VII

I have argued that it is Descartes's ocularcentric rationality which is responsible, at least in part, for his "experience" at the window—that is, for his broaching the possibility that, for all he can know from the evidence of his perception, what he is seeing are not men, but machines. But it could also be argued that, if the visualism of this rationality has drawn him into the force-field of this dehumanization, it is solely, for him, by virtue of his powers of rationality—his faculty of judgment—that he is able to avoid this conclusion. But how can Reason, the ocularcentric rationality he advocates, save him, here, from the dehumanization of others, when after all it is responsible for the madness in the dualisms of mind and body, Reason and feeling, self and other? What Descartes "sees," before being "corrected" by his rational judgment, is actually the truth about the world that this same work of Reason produced: a despiritualized, dehumanized world. What he "sees," before being "corrected" is the madness of this rationality.

There is, however, another way of reading Descartes's resolution of this scene at the window. That judgment, and not perception, is assigned to establish his relationship with others may be read as an indication of his vision of hope that the universality of Reason, and not the prejudices of the senses or the emotions, will—should—determine social relations among people: a vision of hope, then, for a future in which social relations would be determined by enlightened rational principles. That judgment prevails over the senses, that it is needed to correct them, may be read as an affirmation of the power of rationality—an affirmation of its freedom from the given. Unfortunately, this vision is also a vision of rational social control: a vision in which rationalization means the increasing mechanization, standardization, normalization, and engineering of the human populations. A perverse form of individualization and social progress.

An easily overlooked footnote in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception enables us to see a connection between Descartes's enframing, endistancing window, the epokhé , and the historically new formation of capitalism, an economy of competitive individualism based on narrow self-interest. In Descartes's fantasy of the malin génie , in the extreme paranoia of his metaphysical solipsism, one can see reflected the new self-understanding of the bourgeois individual. As Merleau-Ponty points out, "solipsism as a philosophical doctrine is not the result of a system of private property; nevertheless, into economic institutions as into conceptions

of the world is projected the same existential prejudice in favor of isolation and mistrust."^[98]

There is, finally, yet another way in which Descartes's resolution of the skeptical prospect is disturbing. Why, since he holds that only human beings are capable of authentic speech, does he not consider speaking to the men he "sees" on the street? Why does he allow his window to enforce a separation that excludes reciprocity, communication? What kind of judgment allows itself to be enframed in this way? And what kind of rationality is it which allows itself to be cut off from communication? In what way is the judgment of a monological rationality superior to, and able to correct, the communicative moment of perception? In The Infinite Conversation , Maurice Blanchot notes that a shift in paradigms from vision to speaking "frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guarantee of light or under the threat of its absence."^[99]