nature and the human spiritual or intellectual and cultural order Natur und menschlicher Geist is itself the kind of division that only goes back to the classical Greeks, and is only there as something still rather partial, but nonetheless forcefully enough established to give us the first development of our patterns of reflective thinking; whence the origins of the sciences, critical ethical theory, and, in the corresponding
37

Here I refer to part of that passage from Metaphysics, XII, 7, with which Hegel closes the Enz. of 1830. Thought becomes that of or as thought by way of touching thiggann (thingann). ( Meta. 1072b 20-21.) There is a related version of this coming from the beginning of the same project, so in the introduction to the Wissenschaft der Logik, the so-called Greater Science of Logic, where Hegel plays on the connection between the German Denken and the word for thing or Ding. Etymologically, he seems quite correct: thing comes from the field of the Greek thiggan-thigganomai, as what gets touched in this middle-voiced context defining a fine or discerning touch and feel. And thinking is what somehow does the touching of the thing by way of the fingers as conceptually extended by language. And even the positivistic neuro-sciences recognize now the link between the manipulations of the hand and the articulate framing of speech. Today we say that the same brain functions do double duty here, with the higher faculty of speech developed on the basis of the lower faculty of touch, whereby the tongue and the hand are linked. These faculties are then Vermgen: they are capabilities or Aristotelian dynamic means, so potencies as powers. Here again we meet Platos pathmata en ti psychi, the correlative affections in the soul for everything from the objects of the passions to the field and objects of noetic understanding and cognition. -73-

institutional order, the democratic political world, built out in relation to the first order of private property, the private family, and the commodity exchange system.38 How much of this is causally
38

This is a crucial point. Few people seem to realize that the Greeks did more than merely lay down the first versions of the physical sciences. It was not so much the sciences themselves but the framework for such that they created. They created nature, not merely natural theory. Prior to the developments of thought belonging to the 6th Century, BC, we have nothing that would differentiate between an explanation or account for what we now call a natural event and such account as it might pertain to an institutional system of power. The same tales that explained nature might thereby also, and most often did, explain the state or some general social hierarchy. With regard to the states power, this explanationin some other field of events and experience is what functions as a legitimation; and something might also be mentioned here as to the involvement of the scientific in the order of metaphor, so as regards the means and authority of moving between fields of discourse and experience from the first. Here, for instance, one might already think of Homeric poetry, and poetry generally, as a halfstep towards a new order of descriptive analysis. In the older order, however, and with respect to high civilizations, we are most often dealing here with true or full theocracies, such as in Egypt and the various Middle-Eastern and Mesopotamian civilizations. Thus the impact of taking the desires of the gods out of play in so called natural theory breaks the universe in half. For with regard to human events one cannot dispose of the passions and desires as operative principles, nor accordingly with the gods that personified such passions and desires in various realms of experience and endeavour. Thus the more one explains nature as a selfenclosed system of regular transformations following certain principled patterns or structures, the less one is able to deal with the very human social world from within which the explanation is being generated. By the time of Plato, the recognition becomes a direct and dramatic confrontation. In the Phaedo, Socrates asserts that those who speak about nature confuse mere conditional description with causal analysis at the level of aitia proper: Natural theory cannot explain why Socrates is sitting in prison peacefully awaiting his death. Nothing in it can say anything more than that a sack of skin and bones and sinews is disposed in a particular way in a particular place (Phaedo, 98-99.). The recognition is, of course, with us to this day: The physical sciences have nothing to say concerning the field of moral causation. But they continue to operate, by way of significant slips in fields of meaning pertaining to judgement, as a partial system of legitimation for various institutional frameworks of hierarchy and political power. The most famous such slippage defines Social Darwinism as the legitimating framework for the excessively destructive results of modern capitalism. But it should always be noted that other kinds of physical theories, everything from Democritean Atomism to Newtonian Mechanics and later Quantum Mechanics, are relatable to and useful as tools for legitimating certain frameworks of social and political hierarchy. Physics has never been innocent in a political sense; and this, from its inception as a partial result of the Greek political world and its economic conditional structures. And the more one asserts it to be value-neutral, the more dangerous it becomes. The more difficult theoretical issue also arises in the same context in the ancient and again in the modern world: For once one establishes a division between the natural and the human orders, how does one treat the not so minor fact that the assertions concerning nature are all -74-

interrelated and in what way is a problem, and not one that can be easily deciphered. Even the form of the problem is difficult to ascertain, as so much of our own discourse of causality and knowledge comes from just this world, even if by way of linguistic and institutional over-laying and transformation. Indeed, much of what might still in part belong to people of most every other culture of our present-day world now only survives in Western Culture most proper as a complex remnant of a remnant of at least two other patterns of organized existence, tribal and feudal; to which is always to be added in some way a third at a more distant remove, hierarchically centralized and dynastically developed high civilization. And, again, our relation to the ancient Greeks is anything but direct in its own right, making out its own second order problem with remnants. But this also gives us a key to this key. First, in that we engage here a kind of doubling, relating to the ancient and modern orders: return of democracy, return of the sciences, return of commodity exchange system, return of aesthetic forms, the arts and theater, etc.; and then, in the second place and more specifically, in the recognition that whatever is here today had to develop/be developed to the present state by means of and in terms of just this doubling and its complex order of cultural means. So virtually everything state of organized institutional affairs, state of awareness, state of lost vision and heightened vision, state of radical ownership and loss of any older and differently meaningful pattern of ownership appears at that level related to the systems of reflection and their submergence in the present orders of knowledge; and all of this only on the basis of a specific ordering of relations as this pertains always to the feudal world of mediaeval Europe and its own breakdown. And this same feudal world then seems to double-up, in its own right, on an older order of transformation underlying the appearance of the world of the classical Greeks, which world followed upon their own more feudal-like and dynastically royal order of Mycenaean civilization with its own breakdown and partial return to quasi-feudal and clan-centered tribal patterns of existence.39

coming from the human order, subject to the field of language and the problems of meaning as related to the cultural field. Here mathematics is a partial bridge; but again it is hardly capable in itself of establishing its inherence in the physical world as an actual structural principle or even as pointing to some such structure by way of an order of what is only thinkable by means of numbers and other symbolic formulae. And generally speaking, we never establish such a connection beyond a merely pragmatic framework of technological utility and what it might make available to us in the sensible order of experience. Pure theory, on the other hand, is free of all such practical encumbrance. As a result it quickly comes to be considered as divine when viewed from within the older metaphorical framework. This is an important point in its own right, but difficult to deal with because of lack of factual knowledge. Still, civilizations arise more or less directly from patterns of tribal existence, clan structure and confederation of tribes, or conquest of one tribe by another. Such civilizations can also fall apart for various reasons. And the marker of their existence is often only a notable change in the mythology as religion. One has goddesses and gods, rather than only spirits and animal forces. Movement back and forth between these types of societies does not, however, automatically yield a world of private property and democracy; and this even when money gets involved. So there appears to be a missing middle step necessary for the generation -7539

of such a peculiar set of institutional developments. And at least part of that step may have to do with the effects of a breakdown of clan organization that comes with overlordship of a certain kind. In this the relative autonomy of the village or deme, as the dwelling place of the common people, is perhaps the key. This unit is neither tribal nor merely an administrative unit of some palace-central society. In that it is not purely tribal, the clan organization has most likely been disturbed, so also the notion of land-tenure and allotment. When such a process is then doubled by a partial return of tribal patterns, as with the pre-classical Greeks, a certain space exists within which habituated or traditional structures are open to take a new direction. A simple return to some clan system is not likely to be an option, in that the members of a village would not necessarily belong to any one tribal unit, nor to the new tribal system, as in the case of an invasion and fall of a palace-central society such as that of the Mycenaean world. Something of the same kind of problem might pertain in mediaeval Europe, in that the feudal system produced a caste division which in turn produced a double-pattern of administration at the level of the villages. Feudal levies and duties existed, but the village itself had considerable autonomy in the mode of dividing the commons for agriculture and organizing the family system. There is then also the role of the Church to content with: Did it support clans or private families? Was it itself organized on the principles of the extended clan or the patriarchal family? And here one has the effects of the earlier system of Roman property relations to deal with. But, again, how this survives within the feudal system of obligations as a mode of ownership and as some kind of basis for a later development of the modern institution of private property is difficult to ascertain. Accordingly, and as with ancient Greece, in perusal and analysis one is apt simply to start everything again with the advent of some system of money and merchant capital. But especially in the case of Europe it should always be remembered that it is not from the Italian city-states that we get the modern patterns of corporate development and the extended development of the institution of private property. This development has to do with the semicommunal structures of north-western Europe. What foundation is then present upon which to build up the investment companies of the new systems of world commerce when they appear? . This is a pressing question, especially as regards the English and the Dutch. But it is not such as to be completely written off to religious difference. Commerce plays the leading role to be sure, but we also have origins that are sunk into the tribal systems of the Vikings ( Swedes, Danes and Norwegians) and the English themselves as an amalgam of another order of Germanic tribes and the Celtic population. For instance, the remnants of the Viking invaders of England constituted a kind of society of freeman as small farmers within the more generalized feudal system. As distinct from the order of knights and other retainers, they did not generally answer feudal levies and had to be paid, either in person or as a group to fight in the later wars with France: soldier is a Germanic term that literally means to be paid. Indeed, the Normans themselves were in part descended from Vikings, but adopted the feudal system of the broader culture of France, before invading England. In historical development, social organizations leave traces that can become operative long after the dominant system of authority or rule has seemingly passed away. It is especially important in this regard to locate seams that might articulate systems of difference. The seams then get occupied in new ways, especially with dislocations in systems of authority. But the development is rarely radical. This is then -76-

But all of this resolves itself again in terms of how one treats the historical and institutional variant of the Hegelian concept of aufheben: so how pervasively and with what necessity one views the pattern of destructive preservation and transformation as this pertains especially to the institutional order of existence, as that order within which and in terms of which patterns of awareness are generated at the individual level, both at the most ordinary and the most theoreticized or internally reflected levels. And here I have already indicated that another system of reciprocity, as a kind of side-by-side system which permits considerable confusion, is likely to be involved. Beyond this institutional level, there is largely for us today only our present view of the order of nature. We no longer have even a self-referential world of the soul to deal with, except in a psychologized manner continuously overridden by the positivism of the sciences or, where remaining religiously determined, set out in simple patterns of reflective opposition to the sciences. But, on the whole, there is very little to human nature that is not thoroughly entangled in this other institutional and intersubjective order of general cultural determination. Language, of course, still stands as the sign for this entanglement; and this even in its relation to the new forms of information. But what now can be said for the field of human interests by way of this highly mediated framework of knowledge and property relations? If not original relations and fields of awareness and action, then what kinds of things remain here in play within our cultural systems? Even more important, what kinds of things are here, either as digested or undigested, which might countervene dominant patterns without becoming naively determined opposites to be ground up in the extant version of some general cultural progression; so by means of what I am wont to refer to, by way of Deleuze, as the Culture Machine, in its normal order of advance? There is here no absolute need on the part of reason, whether critically developed or not, to maintain old paradigms for justifying the most atrocious of actions, human misery and destruction. But if there is no need, then what is driving the interest in maintaining the view that only by passing through some painful correction can the human race, or just some country or some group of people, achieve some new higher order good ? Here we seem now always to use a conditional historical knowledge to justify a future projection regarding some present state of affairs. Here, accordingly, knowledge is constantly becoming ideology. But, at least in part, this self-same ideology is realizing itself as thoroughly as Kant once realized the old metaphorical transference

still what makes the Greek world so unusual. For there is no adequate explanation as to where this pattern of civilization comes from, save the rather simplistic statement that it fused elements of tribal existence, such as interlocking councils and offices belonging to certain clans, with elements of organized, dynastically developed high civilization, whence the centrality of the polis or city-state and the control exercised either through or in relation to a central market and by way of the military organization. But again, even here, the use of lots and chance in the later democracy has its origins in the seasonal allotment of the commons in the agricultural world of the deme or village. So whereas the advent of coinage might have promoted the merchants and set up a line of tension within the older clan-dominated world of an agricultural aristocracy of sorts, the democracy proper is not founded by merchant capital alone or even principally. -77-

obtaining between seeing and knowing, while determining the whole in relation to things that can never and have never been seen at all. Again, however, in order to do this, Kant needed a mediate order of appearances. I suggest that this is then precisely the role of private property in general societal and political affairs, national and international. And, indeed, if we do not advance along just such a path in the pursuit of understanding, then we are betrayed, in all attendant social analysis, to a general view of the sadistic nature of human beings, as such might now easily be projected along the lines of some advanced psychoanalytic framework. But, again, how does private property convert itself into the driving interest of systems of knowledge? It must itself be of the order of such knowledge to turn this trick of self-conscious reflective reasoning. And as such, it must no longer be property in any sensuously real sense at all. It must be virtually purely intellectual. So also, and as such, it must be a rather pure product of reflective reasoning. For it is precisely this purity that bears the stamp of reflective intensification by division and subordinate determination. But it is also just this purity that marks money, but only in its potential, as it invades the older frameworks of property. If one then proceeds under this supposition, then what has been said by way of the systems of pure reason might well offer the only appropriate points of orientation by means of which to approach the modern institutional world as well as the ancient order of the city-state. Here understanding understanding becomes the road to understanding the world. But in this there is always a double movement: one pattern of understanding establishes the theory of appearances by exploiting a breech in the ordinary affective relation with the sensible world, while a second pattern uses certain results of this first systematic development to return to the world in the mode of positive knowledge. The return trip is always the more dangerous affair, even if required for progress. Returning, then, to the problem of interest, one must here entertain the hypothesis that a certain affective relation, linking thought to the cultural world, constitutes the framework for the development of both of the above cognitive or intellectual movements. It is, for instance, a common interest of sorts that links Platonic and Aristotelian patterns of reasoning in antiquity or Kantian and Hegelian patterns in modernity. And it is this interest which then develops in its own right in such manner as to link both orders of reasoning as well as both worlds. And it is then this same underlying framework for interest which is to be associated with the advent, dissolution and reappearance of private property and the democratic state-form. And an important element here is the manner in which the first system as a whole, like the first world, disappears into the feudal order of existence, marked by the religious pattern of affective reasoning; here disappearing along with a large part of the money system of ancient civil society as well. And all of this, in particular, was well understood by Hegel. However, it is not this feudal order of property relations, nor the religious pattern of affective reasoning that belongs with it, that is here of principal concern; not even as it refers to the complex disappearing act of civil society and money. Indeed, this whole complex may well still hold the reigns of our present culture and drive it variously. But it is the first field of interest that somehow reappears in its own right in the modern world, even if reorganized by the effects of religion. To be sure this order of interest is transformed by this middle or mediaeval world of institutions and events, but it is still something -78-

in its own right to begin with, and something which is somehow still present in its transformation and return. There is something here which falls back from the passions and any more original field of desire, establishing itself in relation to the world in such manner as to create the very possibility of the sciences to go with the new object-field of the natural. This establishes a new view, which in turn invests a new order of images. And all of this is what gets doubled in the course of history, along with the field of property relations, the money system and the structures of the state.

But now I wish to break-off the discussion and move in a different direction. There is no direct access to the problem context as it appears in its development. That appearances and property relations seem to move here together is just one point. But the point is not meant to establish an order of analogy. Rather here the analogy form itself is only part of a complex order of results. So the question is more properly: What happens when appearances are property relations? What kind of interest is established at the level of a system of predication?

Everything in this regard seems to be a matter of co-lateral terms rather than terms which admit of a normal pattern of distribution. In other words, there is no simple subject-term of which something can be predicated in such manner that a class logic might be used to organize elements of the statement in terms of inclusion and exclusion. So also there is no normal predicate to mark a class to which some subject might be said to belong along with all manner of other things. Talking about property in terms of appearances or appearances in terms of property is like talking about color in terms of shape, but talking across an even more problematic divide. Accordingly, one wishes to move over into the field of analogical reasoning in order to proceed and supply a connection by way of money and finance. But what if appearances define property in the same way that color defines shape? This example is, of course, not innocent. Plato puts shape and color in relation in the Meno in the context of the problem of definition as this bears on the relation between knowledge and virtue.40 And my point here is that any attempt to turn this into some more normal categorical proposition where the assertion runs Knowledge is Virtue, meaning, as it were, All of Knowledge is a matter or part of Virtue, whereby virtue becomes the undistributed, and, as such, the broader term, must be ill-conceived.. Platos point is rather that proper definition can only follow at the level of concepts or terms of the same order as the subject to be defined. This is not the same as genus-species definition in Aristotle; which, however, is also not the only order of definition for Aristotle. So to return to the Platonic example, forms can only be defined in terms of forms, almost as if one where dealing with particular perceptual experiences in terms of other particular perceptual experiences, or words in terms of words. Whether this can then be further converted into a more modern causal framework, as when Descartes asserts that there must be at least as much formal reality in the cause as in the effect, is yet another problem;
40

Meno, 75. -79-

for it must be admitted that there is another kind of relation implied already at the level of causation in Platonic philosophy as well. Still, what appears from the first is that there is a manner of relating terms and the attendant kinds of things or experiences in question by way of co-lateral patterns, almost as if events in a common frame or field, or linguistic meanings in a total word-field. And here the implication is that certain kinds of things belong together. So, again, as in the image of the Divided Line: images of dreams, shadows and reflections; perceptions of physical objects; practical understanding of axioms and principles; knowledge of forms as ideas. Positioning, as it were, one order in relation to another, is more difficult and requires the introduction of a complex notion of cause, as just mentioned. But even with such a notion in place, as with the Platonic aitia as that which is responsible for something or that upon which something else depends, as shadows depend upon both things to cast them and light, as well as eyes to see, if we mean also reflections as these actually appear the hierarchical arrangement is not secure in either an ontological or experiential sense. Just because something depends upon something else does not mean that it follows from it in some radical sense of causality, especially this as strengthened by the implication patterns of some prototypical deductive logic. Indeed, as in experience, the shadow and the thing always appear together, linked by the presence of light. Withdraw the light and there is no simple or straightforward experiential basis for the causal relation of thing and shadow, especially one which connotes ontological priority. Again, once there is light, the shadow seems to be dependent upon the thing that casts it. But as Plato seems already to have recognized, the full causal configuration has more to do with light itself, and so with that which makes the total field of vision possible, along with the activity of the eye, instead of some truncated assessment of various kinds of things occurring within the field of vision. Upon what, then, does hierarchy in causality depend? Is it only a matter of the effects of formal implication patterns as applied somehow to the total framework of experience? In modernity this causal hierarchy depends, as already mentioned, upon the will; and this, even more than upon temporal order or presence by way of position in the old patterns of deductive inference. It is, in other words, a function of agency and, as such, can never be carried over in some simple manner into physical theory, save as ideology. Hume put impressions here as a shield between the order of things in their supposed causal connections and the assumed knowledge of such, as this might then be used in the broader context of human affairs. Newton, refused to attribute causation, in any form, to his mathematical projections, perhaps, in part, because he was still afraid of being burned at the stake, but just as readily because there is a plain difference between mathematical presentations and actual events. And, of course, Kant interposed the complex machinery of appearance here, within which cause and effect pertains to the problems having to do with free-will theory, as this becomes clear in the return trip to the Antinomies, from which the entire First Critique was originally derived. Indeed, everything that develops here is tied to free-will theory and the breakdown and transformation of scholastic philosophy. And with this the Will of God moves precipitously close to the Will of Man in something of a return from the framework within which it had been developed and expanded. One suspects, for instance, that there was never an original infinite power of the human will to go along with an infinite variability in the field of imagination, until this very notion of the infinite -80-

had been developed at the level of a more absolute subject as agent. However, the projected causal framework also tends to invade propositional logic from the time of Locke onward, establishing a kind of hierarchy between subjects and predicates that was only undone at the expense of the ontological significance of the subject-term with the advent of set theory and empty-set logic. Here, rather than returning to the problematic logical calculus of Aristotle, the modern world moved on so as eventually to annihilate the subject-term as anything more than a kind of place holder within certain kinds of propositional assertions of the so-called categorical type. But Aristotles propositional calculus was built up around the singular judgement and its reflective division into the universal and the particular a point which Hegel hammered home in his logical analysis of both Aristotelian and Kantian philosophy just as Aristotles specific definitions seem always to point back to singular beings and the context of singularity, even when extended to a determinate kind of group or species. Indeed, as was eventually made apparent in the late mediaeval world of scholastic philosophy, in categorical propositional logic the singular judgement fuses the elements of the universal and particular as regards certain fundamental patterns of opposition as negation. It is only when one attempts to absolutize this fusion in a particular way that one ends up with the fully reduced patterns of Boolean logic. Here one is always seeking the unconditioned form of some possible pattern of assertion; a language reflecting a desire that begins to come into its own around the time of Ficthes Wissenschaftslehre, with its vocabulary of das Unbestimmte, Unmittelbare. And, of course, the road to this is negation, as with the use of such a functional principle as regards both terms and patterns of connection, especially as in the logical obversion patterns of categorical assertions; something that had already been observed and put to use, as previously noted, by Aristotle in a certain manner as regards a strict logic of terms and patterns of predication. However, in the movements to contemporary logic, one is not looking for or concerned with the reciprocal form of assertions concerning fields of content or kinds of beings. No one is thus trying to define shape in relation to color, as was Plato in Meno, or human beings as political animals, as Aristotle does in Politics. Accordingly, the difference between our present approaches and those of the ancient texts is marked, but not merely as most contemporary logicians would have it. We say, what Plato means is that all things with color have shape. Plato says, shape or figure follows color. And one can still understand part of this by returning to the visible register. For as color becomes indistinct owning to the absence of light, shape or figure begins to become vague and imprecise, until we reach the limits of vision in the absence of light. Color, it seems, is, for Plato, closer to light itself. And here one jumps quickly all the way to Newton. But in the ancient world, even having reached such limits, we have not abolished shape as figure itself. In other words, the implied (for us) ontological hierarchy remains incompletely established or asserted, suffused with a sense of reciprocity that remains in place. For in certain cases one can still feel shape, even when one can no longer see it. And it is this other affective basis that seems, in the end, to be functioning along with the presence and absence of light. But this is not to say that experience and knowledge are dependent upon touch per se or even as extended through light by way of some analogical conception; rather, it would be more appropriate to say that the form of touch, so also its thoughtfully construed constitution, is controlling the conditional analysis of perception as a whole, even as it shifts toward a MiddleEastern metaphysics of light as in the Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia. Or to use the -81-

