Specular Nature, Hom(m)e Economics or - Vestigium Hominis Video Robin…

Specular Nature, Hom(m)e Economics
or - Vestigium Hominis Video

Robin Mackay

According to Kant the aesthetic judgment, insofar as it is concerned only with the harmony of the
faculties, and a certain pleasure resulting from the conformity of nature with their own methods of
binding space, is purely subjective. The affective element of the experience can be disregarded
since it provides only the raw materials for the judgment which ignites one's auto-eroticism. One
must be disinterested ­ that is, one must not be among things (inter esse).

The disinterest which accompanies the experience of beauty, however, has a significance beyond
this subjective pleasure ; for it constitutes man's dignity, and thus his eminence over that which
he surveys:

        `In the kingdom of ends everything has a price or dignity. Whatever has a price can be
        replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all
        price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.'
        [Kant GMM]

We already know where this other hand is ­ it is the impossible same of reason's double pincer ­
the expression of the ambidextrous specularisation and de(corpo)realization of the body [Irigarary
203]:

        `Whatever has reference to general human inclinations and needs has a market price'
        [GMM]

...whatever falls into the unfiled category of nature, which unspeakably reproduces (re-fers to)
material commodities is subject to the exchangeability of the market;

        `[B]ut that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in
        itself has not merely a relative worth, i.e. a price; but has an intrinsic worth, i.e. dignity'
        [GMM]

How does this withdrawal from the matter of nature become the primary pleasure, as if an
erogeneous zone of the libidinal body were folded back upon itself, vibrating within itself, under
the formal influence of some autoerotic appendage? The question is the same (that of fetishism):
how does the sterile amassing of money become eroticised, how does pleasure come to be
represented by money, the reproduction of capital by means of commodities, where one rushes
to convert the unstable material of the commodity into the abstracted form of capital?

Fetishization signifies a movement from production to representation, where the abstracted form
constitutes an atemporal order safe from the vicissitudes of the market. Man's dignity seeks to
elevate him above the market altogether. Nevertheless there is also this strange economy of
jouissance that consists precisely in the constrictions which this dignity exercises upon him, which
in turn must be explained in terms of a withdrawal into himself.

The representation of experience in the objectivity of reason, comes to be the gold standard
through which experience itself is articulated ­ here there is only one commodity. For the organic
body (re)produces itself both as a species and as an individual [Kant CJ372] in the following
manner:

        `[T]he matter that the tree assimilates is first processed by it until the matter has the
        quality peculiar to the species, a quality that the natural mechanism outside the plant
        cannot supply, and the tree continues to develop itself by means of a material that in its
        composition is the tree's own product.'
        [Kant GJ371]
How quickly the matter assimilated, borrowed, or (d)educted from the outside is negated -in its
composition the material is the product of the tree, and this composition, which is indexed to the
Mark or coinage of Reason, becomes all that matters. Under the mysterious processing power of
the organism, matter becomes material which is defined solely by its formation, its peculiar mode
of `separation and recombination'. The organism's autonomy is therefore only strengthened by an
influx from its surroundings. This rigidity is an effect of a type of causality which exists in the
organism, by which that which is produced at once causes that which produces:

        `Such a connection, considered as a series, would carry with it dependence both as it
        ascends and as it descends: here we could call a thing the effect of something and still
        be entitled to call it, as the series ascends, the cause of something as well. This sort of
        causal connection is easily found in the practical sphere (namely, in art). For example,
        although a house is the cause of the money received for rent, yet, conversely, the
        presentation of this possible income also caused the house to be constructed...Perhaps it
        would be appropriate to call [this] causal connection...that of ideal causes.'
        [Kant CJ 372-373]

The formal structure of the final causality whereby the organism reproduces itself is consonant
with the teleological principle which deduces this causality. A sure return is made on an
investment, a return to the same, in an ideal circuit of desire, where an autoerotic operation of
credit inscribes and is reinscribed upon the determinate temporality of representation without
deviation.

Reason as creditor and debtor both, as ambidextrous self-arouser. Here the notion of cause and
effect operates ideally according to the obscenity of a pure intellect whose time is static. And so
ideally all the unpredictable and unanticipated freakery of nature has already been discounted.

As If

But, He protests, this divine presumption can only serve as a maxim, to set the ball rolling. If we
invest in the idea of natural purpose to further a more rigorous systematisation, it is only so as to
buy time in which to rightfully earn the taxonomic prize. One nevertheless relies on
transcendental complicity.

