Re: nettime money is always personal and impersonal
Ben, Thanks for your immediate and detailed response. The issues you raise go to the heart of what I was exploring and I could reply at greater length, but I will restrict myself here to some headlines. What you seem to be getting at here is that in order to assume responsibility for life as a whole on this planet, we need something like a world market, rather than a world of small economies based on the person, the family or local groups. I think it's worth questioning that idea. Can the relatively recent phenomenon of the world market, involving impersonal trade on the scale currently practised, be made sustainable in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact? I accept the critique of those who say conventional economics leaves out personal, domestic and local perspectives, but I suggest that we also need to get a better handle on the wider horizons of our social experience and connect the two sides more meaningfully. Markets have always been world markets in the sense that their extent is unknowable. Instead of reducing what is going on today to the familiar and everyday, I argue that we also need ways of connecting that level with more inclusive and abstract dimensions of society. Money and markets have traditionally done that, but not satisfactorily in the forms that currently dominate the human economy. It may well be that environmental and energy considerations will lead to a revision of economic forms and of their desirable scale. But I would have thought that global economic issues are bound to remain a matter of common concern. There is also the argument that the imposition of the impersonal economy has destroyed beneficial social relationships, while failing to provide adequate substitutes. Pierre Bourdieu gives examples of the violence of the impersonal economy... Echoing Polanyi... Echoing Mauss... He compares what was gained in this transformation with what was lost: ...To subject all the behaviours of existence to calculating reason, as demanded by the economy, is to break with the logic of *philia*, of which Aristotle spoke... To me it seems very doubtful that such systems, which are based on the 'spirit of calculation', can ever compensate for the loss of real solidarity based on familiarity and trust, i.e. on the refusal of calculation. Aristotle is indeed the godfather of this position and you are right to cite Polanyi as a faithful adherent of it. It is based upon a fundamental opposition between the self-interested market and a small-scale vision of society based on the family, viewing the former as a threat to the latter. Without being reductionist, it also represents the interests of a military landowning class against those of urban commerce. Much in the history of modern socialism also harks back to this ideology. The Bourdieu argument you cite is similar, contrasting two ideal types of colonial capitalism and pre-existing rural society. One of the main points of my piece was to extract Mauss from being lined up with this tendency. He was quite stridently anti-capitalist, unlike his uncle, but he also insisted that this contrast between commercial self-interest (the spirit of calculation) and a world epitomised by the gift was itself now a plank of bourgeois ideology. He sought to expose the personal, social and spiritual aspects of the market economy, despite its dominant impersonal institutions, and sought to expand their scope through, for example, a co-operative approach to them. He was not against money or markets as such, only a one-sided emphasis of profit at the expense of wider social interests. If you look at his Ecrits Politiques (1997), you will see that he took a global view of economy and politics; and certainly did not believe a retreat to small-scale familism was possible or desirable in the modern world. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Technologies of Resistance: Transgression and Solidarity in Tactical Media
Hi Brian, Jackie Dugard did a Cambridge University PhD on informal economy and violence in post-apartheid South Africa a few years back. It was specifically about the 'taxi wars' in Johannesburg/Pretoria and Cape Town, armed conflict between gangs for control of the minibus passenger transport industry. She starts off by tracing the informalisation of violence to the state apparatus in the late apartheid era. But the efforts of the post-apartheid state to deal with the problem failed because bureaucrats were so much slower and more rigid than gangsters. This is not news, I think. The Rand Corporation produced a report not long ago 'Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy that has chapters like 'Transnational Criminal Networks' and 'Gangs, Hooligans, and Anarchists - the Vanguard of Netwar in the Streets'. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/ Its conclusion, as I recall, was that the future lies with flexible network organization and the governments and corporations will go down unless they find a way for transforming themselves into something like their opponents. But that has been a persistent twentieth century tactic, hasn't it, from British government terrorism in Ireland at the time of Ken Loach's latest movie to the lawlessness openly embraced by the Bush regime today and John Perkins' revelations about his career as an 'economic hitman' for the corporations. So I guess one question might be whether something new is going on here? Maybe it's the dissemination of news through these media. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Mona Cholet/ le Monde Diplolmatique: France's precarious graduate