middle-voice configuration, the apparent priority of color that which the shape follows pertains, in something of a reciprocal causal format, as the agency (person and number) that gets attached to the total movement of sensibility as this flows more originally from the field of what has volume; where this volume functions in the world of solids as a reservoir for specific determinations for shape in the same manner as a generalized organizing Fate functions to generate a field for its embodiment in an order of actions by way of those subjective agents in terms of whom or which we derive our linguistic or grammatical forms. Color thereby allows shape to come about in accordance with a system of appearance, but, in the latter, only by way of light, which has, as it were, more to do with volume itself than some specific volume. Indeed, light is volume pure and simple, but volume without a specified surface. While touch involves the surface of what has volume by way of contact, and so presents the limits of figure; demanding, as well, concentration upon the peculiar condition of a possible separation or distinction. This separation or division appears as nothing in its own right, as when the finger rests upon a surface, where the two are divided by nothing more than what appears as if a geometrical planar line-surface of two-dimensions; which, again, when viewed from the side, must appear as a line of contact/division. But, again, what is crucial here in addition to the complex middle-voiced formation and as quiet different from any more modern approach is both the fact and the recognition that mediation, as such, appears always in its own right along with all the things set out variously by means of it. Indeed, in the instance of the finger touching some surface, while being viewed from the side or even in the more famous modern example of the finger touching the finger as touched what we have is a visual presentation of mediation reduced to immediacy. As just noted, it is a presentation of a kind of nothingness which can then always be formalized as a two-dimensional line or extended, as already noted, as a planar surface. Here we have a nothing which both is and appears by virtue of the surfaces it divides and defines, as it connects them. And in this form, if we were to extend its significance by way of the modern regel du choc or laws of impact, as in the field of kinematics used by the likes of Descartes and Hume, we might also say that we actually have now an experience of the place for a kind of physical causation, even if not an experience of the so-called interioror principled transfer of force, taken to be causation itself, as this is still the subject-matter of physics in present-day quantum mechanics, where everything becomes a matter of close-range interaction.; now, of course, everything being separated and connected by way of light as energy. But if we actually take up the instance of touch itself, as if now in modernity where it is more radically distinct from vision than was originally the case, then in the instance of the finger touching some other surface, we have, as well, an immediate experience of causation itself in purely perceptual terms, whether we supply to this the other underlying principles or not: still, it feels smooth, because it is smooth to the touch. In other words, this only becomes inadequate to understanding, if we postulate some other order of reality pertaining to just this activity of understanding itself. And certainly, originally we had no empirical basis for such a postulation, beyond the kinds of problems given in vision as in the Platonic image of the Divided Line, understood as simultaneously an image of understanding in the mode of the science of geometry and an image of perception pertaining to a stick thrust into water, engaging the system of light discussed above. But if we move further by way of the conceptual framework of light, taken now in its own right as an extended medium for vision and all object-relation in the visual field a -82-

relational context that has always been associated with ontological and religious, as well as mere experiential, determinations we come to a new kind of presentation of causal reciprocity in the visual field. We, of course, no longer recognize this by direct reference to vision and the visual field. Rather we call it radiant energy in its more universal form and forgetting to think of all those rays of light moving out from the sun when we squint our eyes. But pushing only a halfstep back to the field of inertial masses in reciprocal relation, we see that the otherwise empty space of this relation of contact, as spatially extended or driven apart, is filled up by the play of forces called gravitation. And here, again, we return to Kant; for this is reciprocity, just as it is reciprocity between agent and patient as long as the sun is in charge of the particular planets owing to its greater mass. But this only becomes causal in some other sense, if we supply the fuller meaning of such reciprocity as it pertains to the Platonic context from which I here set out. For Kant, as already noted, reciprocal causality must contain cause and effect, in order to maintain the priority of the subject term in agent-patent relations, central to the discourse of the Will. But in the Platonic form, taken over by Christianity and moving around in Kants belief system, something does not merely follow along with or from, as if in a mode of agency, rather it becomes or is established as dependent upon something else in some specific way, as in the case of the middle-voice configuration of Fate, or, for instance, in its redetermination as being; whence the mediaeval platform for existence, which refers us to the first element in the Kantian triad of relations, where we encounter substance in its immediate or determinant relation to its accidents as definitive traits. But what is it precisely that one is here struggling with in advance as well as after the fact of all such massive re-determinations? What is it that Aristotle was struggling with when he attempted to formalize the structure of Platonic definitional reasoning in a propositional calculus of terms involving the verb to be and various kinds of negation? To what end was this analysis employed? It used to be said that one of the problems of Platonic reasoning was that it treated universals as if things. To do so then required the addition of another world. In the world of perception, things appear only as specific singular beings. In the so-called supersensible world, universals now occur to the mind in the position of the things of perception. One problem with this view is that the mind or intellect must here be of the order of the things it now encounters or comes into contact with. So the intellect, and with it the soul that it now functions to determine, must itself be more like a universal. And this speaks to us very much in the language of commodification already alluded to, where everything is transfigured as a monetary value, so something formal as related to number and to be dealt with in a calculative system of accounting. But in a certain sense this is all very precisely backwards. For, as just stated, it is actually universals that are being treated more like singular beings or things for Plato, not singular beings that are being turned into universals as in the abstracting process of commercial exchange that might be linked with the Aristotlean uses of comparative imagination in the formation of certain general kinds or types something which comes into its own again with St. Thomas in that age when money again begins to move worlds in new directions. So in Platonic philosophy certain kinds of universals are actually being perceptualized, rather than -83-

formulated by abstraction. This also involves a mimetic imagination rather than a representational imagination of simulation and replacement.. And it is this, peceptualized system of intelligible forms, which establishes the strange linkage between the money-system and mathematics at a deeper level of formality than our own systems of simulation, progressively built out in terms of representation. But this also speaks to us, as if we were dealing with geometry and some order of principles that take shape and are configured in various modes of demonstration. But what precisely, then, is the relation between a triangle and the definition of a triangle? If, in other words, we use the patterns of the propositional calculus of judgement, what is the nature of the relation between the subject and its predicate, where the predicate is now a formal definition? It turns out that in such a case the subject and the predicate of the statement are fully convertible terms in a sense that seems only to belong to the treatment of singular judgements in the older propositional calculus. The triangle is both a universal and a particular together. It is a singular; even if rather indiscriminately so with regard to the general definition. And it is precisely this kind of singularity that is then still sought in an analogous manner by Aristotle in his development of what we now call species definition. Of course, for Aristotle, the word for species is simply the word for form as Platonic shape or eidos. But is it possible to use such a pattern of reasoning for a discussion of the relation between matters which seem to be of different orders? Property is Appearance; by which I mean to say, private property is only a culturally housed appearance. The point here and the point which requires the complicating addition of Platonic and Aristotelian theory is that private property is no more real in some more ordinary sense of perception than an order of triangles. Indeed, it may not even be as real as such, depending upon how one treats of mathematical entities and geometrical figures. But in every respect such property depends upon a legal definition, which definition or formula, a logon to use Aristotle, determines an order of possible perceptual awareness to go along with a world of institutions and practices. It is this last point that is crucial, as well as being the one that seems to be beyond Aristotle and more of the order of Hegelian patterns of reasoning: Institutional structures organize more than society at large. They organize the perception of the people who inhabit them and are related to one another in terms of them and their own, that is, the institutions own, principles, so those principles that define the institutions in their interrelations, while controlling the interrelations of the particular people within them. The principles are mediating structures which define by dividing and simultaneously connecting the institutions one to another, virtually like an order of Platonic solids, mediated by the principles of geometry which they embody, and configured, so divided and determined, by light. But these institutional solids or volumetric entities also contain and connect now the people within them, one to another, just as their principles, as definitive and mediating structures, connect all people, one with another, of every institutional context. With Leibniz, one writes the equation which defines the relation of an infinite number of points on a line. With Fichte, one comprehends this infinitude as an interior order of self-reflection, whereby one writes the equation of the self in relation to itself as the -84-

Kantian framework of possible experience. With Hegel, one writes the equation of the self in relation to itself as an order of other selves, thereby moving back to the level of the institutions themselves. And here, the logon as what is between people penetrates the individual as such, in the mode of the logos, so as language. But to return to Kant and the redetermination of Platonic theory, we begin to see that appearance is never one and the same with its reflectively produced double, the simulation or representation, as the mere image as such or even as seen, even though these two orders are always closely related. Appearance, more like light, is the medium within which the image arises to be seen, recognized and known. The thing is imprinted upon or carried in Kantian terms, objectively constituted by way of the medium at the level of the principled understanding that pertains to such. And it is this medium that is being asserted in the mode of a singular judgement at the level of a definitional statement or predicate; which statement is always at the level of formality. But perceptual consciousness belongs to that hard nut of self-awareness that is always most difficult to split open. In conceptual terms, Fichte splits the atom of Individuum along the line-divide of self-reflection in relation to Kantian theory and its practical redeployment of constitutive principles in moral affairs, while Hegel expands upon the nature and meaning of such a self-divided totality. Still, people believe in private property the way they believe in themselves as defined in terms of the tree that is standing in front of them in ordinary perception. They fail to see that something has always been organized by perception as an appearance, whether in a social or a natural manner. Indeed, they fail to see that the very things which they see partake of something which belongs simultaneously both to their seeing and to the things as such even as seen. Something is unifying their perception of the object, and that same something is also unifying both that perception at the level of the subjective possibility of vision and the object within the object-field of all possible objects as visible. But, again, it appears that there is both a natural and a cultural variant of this realm of vision and the visible. In the natural order perhaps the mediator/connector par excellence is light or our radiant energy. But in the institutional order, what precisely is located here? The volumetric entities called institutions are connected by many things: language, money, and people themselves as thinking subjects. Here, however, I have moved very far very fast. I have, as it were, already arrived again in the world of Kantian philosophy and its order of appearances in relation to the sciences and to the modern world of private property and its order of institutional development. The question remains, however, as to what made this second-order system of appearances possible. And this is also a question of the nature and meaning of appearances in the Greek world of Platonic philosophy with their own order of property and commerce functioning as a proto-form for what follows. In this regard the older metaphysics and the older logic become virtually our only guides, for this proto-form of private property has long since disappeared from our view of things.41

Note 41 It is at this point that one finally parts company with comparative anthropology and ethnography as employed by George Thomson in the work already cited, and moves over more fully into the framework first broached by his exiled socialist acquaintance, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und Kperliche Arbeit: ZurTheorie der Gesellschaftlichen Synthesis; or as retitled in the -85-

English translation, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. Here the form and mode of cognition is identified with the form and mode of social synthesis, especially as this bears on the system of commodity exchange. But now it must be admitted, that even where we can look out at other cultures still extant in our world and think to find, as it were, some version of the property relations of the Athenians, we cannot find in these other contexts some double of the system of reasoning that developed in relation to such. But this is quite a problem, because there is no simple way to map the relation between theory and practice in its historical development. What we can find, however, are always intellectual-cultural configurations which are, as it were, both older and newer: tribal configuration and configurations of organized high civilization and the remnants of these as reorganized by the present-day system of capitalism and nation-states. But the framework that bridges the gap between these configurations can only be understood from within the more developed system of economic and theoretically empowered technology that has now effectively altered all else. And here we encounter that doubled framework that speaks to the socially configured order of reflective reasoningin its historical development. If, however, we have to treat of this development in terms of a conditional analysis that looks away from the subjectification of such, so looking away from the Hegelian pattern where all seems to be cut in the image of a mind that thinks itself by way of an entire world, natural and human, which it thereby produces along the way expressly for the purpose of knowing itself by way of the thinkers it also produces along with and in terms of its societal development, then we are left with a puzzle at the level of the products of consciousness that remains difficult to resolve. The very attempt to pass beyond this by way of a use of scientific or empirical procedures is hopelessly flawed in that this entire order of reasoning only follows from the same cultural intersection that gives us first the Greek world of antiquity and then, by historical distension and institutional development, the modern world of Europe and beyond. The intellectual developments of this order are so specific that they are never found anywhere else unless imported, and this already in the case of ancient Rome. And what must be imported along with such is some version of the economic and political framework that supports such patterns of reasoning. But even if these developments are highly specific, they are specific as regards that entire framework of reasoning in relation to a world that gives us the so-called modern view complete with all its own aberrations of religious consciousness stemming from this same and other social systems. The question then becomes historically centered in the Greek world: What is it that permitted or promoted the full intellectual development that we see there? And here the term full is very important. For we would not even recognize the radicality of the pre-Socratic natural theorists, were we not able to view this in terms of the Aristotelian developments at the level of the treatment of substratum as material. For it is Aristotle who makes the material fully plastic by driving the negative system of determinations to a point where matter simply ceases to be anything specific at all, becoming, as it were, a purely formal concept, rather than something to be encountered in some possible experience of material things. (Cf. Metaphysics VII, 3.) From this reduction to a nothing so negative that it cannot even be a something as mere accident, it then becomes that which has the absolute form of becoming enformed, pure dynamis, plasticity itself, now both physical and conceptional. And it is in this sense that it is paired properly with energeia and related to entelecheia, both of which terms extend the sense of substratum in the direction of the invisible but -86-

Appearances in Platonic philosophy are not purely formal. The double system at the center of the Divided Line has not yet collapsed in such manner as to occupy only the double subject of the subsequent history of philosophy: God and the patriarchal human individual of some system of private property, even when the system seems to disappear into a feudalism, where, of course, everyone who holds property does so ultimately in the name of God the Father

intelligible order of things and activities. But what seems even more crucial is the development of Platonic philosophy. And it is here that we first sense the density of the affective relation between reasoning and the new political world that had been taking shape for several hundred years. In what always appears to be a throwback to a more unified field of human reasoning, Plato houses the entire discourse of possible logical and theoretical reasoning within the framework of the problematic treatment of justice. And for some reason, it is this interest that shifts all else in the direction of what will become eventually the modern order of reasoning, even if by way of the development of a new order of religious consciousness. But the specific bridge between this political interest and the more theoretically configured field of interest is presented in the attendant development of the view of viewing, the field of appearances. Again, consider the following configuration which puts the beginning framework of argument from Bk II of Republic in relation to the image of the Divided-Line from the end of Bk VI: appearing just but being unjust : : appearing unjust but being just and appearing equal but being unequal : : appearing unequal but being equal. If we simply rewrite everything in terms of the problem of the true and the false we will arrive at the general framework for the problem of knowledge as well as the context for the relation between conjecture and truth which makes out the context of opinion. But in returning to opinion we again return to the political world, even if today in a more socially saturated and less directly political context of imagery and rhetoric. The question then arises, as it has been continuously put in this piece, as to the relation between the framework of appearance and the context for interest, especially with the expansion of the field of interest in the direction of the so-called sciences. It is, in other words, the political component, by which I mean that aspect that both depends upon the advent of democracy and reflects both the institutional structures and the problems of democracy, ancient and modern, that somehow shapes the possibility of theoretical reasoning and the sciences; and this by reframing the discourse of truth in terms of the problem of justice and linking this with problems of deception and opinion by way of the order of appearance. Only the first aspect of a conditional analysis for this is then contained in the question of property and the reorganization of this in terms of what becomes a theoretically imbued order of money-form exchange relations. But where the money-system does not pass over into the full meaning of a system of private property fused with state power, what is noticeable is that the passage into and out of democratic state-forms is missing. In other words, and in a way that is difficult to articulate and present, it is the development of the democracy that makes theoretical knowledge more than merely possible, just as it is only on this basis as well that the abstract and formal structures of economics become conceptually and institutionally possible as actualized in a given world. -87-

and some great lord or King.42 But neither are we in a world where there is only God as the King in an exchange relation that involves the remnants of the matriarchal unity of the clan or gens, reconfigured in a logic of appropriation and consumption. In the Greek world of antiquity we still have the patriarchy in its attempt to secure itself in its own form of property relations, but we do not have this as absolute. In such a situation, in the world of thinking we notice that everything is located on the line that separates and connects immediate sense and purely rational activity. In the world of property relations that line is progressively occupied by the newly developed money system. Something, virtually formal in nature, begins to reorganize the older meanings of property and ownership: money begins to penetrate property by way of the commodity form. But the beginning remains always incomplete, as too much of the institutional order still belongs to another world. And after the fall of the Roman world in the West, everything goes underground, disappearing into the very form of communal property out of which it had arisen in the first place; but now in no way still being of this more original order of communal property. And it is also here that we first see the place for an interior dialectical restructuring that alters any simple use of analogy and forces one to move into the patterns of analysis first developed by Rousseau, Herder, Fichte and Hegel. I once called this an order of affinity, rather than an order of analogy, as with Hume and his Enlightenment pattern of reasoning; in that affinity runs sameness across and through a principle of difference, while analogy organizes patterns of difference by way of an external structure having to do with the same in the mode of a principle. But whether and how this is ultimately of any use depends on the further recognition that the dialectical relation of similarity and difference is itself that which is at stake throughout. In other words, one needs both orders to deal with either system. On the other hand, affinity is more like some more original form of metaphorin the field of language. Analogy, by comparison, is more a matter of a mathematical reorganization of language. And I would now say in the light of what has just been discussed that Analogy and Affinity are related as in the Platonic treatment of Shape and Color; while the dialectical theory of historical development utilizes both while colonizing the line of difference itself in a temporally charged manner of subjectivity. Still, one should never lay aside, in some simple manner, a conceptual difference of this order, especially if it has been or still can be used to take one to the heart of some great affair, such as the organization of history. There is then something to affinity that is still being worked out here, while analogy is largely just
42

It is precisely here that one begins to suspect that there is something very different about the nature of feudal property in Western Europe in the mediaeval world. It is already reformulated so as to be private, but only in a universal sense that admits of particularity at the level of real divisions. All that is lacking is a new more radical distribution in the mode of singularity. It is not really like property in Pharonic Egypt or the Middle-East generally, or property in China or India; and this, even where it appears to be, as with the monasteries in Europe. This suspicion then amounts to the fact that the older property forms have already been evacuated and rendered nil. This is a fundamental diremption or emptying which leaves everything open for a radical redetermination. And it goes along with a fundamental diremption of an older subject, which empties itself as well into its God in such a way that it is left open for a radical redetermination at the level of the state as a system of external authority. Matters, then, begin to shift with the reintroduction of the money system in the 12th and 13th centuries. -88-

a frame, and, as such, a trap, as in Renaissance or Enlightenment patterns of reasoning. But what again remains special is the Greek use of analogy, as that which set up of the system in the first place. Here we always see the linguistic force of affinity operating alongside of the mathematical form of analogy. This linguistic form belongs to the perceptual order of the middle-voice. And when this disappears into the mathematical form, it produces the framework for the modern dialectic. But much more is disappearing here and being reborn in a new more elastic form: democracy disappears into imperial, whence feudal hierarchy; and the older, more direct passions disappear into the emotional landscape of Christianity and its strangely attenuated doctrine of love. From a modern, especially a contemporary perspective, everything here is backlit and saturated by systems of meaning and institutional settings that have long since been all but naturalized. Our perceptual system, like our property system and our emotional system, is now fully authorized to dominate a world, as if nothing else had ever been possible. And it is precisely here that we are often most trapped in our analogically configured manner of moving back on historical origins. With regard to other kinds of cultures and their religions or spiritual settings, this shows up by reducing these to contemporary patterns of spiritualism as that which actually goes hand and hand with the hyper-views of contemporary astrophysics and economics. Everything appears now, as already mentioned, as if on a television show: the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Incas and Aztecs, the remnants of the tribes, etc. For various peoples still existing with stronger relations to other forms of tribal and civil organization, this makes out a very specific kind of problem. But whatever that problem, it must now also participate in the more uniform problem already alluded to in the mode of the dominant patterns of Western Civilization and Western Culture, especially as regards the origins of that now dominant system. And so, again, we have the question concerning the moment of transition: How actually think the Greek system of property and knowledge as truly distinct from the world that has since been developed in the image of that earlier system as an elaboration of its institutional possibilities and its initial order of appearances? Here, I am literally reworking cultural history in the image of the image of understanding: everything doubles but is somehow held together. But there are two points that need to be made here. The first relies on the frame and an extensive use of historical analogy matched with institutional analogy. Here we have the system which asserts the relations, private property :: theoretical appearances, within the historical frame, ancient order :: modern order. But the second has to do with the form that makes the analogy possible in the first place; or more precisely, the form which reasoning takes as it is first generated as an analogical order standing always next to perception, which it then recognizes as such. And it is this which then has something to do with the development of the concept of affinity, mentioned above. It is in the context of this second problem that we encounter the meaning of the field of interest or the way things are related to subjectivity and the self. And while it might be something of a commonplace to assert that the self of Platonic philosophy does not encounter itself in the mode of the Kantian subject, this does not really tell us how it does encounter itself; as, for instance, a thing of immediate reflection within a system of bodily perception, where the body makes perception possible by its own participation in the order of -89-

sensible things.43 This system of self-relation seems to us to be more objective in that the self relates to itself as if a thing of perception. But in fact it is considerably less objective than any modern version as such. And this despite the fact that all modern frameworks are more abstract. For the fact of the matter is that the self does not appear here in the ancient world as essentially related to the body at all. The self only appears as the Platonic soul, which has as yet no essential relation to a particular body as such, and has actually freed itself from such associations as pertain to the views of tribal cultures, before all of this returns upon the Christian subject as singular person. Such a Platonic soul can then be freed further to travel from body to body, in a manner that still reflects upon the earlier patters of metempsychosis as prevalent in the religions of other older cultures belonging with other older forms of civilization. Therefore, this Platonic self or soul appears in a world that is half-way to our universe of subjectivity and the self, as we might have them today with the whole of the corporate cosmos in tow. But such a Platonic self, as quite distinct from other modes of such a soul in these other older high civilizations, does look very much more like the subject of Aristotles propositional calculus. For it is a thing that other things can be predicated of, but which eludes all but essential predication at the level of the full convertibility of terms. But the problem is that what is fully convertible in this sense is either at the extreme of the accidental system of traits and characteristics or without specific reference to the person as such. Socrates, in other words, and to use Aristotles most famous figure of reference and the most convenient bridge to Platonic theory, is either an old man with a snub nose, pop-eyes and big ears, moving in the mode of the satyr-like figure who needles people incessantly about topics they have no way of dealing with in an adequate manner this, taken almost directly from the opening of Theaetetus or he is man
43