        `[E]mpirical concepts do have their territory in nature, as the sum total of all objects of
        sense, but they have no domain in it (but only residence, domicilium); for although they
        are produced according to law, they do not legislate; rather, the rules that are based on
        them are empirical and hence contingent'[Kant GJ174]

Reason's maxims operate to allow these laws to be produced. But even if reason `gives to itself, ,
as it were', these maxims which are destined to accomplish the confirmation of their hypotheses,
still a `detour through the outer world' is a detestable but necessary component in the
construction of the system.

That order which arises from his own binding or bounding of space, since it springs from a priori
intuitions, is to be differentiated from 'an order and regularity in things outside me. e.g: in a
garden, order and regularity among trees, flower beds, walks etc.' For these ­ `existing things' -
must be given empirically...Not for the first time reason depends upon the sensible for the
germination of its principles, and is forced to set up home temporarily.

In the absence of firm ground (territory), the maximal (or maximin) investment establishes (with
great foresight and planning) a domicile whose shelter will restore one's (his) dignity while the
earth quakes. For, make no mistake, in the contemplation of old age, for him the ground is
dissolving as more interstices open up between the kingdoms already won, and in the
desperation to retain the isthmus(or perhaps the territorial treaty) which would hold them/him
together he is prepared to make small compromises.
As the Athenian citizen prostitutes himself to woman in the anerotic sexual act ensuring the
reproduction of the male line1, paying for the perversion of the politeia in sperm to be converted
into warrior-politicians, so to preserve the community of rational man a similarly compromising
position is taken up by Reason, enacted coldly in the time lent by the subject to itself in order to
retain its hom(m)eostasis.

Credit is always credit of time, and such credit given to oneself constitutes a safe speculation.

          `(T]he credit of time is only a process of expansive regulation, an arbitrary act by which a
          power to include new energies in the system is delivered'
          [Lyotard 225]

The credit procured supplies the system with the requisite time in which to convert the influx into
its own currency, anchored on the meson2, The role played by the other term in this exchange is
never more than a lacuna.

The maxims by which the subject interrogates nature are loans given to reason by itself to allow it
time to loot experience and retum to the fold.

Far from being disinterested, the dignitaries gorge on the jouissance of the politeia, they are true
libertines of immolation, But they prostitute themselves coldly, allowing into their house a different
eros -in retum for a conversion of affective or intensive flux into the screened and annulled
coinage of the specular economy, And the whole sordid business can be negated since it took
place outside the system which, now reinstated, heals its wounds, reconstitutes the temporality
where it is/has been/will always be, It is a loan of time(secured by the as if) that allows us to
resentfully donate our seed to nature, so that she may produce for us a new child,.,..lt's a boy!

          `From now on every woman, and no longer insofar as she is sterile, but insofar as she is
          impregnated, like a machine that transforms sperm into a child, into a potential warrior -
          every woman would therefore appear as a detestable but necessary appendage for the
          one authorized function of jouissance, which is here the production of a society of
          loquacious citizens, homosexuals and warriors.' [Lyotard 157]

All that is registered in the polis is the spontaneous generation of a new citizen.

          'The problem of maintenance is answered by woman, the domestic animal who tends to
          the matter from which reason must keep itself pure, who can grow crystals from seeds in
          the hot moist warmth of her womb. Reason arrests the processes of growth and decay in
          favour of a momentary coagulation of forces, distorted to permanence, making the
          domicile and its degenerate occupant in one leap'[Beddoes 1161]


1
  [T]he Pythagoreans apportion [their semen] out. They will of course impregnate their women, this wiIl simply be the price
to be paid for providing the city with young people to educate, arm, introduce into and annul in the homosexual circle.
One part sperm for propogation, one part for masculine commerce They strangely reverse the terms of a dispsitif that one
used to be able to think of as natural; it is when they go to bed with their women that they prostitute themselves...the
prostitute transforms the client's jouissance into money and therefore phlegmatically converts the perverse libido or simply
its use...into money, and then into commodities (into capital indeed) thereby taking care to guard the social whole...every
woman would [now] appear as a detestable but neccessary appendage for the one authorizcd function of jouissance,
which is here the production of a society of loquacious citizens, homosexuals and warriors' (Lyotard. 156-7)