On her anonymous blog, Séverine, a 28-year-old Parisian graduate, posted this: I'm from the intellectual underclass. One of those who fry their brains, read megabytes of books, magazines, web pages, political pamphlets and petitions, and never get anything out of it. I'm like an engine guzzling fuel just to stay in overdrive, burning up mental energy for nothing (1). Séverine's working life has bounced between internships, welfare benefits, temping and unemployment. Thanks for posting this, Patrice. I know quite a few of these people. The situation ie often heart-breaking, for individuals and the cohort as a whole. But I have trouble placing it in a framework of comparative social history. What is new and what old about it? It may be that what is new is rising militancy (compare the New York graduate student union) and a higher incidence of acute despair. At least people are speaking out now and the new media give them a means for expressing oneself without censorship. The universities everywhere are facing a crisis of function and funding, but especially in the state-regulated higher education systems of Europe. Excess supply in the job market is probably higher than ever before. And I am well aware that I came into the job market at a time (1970) when conditions were much more favourable than now. But. But... Universities have long specialised in exploiting precarity, none more than my alma mater, Cambridge. It is a scandal that permanet jobs are being replaced with casual employment at low piece-rates and senior academics take leave to write their books in order for replacement teachers to do their job for a pittance. But this system was pioneered by universities like Cambridge long before I turned up there. The powers always knew that they have a pool of excess teaching and research fodder who would rather stay in school that get out into the world and probably feel that anywhere else than where they are would be a personal loss. So they keep them all stringing along for an irregular supply of peanuts. At the extreme, those who stay in have opted for self-exploitation. I spent the last two years of my PhD without any overt source of income. I even got married in this period. I recall eating spaghetti with red wine in a small rented flat. It wasn't a bad life. We got by. I felt a lot poorer later when I was a lecturer with a mortgage, car and the rest of it. I took on bits of teaching and research assistance, calculating that if I wrote my thesis instead of doing the work, my professors wouldn't have th ecourtage to call my out for it, since they knew it was exploitation. I got away with it. Now I probably wouldn't. It was a more benign time for sure, but the system was already in place. It is not new. Or take the way of life of countless American students who spend ten years completing a PhD (an average figure in some subjects). A bit of TA-ing, wait at table in a diner for a few hours, smoke some pot with friends, write a page of the thesis, cruise the mailing lists. The life is so seductive, it is not surprising they prefer to remain an ABD than join the army of unemployed PhDs. The main difference between this and Severine's plight is that she thinks she's frying her brains and gets nothing from it all. And she has a public for this. I don't know what to make of it politically or of this whole precarity movement. The old Stalinists and ATTAC-ers of mondediplo obviously think there is some mileage in it. At the very least, if the crisis of late academia (my label for universities past their sell-by date) is to be addressed, we need to be able to place the predicament of young people daye within a framework of realsitic comparison. But then I joined stayed in school for the rest of my life in order to avoid having to get a real job. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
Andreas, Thank you for bringing up again the fundamental issues raised by Rana's essay. My own immediate response to her exchange with Ben was intemperate; so you have given me another chance to be more reasoned. The main demographic event of the last half-century was the rise of Third World cities. These have been seen in fairly pathological terms as having created a planet of slums (Mike Davis). Black Africa, which began the twentieth century with only about 1% of its people living in cities, ended it with half of them living there. It is a matter of some interest what social and cultural forms are emerging under these conditions, but we know at least of a religious revival, an explosion of the modern arts and a proliferating urban commerce, usually referred to as 'informal'. Rana raised the question of how these seismic shifts in the size, location and character of the human population might be manifested in the cultural representations of the West. A century ago, as Sven Lindqvist makes clear in Exterminate All The Brutes, the answer would have taken the form of a genocidal impulse rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation. Today it is more likely to take the form of a vision of Africa as a dying continent (Stephen Smith's Negrologie: pourquoi l'Afrique meurt, Hubert Sauper's movie, Darwin's Nightmare or just the endless reporting of disease, war, hunger and death). In 2005 this vision was linked to a rescue mission (at least at the propaganda level) launched by a bunch of cynical politicians and fronted by ageing rock stars). How long is it since the main threat to planetary ecology was an excess of black babies? Now we are told that Africa is dying, even though its population is still increasing at 2.5% and the continent has just reached a