Here we come upon the earlier version of Spinozas interest in what a body is capable of in its own right, as this becomes an object of interest for Deleuze: See: Spinoza: Philosophie practique, 1970 or Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, tr. Robert Hurley (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 1988), cf., p. 17. This is then expanded upon via the concept of the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, where we get a kind of new metaphysics of the body to go along with a new psychology and a new view of cultural history. But in this regard it is always worth remembering that Spinoza was one of the very first political philosophers of modernity, coming as he does from the world of the Dutch break with the Spanish Hapsburg Empire at the end of the 16th century, and the ensuing turmoil that effects everything, from commerce to the more famous English Revolution of the 1640's. He actually dies in 1677 while producing his Short Treatise on Politics, breaking off within the discussion of the problems of democracy at the point where he tries to justify the disenfranchisement of women and their full divorce from the system of state authority. Is it then possible that he could not rationally justify what he had just written, especially within the framework of modern democracy? Indeed, is it possible that he had here encountered a problem with Platos Republic, not so much in terms of democracy per se, but in terms of his own attempt to divorce women from political authority in any form whatsoever? He was, in other words, duplicating a cultural prejudice without an adequate critique of its basis, even just in the history of political theory and with respect to the most famous text in that tradition as it had emerged from and finally broken free of the Renaissance world of Princes and Kings. -90-

as human being, whose question concerning the nature and meaning of knowledge in relation to virtue is a version of the order of that famous abstracted reduction of the Sophoclean Oedipal question of parentage Who am I ? as this had been housed from the first in the political city along with the problems of democracy. Everything in the logical calculus carries Aristotle towards the latter determination at the level of the eidos, shape as form: man the political animal, and as such, the only animal with reasoned speech. Yet the demand of singularity itself resists the reduction to mere species man, even as culturally specified in the relation to the Greek world of the city-state and a particuilar person with a particular fate or destiny. So Socrates is and remains Socrates, even if now for the most part only the reflectively divided Socrates of the literary and philosophic traditions. And while this appears to be a version of the presentation of a specific triangle within the system of all possible and actual triangles, so also a determination at the level of being and the possible beings, it is actually something wholly distinct. Here the limit of the logical calculus is not the species but the actual human being and all memory on the part of others of such. And it is only the logical encounter at this limit that constructs for us the problem of an appearance beside or beyond the physical appearance as such. It is the fusion, not of the universal and the particular, but of the universal meaning and the singular being as such, a leap that Kant will later re-inscribe in a new way in his Analytic of the Sublime from the Critique of Judgement. But more originally in the Greek world, it is this peculiar second appearance that has the quality of our first system of private property, as something standing always immediately still beside another and older system of property relations.44 Socrates, of course, was still standing next to his shade, as his older soul and shape. This initial system of appearance in and for theoretical reasoning as a second-order appearance is what can then be asserted to have remained present within any more developed version, up to and including our present world of techno-appearances and images floating on a
44

There is something imprecise and difficult to comprehend in this formulation. In the propositional calculus the singular is the fusion of the universal and the particular. Such a fusion is really best fitted to a conceptual entity, such as in a species definition: man not a man. But clearly in the case of an actual singular human being, such as Socrates, the universal has no real play with a field of some as at least one but admitting of many more, or the Greek more than two. (Classical Greek has a number of special grammatical forms for both verbs and nouns having to do with the case of just two as in pairs and specific patterns of speech with only two people involved.) All particularity here bears on the individual in the mode of a universal. In the context of property law this has something to do with the peculiar language of several property and severalty in the place of private property as a determination of ownership. For instance, originally a field could be held by several people at the same time, as common pasture or as allotted for planting. And this obviously has more of the significance of the some in logical judgement. Private property appears to be too much like personal property to admit of the kinds of logical variation required by corporations and the like at the level of artificial persons and stock holders. But the rhetorical confusion of personal and private is very useful to the ideology of capitalism; which is to say, it is useful for the political deployment of the ideology by those who would use it to hold power in some popularly supported manner. -91-

world of screens. In this regard, however, this mediating form is not what some tribal people or some other development of such to the level of an organized high civilization would contain or operate in and through in their own right. Rather, it is what would be more specifically developed as the understructure to only that world which any of these other social organizations of consciousness would come into contact with in encountering the present-day order of capitalist society. But it would also be something within the present order less alien to any other such tribal or hierarchically centralized people. In the same way it would also be between the people of such cultures and themselves, as it were, in something of a less immediate, so less invisible sense than for anyone completely lost to the present-day frameworks as these are proliferated by the contemporary business culture of world commerce and trade. Just as the ancient Greeks still stand between virtually every other order of social organization with its attendant pattern of consciousness and what has since become the so-called Western version of such, so, too, their peculiar synthesis of tribal and civilized patterns would still speak to large numbers of people as something of an intermediate level. Again, however, and irrespective of the dubious practical meaning of such a finding, there is something here regarding the interior of any system of property relations as this refers to ways of seeing, so sensing the world in an immediate interface with patterns of reasoning, as well as the deployment of the more formal or logical versions of such reasoning. I am again referring to the basic organization of understanding as this operates in a kind of uninterrupted interface with perception and through this with the social and/or natural world as a whole. Property relations are, then, a large part of how human interests are developed by way of a system of understanding defined by and defining a world of appearance. It is here that the social and the individual are fused, this being the existential ground of the fusion of the universal and the singular. However, the story of the advent of private property carries us much further and in very different directions.

But it is now obvious that clarity is once more at something of a minimum; even if now it is more a matter of saturation than a problem of some simple absence or more ordinary pattern of confusion. Again, how can an objective institutional structure like private property occupy the mind in a foundational manner that has to do with matters of a quite different order? But now at least the way to the answer has been made possible: It does so by becoming that which is used to construct a world of social appearances that undergirds the intellectual developments that in turn both require and result in a theory of appearances.45 And it is this process of development that
45

This is a culturally transposed version of the movement of Ficthes Wissenschaftslehre. Confronted with the organization of the Kantian critical system, which moves first through the critique of a naturally oriented realm of Erkenntnis in order to arrive at the entire field of praktischen Vernunft, one eventually realizes that something from the resultant field was actually present from the first in such a way that it divided to become the basis for the more ordinary distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning. But rather than developing this grounding relation as an absolute subject or even as the field of Subjectivitt, here I move to investigate the constitutive framework of a culturally invested subjective interest that results from a mediating fusion of other grounds. There is something culturally specific which makes -92-

hangs together with the transformation of society that goes by the name of democracy. But, again, democracy is not a causal result of private property and the money-system of exchange. It is, rather, a peculiar kind of co-lateral development that goes with the economic order in the manner of the relation of color and :figure. The thing or being that is left hanging in this presentation is, then, that which determines the singular judgement with respect to agency. This is the subject, both the term and the being, as that which is, in its own determinant ground as medium, more like light in the Platonic example. And the subject is related to the world, inner and outer, by way of an affective order of interest that is to desire and its field as the framework of appearance is to the objects of possible perception. The basic form of this subject is then always to be housed in an older societal format: In the still communal order of the ancient world of the Greeks, it is the instituted order of the gods; for modernity with its inheritance of a number of movements in the direction of fully formal private property and the more formidable modern state, the subject is that strangely divided individual as God. But always now the subject is divided with respect to itself, rather than simply over and against some other. What it is precisely in some other context where this division is fully reciprocal as with the framework of touch is difficult to determine: For instance, in the Greek world of middle-voice exchanges, one never actually touches anything that does not at least potentially touch back in a sense that makes feeling-sensing possible in the first place, along with very much else. The double of touch as tych is dystych.. And double-touched is touched once too much; whence the unfortunate encounter balancing out the fortunate. Here, the world is more than merely alive; it is still, at least at first, full of gods, who are anything but merely well disposed towards mortals. Determining, by way of recognizing, that these gods are nothing but the forms of the culture itself as piled on top of the other forces of nature, takes twenty-five hundred years and a history of conflict that leaves one thinking that these Greeks were right about their gods, even if they did not understand that they were only talking in large part about themselves.

the dialectic possible in various forms, while effecting a massive shift at the level of historical development and the general horizon of possibility for change. -93-

IV

Interest is predicated of the subject at the level of a definitional determinant. It is because of this that we can speak of all interest as self-interest. But as a definitional determinant, interest is in the position of a medium rather than being had or possessed merely as a predicate or quality. And in this sense of medium or middle-voiced affect, it is in the position of money in the objective system of exchange relations. But more subjectively, it makes out the order of contact/division with a world in general as well as a world of the mind, and thereby constructs the interface between agency in any form and some content. Interest thereby defines the self, as it were, before the self. It imposes its logic on the self so as to become self-interested or selfconscious feeling and reasoning. In this way, it constitutes the field of, as well as the connection between, desire and reason, while occupying the line of contact/division defining the field of perception. It is in the position of the Will. In psychology we encounter here the order of drive and instinct. The second, as with Humes psycho-centric theory of custom and utility, is taken largely, if not entirely, from Hobbes and the early modern world generally; and in this form it functions as the foundational or cultural version of the more modern psychology of desire with its redetermination of instinct at the level of drive. In truth, this driveis itself a return to the Greek hormon as an unreflective and so undivided version of the distinction in play. However, this later psychological view also belongs to the framework of the positivistic sciences, as these have now been variously critiqued and opened up for conditional analysis, along with Freuds theories and their involvement with such. But the more important critique lies deeper in terms of the modern cultural framework. Deleuze was already reasoning along such lines forty years ago. Following Nietzsche back to those early English swamp toads of utilitarian reasoning, will, however, only take us so far. So, again as with Nietzsche, one might also continue in the same vein to the dyspeptic age of Luther and the late Renaissance world of the Reformation. But in this way we jump over the origins of modern capitalism, private property and the state. Again, everything seems to happen in a peculiar space that opens up quite suddenly. Who can actually trace out the rise of the contemporary order of international corporate capitalism in some direct manner from the early world of the religious reformation? Even Shakespeares world seems disjoined from our own, though it is certainly verging on it; just as one can read a play like Hamlet in various ways.46 And indeed, what is
46

In so many respects Hamlet is the great modern play, or the play at the very outset of modernity as such. Shakespeare sweeps up here both the figure of Orestes and that of Oedipus, combining the force and themes of the most famous plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles in a single work. But what is missing is very precisely the political context of these earlier plays as they bear directly on the problems of the Athenian democracy. This, for some peculiar reason, one hardly even notices; perhaps, because the earlier plays themselves are always taken by us more in their mythological setting than in their more direct political context. In this way, everything seems to be about princes kings and queens all around; figures who are, as they say, greater than life, especially our more ordinary mode of the political life.. But even so, it should -94-

missing is missing in the way of the Big Letters from which we always read the small: What is missing is the modern State-Form. Strangely, then, one seems more at home today while reading Platos Republic than some Renaissance reception of such. Again, the shift that is most telling has to do with the reappearance of the world of democracy, now in the more fully representative form belonging to the parliamentary developments of the modern nation-state. Of course, here and for us, this is not a matter of some simple approval or disapproval of democratic institutions, especially as regards the reading of Platonic or Kantian texts. Rather it is a problem of reasoning, along with just these texts, always from within a world profoundly affected by such institutional changes. Again, as with the Greeks, one notices quickly that it would be convenient to ignore the problem of causality as vested in the development of the state-form, when tracing out the rise of the new patterns of reasoning. Money and the transformation in property relations make for a much simpler story of the evolution of social-consciousness; whence also the treatment of the modern psyche and the modern sciences. With modernity the world, once again, doubles, to go

be remembered in this regard that the context that is here missing is also that context which first created the framework for the initial presentations themselves. What is more, the context of Hamlet is literally that of the prince who cannot rule; perhaps because the rule of princes is now already foreclosed and over as a meaningful epoch. But we also prefer the greater density of the modern subject, to the formal display of such as a mere cipher to a particular world-order. It is the total conception of the Greek plays that still strikes us today, along with the remarkable use of language and concentration of plot or mythos bearing on dramatic affect; but we cannot find ourselves in Oedipus or Orestes, unless we recreate them in a more compelling existential format. Hamlet, of course, already possesses this existential format, as the product of some formidable juncture of social forces and poetical insight.. And it will take considerable insight of another kind to remodel this so as not to run off into the reductions of soap-opera in a thousand forms, while bringing the whole back to bear on the political problem and the social context in a fully critical manner. Here we will have first the birth of historical drama and then its rebirth in the mode of epic theater: Schiller and Brecht, Wallenstein and Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. But in the movement to the contemporary world there is always too much more to be dealt with: psychological theater, existential theater, opera, vaudeville and the movies. And it is the last that finally carries us over into our present world of electronically reconstituted screens, where character and plot become increasingly inconsequential and the visual register itself is played both with and upon in an ever more constituitive manner. Of course, even for this there is a pre-history and a history of sorts, the field of the Greek sken and formalized Roman and Renaissance backdrops, whence eventually a new world of stage-sets with perspectival and anamorphically painted backdrops and wings; to which must always be added the shift from the Greek theater, so marvelously acoustical and aesthetically pleasing, to the O of Shakespeare, and the indoor barns that followed. And then ... to nowhere, the living-room on the way to the lap-top. Here, then, a brief history of alienation in social space, to go along with the rise of the theatrical subject and the problematic political place for the appearance of modern subjectivity. -95-

along with the various things of commodity exchange in the money system. And it is easier still to note that the direct democracy of the Greeks, and the corresponding order of partnerships in commerce in their world, is supplanted by the indirect patterns of fully representational democracy and the corporate models of business that proceed by stages from Rome and its Empire to the general corporate form of the Catholic Church and eventually to the fragmentation of this general form by the various Protestant sects.47 In our present patterns of
47

The first corporations of a more strictly contemporary economic sort appear in the republican period of Rome, as it begins to shift towards empire around 220 BC. These are the Publicani, or Tax Farms as they are called in the early-modern world, when the legal form is resurrected, expanded in relation to the stock-option company, and again made productive for the generation of wealth. In Rome they are legal entities that survive the death of the particular members of an investor pool and so remain intact semi-independently of the people involved. In fact, they are investment companies that are granted the right to raise taxes in some province for the Roman State, having raised the capital to buy such rights and been left to profit from surplus taxation. They become a source of wealth for the upper-middle-class or equites, as the members of this class come to full power in the Senate, presaging the rise of the Empire by way of the collapse of the more democratic elements of the tribunate and the popular assemblies of the older forms of the Republic, which assemblies had come to power initially in a battle with the aristocratic patrician class. The form and result of this older battle was then much effected by the presence of the Greek city-states of southern Italy and Sicily. Especially important here is the democratic establishment in Syracuse in or about 466 B.C. But now, by way of a significant detour as regards the general problem of corporation as this bears on the development of Rome as the housing and the model for so much else, it should be noted that this early Roman history of the Republic is something which must be taken, not just with a grain of salt, but a lump of sugar. The traditional foundation date of the Republic as 509 B.C. is, even in our transformed dating systems, quite curiously just one-year earlier than the Kleisthenian reform of the Athenian constitution in 508/07. There is, then, no real evidence for placing the events in question at this early date. What there is evidence for, however, is the presence of Greek merchants and moneyed interests in the market district surrounding the temple of Ceres (Demeter) in early Rome. And it is to here that the populous retires when it revolts on the occasion of a set of authoritarian decrees delivered by the patricians of the original Senateof the 5th century. There is, in other words, no evidence at all for a generalized autochthonous Mediterranean or Graeco-Italian movement to democracy, a favorite theory of social evolutionists of the 19th century, such as Mommsen, and in a different more universal context, of Marx and Engels. So what we really have here is the first appropriation of the form and force of the democracy, by a very different culture. And herein lies part of the origin of later corporate formation; for there is apparently no straight-line development out of the ancient Greek polis in this regard. But even if Rome offers us no parallel autochthonous origin for democracy, there is still a problem here: namely, that of explaining why the Romans do not maintain their Lydian-form Etruscan Kings or move more directly to the Persian mode of tribal confederacy and empire. And there are some still stranger things to note about the Carthaginians, that bear on their resistance to all such influence. Still, the deeper problem that so many theorists seem to wish to get by here, is precisely that of the cultural -96-

singularity of the Greek development of democracy; its virtual, in fact, its actual historical uniqueness. To put it bluntly, such is not natural, save on some rebuilt version of an Aristotelian definition of physis; which is to say that it is not supported by a view of cultural necessity, shifted out of the framework for the physical necessity belonging to the so-called modern empirical hard sciences. The relation of such views, on the other hand, to biology and evolutionary theory remains something of a vexed question. On the one hand, one ends up much too easily in the world of Social Darwinism, with its naturalization of capitalist dogma; on the other hand, one does have here a proto-framework for valuing the singular accidental occurrence. But transferring anything from a realm of chemistry and genes to a world of linguistically grounded cultural transformations involving the affectively saturated rational recognitions, deliberations and actions of various people organized in specific kinds of groups over time, is simply too much to undertake without the projection of a mechanism to secure and critique the required lines for transference. Culture, in other words, is only metaphorically related to nature, just as nature remains reciprocally still largely a metaphor of the cultural order. And this is the case, not so much because culture is not a natural occurrence in its own right, but because nature is not such a natural occurrence as we still conceive it as decisively distinct from the cultural sphere. Moreover, the metaphorical connection employed here, is, in its own right, at least two things: again, it is both analogy and affinity, as was discussed briefly in a related context in the last section. But here, on the way back to the topic at hand again, not merely the order of corporations and their development, but the context for the assessment of all such historical material it might now be added that the analogical form goes with the attraction of physics to mathematical principle, while the notion of affinity goes more with the order of organic nature. And the whole of this, itself a naturalistic treatment of subject-matter, would carry us back again to the world of Kant and the Critique of Judgement, where the double system of ends is in play to divide the work as a whole and to differentiate already between the mechanistic order of Newtonian physics and the taxonomy of Linnaean biology. But it would also take us back, in the very same context, to the world of art and the naturalistic theories of Goethe, where affinity functions in place of strict causal determinacy. It is then precisely between these two orders that the present-day science of genetics grows up and develops by way of the analysis of the code, itself borrowed first from the world of language and later from linguistic theory. And it is this complex code, the interlocking double helix of DNA, that is then taken back over, with its double-sided binary format, into semiology by Barthes, where it is combined with what becomes apparent in the editing procedures of film, and reapplied to cultural material beyond the ordinary field of speech and writing. From here it then issues as a generalized instrument of historical cultural analysis within the broader framework of a Marxist sociology and a critique of a world-order of capitalism with its hold on the nation-state as its instrument of colonizing, imperialistic power. And matters have moved on from here to the digitalized spreadsheets and flow-charts of modern multi-national corporations and the world of information technology, now increasingly employed as an instrument of cultural analysis for a social order that it saturates and so in part reconstitutes. But the whole of this lacks a critical framework, beyond that of some assumed use of theoretical insights from the past, whether those of Marx or Kant. So while it seems informative, we are -97-

reasoning, we thereby arrive quickly enough at the contemporary order of oligopoly and representative democracy as the replacement for the ancient order of oligarchy and direct democracy. But in neither case do we deal with the problem of appearances in theory or the highly peculiar nature of property relations that comes to predominate along with the rise of the democratic state forms in question. On the other hand, what could be simpler than supposing a uniform basis in human nature at the level of interest? The class-structured vision of natural aptitudes or natures in Platonic philosophy does not support such a uniform basis in its presently reduced form of the radically self-interested individuals of Hobbsean theory, just as it does not support the democracy in any form, save, perhaps, as a given or existing basis to be played against a sophisticated fiction that pertains as much to the form of thought itself. But why not, then, presuppose modern or even contemporary patterns of this radical self-interest and construct everything else in accordance with this? All we have to do is forget about the frameworks of Greek reasoning in general and Platonic reasoning in particular, and then forget again about the total framework of modern reasoning in general and Kantian reasoning in particular. And since few people even know anything about these topics, owing to our remarkably remiss educational frameworks and the fundamental divorce of patterns of informed thinking from the more ordinary frameworks for getting along with life, as these now effectively control even academic patterns of reasoning, such forgetting is made considerably easier. Indeed, if we marginalize both the force and meaning of reflective reasoning in general and stick to the broad lines of a purely pragmatic framework as it has developed in the United States in the course of the last two hundred or so years, we are offered a way to explain the state, as well as the universe at large, in a manner that makes perfect sense to any modern businessman, and now also businesswoman, whose psyche is thereby both explained and legitimated along the way as well. Of course, nothing has been said here about reasoning in terms of democracy, except to say that it is a matter of conflicting interests and the relative victory or fusion of one set of interests over or with another. But precisely who or what these interests belong to or with is left unspecified, especially as regards the peculiar manner in which private interests are converted into public interests and vice versa, by means of corporate reality. Could we not say that private property is always and already public by nature? especially since it requires the entire apparatus of state power and judicial process to secure it in any way at all.