2
  `the meson that Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, Vernant and Finley place at the empty centre of the
ancient Greek collective of warrior talkers, this place for depositing all the plundered loot, this
tribunal at the centre of the civil world, this geometrical plan of thc isonomia of the citizens, this
hub where all the political radii are instantiated and all the diameters of exchange are neutralized,
in sum, this zero, well, it's the same one that Aristotle institutes, under the name of money, as the
judge of economic exchanges. Its distributive justice oonsists initially in annulling the terms of the
exchange and the exchangists themselves, inasmuch as one wants...what the other has' [Lyotard
155]
If the maxims should crystallize into a positive result, which is to say some taxonomy consonant
with the system as a whole, then this obviously nourishes the organism. If not then one has
theoretical recourse to a different nature, the chaotic and disorganized nature that he sometimes
invokes as a warning ­it could have been that there was only this chaos, how lucky we are to be
able to stand above her/lt. Here one simply pleads the luxurious ignorance of the bourgeoisie.

One term, then, of dark mystery, a second which stands separated above its chaotic dissolution
and the third term, apparently as an appendage of the second, which goes between the two, but
which associates with the first insofar as it has already been alleviated of its confusion and made
into proper(ty), or raw material for the elevation of the second.

        'They have, therefore, two penises, one for this payment, the other for civic jouissance
        [Lyotard 1581]

Is imagination or judgment itself (that is, the other term) not cleft in exactly the same way as this
noble member of the polis, resigned to a detestable but necessary fecundation which it refers
back to itself as reflective, and finally forgets in the jouissance of that sterile copulation which
determines?

        `And of course what matters is not the existence of the object -as such it is indifferent -but
        the simple effect of a representation upon the subject, its reflection, that is, in the
        imagination of a man'[lrigaray 207]

The procreation achieved through the object ('which feeds those inconceivable faculties of
knowing that are at work in the reflective judgment'[lrigaray 207]) is ascribed solely to his
imagination and the role played by the object is negated:

So judgment speculates upon nature on condition that the return is already annulled.

        'Yes, man's eye -understood as substitute for the penis -will be able to prospect woman's
        sexual parts, seek there new sources of profit. Which are equally theoretical. By doing so
        he further fetishizes (his) desire.'[lrigaray 145]

In the empirical legislation of nature. where he is moronically delighted with each confirmation of
his as if; all that will be gained is a new influx of annullment, so that the system will never grow,
decay, change, but always exercise its constricted hommeo-theoretical eros in the asymptotic
approach to the unity of experience, or the meson/maison. Not only does the noble heritage of
Hellenic intellectual endeavour rest upon the use of slaves to tend to the raw matters of logistica.
but also upon the exclusion of all foreign parts from the episteme to the advantage of the penis
and the loquacious mouth, The ideal golden mean (which is not to be understood In terms of a
median quantity but rather as a eudaimonlc equilibrium) which Aristotle lays down for the
regulation of akrazia and also for the monetary standard of exchange perfectly expresses the
fetishization of the penis/logos, or the miraculation of the hommeo economy:

        `So there must be some one standard, and that on an agreed basis...because this makes
        all things commensurable, since they can all be measured in terms of money...It is this
        that has led to the introduction of money, which serves as a sort of mean(meson),but by
        a convention has come to be represented by money'
        [Lyotard 161 from Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics Book V, 5, 1133a-b]


Coining It

Insofar as the libidinal flows of the politeia are homologous to the flows of money, the (double
term of exchange) penis/logos becomes, by a convention, the very representation of desire -
Hommeo-economic Reason becomes apodeictically the seat of desire, where all flows are to be
annulled in the fetishistic zero-sum game of a representational economy.
This coinage of a screened economy of signs, this sterile currency of null exchange, is minted in
the schematism, It rests upon the transcendental conversion of all reality to representation, and
thence to concepts,

For the necessity of the homogeneity of objects and concepts [Kant CP A137/B176], as
transcendental necessity, is already a fait accompli,

        'This mediating representation',while it must in one respect be intellectual ... must in
        another be sensible, Such a representation is the transcendental schema [Kant CP
        A1381B177]

This is where reflective judgment or productive imagination is located, the vague or vagabond
imagination which pays in its lack of precise understanding of itself, its position on the edge of
rationality, for the perversion of the system, and allows the understanding to
dominate/domesticate empirical reality.