never quite sure what it is informative of: our linguistically determined patterns of reasoning or our institutional history of structures and types of culture? The present piece is then located in relation to this problem. But in developing a new form of an older mechanism of criticism, it utilizes the heritage of the systems of idealism and the theoretical framework of appearance, to move in the direction of a general cultural critique of prevalent institutional forms, where both the institutions and the critique are centered in relation to property forms and human patterns of interest that bear always on the present order of economics, but do so from a political perspective. Whether the new money-form pattern of language as information has already rendered all of this obsolete, remains to be seen. But I prefer to think of the critical power of reason as that which is obsolete in the manner and mode of democracy in the 17th century: this was obsolete, as was everything returning from the past at the time, but it still had both the affective and effective power to transform its world by transforming patterns of self-conception. -98-

Now it is clear that I have taken a very long time in coming back to the topic of democracy and the state. This is necessary in that a great deal of material must be put in place, even in an abbreviated treatment such as this, before moving back on such a field. The simple presentation of an analogy linking the ancient and the modern worlds in terms of democratic state-forms, even when complicated by some historical treatment of mediating forms of the tribal and feudal societies preceding both orders, will inevitably fall into line with a more purely economic mode of analysis, such as that used by so many as a way of simplifying the views of Marx and Engels, rather than complicating them in the appropriate manner.48 Everything will eventually come to turn on money and the money system of commodification and exchange, while very little will be said to explain why the mere advent of money in so many other cultural settings does not result in the full development of this money system of exchange as we now have it, or even as it was in the Graeco-Roman world; to say nothing of not resulting in the foundations of the sciences or logical analysis and critical patterns of ethical reasoning of the order of Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau, Hume, Kant or Hegel. In the case of Marxist analysis this has the peculiar effect of leaving unspecified a very important link in the development of the patterns of reasoning being employed: Nothing is said to explain the dialectical aspect of the system of dialectical materialism, just as little is said by way of explaining what it actually takes to empower the modern empirical methodology of the physical sciences. In a more specific sense, nothing is said, beyond an assertion concerning the general ideological nature of philosophical reasoning, to explain Marxs own relation to the patterns of reasoning promoted by the Kantian and the Hegelian systems, and beyond this by the modern world at large.49

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The text is constructed by Engels partially on the basis of notes from Marx. Again, and by way of simplifying the problem: Marx treats the commodity and its formation as a cultural version of the categorial objectification process of Kantian theory, complete with an attachment to the Aesthetic structures, especially the priority of time. This requires the expansions of Hegelian philosophy by means of which such objectification is taken to be a matter of the broader institutional world of customary practice or the field of Sittlichkeit. But this in turn forces the recognition that one has to have a certain kind of world to support the movements into Kantian philosophy as a rather specific response to patterns of reasoning pertaining to British empiricism; and, again, that world has, in large part, to do with Great Britain and the rise of its commercial and industrial empire. But what precisely in such a cultural configuration could force or support a re-appropriation of a doctrine of appearances that reaches back into the world of Platonic philosophy? And while the ancient world does contain a considerable commercial expansion, it is not this alone that supported the creation of Platonic theory and its own appropriation and transformation of the more general context of appearances. Again, the indication is that a certain reframing of the view in the context of the rise of democratic institutions is the crucial mediating element in both orders, ancient and modern, though in the case of Kant, one is now always looking at the effects of such a transformation at something of a distance and by way the Moral Subjects of Humes Treatise as this also reshapes his later Enquiry. It is, again, just this field of Moral Subjects, written in -9949

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This concentration on economic analysis also results in the demotion of the problem of appearances to something referring rather indiscriminately to a mere creation of some collection of philosophers and religious thinkers, ancient and modern. At the most it might permit a recognition that such a doctrine is put in place, as in Kantian philosophy, to make possible a defense of certain more properly religious doctrines or moral principles God, Freedom, and Immortality. But such a wholesale reduction also permits, largely through lack of interest, the single most damaging shift in the treatment of such a doctrine, by following Schopenhauer into the merger of Eastern and Western versions of the view of appearance. To be sure, part of what we now refer to rather generically as India as much a creation of Herodotus and more recently of the British Empire than of some internal ethnic identity was invaded early on by a group or successive groups of so-called Indo-Europeans; but the entirety of the resultant and variously fused civilizations remained ensnared in the forms of reasoning belonging to preclassical Greek culture, and this through several successive invasions of all manner of Peoples. Indeed, one might say that there was a magnificent advance on proto-Homeric Mycenaean mythopoetic reasoning patterns of Greek reasoning of which we know next to nothing outside

large letters even larger than those of the title itself on the original title page to the 1739 edition of the Treatise that forms the third Part of Humes work and gives an indication of the purpose or end for the theories of knowledge as Understanding and the treatment of the Passions, from the first two parts of the work. And from this one does well to take away from A Treatise of Human Nature the understanding that causality itself, as already noted, is a moral force and principle, while the analysis of cause-and-effect reasoning is directed more at an understanding of habituated willed action than at any simple understanding of nature as a whole by way of perception; this being the point that links Hume and Kant at the deepest structural level as moral theorists of knowledge, and this before the fact of all subsequent disagreement and strife concerning the doctrine of freedom. And finally, consider precisely what is most absent from the mediaeval world with its inherited but truncated views on appearances. There is no democratic state-form in force or even on the horizon as the Catholic Church first comes to power along with the feudal aristocracy. Or, more properly, the only surviving element of democratic councillor rule is that which is actually preserved in the curia and ecclesia of the early Church itself, its various councils and assemblies, some of which are still in force today. But this becomes a different kind of force and problem as soon as the Church loses its newly won secular authority of Constantines Empire with the subsequent collapse of the Western Empire as a whole into the Visigoth and Ostrogoth Kingdoms, initiating the patterns of royal house-hold rule of the early middle-ages and the famous tension of Church and State in the whole of Western Europe for the next one-thousand years. Only with the rebirth of democracy in modernity does the state eventually come back to uncontested full power; and this, of course, in close relation to the rise of the new economy. But this also means that, whereas the conjunction of money and commerce in the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Roman Empire is a large part of the initial basis of Christianity, it ends up in its own contest with such in the modern world of Europe and America. And in this we also reframe the conflict between democracy and wealth, as it first appeared in the Greek world along with the first doctrine of appearances, as the place of speculation as theoria. -100-

of just such an extended Indo-European context but nothing which breaks out of this, save by direct movement into the framework of religion at the level of certain kinds of asceticism, and that supported by various forms of organized high civilization that remain distinctly non-Western. There is no world of Plato and Aristotle, Democritus and Epicurus. And, of course, there is no democracy, such as that which made Athens famous in antiquity and England famous in modernity. Today, India is the largest single democracy on the face of the earth, but not for reason of an interior ethnic or cultural development that might be used to lay claim to anything beyond a present-day pragmatic use of governmental forms. Anything else forces one to trace out the same line of genealogical ascent that passes out of Greece, through Rome, and then through Europe to the Dutch and the English. It is the same path more or less for everyone today, but not with the same more immediate historically and institutionally housed patterns of identification. But, again, the issue here is one of appearances and their meaning. And the doctrine of appearances in socalled Western theory is not the same as that in Eastern thought, however they have been more recently combined and confused. For the fact of the matter remains that theory itself, especially in its relation to the conflicted relation between scientific and moral-ethical patterns of reasoning, is more than merely a Greek word for something to be found in just any other culture. One can only stretch the limits of a term so far before it loses the determinative power to explain the most pertinent elements for its developed framework of employment. But what, then, does democracy have to do with a general framework of appearances that might eventually promote something like Platonic philosophy in antiquity and Kantian reasoning in modernity? And what might this have to do with a foundational theory of human interest as this bears also on the rise of the now ingrained patterns of theoretical reasoning, the physical sciences, technology, and all of this in relation to the modern financial system? Again, the key seems to have to do with property systems and institutional change in the framework of government. One notes, again, that the institution of private property is also something which does not exist at random in various historical-cultural settings, despite the manner in which it might easily be confused with various other forms of personal property or feudally held property, or even communally held but individually worked landed property, so called, several property. But then how does the institutionally secured form of modern or contemporary private property come into being either from or in the midst of these other and earlier modes of property? Private property is then a specific kind of cultural appearance, as stated already several times over; but there is no independent or individual mind to which this appearance belongs, unless we adopt some version of the Hegelian concept of subjectivity by means of which to treat modes of intersubjectivity and the institutional contexts, saturated and connected by such, as if reflectively engaged with themselves or itself as a world-order of perception and self-conception. In itself this might do an injustice to the complexity of the Hegelian position, which may only require an historically and culturally linked collection of actual human beings to constitute such a subject and such institutionally shifted orders of Kantian subjectivity to go along with the more purely objective natural world and its human variant; but for the moment one must only presuppose the meaning of such a view from within the more normal frameworks of American and English patterns of reasoning. So without constituting such a super-individual subject to -101-

correspond to a broader field of subjectivity, we are then left here with a peculiar problem at the level of what is given to any more ordinary kind of subject in terms of such a conceptually affective structure of appearance. We, of course, would like to say that this use of appearance, as conjoined with culture or some other collective concept, is merely metaphorical. And, indeed, there is a metaphor involved here. But what precisely is it the metaphor of? That which appears most fundamentally in a Kantian sense, is, then, oneself, but always as a world for self-reflective reason to operate within. In the expanded Hegelian context, this Kantian self is aware of itself, but always only within the given framework of some cultural setting. Part of this is linguistic, but the setting goes beyond even the field of language. Conversely, there is no simple self, no non-constructed pre-reflective cogito or natural being, that is somehow decisively different from the culturally constructed self of ordinary perception and consciousness; rather any self is penetrated and arranged from the first by the social world in which it as one or we as it always lives; and this even as it remains specific to itself always as a unique synthesis. For, as the institutional structures of such a world family, state, military, commercially corporate and religiously corporate forms are themselves more or less thoroughly intertwined and at least partially inter-reflected in any given society, there is no true way to divorce this self-awareness from the form that is promoted in a given cultural setting, by the very manner and means through which these institutions are themselves arranged and connected. So, again, the assertion of such a self, as a distinct or singular subject somehow set over and against everything else as Object, is always a culturally induced occurrence in its own right, to go along with the continuum of ordinary experience, in which the world at large appears to the subject, without the subject being very much troubled by its own involvement with such an appearance. And even when somehow interrupted in this sense of subjectivity as fused with various objective perceptual forms, one generally returns to the same frameworks of experience as if nothing had happened. For, indeed, and for the most part, nothing has. Thus to change a basic order of affectively tuned relation with a world, so a fundamental context of interest, which also constitutes the manner and mode of this self of self-interest, and all of this in relation to some system of appearances both public and private, occurrences have to take place in a cultural arena in such a way as to sweep up the subjects engaged in everyday practices and shift them into another, differently constituted, version of this arena of action and general experience. But since individual human beings do not consciously recognize the new as anything more than an immediately presented modification in some more familiar context, what has sometimes been called a kind of basis for comparison and this, whatever may happen unconsciously and so as unbeknownst to us mere babes as we are forever and continuously separated from the breast of a mother as Mother Nature what is radically new must, in fact, never appear as such in its own right, especially as an independent order of appearance itself. Indeed, in current psychological theory, everything new is framed by and within the visually tactile framework of just this ubiquitous mothers breast. But now to leave the more problematic aspects of an individualized self-constitution behind and return more fundamentally to the cultural universe, one can, for instance, easily conceive of a gradual reorientation of the clan-structured village holdings of the Athenian population as that which went along with some other alterations which progressively privatized the family structure of the oikos or household, such that this floated more freely within the deme and beside what remained of the older gens affiliation as this moved still in relation to the phratrai as interlocking military organizations and hold-overs from the older -102-

matrilineal clan system of tribal affiliation. And here, for instance, in relation to just these phratrai, we do still hear of the homogalakts, those of the same (mothers) milk. Indeed, as Thomson showed, most, if not all, of the clans of the Athenian tribal system were fully totemic in origin, and probably matrilineal at some time, either in origin or in some intermediate period of cultural development. But to ratify or regularize one system or another requires changes in the authority structure of the tribal confederation. The democracy is then most often associated with the final victory of the system of private property and the coming to ascendency of the patrilineal private family of antiquity, as then eventually extended to modernity by way of the Roman influence on mediaeval Europe. But other systems of patriarchy and patrilineal inheritance exist independently of this development of institutional private property, just as these bear on all manner of feudal-type arrangements in other lines of cultural development. In the world of ancient Greece, however, and with respect to Attica and Athens in particular, the tribal system itself becomes an instrument for the most radical transformations of this democracy, where we have the re-division of the society at large in terms of a system of ten artificial tribes, with thirty artificial clans (phratrai), now re-established around the chief demes of certain regional collections of actual villages and estates; three chief demes to a tribe, as places where the records for the corresponding artificial phratrai are kept, rather than, as more originally, three extended clans or more original phratrai, composed of various aristocratic families as gens-gentes, to each of the four Ionic tribes, as was still the case in Solons constitution. And this rather direct use of tribal structures, now as an artifice, as with Kleisthenes reforms as just mentioned,50 is, in itself,

Today one might say that Kleisthenes Gerrymandered the democracy into existence on the basis of a rather sophisticated redistricting scheme. And here it is always interesting to note at the outset that democracy is not simply rule of the people, but rule by way of the place of the people, originally the villages and estates as distinct from the palace-fortress of the king and the royal clan. And the key, carried by way of this distinction, was the fact that the districts or demes were not purely artificial, even in the artificial system as instituted, though no longer strictly tribal or clan configured, owing to the breakdown into the patrilineal system of private families; while the total scheme was meant to balance opposing interest-groups, by splitting them up and redistributing them, rather than, as in modern representative democracy, to allow the primary interest groups to defuse all meaningful opposition by way of establishing disproportionate patterns of representation of voters in regional and local election districts, which districts are now fundamentally controlled by party machinery right down to the voter lists and the polling places. However, even here in Kleisthenes plan, it must be admitted that in apportioning one trittyes, deme or district, always from the city in every tribal grouping of three such districts, it gave the city an enroad to furthering its control over all other regions: the seacoast villages and the outlying countryside, plains and mountain pastures. Peisistratus, for instance, was associated with clans and families from these outlying districts, especially the rural people of the more mountainous areas. The historical advance here involves, then, not just the break with the older aristocratically controlled clan system of property, but the concentration of power in the city as linked to the near-by chief port of the Piraeus, thus the linkage of the new center of merchant power with that of retail trade and financial affairs, all as located on the doorstep of the government in the agora or forum. And this refers us loosely to the later duality -103-

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something quite different from anything in the later world, where one moves to deal with the rise of the modern system of private property and the reappearance of democratic aspects of some regional or national government, along with the development of the modern family structure. And it is also this artificial tribal system that lies behind Platos attack on the more privatized family structure of the state in Republic. Here he takes the political form, used both to house the new private family and simultaneously break the power of the older clans and aristocratic families, and

of town and country as in Marxs analysis of the rise of merchant capital in the middle-ages. But for the Greeks, as for the later Renaissance world of Europe, it is always the sea that is crucial for trade and commerce and expanded political power. This alters, somewhat, the configuration for the development of industry in the ancient world of Greek commerce, and with it any extension of a Marxist pattern of analysis. Everything is developed for immediate export from early on, even what is for us the rather magnificent Attic red and black-figure pottery. There is little more purely regional or interior development, beyond certain small-scale operations of smithing, tool and weapons manufacture. Sophocles, famously, owned a weapons or shield factory. And the culture as a whole remains fundamentally agricultural, despite its newer city forms of retail trade. The development of regional industries in Europe is something of another matter. We begin, again, more with the concentration of guild activity in certain towns, which initially grow up in association with certain fortress strongholds, many of which are more or less land-locked or only linked by way of rivers after the collapse of the Roman road system. It is only much later that industry is linked more directly with export trade at the level of antiquity. And when this finally occurs beyond the restricted framework of the merchant cities of Italy, so within the framework of the modern nation-states, as with Holland and England, the door is already open to full scale industrialization and the movement to a new form of merchant empire, which is still with us today. The United States, and later the now-defunct Soviet Union, are special cases, in that they are continent-size platforms for an interior development of exploitation and industrialization. But especially the United States was never without its marketrelations, involving some mode of capitalism and its export-import configuration of trade, especially with England and Europe. From early on it was the inheritor of the new modes of commerce, trade, and industry, stripped of all the excess cultural baggage of feudal Europe. One might then say the same for its inheritance of political forms, especially from England in the 17th century at the time of the Puritan Revolutions. There is, then, nothing underneath the American cultural system in a meaningful manner that bears on embedded practice with a regional significance and institutional structure to support it, beyond what it itself has developed over the course of the last four-hundred years. This, of course, speaks to its radicality in both economic and governmental developments. It was, in other words, and largely still is, a version of England, which begins, however, with what is most new in1600, and this with almost no habitual resonance of what existed from 600, A.D. onward, and so from the time of the full collapse of Rome and a redevelopment of civilization stretching through the mediaeval and Renaissance worlds. For better or worse, the United States is, as reflected in this very piece of writing, a country and a culture with only a split conception and force of history: its own and a universal, but largely only commercial and governmental, appropriation of especially European developments as merged with whatever else comes along. -104-

turns the general principle of artificial rearrangement for the families into a eugenics program that is also directed back against the new system of private property, as if returning to a yet older framework of communal property and a Cretan-form or Spartan institution of the phratrai as the common mess. In essence, he plays the advances of the city-state off against its older more communal tribal forms. And as for eugenics, he merely seeks to introduce some idea of rational oversight into a system which already operated in a haphazard but no less deterministic manner, as it does still today, directed more by wealth than simple desire, and organized by way of a thorough-going class differentiation, dividing the nobles and the commoners today, we would say, dividing the rich from everyone else, by schools and all manner of social institutions and thereby assuring the patterns of marriage and breeding. This he does more consistently and with a view to other goals or ends, but only with regard to his new ruling class, as largely coextensive with the military class, now in a more restricted form than with the extant Athenian militia of all male citizens of a certain age group. But now more to the point, with the rise of modern Europe, it takes a very long time to establish the system of private property and the modern nation-state, where one is, virtually from the first, at a greater remove from an older tribal configuration as the total system develops. 1265 is the date most often cited for the distant beginnings of the English Parliament with an element of the Commons, where we have de Montforts apparent attempt to garner support from the Burgesses and Shires for his war with both the Barons and the King; and this is four-hundred years before the true ratification of the system of modern private property and the rise of the modern parliamentary system, together with the reappearance of a kind of constitutional tyrant in Cromwell51 and a drive on the part of the

The Americans, in particular, are well advised to remember that it was their English forebears who actually cut the Kings head off by Parliamentary decree, even if only that of a rather dubious and restricted Parliament, and thereby established the first dramatic version of a legitimation crisis in governmental affairs, resulting in the rule of Cromwell, a tyrant or dictator. who could not actually become king, and who may not even ever have wanted to be king, whence the Protectorate. Cromwell, like John Locke, is a Gentleman, not a Lord; and accordingly stands forprivate property, whereas kingship means feudal property. It is his new class affiliation that determines the course of events, not some dissociated system of desire, even when this, too, attempts to find an embodiment by way of his son. But in the important field of ideology, one might then also note well that it is January 4th, 1649, and not July 4th 1776, that sees the following Resolution: That the Commons of England in Parliament Assembled, do declare, That the People are, under God, the Original of all just Power. And do also declare, that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by, and representing the People, are the Supreme Power in this Nation. Here, from: The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, by Several Hands, (London: William Sandbury, 1755), Vol. XVIII, p. 494.) This should then serve to establish exactly from where John Locke drew his doctrine of popular sovereignty. It was no mere theoretical creation in advance of some deployment in state affairs, any more than was the Greek democracy dreamed up by theorists, despite the remarkable responses to such in the world of theory, including there the creation of the world of theoretical reasoning itself. In modernity we more properly get the recreation of theory, but with an extensive development out of the original creation now in tow. In modernity -105-

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Commons, first to abolish and later to restrict Lords. And it is clearly from Cromwell that we will shortly get the more modern type prime-minister as well as the American-type president, rather than just some other chief minister from the age of the Tudors or the court of some other European monarch. And the point here is that de Montfort cannot even be a tyrant in the mode of either Cromwell or some ancient general, because there is no political configuration for such a figure, though he may well have been moving already to create such a configuration by expanding the field of representative presence in council. Still, in his world, one is either a king or just a great lord, related in some way to a king. Ministers are even of questionable importance, just as there is no way to move towards some chief minister or archon-like figure as appointed by some kind of parliament or assembly. But there is a difference between the gradual development of a social framework and the revolutionary force of a more fully developed governmental system, once it begins to have extensive and meaningful effects; and this in either world, ancient or modern. A more privatized patrilineal family structure may well be a conditional feature of the rise of a more atomized version of the older clan property system in antiquity, also a version which goes along with a growth in some merchant class and with some form of retail trade in the markets, as is always associated with coinage associated first by Herodotus in his discussion of the Lydians as the first coiners of money but as soon as all of this takes the shape of a new more class-specific councillor and popular assembly, together with a more democratic court system, the effect upon the consciousness of the new citizenry is more sharply defined and more palpably present. In this world of real authority, legitimating structures, always fitted to some older system of rule, can come into extensive conflict with the factual reality of a new system of power. The Marxist law of ideology operates here at levels beyond those pertaining merely to dislocations or advances in the order of production; perhaps even independently of such. Of, course, none of the terms used here is simple: power is a modern term and concept; authority is more of the order of antiquity as a term and concept. This is the kurios of the Greeks. Kings or clan elders have authority and exercise what we call power by means of such. In their own world they have anank, coercive force, at their disposal; the term later borrowed by natural theory along with the meaning of arch, itself taken over always in relation to the meaning of archon as councillor first chief or originating clan figure. Conventionally configured states, recognized and molded as such, have power over their subjects or citizens,52 it all begins again in Holland and England with the rise of democracy and the new patterns of commercial capitalism. It is in the Roman world where a crucial transition takes place in relation to the meaning of these two terms, citizen and subject, that bears on the disappearance and transformation of the ancient political world of the democracy and a good deal more. The fully empowered Greek citizen of, for instance, the Athenian democracy, goes to the Roman citizen as mere subject in the late Republic and the Empire. Now one is subject to as thrown under the law, which is a universal but over which the ordinary citizen has no effective control. One has a claim, largely now only in the courts, to equality under the law, of which we still hear so much today, but the law remains established at the level, first of Caesar, and then of God. Here we finally arrive at All equal in the eyes of God, the Christian remake of the Roman juridical -10652

especially in modernity, whether they have a fully legitimated authority for such or not. In this context we come to see that the rise of the sciences, together with the fabrication of the complex field of appearance in theory, is the product of a loss and attempted, but never absolutely successful, recasting of a basis for legitimacy. This is a more acute problem than that which occurs only in some otherwise regularized development of the socio-economic field as such or in terms of rudimentary shifts in property relations. And it is only in terms of the full effect of this, what can now be termed, political problem with the authority of some organized system of power, that all further radical change in both the economic and theoretical realms takes shape. Where the form of authority vested in the state, or whatever passes for it in the governmental sphere, is not challenged and broken, there is no radical development of thought in either antiquity or modernity. It is then this process, in its further institutional development and the affective relation of such to consciousness, that shapes the problematic double history of the rise of the sciences and the property systems of Western Civilization. And the complex doctrine of appearances, which itself appears in the train of this history at two crucial moments, as something of a reactionary movement on the part of foundational moral theorists, now informs us about the nature and meaning of this peculiar political cause.53

system of the Empire. We have, of course, moved from the Roman world to the Reich des Geistes or empire of the spirit and the contested double system of the Holy Roman Empire of the mediaeval world and Charlemagne or, more properly, Karl der Grosse. The Franks were originally a Germanic People, as were the Burgundians, who, for their part, ended up settled in Austria or ster-Reich, and who, as such, figured into the original setting for much of the Nibelungenlied. This links Nordic and Icelandic Saga with tales about Theodoric, the Ostrogoth King (Diedrich), as well as Attila (Etzel), and runs the tale across Europe from the Rhine to the Danube. And all of this here by way of establishing something concerning the original scope and ideological framework of the Holy Roman Empire in its relation to the far-flung Germanic Peoples. Canute is also a Christian King who features himself as a new Constantine, as did Charlemagne before him. And Constantine himself comes, together with his legions, from Trier on the Mosel, where we find the oldest extant Christian Church in northwestern Europe. One might consider this a massively expanded and historically determined version of what was discussed in a different context by Habermas under the title of Legitimationsprobleme im Sptkapitalismus (Frankfurt, 1973). In the present context there is a specifying determinant ground for such a crisis in theory in the political field, beyond the more broadly cultural or more economically invested social order, just as the whole problem context is more directly determined in relation to the systems of modern idealism and their ancient precursors. Again, it is not so much about the fate and framework of epistemology or Erkenntnistheorie in the Geisteswissenschaften adrift in the world of the positivistic sciences, as already noted with respect to Habermas other early text on Knowledge and Human Interest, but about the possibility of theoretical reflection in general and its relation to current problems of the economically over-determinated political world. -10753

The Greek world still gives us the clearest version of the underpinnings for all of this subsequent development, for reason of the kinds of breaks involved. The expanded tribal system, having already been developed variously in relation to certain patterns of gens-related royal power and broader societal caste differentiation, is that which makes out the substratum for the development of the classical world of political transformation. One can easily suppose that the legitimating framework of whatever passed for the governmental structure moved about here at the level of various kinds of mythic presentations and culturally enforced rituals. The older, more original version of such a legitimating system, as it might have existed in the Mycenaean world, had more to do with elements of matriarchy surviving in an otherwise patriarchally shifted framework; the newer has to do with the proto-political tyrannical framework of the Olympiansas the system shifts even further towards the militarily secured patrilineal system of private families pertaining to the early city-states. But nowhere in this total framework is there anything which would serve to legitimate the authority of some democratic legislative assembly or juridical court. Therefore, however the Greeks arrived at the outlines of some democratic form of government and wherever they arrived at such principally but not only in the developing merchant cities of Asia Minor and in Athens with its own Ionic heritage and expanding merchant interests the older framework could not function to explain what eventually became the extant system of real power or rule. Homeric poetry does not function to legitimate ancient democracy any more than the Arthurian legends function to legitimate parliamentary democracy.54 Thus, a

This opens up a peculiar problem: why, indeed, are such mythic or legendary presentations associated with the movement towards the appearance of democracy, ancient and modern? In both cases they seem to have something to do with what we might call executive authority and power; something by way of the problem of transgression, which reaches back to other older forms of presentation in the legitimating schemes of dynastic civilization and tribal society. In this regard it should also be noted that Homeric poetry was probably Aeolic in origin (one of the surviving forms of the earlier Achaean or Mycenaean civilization) and was imported quickly into the Ionic world (also derivative of this earlier civilization) along with the advent of tyranny. The ancient tyrants seem to have made some use of this mode of presentation as a kind of fabricated history of sorts that had a certain kind of affective power over the populous at large. Peisistratos seems to have established it in Athens as a regular feature of the city-state. On the whole, it made much of aristocratic families, just as its early history is almost certainly one of being sung at the households of clan leaders who could still lay claim to the heroes by way of lineage. But it came to have a much broader appeal among the citizens at large, functioning almost as a modern ideology, though certainly a peculiar one, and as such was bound together with other important cultural events and festivals, such as the athletic contests, the various games. And notable here is the fact that everything in this Greek world is in the mode of a contest, including the presentation of the poetry as chanted or sung at some festival established for it. As I have already indicated, however, the deeper significance of these games and contests is somewhat darker in meaning. And this is likely to be the case with the poetry as well. It has a religious origin, at least in part; and this means an association with death and the rituals which surround it. It is hardly an accident that the most revered poem of the Greek tradition has to do with the man-destroying wrath of Achilles and is set within the cycle of fated events which -108-

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significant number of people found themselves directly involved in administering a system of real power that had no adequate religious or mythic legitimation. And in this way anyone positioned so as to view such a system in some comparative framework might, should or would, begin to recognize the artificiality and conventional nature of all such legitimating schemata, both those belonging to other well-recognized cultures with which one was in contact and those pertaining to

brings his death as well. And as for the Odyssey, the more properly Ionic and Athenian tale and proto-comedy, it ends in a ritual blood-bath, to which a reconciliation is tacked-on in order to close the cycle of fated restitution in the mode of revenge. In this tacked-on end, it might be said to have something to do with the democracy, in that it treats the theme also handled by Aeschylus in Oresteia, which closes with the famous first court-room scene, establishing the rule of law, or more properly the rule of democratic councils and courts, by way of the Areopagus as the original high-court and council of Athens. Beyond this, however, there is only many-turned Odysseus, wily in speech and indomitable in his drive to fame and fortune. But the issue remains as to the general function of the epic tradition with regard to the ancient democracies; and this issue is made even more complex in the later case of England with its Arthurian cycles as both sung and written. Why are these tales of warring princes and kings, lords and ladies, embraced by a populace of commoners, even today? And to pass all of this off to some pattern of desire, by way of asserting that these more ordinary people all somehow see themselves in these aristocratic figures, is hardly to answer the question. Why see themselves as such? How shift between the hall of some mediaeval lord and the reading room of some 19th century investment capitalist? How shift yet further through the world of the novel to the framework of cinema and television, while holding onto an order of content that continuously recedes in its cultural setting and its more original patterns of display and meaning? We need more than Schillers distinction between the naive and the sentimental to differentiate here and to explain the continued attraction of both orders of epic; but this is probably still a better place to begin than by mere empty reference to modern patterns of social psychology. There is also this to consider: money inhabits Christianity as well as the early Germanic world of Romanized Europe, in a manner far beyond that of 8th century, BC Asia Minor. Offa is coining gold in his 8th century AD, newly Christianized kindgom of Mercia, at the very time that the Arthurian legends begin to take shape among the Celtic peoples he and the other Saxons had just conquered. But we have no understanding of the patterns of circulation for such money, especially within England itself. How was it used? And what did it mean? Is this Wergeld? But more important in the present context: What did it do to the form of the epic tale ? especially in that Christianity itself was largely the product of the earlier world of monetary trade and commerce. To be sure what occurs here is less serious than the tales from the remnants of the Mycenaean universe. But not by way of plot or original myth: Arthur is undone by his bastard son out of an incestuous relation with either his half-sister or his mother. Here, again, we have the older matrilineal order being displaced as in so much Greek myhology. And when we add in the later rise of parliament and the new jury system of post-Saxon England, the fabled basis of the tale becomes increasingly complex. But, like the Homeric tales, it never directly supports the world that issues from its period of formation, save by a highly peculiar mode of transference. It legitimates nothing of democracy, save that it shows kingship to be a tragic affair. -109-

ones own more immediate culture. The first effect here is, then, to render various accounts questionable on various grounds, in some way forcing a divorce and subsequent diremption in the otherwise unified field of religious practice and state-functions. The second effect is such as to make it apparent and to do this while continuously bound up with the new and increasingly radical institutional political basis for all such practice that traditional views are not necessarily valid means for interpreting the world. This point, in particular, makes out the very possibility for the now fabled birth of the natural sciences. One now has both a ground to disbelieve in older frameworks, both tribal and royal, and a reason to project a new system. The question, however, is why project such a new framework in relation to something called nature? especially since the more pressing problem of legitimation has to do with extant social hierarchy and patterns of rule. In the end this question is actually fairly simple to answer by comparison to others that come along quickly enough. For the cultic and mythopoetic structure of all pre-political peoples combines, as already noted, what we divide into nature and the human order. And so, again as already mentioned, legitimating tales for clan or royal authority are often housed in some account of what we now refer to as nature or move rather indiscriminately in and out of such Sky Gods and Earth Goddesses do this and that, function this and that way, while clan figures and the invested figures of royal houses are direct or indirect mediators of such functions to clan and tribal members or the broader population at large. But at stake in the generation of nature and natural theory is precisely the meaning and the form of the necessity of all such claims made on behalf of social practice by such mythic configurations. And it is the very necessity of a given and older order and hierarchy of society that is called into question with the advent of the democratically directed political system, whether a fully democratic order or not. If an observer of or participant in such a new and developing system then wishes to preserve the general notion of necessity, they might well do so by shifting the sphere in which it operates with unquestioned authority away from the newly reconfigured human world. But they would only do this, if, and to the extent that, they felt a need to so. And, indeed, what immediately precedes the appearance of the early natural theorists is not just some early formation of the councils, assemblies and courts, as these move beyond the older clan-oriented frameworks, but the more dynamic problem of the tyrant in the context of civil strife that develops along with these early movements towards democracy. And even in early development, where clan structure is almost always involved, and where kingship seems somehow interwoven with the advent of tyranny in some form, what marks the tyrant is precisely the lack of royal prerogative as legitimately disposed or recognized within some older system. The tyrant is thus never a true king, at least not in some particular extension of authority; and if he could be such a king in such a use of authority, he would not be the tyrant as such, that is, someone who has, either for the most part or in toto, come to power by marginalizing or replacing such a royal figure in their older and more established governing functions. The Instance of the tyrant for the Aeolic and Ionic Greeks is then Gyges, the Lydian usurper who comes to power by killing the king and marrying his queen. In fact, however, this also records the matriarchal nature of royal authority in Lydia, as will become clear directly. But everywhere it is clear that the tyrant must find a mode of legitimation, or, failing this, must rule by force of arms and/or some appeal to the immediate benefit of a significant segment of the populace. And again, the proto-forms of democratic councillor rule make this legitimating -110-

function, by way of the attempt to re-establish some dynastic system of royal rule, increasingly difficult as anything more than a conventionally arranged mode of transition. Gyges manages this in its royal mode, with the new line moving down to Croesus, who loses the kingdom to the Persians; but virtually no Greek manages to do the same in the same way, that is, with any secure royal prerogative attached. Again, if one is not truly descended from the royal clan, one cannot become royal by proclamation or mere force of arms, while such descent carries certain restrictions and limitations with it. And in the early city-state configuration, everyone knew who was descended from such a clan, just as everyone knew the traditional forms and limits of such royal power.55 Moreover, even where and when originally so descended, the subsequent impact of a developing order of usurpations marginalized all real extant royal authority in anything but the most backward of Greek city-states.56 One thinks, of course, of Sparta, with its tribal order of two kings, playing off of the distinction between domestic affairs and rites and the demands of war, as with the more common polemarch of the ancient Athenian state to go with the ritualized basileus; and later of Macedonia, where the tribal institution of kingship held out in a more unified form in direct relation to a council of warrior chiefs, passing over into the classical period, where it took on a new form with Phillip and Alexander, ruling with a council of generals. And, again, one notes the importance of the female figure in this older, more tribal system, as with the ascent of Alexander. But then why should such a dynastic transference have worked early on in Lydia but not among the Ionic and Aeolic Greeks of Asia Minor? Part of the problem, as should have now become apparent, is that especially the Ionic Greeks had become more or less fully patrilineal, so power could not simply pass by way of the children of the Queen, even though in certain other places like Sparta, women remained in control of much of the landed property. And, at least This may also be why so many earlier mythic presentations of rule involve bastard children returning to claim a throne. Something must always be said to legitimate such irregular transfers of authority. And this is then further complicated when one shifts between matrilineal and patrilineal tribal and royal systems, where two lines of descent come into conflict. The most famous passages on the rise of tyranny and its early forms come from Aristotles Politics. At 1285a-30, he discusses an intermediary form between tribal kingship and tyranny, the elected tyrant or aisymneiteia. At 1310b-7 ff., he discusses the two forms of monarchical rule and says that some tyrants arose from kings who transgressed traditional limitations and aimed at a more despotic authority. But the general form of tyranny is always associated with a use of popular forces to gather power against the nobles or gnorimoi. Kings, on the other hand, always refer us to the class of the nobles and are bound up with an older system of prerogatives and corresponding restrictions. The concept of tyranny is also linked variously with the new world of money-wealth, in that the form of power sought has no limit, so no natural form of societal end. Money as a mere means, as already noted, obviously has no limit when positioned as an end or made into an end in itself. This also makes out its ideological relation to the modern concept of freedom, especially as this is implied in capitalistic schemes for the production and acquisition of monetary wealth. Indeed, the concept of the limitless is caught up from early on in the dialectical opposition to the limited; and there is also something here that bears on natural theory and the history of the assessment of the boundless of Anaximander, as its becomes bounded by the modern concept of the infinite as with Leibniz. -11156 55

ideologically, the case of Thebes is particularly significant. Thus, as in the more politically configured Oedipal myth, remarriage or marriage to legitimate a change of de-facto rulers the case of Gyges no longer worked, even though it is still depicted. The further point that with the Oedipal myth the conflict is presented as mother-son incest, as displacing some version of the more common brother-sister incest (as is still reflected in Antigone), may recall some actual practice or may just be presented for effect, where the ultimate effect is actually recorded in the mythic version of the affective power needed to shift the matrilineal system into the patrilineal mode and the later patriarchy. Oedipus, of course, must also overturn the mandevouring Sphinx. But it will always remain difficult to determine whether even sleeping with ones own mother was all that problematic for the Greeks of the classical period, to say nothing of the earlier matrilineal period. Plato passes it off as something that occurs commonly in dreams. But it was definitely dangerous as regards the newer system of linear descent of property in the male line. In any event, however, the clan leaders, seeking dominant control of some expanding and unstable population in the proto-political world of the Greek city-states, are progressively cut off from older structures for creating dynasties anew, and so thrown forward into the world of councils and the expansion of councillor and juridical power that comes along with the new system of private families and private citizens, the first world of private property and the democracy. In this way they created a continuous political problem of legitimation; which problem made the human world subject to a pressing threat of almost constant civil war, as the proto-democratic councils continued to deal with the remnants of the aristocracy on the one hand and any clever usurper who might come along in the form of a tyrant, on the other. Here, nature and the necessity of natural process was invented both on the basis of and in flight from the dynamically unstable political world. But the gods still belonged preeminently to the social, not the more purely, and now for the first time, natural world, while the older aspects of the socalled nature-deities belonged to a yet older tribal universe of animal spirits and more fully totemic clan structures. So the gods have to be rebuilt, once they had already been established and invested as within the Mycenaean world. And this plays into the edifice of the coming order of moral idealism.

In this context one can then begin to work out the causal history of the theory of causality itself. Mythopoetic causation, as often noted, is not like causation in natural theory. But neither is modern causal theory like the Greek causal theory of Plato and Aristotle, or even that of Democritus, from what we know of it. Again, the pattern of reciprocity in agent-patient relations is very different in the two worlds. In the Greek world, it is worked out from a complex center towards the edges or elements involved, rather than in terms of the more straightforward mono-directional agent-patient relations of modernity; while the manner in which so-called natural events are separable from human affairs has to be sorted and projected variously in the different worlds as well, something which was never fully accomplished in antiquity and even today offers us an arena for confusion. But the most important thing to recognize is that only where the new political configurations are promoted and developed, is there a corresponding continual development in this entire field of causal reasoning. Here the political world forms a kind of platform for the support of a new set of views and the further radicalization of various aspects of the culture, e.g. the money system. The Ionic nature philosophers show us only the first -112-

break with mythopoetic patterns of reasoning, just as we have here a rather restricted field of democracy and economic development. For the most part we have to look elsewhere for even the mathematical and proto-logical developments. Indeed, it is a very long way from this first framework of development to the frameworks of Plato and Aristotle. And what intervenes is the complex history of the most famous of all Greek city-states, Athens, the instance of democracy in its full development in the ancient world. What is crucial here is not merely the re-emergence of the erstwhile sphere of divine reciprocity within human affairs, the aspect which shows itself in Socratic and Platonic reasoning under our general heading of moral idealism, but the projection of a field which can, as it were, displace the full opposition of the otherwise sundered natural and human orders with respect to a now contested view of necessity in causal affairs: What is crucial is the creation of the doctrine of appearances. Precisely how important this is for the subsequent history of both theory and practice is hard to overstate; but, as should now have become obvious, it is equally hard to understand and present. In this respect, the development of the ancient democracy, as this comes into an increasing reciprocating alliance with the developments in the economic affairs of the new mercantile empire of Athens, does more than merely supply a continuous institutional platform for increasingly complex modes of reasoning about reason itself and its relations to the world of things thinkable as well as perceivable; it also supplies the human mind with a new model for a projection of the interior framework of such thinking. As Aristotle makes perfectly clear, while making good on the Platonic analogy between the soul and the city though in an inverted order of importance, discursive and demonstrable patterns of thinking require powers of deliberation and judgement. As already mentioned, the latter two are also the chief institutional fields not just the powers but the place for the exercise of such powers in a collective manner access to which define the citizen or polits most proper in Aristotless political theory.57 In the increasingly militarized patrilineal system that comes to full power by way of the more privatized patriarchal family units that make up the social fabric for the democracy, women lose access to the real system of power, just as they are barred from the political assemblies, courts and councils, as legislators and jurors. What authority they have is shifted into the cultic and religious context, as this spreads out from the more original world of the oikos or clan-related household to the society at large: So the city still has a central hearth, just as the festivals for fertility associated with agriculture are still celebrated and even expanded upon in the direction of certain associations with the cycles of birth and death and the attendant afterlife as a redeveloped and personalized version of what once existed more or less between the lives of clan and family members. In the earlier version, more as an order of endless repetition bearing on patterns of symmetry, we have a movement of fathers to fathers, as sons via mothers, and mothers to mothers, as daughters via fathers; though originally with less necessity of the intervention of the opposite sex especially in the case of mothers and daughters. And the last point has to do with an

Here the arch kritik kai bouleutik, or the principled power of decision and counsel (Politics, III, ch. I, 1275b 18 ). -113-

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important imbalance underneath the ritual world as this develops and shifts. For there is here no absolute symmetry in the ancient mind, just a developing desire to establish such and hold on to it in some form. And while it is the general economic field that functions along with the military organization of the city-state as a partial ground for this transformation and loss of effective power in group affairs on the part of women, it should always be noted that it is never simply by way of some subsequent alteration in such a ground that women actually regain such effective power. In fact, as modernity makes abundantly clear, it is only by way of political enfranchisement that women begin to regain full economic power, that is, power in that field as redeveloped from the older framework of power, familia or oikos. Again, sheer economic determinants, such as the broad use of women in factory wage-labor system of the 19th and 20th centuries, are only causally transformative of consciousness up to a certain point; and generally not up to that point which would actually challenge the fundamental structures of the society and of the economy itself.58 Clearly, however, what we are dealing with in every respect is a development in mediating configurations of some broader social whole. In the ancient world, the economy first develops