        'Thus an application of the category to appearances becomes possible by means of the
        transcendental determination of time, which, as the schema of the concepts of
        understanding. mediates the subsumption of the appearances under the category:[Kant
        CPRA139/B17B]

The schema can be brought neither before concepts or displayed as an image, but serves them
both as a crucial but mysterious third term, unable to participate in the full rigor of the
organisation, 'an art concealed in the depths of the human soul'[Kant CPR A141/B181], the
inviolate suspense never questioned. Through this channel the transcendental determination of
time as unity submits sensibility to the isonomia of understanding;

        `Thus, the function of the transcendental schema will be to negate an intrinsic quality of
        the sensible world, and this irredemiably' [lrigaray 204]

As the subject is (the only) time, the generation of the subject is spontaneous. As the arborescent
systemisation of nature is the only possible mode of organisation, any new loot acquired clicks
into the economy in the blinking of an eye. Such miracles are excused in several ways : either by
referring the schema to its transcendental grounds which insist upon its existence, or by refiguring
the material into the form of the schema. And both amount to the same, namely an absorption
into the specular economy.

        'This go-between, destined to become specular, will be at least doubly effective. Either
        the "mirror" has already been defined as inclusive of the object it must mirror, or it simply
        re-determines that object's intrinsic quality by framing it. Or the mirror does not "know"
        the "object" proposed and has to constitute a general reproducible matrix while reflecting
        it' [lrigaray 2O6]

Henceforth any traumatic event can be absorbed into the hommeo economy, so long as one
discovers a means - and ultimately this means is (produced by) nothing other than its own
necessity -to convert it into a matter of form, to convert the question into one of combination,
rather than matter. This is the monogram special to the specular economy, which stamps
everything with the mark of its reproduction, and its place within a divine time of uni-finality. This
economy really does amount to `a zero sum game (the exchangeable quantities are constant)
and a game of complete information (each knows what the other will ask at the centre)' [Lyotard,
159]. We really must admire this system, which is like the sphere, which contains infinite and
comprehensive answers, even to questions not yet asked. Disequilibrium merely acts to develop
the baroque articulations of the hom(e)ostat(e), the principle transcendental ideality=empirical
reality; which seeks to fill all gaps, a lens which will always cling to the eyes of the polis and annul
the shock of the new, which is never exhausted in its conversion of all materials into signals to be
projected onto the screen in the form of their own death.
        `Something undermines the "psychic apparatus" or capitalism, an excitation which
        proceeds from the pulsional "X" or from force, and in relation to which the "apparatus" or
        the system reacts not only by binding the disruptive effects that result from the
        introduction of this force into a circuit of regulated tension, but by modifying. and in
        particular by heightening, the capacity of the tension regulator, without which the system
        cracks up...Living force is the pulsional source of the event, capital is its death as its
        binding. Nevertheless Freud distributed these roles in the opposite way: what produces
        the event in the system is the death drive, the Eros of life is what produces the system'
        [Lyotard 144]

The eros of centripetally-geometrically bound space, Verbindung; flees the already-specularised
thanatropic intensity of nature by means of an impossibly perfect (one might say even
miraculous) regulator which produces its own etemality, that of representation (the object was
always there, and so was the subject...). Only by questioning the time taken in the ego/subject's
binding (after which nothing will be left to chance), or between the entries into the ledger, does
one uncover the erotics, the hommeo economics of the transcendental organism, discover what
makes it hard.

        'The role played by the object will be rediscovered (and rediscovered as a gap) only by
        questioning the time taken to circumscribe [bind] the space or else the extension in this
        way. By questioning, that is, the logical time taken for the object to constitute itself as the
        imperative mediation between those empirical intuitions which lead to confusion and as
        the regulation of the empirical into universal a priori categories. By questioning the third
        term, which is very much the creature of the second and required to purge itself of the
        first term that had once nourished its affection, on the assumption, no doubt, that it
        remains homogeneous with the first term by its very temporality.'[lrigaray 204]

This borrowed time will not be discovered in the homme economics, the double-entry book-
keeping of the meson/maison -where indeed it represents nothing less than the spontaneous
beginning of time - but in the unwritten pleasures of the inclinations of matter, in an unconscious
both of the system and of the systematiser, the intensity or matter of experience which is
forgotten.

The ironic or reflective objectivity of transcendental principles homeostatically reintroduces what
had been lost in secularization, As surely as privatization releases the bound flows of the
communal polis with its ascetic perversions and its pyramidal structure of forms, it miraculates a
new, transcendental body (critique) dedicated to self policing, which allows it such luxuries. not
only the enjoyment of its intellectual comprehension, but also the potential to periodically import
more capital, on condition that faith in its pure value is maintained.