Here again we encounter the contested issue in any version of economic determinism. For the ruling social theory, insofar as such moves beyond the mere ideology of democracy, drives towards a view which conceives of all social transformation on the basis of economic transformation, and all transformation of consciousness on the basis of this general social transformation. What is overlooked here, however, is a significant gap filled by the field of political reality as this bears more directly on important changes in patterns of self-conception. There have in fact been many societies in which women have enjoyed considerable social and governmental power, without shaking another order of the fundamental beliefs concerning the sexes. To put this other order in question in any sense at all is not as easy as it might seem when considered within the framework of such economic theories alone. In terms of actual social practice, money alone will never do this, unless it buys direct access to a specific kind of appearance in the field of political power that has an affective hold over the entire ruling sphere of the society. But the problem here is quite severe and difficult to resolve, because it borders on the merely ideological presentations of democracy mentioned above. To be sure, democracy is part of the ideology of capitalism in the contemporary world, just as one can claim that modern democracy in general is dependent on the rise of the entire order of private property and commercial banking. But buried in the midst of the ideology is something of some force and meaning, beyond the mere framework of ideology. And here we encounter the problem of a reciprocal causality, which makes itself known beyond mere general consciousness in the world of theory as the problem of appearance. It is as if to say that one has to have a new view of justice; but to get this one has to have a political world in crisis at the level of democracy. But the crisis and the view of justice both promote the new uses of the problem of appearances in theory, which, in turn, effectively alters the views concerning justice and politics. But the most remarkable fact has to do with the further reciprocal effects at the level of the economic forces and institutions in play along with the general field of consciousness in social formation. It is as if one is here transforming the whole by transforming only a superstructural part. And this is like defining the ship by the sail rather than merely referring to it in this mode of synecdoche. But then it is precisely the design of the sail that allows the ship as a whole to sail into the wind. -114-

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between the clans, then between the families within the clans, and then between the patriarchal families as within the city-state and between the city-states or the older empires and such city-states. But as regards the fate of individuals and significant groupings of people, the economy functions only as a conditional ground rather than a Platonic determinant cause. This determinant cause is first political, then individual; and only then generally social and economic in a more definite sense. For instance, what is class affiliation before it is politically determined in the ancient city-states in relation to the assemblies and courts? No doubt it is something, but not necessarily something which we can today categorize and understand under the heading of class consciousness rather than caste affiliation. And then there is finally a question as to the relation of this determinant political cause to intellectual development at the level of a theoretical consciousness that now always engages the form of self-conception as well as the conception of nature or some social complex of the order of the city-state.. If two causal fields are in reciprocal relation, both of which are institutionally housed and developed, what is the effect, not just on patterns of reasoning, but on the affective resonance of such reasoning as that which promotes such patterns? But here, in particular, this question cannot be asked in such a general manner. For the problem is rather precisely how such a relational complex produced the very context within which the question is framed or asked. It is a question which would never even occur to people without the development of a considerable rational apparatus; just as it is that apparatus that is employed to answer it. We are not just dealing with two different views of causality, but with causality itself, as it were, at the moment when it first divided to admit, not just of diversity for every mythical or tribal system admits of various kinds of causation but of two fields which come into direct conflict and can be recognized, hence cognized, as in such conflict. The view of necessity in nature (anank), again, itself something initially borrowed from the social context as the concept of coercive force, is, in fact, made rigid and absolutized by the conflict: necessity becoming here more restricted, literally more compulsory, so incapable of admitting of different degrees of elasticity, referring to different fields of action or activity; just as what is opposed to this natural necessity in its own terms is made more fully accidental, now as that which verges on unrestricted spontaneity or chaos. But in the choice between the two latter terms, spontaneity and chaos, we again encounter the double system within which we work today: spontaneity is a term featured in Kantian theory; chaos is what is already being responded to by the likes of Hesiod at the very origins of the political world and in the increasingly unstable social context, verging on recurrent civil war. And again what is interesting for us and for a theory of political interest, is that neither term seems to dominate Platonic theory. Rather, the entire opposition is housed there, contained and dissipated, by the framework of appearance. It is a resultant movement which is then used later by Kant in a very different context as a kind of theoretically housed rhetorical device. But, again, for Plato, we are standing more or less right next to the first world of political rhetoric, rather than in an intellectually and theoretically shifted version of such. Indeed, Plato creates the very possibility of Kants theoretical world, in something of the same way in which Greek natural theory creates the very possibility of the modern natural sciences; while the Greek world as a whole creates the very possibility of democracy, which is then reworked in modernity in a shifted context, related to a newly projected and radicalized world economy.

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The key to understanding this initial occurrence has much to do with the shift in the middle voice that was detailed in the first section, especially that as pertains to the framework of seeing. Unlike the Kantian framework in which vision is almost purely metaphorical as it pertains to a theory of appearances, the Platonic view is such that all metaphor is understood in relation to a system of analogy which still pertains to an actual order of vision by reference to the middle-voiced verb horaomai on its way to the more straightforwardly active horao. The older objectively dominated system of affects, which throws all activities in the direction of the field of affective receptivity, is now tensed by the development of a new sense of a semi-independent subjective agency. The subject appears as the soul or psych, for which the eye becomes, not a religious symbol for the soul as in Egyptian hieroglyphics , but a mere instrument of sorts, a precursor to all modern scientific views. But the older context of directly dominated instrumental activity, in which there really is no such even partially active subject lurking behind the affective equation of vision the middle-voice discourse of the eye affectively related to the thing by way of light has been shifted into the field of a new order of vision which will progressively dominate the theory of knowledge down to Kant. The more immediate order, still of affects, is that in which the mind is now in contact with the intelligible objects of understanding, as if an order of perceivables. This is, then, the field of knowledge proper as the affective contact between two related fully intelligible kinds of beings: the mind, itself now taken as the affective capability of the broader soul, and the ideas or the conceptual forms as made accessible or recognizable in language. And it is this mind-soul or psych which is the remake of the metaphorically presented eye of Horus mentioned above. But what is of greatest importance here is not the full shift into the intelligible order, but the lingering effects of the still partial break with ordinary experience. It is this which is doubling up the configuration of the new political world and the first system of private property: Here, the older tribal and dynastically disposed caste-configured system is still floating along beside the newer democratically configured political configuration. Indeed, in Athens, as already detailed, there come to be two effective systems of naming many of the citizens, by clan and tribe or by political district and artificial tribe.59 And in the space that is constituted by the juxtaposition of these two orders, variously understood across a range of institutions, the new economic system, advancing the claims and forms of private property, begins to develop its more abstract character as a mode of general ownership and a new mode of control. Writing laws that give private people disposal over money and monetary instruments is granting people ownership of anything else that can then be freed-up from some older context of meaning and value by being shifted into a purely monetary context. In this way it should be understood and argued that the extended force of the money system of exchange only comes into existence along with the extended framework of the democracy; and it is both of these forces moving together that promote the system of private property, moving it for the first time in the direction of what it has since become. But the abstract nature of private property in antiquity is not nearly what it becomes in modernity; where such property truly verges on formality of a purely conventional sort; just as the order of appearances is not nearly as metaphorically reduced and extended in the ancient world where it first takes shape. Indeed, for

It is unclear precisely how many of the citizens of the later democracy could still count themselves members of the older clan system, while every citizen belonged to the new system. -116-

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abstract matters of ownership to take precedence over actual modes of physical presence and the contiguity of labor processes and the things effectively altered by such, one must have a new kind of self to which such things can be said to belong. Here we again encounter the transformation in the world of having that goes along with the development of a logical system of predication of a singular subject. This subject is, again, first a political citizenor polits, whether he is also a merchant, a craftsman or a farmer; and, in the end, even if he is only a free laborer, selling himself for a daily wage. The fact that such a self as subject can then also break free from the political field, as with the resident-alien merchants at home in Athens, does not make this mercantile universe the true originator of such a subject; as will later be claimed, for instance, with respect to Kant, who seems to read Adam Smiths merchant citizen of the world into his so-called cosmopolitan Weltbrger, as the subject for a new universal religion of reason. Indeed, what one has to deal with here in antiquity is not just the aristocratic merchantlegislator, Solon, but the instance of the philosophically shifted new free subject-citizen, Socrates. It is the question of where such a new subject comes from that tells the full tale: Socrates is demiourgoi, of the clan-affiliated craftsmen as workers in common for the city; and as such he is both bound to, and a free citizen of, Athens. Solon, by comparison, is an aristocrat, riding the new wave of mercantile power, and so set variously against the older order of the landed aristocracy as such; but not necessarily in principle, since he, too, is an aristocrat from this basis in landed property and wealth. From Solon we may then get Kleisthenes and Pericles; but only from Socrates will we get Platonic philosophy and Aristotelian theory, as well as so much that follows by way of Christianity and Christian Platonism. But at the center of this shift is the political city itself and the problems of the new democracy as extending now beyond the simple shift in paradigms concerning necessity in nature. In the political world, something else is then taking place that bears heavily on the formation of this new subject and is especially important for the world of thought, just as it is fundamentally beyond the sphere of mere mercantile activity. The Greeks pay particular attention to speech in council or before the assemble. This, too, has deep tribal roots, especially as regards the democratic councils, courts and assembles. Again, it is here that we encounter the full force and depth of the Greek logos in its relation to questions of justice; while later, in a shifted context, we sense something less well defined with the German vernehmen, as a kind of taking in what is spoken, in relation to a hearing in tribal councillor assembly or in the mediaeval Femegericht, in its relation with right or Recht. And we might well suppose that there is actually something of this second system underneath the more developed framework for Greek speech and reason, just as it will again be underneath modern patterns of reasoning in the mode of perceiving. Moreover, as is often noted, the realm of speech and hearing is even more fluid than the field of vision. Writing helps to stabilize speech, in a manner that passes beyond the mimetic devices of oral poetry belonging to tribal peoples, constructing along the way an interface between vision and hearing, sight and sound. But the field for the immediate impact of speech is vastly augmented by the democratic courts and assembles. These, of course, become the playground for the first great development of rhetoric and the rhetoricians. Indeed, there is something quite peculiar about the Greeks that is revealed here, which again speaks directly to the advent of democracy; for they are particularly subject to a belief in language and what it delivers to intellect by way of an affective relation. It is almost as if, having discovered this newly invested world of speech, they fall in love -117-

with it, like their own child. In any event, here thinking seems even more subject to such speech, than in more purely oral tribal culture. It is not too much to say that for the early theorists in particular, if it could be spoken, or written and then read out again to be heard, it must be something in some important sense; this, perhaps as a kind of hold-over from the magical power of formulaic speech in tribal culture, but certainly as developed far beyond this mere formulaic and ritualized hold on chants and incantations.60 It is then this trust in what language itself delivers-up for recognition to the intellect that grounds the extraordinary development of Greek thinking from the first. These thinkers, more than following any order of actual experience or experimentation as with modernity, are following what can be said about experience. But again, what can be said is weighted toward a very important new kind of reality, once society itself becomes almost entirely dependent upon political debate and decision. Indeed, like no culture before or since, real efficacy in practical affairs rests here almost entirely on spoken language and its use in some immediate field of contact between numbers of people. It has not yet been replaced, either by writing or by financial power moving somehow behind the scenes. Indeed, at first, the only scenes to move behind are political constructs, such as property qualifications for certain offices; and these are progressively abridged and virtually removed by the time of Socrates and Plato. And here, too, we notice a considerable difference with the modern political world and the modern world of theoretical reflection. In the latter, much more has become a matter of closed counsel and the interior private debate that goes with individual reflection and more insular modes of thought and action. In the more fully alienated framework for modern and contemporary philosophy, the attempt to replicate this leading order of speech by way of the leading order of writing has some efficacy, but it is never such as it would be when directly tied to political life, even by way of the partial rejection of the later as with Socrates and Plato. Indeed, political life itself changes shape along with the frameworks for the use of language. And here it is worth adding that corporate boardrooms are not political assembles, any more than are the council chambers and courts of kings. Yet today we freely use the term political to describe the order of reasoning fostered by such boardrooms and the structures for debate and decision which they house.61 Today, of course, the model for political discourse and One can still sense something of this in the peculiar fusion of subject-matter belonging to Empedocles and attributed to other pre-Socratics as well. But, again, beyond the peculiar subject matter curses on enemies and magical spells and chants to bring wealth and good weather, all, as taken together with a particular kind of evolutionary cosmology there is the question of the effective power of language as it moves in an affective/effective relation with thought, even as independent of some field of direct action. The ultimate question here would be: what good is the new physics? Is it possible that knowing the activities of nature is similar to the erstwhile knowledge of the gods? So it offers some kind of practical control, as with Empedocles, or some kind of enhancement of status, as with Thales, who was ranked early on as one of the ancient wise men consulted by kings and councils. And, again, all of this is housed in language and its modes of expression; now, especially in the manner of writing: Spells and case briefs for sale, retail and reusable. I once thought it worth noting the manner in which the adjectival signifier political slides across a number of institutional fields that seem to have little to do with that democratic -11861 60

government itself is business. And the model for business is the corporation with its executives and boardroom meetings. Here we have a field for deferential pattens of speech that take shape in clearly defined unequal power relations, with no demand for or recourse to open councillor or assembly discourse. It is little wonder that the principals here comport themselves like would-be kings. And kings, especially what we normally mean by such as mediaeval and Renaissance kings, are always created along with their retainers and servants. There is no training here for democratic politics, rather only politik behaviour at court. The whole of this framework can perhaps now finally be comprehended in relation to the problem of interest with its own relation to the problematic double order of self-interest. But the road to this takes us back again to the problems of having and seeing as developed in terms of

world which was first used as the backdrop for its general determination. Aristotle, for instance, seems often to use the term politikos in a somewhat restricted sense as regards systems of authority and rule. Especially in the famous definitions in the opening chapters of Bk I of Politics, where we have man the political animal linked with man the only animal with reasoned speech, it seems that he is using political as a kind of specifying element to the more general definition of humans as merely social and economically organized, were they are likened to bees and herd animals, as living communally but feeding at large. In the same context, the political life is linked rather quickly with the framework and problem of justice, since here we also pass beyond what is merely expedient, the hurtful and helpful, and move on towards something that is meant to support full rational development. And then there is Aristotles use of the term in relation to rule to designate the good form that is paired with the bad form of democracy per se, which is only the rule of the many as ignorant and seeking personal gain. This more properly political form of the rule of the many is often translated as constitutional rule, following the Platonic use of politeia to designate the form of rule or constitution, which has always the issue of justice as its central problem and concern. In any event, it becomes extremely difficult in the contemporary world to use the term political to mean anything more than a general designator for some hierarchically invested system of power and some order of intrigue by means of which people operate under the constraints of this system of power as selfserving agents for economic gain. Without even a communally determined love of honor as derivative of tribal existence, the very field for the determination of a political interest becomes increasingly self-centered. This, however, may be significant as regards something else: There is also an increasing concentration on the individual as set over and against an entire social order. From a political perspective, where democracy is a general backdrop in some fashion, this pushes one towards the analysis of the tyrant and tyranny, as well as the problem of the demagogue. And, again, it is in this context, doubled by modernity, that we encounter the rise of the framework of reflective reasoning and critical theory. But there is obviously more to this contest between the individual person and the society as a whole; something which shows up again in religion and all manner of oppositional consciousness. Indeed, it is now some version of this that must again be harnessed to a general project of social transformation and governmental reform, if we are not to lose the benefits of the original democracies, ancient and modern, to the reductive social framework of institutional power now totally enthralled to economics. -119-

private property and appearance. For property to become private, rather than merely personal, appearances must slide decisively in the direction of a system of subjective interests that can be tensed against a more generally accepted field and framework of possible meaning. This requires an institutional shift in the direction of democracy, for various reasons which isolate and reconstitute the individual in new ways relative to the group or social whole. But what is constituted in the first order of this shift is, in a certain respect, only the possibility for what is accomplished by way of a second order of developments. What makes this first shift special, however, so different from just any order of cultural developments, is the fact that a mediating arena is laid down in a two-fold sense that comes to control the totality of human experience. We not only reorganize the everyday world in its institutional context, but through this, we reorganized the possible perception of such a world by way of altering the entire institutional landscape of the culture. This is the point that then bears heavily on the centrality of the Platonic view of appearances in ancient theory and the Kantian order of appearances in modern theory.

What strikes one about the Platonic view of appearances in this regard is that there is no way out of it, short of dying and thereby cancelling the entire projectional framework; and even then there is no guarantee of escape, as one might just redo everything in another life between lives or some other afterlife. Most famously we have here Socrates statements from Apology that death is one of two things: either a dreamless sleep or a transfer to a world inhabited by the souls of myriad people from the past. And in the second case he avers to move on to practice his art of questioning, but now with the most famous of ancient wise-men and women. And there are other peculiar supports for this problematic view as well, as, for instance, the fact that metempsychosis involves a loss of memory as regards what is encountered in the interim world as between lives. But this leaves only the working relation of being in some life as regards the framework for all recalled and recallable reasoning in its relation to speech and other modes of discourse and experience. Indeed, there has never been a more throughly present-tense version of thinking and acting, always in relation to a continuous past as if projecting a recurrent future. So no matter how much one turns ones perception inward, as it were, or towards intelligible objects, this pattern of thinking is still a movement of some extended order of perception with regard to some possible object of some actual object field. It is unified by a general sense of awareness and a kind of directed interest.62 Whether a matter of knowledge or more ordinary patterns of external perception, one is bound to the same order of experience: the one which is dominated by the

This directed interest within a general field of awareness is a virtual translation of the German Anschauung. But this is itself a construct by way of a fusion of the more generally passive affect and the more specified directed look or gaze. Schau mal das an! means look at that! In effect, of course, we are dealing with a middle-voice configuration which now shifts back and forth between objective and subjective poles. Anschauung, translated as intuition, has more of the passive sense. In antiquity, however, we do not yet have such poles, only the first context which will allow such to be developed by way of increasing degrees of separation (social alienation) and subsequent fusion (linguistic and ideological projection). And everywhere the question will be what is mediating? desire and language, money and the will. -120-

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central division of the image of the Divided Line. Everything is then projected from this center towards extremes which tend to mirror one another in particular and sometimes quite peculiar ways. There is, for instance, in addition to an adumbration, a reflective inversion. In Kantian philosophy, by comparison, one is always struck by the artifice of the doctrine of appearances; whence the suspicion, borne out in the end, that the view has been constructed while standing, as it were, somewhere else beyond it. But this reflects on virtually everything that can be said to be doubled in some way so as to present the distinction ancient/modern, where we are dealing with the classical Greeks and the modern Europeans. And today, while we are perhaps beyond the entire prior system in some sense that makes it more visible to us, still we are only just barely beyond it, and so next to it in a way that complicates all possible vision. The Greeks reason from within their own horizons. They break out of an older order to the extent that what they think carries them to a kind of edge. The modern world, on the other hand, seems to begin with this edge but always as projecting the whole from some place beyond the old center of human experience and knowledge. It is a difficult point to grasp directly, but an image, as drawn in part from our own times, may help. The degree to which the contemporary world has now doubled the world of immediate perceptual experience, especially in the field of vision, is remarkable. Children grow up looking at various imagistic displays of the solar system to go along with looking up and watching the sun and moon circling (round, as we still say. Today, the two views simply co-exist, with the immediate perceptual order subordinated to the projected versions in the field of general understanding. There is no longer even an attempt at mimesis and transposition as with the face of an old-fashioned clock and the movement of the hands, as was still the case in the Enlightenment as an inheritance from the late mediaeval or Renaissance world with its metaphysische Uhren, as sometimes even housed in the choir of a cathedral. But the Greeks, from the yet older time of the sun-dial, and like most other peoples until relatively recently, had only the perceptual system as a base. All projection is, then, just that for them: a projection relative to this base. But what is more, there is no general form for such a projection. One has to use the evidence of immediate experience to argue about the size, shape, and relative movement of the heavenly bodies, especially the moon and the sun, and by inference, the earth. In this regard, their most powerful theoretical principle is ratio. It is the same principle that they used to construct their temples and other public buildings of note. In the science of geometry, this general order of analogical reasoning is supported further by the use certain constants, most famously , governing the ratio of the circumference and the diameter of a circle as this relates to the crosssection of a sphere.. Assuming the earth to be a sphere of a projectible circumference, one can calculate its diameter. Working out the projection of the circumference is then a matter of extending the use of triangular measures of shadows by way of the use of ratio, and measuring the distance to a point on an horizon, determining curvature, etc. There is actually a great deal in the etc, even if it is all supposed to have flowed from the gnomon of Anaximanders sun-dial, and that from the shadow of Thales, standing beside the other shadow of the Great Pyramid. But the point is that any developed view of the heavenly bodies is taking shape along with the view of the nature and shape of the earth itself. And within this perceptual framework, it is the moon that is of central importance for the Greek thinkers. Unlike the latter Copernican Revolution, the Greek revolution in astronomy is predicated on assertions concerning the moon, relative to the -121-

earth and the sun. The essential assertion, most often credited to Anaxagoras, is that the moon shines by reflected light of the sun, and that the earth is interposed between the moon and the sun for Anaxagoras a hot rock glowing and so giving off light in the uninterrupted manner of our radiant energy in such fashion as to cause the changing shapes of the moon; again, by an analogy saturated by affinity, with the shadows of the sundial. In this, one will also note that in any mode of direct perception the moon does not seem to rotate about its axis, even though it appears, very definitely during a full eclipse, to have volume and so be spherical; this being one of the arguments, by analogy, against the rotation of a spherical earth as necessitated by the hypothesis of a heliocentric cosmos. All of this, however, is never as simple as it seems to us today; in that the Greeks also had to explain why the moon appears sometimes in the daytime sky along with the sun, why it changes size when on the horizon, and why it appears at all in a full lunar eclipse. The problems were, in fact, so severe that a kind of counter-sun was also once postulated. Such a process of rational projection is, of course, never complete in the Greek world. In part, however, because at every level immediate sense experience is built into the system of projection, such that it is never simply a fabrication, fully displacing the order of such everyday experience by way of an explanation framed in a different context. Even the image of the Divided Line, as I have already pointed out, is not merely an image in the mode of a modern geometry of line segments and ratios. It actually also exists, at least in part and as regards its initial distortion or divisionof lengths, in ordinary experience as the vision of a straight stick thrust into a still-standing body of water, under certain, quite common, conditions of lighting. So, here the geometry inhabits the world, which it measures in its formulaic manner; and everything is there along with the geometrical version, including the necessity of the sun and its light and the eye that sees; and all of this from the immediately preceding sensibly configured, image of the Sun. And as regards the geometry itself, it once actually measured the earth rather directly and pragmatically, in that the older version of this pertained to the art of the rope, where knotted ropes were used to divide up and allot the commonly held fields for a given planting season, as well as to lay out the outlines for a temple; all of this as taken over from the Egyptians, whose practical grasp of such an art was as impressive as the Pyramids. Obviously, however, the theoretical component in Greek reasoning is what is new; but, again, this component is still bound by and to sense, even in Platonic reasoning. By comparison, modern physics takes off from a more fully projectional framework, in which, to use again the most telling example of the solar system, the mind is thrust out of the framework of possible experience and positioned as if looking down upon the system of planetary movements from above. Something of the older order still exists here , especially in the manner by which Kepler went about reasoning to the new framework of elliptical orbits, extrapolating from measurements of the positions of Mars and splitting the center of the circular orbit of the Copernican system, in part on the basis of a kind of late Platonic mysticism. But even here the fundamental disposition of intellect has now been or is being altered. Demonstration increasingly proceeds from principles which are no longer directly implicated or presented in the very same field of ordinary experience which is being clarified or explained. Intellect is no longer standing next to sense. It is rather nowhere in the picture, forming instead the perspective grid for a free-standing duplication of the sense world, fitted to a singularized subjective view. The stance of the viewer, as located by the perspective structure -122-

of Leonardos Last Supper, is here suddenly freed to look down upon the entire universe as a solar system. To be sure my examples here are inadequate to the task at hand. One can always point to the Ptolemaic universe of spheres within spheres and state that such requires the same view from nowhere. But even this relative nowhere would only be from the edge as with some spherical enclosure, so also mimicking the actual position of the person standing next to the stick and looking at it as thrust into the pool of water. And certainly one cannot or would not build up the Ptolemaic universe from the modern theoretical perspective. As in contemporary astrophysics, it takes considerable theoretical maneuvering to bring volumes back into the picture of the universe at large and the solar system in particular. Indeed, what is required is nothing less than the Newtonian concept of inertial mass to make any headway here. And in this sense it remains interesting to consider where, precisely, we stand in relation to the projections which we now utilize. Newtons universe has no center and no edge. That of Einstein and current cosmology is actually somewhat homier, even if still difficult to picture. But it does follow the projectional lines of the more creative Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis.63 But the crucial feature in all that passes here by way of example is the element of contiguity and contact. Here, in antiquity, is the field of a presence which maintains or supplies difference. And it is only on this basis that we have an actual perceptual basis for a metaphorically extended discussion of reasoning as a way of seeing. Here, and here alone, appearance is real, both in itself and as a partial illusion concerning something else. What comes forward in this is crucial in various realms. There is an extended moment in cultural history in which private property is both real and formally abstract, just as there is a world of theoretical development, underneath our own patterns of such, in which appearances both appear on their own and are metaphorically extended in the mode of knowing real truths about partially real things, things which are also of the order of the appearance of something else. There is in such a position of knowledge, no question of absolute falsity or error, just as there is no absolute negation of the good, no absolute evil or complete injustice. Indeed, even as with the image of the Divided Line, one cannot escape form equality read justice even when

Few people today, even among scholars, pay much attention to Kants pre-critical writings on nature and the universe at large. Here we encounter projected extraterrestrials to go with Leibniz notion of a real infinity of worlds. The universe itself is given a center for an infinity of galaxies, just as the Milky Way is now given a center for the production of an immense number of planetary systems. But exactly why the Universe has a center from which to expand as a whole, is unclear, save as a rather peculiar and distorted extension of the solar system as derivable from a single swirling nebular mass. And while this might accord with the Kantian universe as projected at the time, it had no relation, as such, to the Newtonian framework of absolute space and time, housing various inertial masses in gravitational relations, one with another. Such a universe, again, needs no center or edge, unless it is asserted to come into being from some singular quasi-material source. -123-

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beginning from an hypothesis of inequality read injustice for the equality reappears as mathematically guaranteed as regards the two central segments of the image as constructed. There is only knowing in accordance with what is itself of a lesser or partial order of being, thus by way of the privative a of adikaios or injustice and asaphneia or unclarity in knowledge, and this in order to use the patterns of privation to advance to that which is of the nature of the unnegated base term. Here we have also that problematic context of opinion that is dragged forward even into the framework of geometrical reasoning, as something that pertains to an intermediate realm of being. When put back into play in the Kantian universe of appearances, this amounts to knowing what is partially false, but only about what is admittedly less than capable of delivering the truth of the things in question in its own form or terms. One cannot see ideas as physical objects or know them under the demands of the physical sciences, even if these ideas alone, or these in conjunction with what they refer to, make the things and the objective configuration of the sciences possible in the first place. But the system of property relations that goes with this is considerably different from that of the Greek world, just as the ethical dimension of reasoning has been decisively shifted in the direction of real and absolute patterns of evil and good in the modern world. Nietzsche, of course, came at the whole problem from the standpoint of the moral transformation, as discussed first by way of a set of significant inversions in values by Hegel in the Phnomenologie des Geistes.64 But, again, the question becomes one of the status of the property system that goes with all of this. It, too, has shifted into the field of the abstract or formal. It has become something only of monetary value, something only conventional. But even assuming that this is somehow true for us, the question remains as to what all this might now mean. Reasoning from the standpoint of a line of contact/division in some theoretical dimension that constitutes a field of interest for something more than merely a system of knowledge, leaves one with a problem of having to determine two things simultaneously that do not seem to fit together in a single discourse. This is something I mentioned earlier in relation to the problem of what got and still gets divided in the various systems of reflective reasoning. Here, however, there seems to be a need for both an extended theoretical treatment and some kind of practical or ethical treatment. But this practical or ethical treatment is more of the nature of a statement of

Phn.des Gesites, cf. Suhrkamp Werke 3, pp. 128-129; Miller translation, p. 97. In another sphere, revenge on an enemy is, according to the immediate law, the supreme satisfaction of the injured individuality. This law, however, which bids me confront him as himself a person who does not treat me as such, and in fact bids me destroy him as an individuality this law is turned around by the principle of the other world into its opposite: the reinstatement of myself as a person through the destruction of the alien individuality is turned into self-destruction. If, now, this inversion, which finds expression in the punishment of crime, is made into a law, it, too, again is only the law of one world which is confronted by an inverted supersensible world where what is despised in the former is honoured, and what in the former is honoured meets with contempt. The punishment which under the law of the first disgraces and destroys a man, is transformed in its inverted world into the pardon which preserves his essential being and brings him to honour. -124-

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how interests are controlled and determined within the current dominant cultural setting, understood, however, by reference to what can now be made more apparent in relation to a different system, now at least partially developed; while the theoretical treatment might be little more than what has already been detailed as an order of problems relating to knowledge and appearances, though something else might be made of this as well as a kind of intermediary system of human interest. Still, for the moment I will move to conclude on the basis of a discussion of the more important aspects of the ethical framework.

Today it is the uniformity of the institutional context that increasingly empowers the business-form interest of abstract and near formal relations running about clothed in the perceptual order of everyday experience. Governments, schools, military and police establishments, hospitals and medical establishments, even families and religious establishments, are increasingly of the same form, both at deep levels and on the surface, while everyone within every such institution is related both to the institutions and to each other by way of money and the new systems of information; just as all the institutions themselves are related to one another by the self-same money system and the order of commodity exchange. Without increasing access to older or other institutional contexts, contexts that are not or have not been penetrated and reorganized by the money system to the same extent, it is difficult to conceive of any fundamental shift in the prevalent ruling ethic. And the international capitalistic order is currently reducing all other forms of culture to its own form, by way of reorganizing everything in the mode of business, operating now always under the overarching and dominating financial umbrella of corporate existence. Therefore, short of some hypothesis concerning innate ideas, where we have to deal with content as well as mere formal structure in some post-Kantian manner, it must be asserted that one must at least have a memory of something else to make any meaningful opposition possible beyond the typical confusion of liberal politics; a confusion and a politics which belong, of course, to the self-same system and its development. So we need a memory of some other way in which human beings are related and positioned next to one another in a real world and in real situations pertaining to such, to say nothing of an actual institutional framework for the development of a system of habituated experience that might count as an ethical other in this regard. And this piece of writing might itself serve, in a restricted sense, to establish something by way of this memory, while serving as well to further, by means of this, some possible way forward in the institutional context. But today, even the linguistic form has been seized by the informational context of communication; a context which, as already mentioned, might be conceived on various grounds as money-form language. In the contemporary world of the socalled advanced capitalistic societies this means that two things, insofar as they might still be maintained as distinct in any way at all by way of social practice and habituated orders of meaning, are always now running side by side in everyones head, with nothing dividing them but the very form of division itself, where this very context is always being doubled in both the conceptual and practical world by the form of money itself. In real terms, this amounts to the invasion of all difference by a single system of difference, across a frontier or threshold line of difference that amounts to nothing more than a conduit for the flow of information in a predigested form, positioned always within a general system of constant and pressing mediation by way of the movement of money. And in simple presentation one can make clear rather quickly by -125-

way of example, what is obviously very difficult to development by way of a full demonstration and articulation at the level of theoretical understanding. In the medical world, for instance, we now have unfolding for us a rather straightforward conflict between an older system of care and a new profit-driven system of care. The older system relied on the older institutions of the family and a context of human relation that still laid claim to some patterns of behavior developed independently of the contemporary money system not in full abstraction from the history of the development of such a system, but still in some way as distinct from a pure reduction to corporate form and the demands that such makes on the patterns of belief related to decision and action. But, today, in virtually every instance, this older system, where it still pertains at all, is set down right next to the demands of the new system. Driving along beside the older frameworks for care and responsibility is a newly fashioned order in which virtually every decision is rehoused in relation to money, to corporate demands for profit and institutions embodying these corporate demands. And the point here is that all reasoning thereby becomes saturated by an affect that now floats between two orders. Literally what feels right now begins to shift from what used to feel right in the older order of care to what increasingly feels right, but now supports the lines of decision that flow from the new order. There is an erosion of the affectively charged framework that supports an ability to reason in opposition to the developing context of the medical/insurance industry. And this pertains to doctors and nurses as well as patients and their relatives. Indeed, it is a long time now since even nurses were drawn from a domestic realm, which might secure a distinct order of habituation. This then pertains to the affective form of understanding, which has, as already noted, the shared stance of perceptual experience as its ordinary form; which is to say, that its affect is that of not noticing its rather continuous operation in the transfer between subjective and objective registers. Operating within such a framework, this means that in a very subtle manner, ordinary people, as well as professionals at various levels, begin to make decisions as if prescribed by a system dedicated to the flow of money in a general framework of commodity exchange relations, without noticing that such decisions support only the ends of this new system and its major interest groups. To notice such a shift, an informed and directed order of reflection is required. But general education does not promote this reflective capability, especially at the required levels of understanding, while medical schools increasingly promote an affinity between medicine and business practice; and this at levels that are much deeper and more subject-related than some mere exercise in a practical disciple: Here there is a training in judgement as decision-making that predisposes one to follow out certain lines of practice, which curiously, or not so curiously, parallel the lines of financial support for the schools and the extended institutional context in question. But more importantly the institutional features of the entire culture collapse inward on the patterned responses dictated by the business ethic and integrated internally and externally by the flow of money and money-form language as information. Not just labor is here become a commodity, as in classical Marxist theory, but thought itself has been synthesized in the form of commodity exchange; and this by way of the institutional housing for habituation and learning. Thus, at every level of institutional existence, human relations are now dictated by so both prohibited and promoted by monetary concerns parading variously as professional concerns or educational concerns or even familial concerns. But, again, the invisibility of such a takeover is what speaks to the penetration of the money system to the level of the affective -126-

register of interest itself, dictating transformations in various more specified versions of the general field.. In this regard what one first begins to notice, if one can still notice anything at all beyond the increasingly smooth surfaceof the ethical totality, is that a systematic intention will begin to work itself out at every level of the organized framework, in this instance the framework for care. This intention is never merely a matter of the individual person but moves always by using various levels of individual action, people housed variously in the organization of the total system. So, for instance, let us say that a particular part of the population of the United States is useful to the health-care industry as a conduit to move money and thereby service certain forms of profitability. Care will be delivered to these people in a manner which utilizes pharmaceuticals and technological assemblages of production and use, firms that make devices and places that use them. And the furtherance of such a delivery system will become the business of government as well as the business of business itself. But if there are other groupings of people for whom it would be cost effective for dominant parts of the industry to dispense with care, rather than to maximize such care, these people will simply begin as they have in fact long since already begun to disappear from the frameworks of such care at various levels and in various ways. And in this country at least, reform is more likely to make things worse, while making things seem as if all is somehow becoming better. And quite remarkably, these self-same people will begin to disappear also from the conscious field for recognition, belonging to a significantly large functional proportion of the population, and/or will only appear in such a field in such a way as to compel a sense of fear and hatred. The culture becomes, in this way, simultaneously increasingly indifferent and increasingly sadistic. One-third of its population is set on annihilating the other two-thirds, with the people in these other categories increasingly set against one another in various ways as well. Here the use of thirds is simply predicated on the systematic demands of the current form of the representative democracy. For in a culture where it only takes one quarter of the possible voting population to elect people to office, at the very most one third of the total population, beyond the mere voting population as such, can be said to constitute the entire meaningful context for all political control and action. And, of course, this one third is also an economic determination of considerable force in terms of marketing and propaganda by way of media presentation and representation; just as it is virtually the only order even potentially active in the control of all institutions of either government or business. In other words, only one third of the country ever even appears to the whole, and this as a meaningful part of the propaganda machine; appearing always to itself as well in the position of the now famous bourgeoisie of Marxist theory, as that which claims its interest to be universal and puts this in the place of the interest of everyone else in the population indeed, as from the first, in the place of the interest of everyone on the face of the earth. And when any one else appears at all, in this system, it is always as housed within the framework belonging essentially to the control mechanisms of the upper third. Such people are, for the most part, only to be seen on television as the unfortunate others, rather than the actual majority of the population and this in a socalled democracy. In this regard, for instance, the entire mainstream liberal press, as belonging, again, only to this upper third of the nation at large, is already effectively right wing, as any theorist of any note and warrant recognizes. The present right wing press, by comparison, has long since run off the scale: It is straightforwardly fascist, bigoted and -127-

prejudiced beyond any possible appeal to reason or redemption. But, again, the patten of such recognition is also already controlled; which is to say that it leads to no real opposition, since the people themselves to whom such recognitions belong, already belong to the ruling one-third of the culture as well, even if now as increasingly marginal. In the margins, of course, one is free, and free to fall through those now famous cracks in the social floor boards of society and thereby be disposed of with the rest of the refuse, which increasingly defines the culture at large. Indeed, as the evangelist doctrine runs, we are always walking over the fiery pit, and the floor boards are rotten. This, however, as with so much American religious dogma, has now been made literal for the vast majority of people as regards the very form of its so-called social safety net. But more important, in that it bears on the possibility of transformation both in consciousness and in fact, the United States is now a parody of any actual form of democracy: Two-thirds of the people have no political representation at all, to say nothing of actual political power as direct access to the arch kritik kai bouleutik, the powers and bodies of judicial and legislative activity and action; while what parades itself as reasonable discourse and learning has no access to and no concern with anything beyond what the upper third of the population can cognize in its selfproduced and heavily edited forms Generally speaking, such learning as is now available, has no power of perception with which to penetrate to even the level of the principles and structures of the present piece of writing. One needs the habituation and a good deal more by forced and unforced patterns of learning. Effective opposition to such a system depends upon both a kind of reasoning and, as just mentioned, an habituated framework for such reasoning. The framework is always the place of affective interests. This is more than a matter of sensing that something is wrong. It is also a matter of being able to sense anything at all as distinct from the demands of the corporate machine of profitability and power, and thereby reason in any way at all beyond the frameworks of the models dedicated to business and business-form patterns of education and government. But even assuming that one still has some habituated framework within which to move against or beside this more uniform culture of institutionally developed and housed practices, again, at virtually every level of encounter or decision, the two frameworks for affective reasoning will be located, as it were, right next to one another: In ones own mind, the two systems will co-habit, to the degree to which they still exist, as it were, as separate patterns. And the only maintainable difference will have to do with the peculiar line of difference which constitutes the division by way of contact of the orders of practice and reasoning concerning the self-same state of affairs. And the question here is not one of the physical mechanism by means of which one system actually invades and prevails over the other, for instance, as this pertains to the physical chemistry of the brain for virtually anyone can project some version of this on the basis of the current technology and state of the sciences but the cultural mechanism which promotes the invasions and increasingly features the one system as dominant and preferable over the other. And here we have such things as the interface between forms of media and corporate control of such, to go along with forms of institutions and the control of all of these.

Aristotle featured a word in his ethics, the word, proairesis. The term means to open a space before, so to produce the place or space for a choice that depends upon the full exercise of -128-

rational capabilities as regards some matter for decision. It used to be supposed indeed, in every dogmatically configured and religiously dominated society, it is always supposed that the ends are somehow set out and given independently of the discussion of means. But obviously, beyond the simplistic pragmatic framework, the ultimate questions here, just as with Aristotles ethical treatises, have always to do with decisions concerning ends as well as means, and the manners in which these are interwoven; whence, as well, arguments concerning the good as such and in virtually every possible instance of discrete activity. And then there is a question of the means itself, which has had an enormous expansion in the framework of the doctrine of free will and with the modern concept of freedom, as a kind of existential and ontological absolute, that is now spread about like manure in the field of free-market capitalism. In any given culture it is precisely this system of ends, as determined always together with such a fundamental view of means, that defines the most basic lines of the culture itself; that which controls, by organizing all of its practices, and thereby habituates and fixes its total system of interests. In a world such as that of ancient Athens, there was actually quite a problem as regards such ends themselves. There were several competing ends. The most famous: honor, both military and political, pleasure, and the pursuit of moneyed wealth, already and increasingly as the means to both honor and pleasure. Then there was something else that seemed to organize the relation between honor and pleasure, something called virtue, where this was understood in its own right variously and was for a time much argued about. In our society, however, and for some time now, near four-hundred years, money must be said to be no mere means, but rather something integrated with the discourse of the means called freedom; while its mode of acquisition, like its penetration of the systems of government and social practice, is such that it now controls the very meaning of honor and pleasure; which is to say, that the pursuit of money is now the very form of virtuous activity, with anything else simply appended for show, as with our political puppets and our military operations, where all the strings lead back to the boardrooms of corporations and the attendant settings for the furthering of personal wealth. Money, together with its modes of acquisition, may not be, as it were, adequate to the actual discourse of freedom, but it does share, in an alarming manner, a certain aspect of that discourse: From the center of the Critique of Pure Reason, and in a discussion of the idealism of Plato, with reference to the degree to which any state can approach the ideal of the good or justice, we read: For the issue depends on freedom; and it is the nature of freedom to pass beyond any specified limit.65 Money, of course, as a means in the mode of a median measure, when itself taken as an end in itself, has no proper limit. Or, as I used to put it : How much freedom is too much? / How much money is too much? But in such a world as ours, where such transferences, involving such weighty modes of equivocation, take on added significance within an institutional context which drives and progressively houses more and more human action, the place for any possible exercise of reasoning regarding the given ends and means of decision has all but disappeared; first politically and now socially. There is no place before and so no space for a critical framework of ethical reasoning. All is foreclosed by the corporate model of business, operating within the society at large, and more directly through the corporate control of all media, all government, and all education. But, again, this is only possible because the foreclosure takes place at the level of

65

K.d.r.V. A-317, B-374, tr, Norman Kemp Smith. -129-

interest itself. For to organize desire in opposition to money is now to will ones own destruction, in a sense that has only recently become utterly and coercively compelling; thus as an instance of the old Greek anank.. And so as the differential spaces between institutions and within institutions collapse along with the spaces between the people within these same parameters, less and less becomes conceivable, just as less and less becomes interesting in a manner beyond the paradigms of the culture itself. Faced with growing recognitions concerning problems of this nature, systematic philosophy and reasoning in general long ago took recourse to another pattern of developmental theory, one which organizes interest itself at the level of cultural dysfunction and contradiction. If, in other words, the systematic field of interest inherent to the capitalist mode of production and exchange, so, as it were, the societal field and framework for understanding, does not produce a constructive contradiction of itself and in its own terms, and this at the level of the ruling institutions of society as a whole, then all change becomes a mere dogmatic display of technological progress without the ability to produce a meaningful alteration in the fundamental logic of the dominant culture of oppression. But as capitalism seems now, and for some time, to rely on a logic of contradiction in the mode of a system of cyclical crises that simply feed the furthering of the financial framework itself increasing its actual hold on power with every such crisis, even the most severe, and thereby making the whole a virtual double of the old Hegelian system of historical process and development, bereft, however, of any of its higher ethical and aesthetic or intellectual realms and activities this other logic of change has now fallen away as compelling. Therefore, there now only remains a framework of direct confrontation, but one orchestrated at the level already achieved by the culture itself: confrontation at the level of the individual, as the contested product of the large-scale cultural history in question. But the individual is itself an abstraction bordering on formality, as already pointed out, to go along with its famously modern and contemporary alienated character. Here we have the reduced, formal not not-one of the older not cut in two or not dyad, which plays across the field of equivocation in the meanings of negation and into the hands of the field of modern corporate interests. And one must certainly by-pass the juridical field for such determinations where, indeed, Spinozas maxim, all determination is negation holds sway in its own context in order to give the term any meaning at all beyond the now customary discourse of rights; all of which actually only belong to those individuals who can divide themselves into themselves via their corporate holdings. Or to be blunt in the well recognized parlance of the times: One has exactly as much by way of rights as one can buy, in a country such as the United States.