And so he reinvests (as the `supersensible') the dimension which Leibniz calls God, the panoptic
eye, which purportedly programs each unit so that they act as if they were connected, as if there
were a material continuum. But for him, empirical reality = transcendental ideality, and everything
is reflected or refracted through the specular bounds of His form. Rolled up into a ball, dense,
impermeabie, he sees himself, and forgets about his his sojourns away from hom(m)e(o), even
forbidding mention of them.

It is convenient to have all the pleasures of the world in one's home, in front of the fire, in comfort,
without having to admit to corporeal existence as such, but only as if: Because the surefire
investment he made on which the return was already guaranteed (a fait accompli, because
always complicit), and allowed him to (in an Augenblick) instantiate transcendental simulations in
place of her. Like a house where the TV substitutes for the outside world, or where travel guides
give one an extensive knowledge of exotica whilst one remains forever punctual and sedentary in
one's home town. Man is safe again. and certainly not alone. For each house has a secret
chamber as its focus-point, where (he says) the supersensible mysteriously binds him to his
fellow man, this binding being a peculiar (but assuredly super) property of (his) reason, and
providing a convenient excuse for his frequent trips out of the house on business. A reconstitution
of the hommeo-community has to take place even as he languishes in the private home, for
incipit solipsism is just as bad for one's health as the bovine commutation of matter-money that
corrupts reason.

Isn't it his pietism which privatises god, as capitalism privatises the individual,
and as later he would privatise the subject, one privati(sati)on too far, as far as she is concemed?
Isn't this the cause of an immense deregulation, which liberates at least a part of the bound
dispositifs of self/control, only to find it necessary to recapitalise upon/recapituiate them, to invest
them once again in a sure bet(faith, pascal's wager...) As surely as he pretends to shun the mall,
attributing his absences to the secret chapel, he buys into a phalleconomic corporation, an
organic and organised body of capital which will drain intensity, or at least build on it this domicile,
using a clandestine detour through the flows of matter to re-establish a regulated whole which will
only later emerge from the chamber with the dignity of spontaneous generation or self-birth.

Under the dome-nation of critique, life still carries on beneath a Hellenic concave firmament. If
only this lens were crooked, jagged, or there were even apertures or orifices through which the
inside might become external But it is a impregnable dome/home, and perfectly specular,
refracting light toward a center or meson. Who desires the emaciated dignity of its shelter?
Certainly she never has, and also has never been offered it, whilst always being subject(ed) to its
private little kingdom, always left behind in the house, or sent shopping, as befits her nature. But
if housework/maintenance is her role, it is without ever being privy to the angel in the homme,
whose supersensible realm remains ever veiled for her, exchangeable and undignified matter,
except in his thrilling tales from a good book in the evening. So paradoxically as he perversely
represses his interest(s) (in her, in matters not unrelated to her) and fetishizes (his) desire, she is
excepted from his hommeo-economics for which she (the wife, along with the slaves) is the raw
material. In his self-pleasure (of reason), how quickly he forgets the compromising positions he
took up. Matter becomes the matter of form, and is formalised on the concave screen of specular
nature.

Of course a detour was inevitable         which took the shape of an invagination of the specular
surface. But this/she is no longer on the agenda.

This eros, this self-enjoyment which consists in the constriction of a segment of the libidinal
surface which is henceforth concentrated into the penis/logos eye/reason, we must at least say
that part of its history (hystery) involves an other erotic component, that which has been
neglected under the sign of the thanatropic, chaotic, dark, and that the terms which connect them,
which have always been little more than a dark space, a shady deal, might be rediscovered in the
productive relationship between them, before or behind the time of the subject.

Thereby nature might escape not only the double-bind of being determined (n)either machine nor
spirit, but the reflective fate of becoming forever specularised for the pleasure of the same.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beddoes, Diane (1991) `Snapshots of Kant's Third Critique', in Kant:Trials of Judgement (PLI
Vol.3 Issue 2)

lrigaray, Luce (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. G.C.Gill (Comell University Press)

Kant, Immanuel

[CPR] (1964)Critigue of Pure Reason, tr. N.K.Smith (MacMillan)

[CJ] (1987)Critique of Judgment, tr W .S.Pluhar (Hackett)

[GMM] (1993)Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. J,W.Ellington (Hackett)

[OP] (1993)Opus Postumum, tr.E.Forster & M,Rosen(Cambridge University Press)

Lyotard, J.F. (1993)Libidinal Economy, trans.I.H.Grant (Athlone)