At the same time, but in no way requiring the same intellectual training and even less by way of specific culture heritage, what is becoming clear to increasing numbers of people, especially in the so-called advanced or established democracies, is that the existing patterns of government are now no better, and for the most part are actually worse, than the people who inhabit them. As institutionally configured and constrained by the self-same economic system, they have now the power only to make the people involved worse, if and when required; which is rarely the case. Such a power is, again, the consistent result of that institutional structure of habituation or mode of customary training, dedicated to the pursuit of property in the name of -130-

happiness. To demand, then, that the government operate differently with respect to those most basic drivers and tendencies of the corporate universe and the people who promote and benefit from it, would be to demand a different government. When in the course of human events .... But all such demand is itself culturally housed and ethically bound; just as Jefferson was once bound to promote the meaning of Lockes pursuit of property with his more Aristotelian pursuit of happiness, where there was a question from the first as to the meaning of such an exchange even in the reasoning of Aristotle. There is, then, no field of possible human knowledge that simply leaves the world behind, even, most famously, when it invents and invests another world, such as the supersensible world of God or pure reason. And this also tells us a great deal about the origins, even if not necessarily the order or results, of the scientific view detailed earlier with respect to modernity, by way of the Gods eye view from an above that is now the location of the corporate boardrooms in New York or Houston. Having to deal, then, with these more forced recognitions, beyond those already handled in the systematic adjustments of subsequent patterns of Marxist theory and other modes of critical theory, the tendencies of the times would seem to promote a continuous wearing down of all idealistic thought, even that as only pertains to the necessary critique of idealism and its Marxist development. In fact, however, it is precisely this kind of condition that has always produced the idealistic pattern of reasoning, as well as unleashing its full critical potential; and this from the first: Not simply the rise of the democratic order, but its near continuous dissolution into oligarchy verging on plutocracy and associated with quite fetching forms of demagoguery, is that which gave us Socrates and Plato; and with its final collapse, it authored no one less than Aristotle. Not merely the movement through the English Revolution to the American, but the protracted failure of the French; whereby we got, not just Napoleon, but, and again at some significant remove, Kant and Hegel, and finally Marx. These are then the broad patterns of the double history of the theory of appearances in the world of private property, so of having and seeing as they have now already been developed and upon which so much else depends both in theory and practice. And always at the center is the problem of the political world that goes by the name of democracy. Indeed, one is more than merely tempted to say that without the movement into the democratic state form, there is no theoretical world at all, since this world is, in fact, the product of a thinking that does not just free itself from ordinary perception, but reconstitutes the entire field of such perception; whereby it makes possible and actual everything from the sciences to formal logic and critical ethical theory But equally it is precisely this total field of endeavour that also yields the framework for the development of both the ancient and the modern systems of exchange, so the new patterns of property and the money-system as a whole. But, again, in this regard it is worth noting that it is precisely not the economic order itself that authors anything of note, despite its promotion of an incremental doubling in the realm of things as commodities. This world on its own no matter how powerful it may now have grown is intellectually and culturally sterile; and generally, the more powerful, the more sterile. The only possible exception here is the apotheosis of money in the exchange system of religion, the Holy Spirit. But even this requires its Roman casing to come forward in a significant manner. Moreover, the order of contemporary businessmen is like a world of perpetual American eight-graders, bereft of all detailed learning, art and literature, and running forward on a kind of science that looks more like a grand science project than something theoretically dense and dedicated to an -131-

understanding of the relation between thinking in any form and the world at large, both natural and human. But more importantly, without the political universe of the democracy, this money system of exchange has always been and remains incapable of generating even itself, let along anything else beyond a system of repetitive power relations wholly consistent with virtually any mode of despotic authority as collected up in history under the form and meaning of high civilization. And high civilization is always reducible in the end to the same pattern: one group of people telling another much larger group of people, where and how to pile up the rocks. And so in the end it was Aristotle who was correct in stating, and Hegel who was correct in reminding us in the most forceful language, that human beings, whatever else they may be, remain reasoning animals who speak and as such have an affective interest in ethics, politics, and and a host of other things; all of this beyond, or at least now beside, the financial framework of what merely makes life possible, but never actual. But again, neither Hegel nor Aristotle is in favor of democracy in some unqualified sense. It is just that it is only by way of democracy, always in a more unqualified sense than they preferred, that one has any access to or possibility of either thinker and their insights, just as the same holds for Kant and Plato before them. But this present work is not dedicated to the political order per se, nor to the problems of democracy in particular, but rather to uncovering the force of the latter as it operates in conjunction with the economy to promote a discourse concerning the relation of the ethical dimension to the realm of thinking itself. The elements of democracy it seems, whatever they be in their particulars and there is very much here that I have either simply left out or only mentioned in passing, as for instance, the fundamental reorganization of the entire temporal framework are always mastered rather quickly by the institutional outlines of an older pattern of steering as control, kyberna, guberno, government. But beyond this, the democratic drive leaves a very significant trace in the order of thinking. And in this piece, this is laid out in relation to problems of appearances in the theoretical realm and the patterns of habituated having that go along with such. Moreover, in this order of pursuit, it is the rather lowly and somewhat animal-like tactile framework of an embedded perceptual consciousness that would seem to be the phoenix that now rises from the ashes of modernity and its systems of pure reason. And, indeed, to return one last time to the ethical framework detailed above, if one wishes to know what it might take to survive the continuous and repetitive failure of contemporary democracy and the continuous and repetitive rise of the contemporary money system of property relations and corporate power, then it should be recalled that all of our modern advances have actually come, not from some fabled beginning of all things, but rather from some distended middle the middle-voiced world of the Greeks and the re-inventions of culture and civilization that belong with this and flow from it. And now by complex doubling, and precisely by way of the loss of this more original voice and what it entailed by way of its own quite special world, we must again pursue the patterns of reasoning that open up an understanding of understanding itself and its relation to the perceptual world. And so reason comes again into direct contact with the world of the senses and what is delivered in and by perception. And we might even find out in this way how to read here a significant order of illusion: such as that of the strangely unified shadow of a stick thrust into a pool of water, as that shadow falls, not just on the surface of the water by way of a reflection, but on the bottom of the pond as well, passing somehow through both the reflection borne on the surface and the water itself as a medium of some density and texture. -132-

From this image of the absence of light, laid down on the muddy bottom, perhaps we will then finally be able to read something else of importance about what lies above the surface, where we walk about as fish out of water with eyes full of sights. But it is just a natural image of which I speak, speaking here imagistically in writing: the image that is always cast by means of something else and made possible by yet something else again. And in this regard we should remember and mark well that our order of nature and the natural is not an original, but just a reflex of something, the consciousness of which would constitute a different kind of knowledge than what our world has become increasingly accustomed to expect.

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Preface in the Form of a Postscript

All of my writing is about the same thing. So much so is this the case that I have now grown tired of pursuing the topic. But I have nowhere else to go. Trapped by habituated responses, there is little that presents itself that cannot or will not be turned back into the selfsame discourse. I keep looking, but I keep failing. Eventually, of course, one comes to recognize this as a kind of fate. Ones idiom, as it were, gets designed in the doing and over the course of a life-time. But there is something more devious at work than this. For indeed, even before the lifetime of development, and so with the initial moves into the material, the very same points of interest were made manifest. But, of course, something else interesting might just get said along the way and by the side of the road most often taken. There is a terrible problem today. It has to do with the crushing power of a single system of control, another single road, leading always now to its own single end. It matters little whether it is the Board Room of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in China or the Board Room of Exxon-Mobil or Goldman-Sachs. The people in power are configured by the current system of power and all else must run along in the train of the decisions made in this highly autocratic and despotic framework. Presidents talk to dictators, talk to business leaders, and they all speak the same language. Everyone else either learns to speak in the image of this single language or is silenced in one way or another. People, the vast majority of actual people, simply do not count. They are merely extras for that now famous stage-play of power or, as more often, mere conduits for the flow of money in the various exchange systems of profitability feeding the fortunes of those sitting at the tables of the boardrooms of the powerful.. Perhaps, there is still a preference here among the principal actors for personal contact. But precisely what is in contact with what is as questionable as the characters of the persons involved . Complaints, of course, do not mean very much to this order of power and those who command the framework of present-day existence. Why should those in charge care? The logic of businessmen the world over is to do something that makes money, until someone or something stops them from doing it; and then either remove the obstacle or move over and start doing something else that makes even more money until something else intervenes. Of course, they do tend to make the world into what they want in advance as well; so to defend forward and to be pro-active, as their minions are now like to say. Still, their entire use of apparent opposition is to turn such to their advantage or simply remove it. The pattern is thus very nearly purely reactive, with only one set determinant: a drive to increase wealth, increase profits, increase net worth, increase flow, motion, production ...etc. Within such a system, anyone who thinks reflectively is burdened with an insurmountable task: For such thinking would always dictate that one service, not a single drive with a singularized set of interests attached, but a drive with at least two principal interests attached, and these to be dealt with simultaneously, rather than sequentially. Up against others who have no such added burden, whether it be in business, politics, or education, the reflectively divided self of the fully alienated individual of the -134-

contemporary world is bound to fail by way of the uniform standards of productivity and profitability. The pragmatic stance, as now commonly advanced, would hardly even be recognizable to those who first projected it in antiquity or again in modernity. What would even William James have to say today as regards such pragmatism in theory and practice? William James, whose reading list looked like the history of German and French philosophy, taken together with all concurrent scientific and social theory of note. But, again, this is so very unimportant that one can hardly feel more than a briefly passing joy in being able to note it. Indeed, not even a joy, just some minor sense of relief attended by a dis-ease of sorts. For is it not the case that the one who thinks and writes in this fully alienated mode is also just as driven; just as unmeasured in response to the system; just as hysterical, to use the older psychological terminology back in vogue today. Two interests or one, all is now cast in the same mold. Indeed, it is only because the world is the world which it now is, that one finds just such strange kinds of writing in it, as one might now increasingly find that is, such a one, who is a kind of reader as well as or in the place of one who merely writes. But the driven writer has increasingly less time to bother with reading. Just as with the new-and-improved money-maker, so this new writer must simply keep writing, looking by the way at the self-same screen on which the stock prices go by organized in this way or that as set beside the news of the latest bombing or the latest invasion; and so keep moving the words and the phrases, orchestrating and directing, and so marshaling the phalanxes of meaning for the next great battle of words and ideas. But for the one who writes in order to think, all is waiting on just such a turn of phrase to be remembered. Driving and being driven by the words, one is waiting for these same words to reinvest the task of understanding. So now, of course, there is the forgotten that is, forgotten by me for the extended moment of the prior piece of writing meaning of the military organization for the history of democracy and economics and the bearing of this whole militarized complex of civil militias and banking initiatives on thinking generally and theory in particular. Did not Rousseau come from Geneva and was not Socrates a citizen soldier? Again, the philosophers and the dog-faced soldiers of the Republic, then and now. But whether this is the same thing as the history of having and seeing, of property and appearance; or just something else next to it and moving along with it remains to be seen. But it does seemingly demand to be dealt with or thought about by way of writing and speech and all the rest. And how today attack such a topic? There is certainly lots of war and killing, beyond even what goes on in words. But here at that center just off center from which one presently promotes and exports so much destruction, it is not just the military, as such, that comes to the fore, but the re-enactment of this, in a hundred circling campfires. This thing is strange. And stranger still in its initial appearance at the beginning of the 20th century, when rather than parading through town on some memorial day, the remnants of those soldiers of the great battle of Gettysburg lined back up on the 50th anniversary of the event and played out the scene of the famous failed charge one last time. The rebel yell reportedly transfixed and then transfigured the recipients, as it came up the hill and across the wall to the hearers gathered up on the ridge at the old line of defense. Supposedly they leapt over the wall and embraced their former enemies as comrades in arms, reversing the actual order of the action. But, again, what a strange re-enactment: old men facing old men, the remnants of the first battle lining -135-

up as if to fight again in the second: A re-enactment one order too real. It is the doubling, as well as the kind of doubling, that is significant. And, of course, it is the doubling, both in general and quite specifically, that takes me be back again and sets me off on the same old road of my own Western Civilization with its patterns of aggression, both naked and more subtle. Not just our denatured same again, but the double as a peculiar kind of image that speaks of the problematic difference between mimesis and representation, and thereby throws the entire discussion into the realm of aesthetics, to go now with politics, economics and the theory of and as appearances. So the Army and Art. In my language, two As divided and connected by a collection of other letters. Derrida again and again. And in history, or just the story, we are once more lost in the middle of things along with the Trojan War and the Iliad, and so connected with virtually everything as doubled, including the search for a cause; which search once opened up that first writing of history, as well as Humes much later problematic use of such epic tales in pursuit of causation and causal theory. But while this might well take me on towards the discourse of a thousand screens and the new universe of computer imagery, it will not really stop the forces now arrayed against the ordinary human beings who are being mauled the world over. Yet there is still something here that demands a hearing, even if only by way of sight, along with everything else which always appears or seems so much more pressing and urgent. It is a task that continues to promote thinking in an age when it has become curiously endangered, not by being pursued by too few but rather by so many but in a manner not at all enough or as inappropriate to itself as something beyond what is now given in and as the culture of productivity. And here the demand has become strange indeed: To not do in the mode of doing. To not make in the mode of making. And all this by way of not thinking in the mode of thinking. To thereby try to do, make, or think differently something different. But this, too, has seemingly been done all too well already. So well, in fact, that little remains by way of all this negatively charged activity in the mode of the same. So all that does remain is to do it again the thing and its negation and see if it finally breaks the machine of the culture before that machine breaks everybody else on the mediaeval paradigm of a Fate, the wheel of progress as wheel of production gone over again to productivity. This should then finally be enough to stop the flow of words for the moment. But something in this notion of stopping keeps coming to the fore. What one wants to stop is not the words, but the inevitable advance of the machine: the culture machine, the profit machine, the wall-street machine, the oil machine, the military machine, the governmental machine, the police machine. In toto the civilization machine. But it seems that we today always want to stop the civilization machine before we actually become civilized but by means of what,civilized ? And this is the problem. For there must be some way to make the processes of advancement less destructive, and thereby negative in some new way. This amounts to making the dialectic progress to art and philosophy without progressing continuously through religion to the economic transcendence of state power and the world economy of capitalism. But, again, this is already an old dream of those schooled in 19th century patterns of theory become 20th century totalitarian regimes with their attendant ghettoes and death camps. So very much here that needs to be simultaneously remembered and forgotten. So much that requires a new approach.

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But here one tends to forget that there are always new people coming along to pick up, not precisely where one has left off, but somewhere in relation to this and in the midst of other matters, supposedly different. And so ones task, relatively speaking, is just to survive long enough, to see just far enough, to offer up something that might just help cripple the giant and trip it up in its incessant order of iteration as repetition.

But then I repeat myself and so finally stop. Albeit a few pages too far, and in a place not right: For, as I once noted now long ago, one hundred and twenty-five pages is just right for the book . And by my reckoning, this is now page one hundred and twenty-six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and again one and two and three and four and five .... and one more yet again.

Not enough by at least one too much.

Ticonderoga, March, 2011.

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For a Lost Friend

I know that I am a man and, as a man, subject to error, but against error I have taken a most diligent care, and striven to keep in entire accordance with the laws of my country, with loyalty, and with morality. after the Elwes translation, Spinoza, Preface to the Theological-Political Tractatus

What might a person do, write, or think, if freed from the fear of the laws of a country, but still bound by loyalty to friends and a concern for what is right? Nobody the Notorious

Introduction

As I can introduce the subject-matter of this piece no better than has been done in the first section, very little remains by way of putting off this beginning, save to find some way to put off the reader. It has been my habit for some years now to protect my thinking by encasing it in a style and by way of commentary that makes the whole somewhat less approachable than it would be if some other mode of presentation were adopted, more in accordance with the rules of decorum in print. But everything Roman bothers me; no doubt because I come from such a Roman-form culture: an empire parading itself as a republic, and all in the name of democracy. Still, there is more to this matter of style than merely the attempt to stay clear of those most famous of Philistines and their followers. It has to do with the nature of writing and the meaning of ideas. There is, in this regard, no form of presentation that accords better with the demands of thinking itself than one in which the words and grammatical structures are put in play in such manner as to generate insight. Here one trusts in the reserves of language itself to bring forward things that otherwise might remain in the shadows forever; and this especially when the thinking involved is constrained by and reduced to the patterns of contemporary expository prose of the American variety. The only problem is one of finding a way to leave enough standing by way of the paths originally taken to the given points of recognition, that a reader, in some projected form, might be able to do more than merely follow the lines of that thinking to their supposed ends. This problem is then greatly expanded, when what is in play is virtually everything that has been thought over a lifetime of intellectual activity. Things pop out and must constantly be housed in the flow of the discourse. Nothing is ever simply there in finished form to be served up to the public, as if one could pour knowledge into minds as sounds into waiting ears, hungry to hear. Indeed, very nearly all such hunger has long ago been sated in these United States of America. And my command of rhetoric is hardly of an order as to permit a reawakening of even this enviable position, that once had to be avoided and turned at all costs. But as this is most of what can be managed here by way of an introduction, perhaps I might finish with the attempt to set the base tone and the bias of what is to follow. It is all very nice to talk metaphorically about Romans and Philistines and whatever else might pass by in the flow of consciousness in a particular context at a particular time and place, and even to talk further about the manner in which talk itself is merely metaphorically used here by way of writing, but all of this really does very little good. For the enemy is the machine, the culture machine, the thing that maims and mutilates minds and bodies enumerable in the long and lamentable history of civilization and its prefigurations. And it is still at work, all but unchallenged, even in the now virtual universe of discourse, hovering above the wrecked planet that we inhabit. It did not happen by accident or by way of a few principal actors and agents interspersed throughout time, or even by way of the present arch-villains of modern corporate power though here, again, we meet with those noble Romans, formed up in their maniples of battlefield tactics as now shifted into the order of business and legality rather it happened and continues to happen because of the very structure of thought itself and its affective relation to the world as orchestrated continuously by means of institutional settings and their development. And, of course, these same settings are the place of the good, and so of all we know and have ever gathered up as informing our ways of life, of feeling, of passion and serenity. But left uncriticized and inadequately understood, these remain,

even so, in charge of all things human, just as they continue to operate with a force and logic that proliferates from some more original place, where they might well once have functioned to service some other kind of more directed good in some field of a more immediate need; both of which, the good and the need, have, however, long since passed away in their own right, leaving only the shell of power to be grafted together with whatever collateral damage might have been done to the order of sentiment and thought along the way. We see this general logic of development revealed in the arts, that is, in the manner in which what was once a matter for a response in a field of pragmatic demands is transposed and freed to become that which serves only a different order of so-called aesthetic ends. We see it in our cultural festivals and in our deepest and most trenchant institutions, where the remnants of some ancient practice are continuously brought forward in either a new form or in the same form but in a new order or world. We even see it in our battlefield monuments and parks, where sites of mayhem are rendered aesthetically pleasing and generally soothing, places for picnics and flying kites. But none of this is harmless in a more absolute sense of what is thereby given: At the heart of the family is marriage, but this remains a citation of ritual rape, while, in the most common religious variant in American culture, fathers still give-away daughters, as if handing over authority from man to man in a shifted patrilineal system of power and property that belongs to a particular development of tribal society as it was taken over to promote certain patterns of civilization. Artworks do more than merely cite a farreaching conquest of material and an always attendant conquest of intellect by way of sensibility. Cultural festivals enshrine practices of ostracism and inbreeding that speak as much of xenophobic behavior as of a general reversal of some patterned authority structure; a reversal by means of which, as with so much comedy still today, authority is secured in its unchallenged supremacy. And what can really be said by way of glorifying the military with its love of honor and the attached worship of an authority which maintains itself in a mode of discipline enforced by punishment? Here, too, we have the most basic meaning of the State, as the police power of the culture at large and, today, of the corporate world of business in particular. Of course, even this, too, was once good; perhaps even a great good. And so we have learned to understand it as such, by way of reading Aeschylus and Plato, and, more recently, Hegel and Nietzsche. But now we note that whatever good such a directed force of military and corporate power once served has long since vanished, leaving only the naked face of a brutalizing practice for ordinary people to contend with in everyday affairs around the world. And so it is somehow the culture machine itself, in all of its institutional complexity, that must be checked and corrected. For it is this which is always in control of the psyche and not the other way around: even the disorders of the soul are historically housed and determined. But, again, the only thing which has ever challenged the machine belongs as well to it in its own mode of development. Here we have the much maligned of late order of reason. And this, too, has its own institutional housing and a history to confound us. Still, in your heart you know its right simply will not do. But what will do? since, in order for reasoning to have any real power among people at large, these same people must, in fact, one and all, credit this order of thinking as precisely that which they feel in their heart of hearts to be what is right or what delivers the right; and thereby to be that which somehow yields insight into the good as an order of betters over worses. But, then, it is the affect, as well as the thinking that belongs with it, that has here failed. And while this is a very old notion and a very basic recognition, it is, today, continuously overridden, virtually trampled under foot. But not by the agency of satanic forces, rather by the misuse of the paths already taken in the development of this self-same rational capability. And always we have now just this misuse to contend with and what belongs more properly to this.

This brings me, then, to the other end of the introduction and the beginning of the piece as already written. I should like to say much more here, but I fear that doing so would certainly return me to my off-putting tendencies in a manner too developed and too extended to be ignored long enough to get to the work at hand. Still, there is always this desire to fire at least an opening shot across the bow of the great schooner of commerce and custom. But, alas, weak-kneed, as master of only a relatively consistent mode of flight to set against the ever-advancing forces of progress and civilization, whatever passes today for thinking only puts out to sea in a skiff, with little more than a clever design to harness the wind and a need, beyond even desire, to get somewhere else: No canon to fire the shot and no idea even how to sail. But still to steer we do have the deep scars of the human spirit as traced in the ever dimer lights of our own suburban night sky: so, the pattern or form we read in just such as these.

Having and Seeing: An Essay on Property and Appearance

In Four Parts

Foundations for a Theory of Interest

by

Paul Randall Dixon, Jr.

Copyright, 2011 Paul R. Dixon

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