share of the world's population equal to its share of the land mass, a seventh. Meanwhile Europe cannot reproduce itself and goes into paroxysms of nationalism and xenophobia when faced with the prospect of having to replace its working-age population from abroad. It is not as if the threat posed by proliferating poor masses is new to the western imagination. In the present case, we are witnessing also the prospect of a decisive shift of production and capital accumulation to countries like China, India and Brazil. The West's grip on a world economy designed to generate substantial unearned income for us is slipping. This surely explains the Americans' resort to military imperialsim as a last ditch attempt to hold on by force and Blair's decision to go down with thier guns blazing rather than work for a European alternative. And the Europeans, what is their global strategy? Myopia and withdrawal. Somehow all of this must be registering in people's minds. The French, as usual, give prominent expression to their sense of a deep malaise, even if the solutions on offer seem equally introspective. I live in Paris which has become the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow shopping capital of the world. I like it here, because it is so unexciting. Andreas's Berlin must be more exciting, especially if it has moved on from being the building site it was when I last visited. I doubt if there would be many Indians ready to vote for Mumbai as the city of the future. It would be good to have a discussion about what cities offer promising social possibilities. But there is this unspoken undercurrent. Has the West finally hit the slippery slope of its long-advertised decline? Some people would say that we are not only dying, but committing suicide. London's Institute of the Contemporary Arts is putting on a 'discussion' next month. (Can't you imagine it? I think we have lost it. Well, there are still signs of greatness...). http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=14824 The Suicide of the West? The success of Western civilisation can be attributed to just six factors, according to Chris Smith and Richard Koch: Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism. These principles, however, have been increasingly eroded over the past century so that where once citizens of the West felt a collective confidence and pride, they instead appear to be heading for collective suicide. Should the West try and save the concepts on which it was based or replace them with new ones? Speakers: Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, UK MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair's cabinet; Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle; Roger Osborne, author of Civilization: A New History of the Western World and Jeremy Stangroom, co-founder, The Philosophers' Magazine. Wed 19 Apr 19:00 Nash Room And on that suicide note, Cheers, Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info
[no subject]
The row about secret prisons in Europe has reminded me of the subject for a book that I will never write, but would like to. The liberal press has been complaining about The West losing its moral superiority since Bush and Blair began their imperial adventures after September 11th. I have long wanted to write about how the British government, notably in the first decade of the twentieth century the Liberals starring Lloyd-George and Churchill, pioneered the weapons of dirty warfare that subsequently became normal. They were much more successful at the time in keeping the news out of the media (which says something about our own degenerate times) and managed to maintain the global image of rectitude that some talented Victorians invented and passed off on a gullible world. The West Indian writer and revolutionary, CLR James, used to talk of a taxi ride he took in London soon after arriving from Trinidad in 1932. He was with two activists, an Irishman and an Indian, when they passed the House of Commons. The Irishman said how he wanted to blow the place up, much to James's surprise as a more verbal opponent of the British, while the Indian displayed enormous erudition on the history of rebellion against the empire. This event impressed on James the need to get serious with his politics. The point is that, in the decades leading up to the First World War, Britain lost its commercial leadership to Germany and the USA, much as Amewrica and Europe are now watching Brazil, China, India take over as the cheapest producers of agriculture, manufactures and information services. At the same time, the British empire faced formidable opposition in Ireland, South Africa and India. It was in response to this dire situation that they resorted to dirty tricks in an impressive and innovative way. They invented concentration camps in the Boer War and death squads, disinformation campaigns and much else in the fight against Irish independence. One story captures this period for me and I got it from Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Michael Collins (Arrow, 1991). In 1913 or thereabouts, Jan Christian Smuts, South Africa's prime minister, wrote to Lloyd George with some military advice on how to keep the Irish down. A senior civil servant wrote a memo: 'Who does this man think he is to advise US on counter-terrorism? We've been putting down revolutions in India for fifty years!' A footnote on this hidden history of early collaboration in the anti-colonial revolution. Between the wars, the British regularly tried to get their imperial subjects to sign up for the League of Nations enterprise. This effort was often sabotaged by an alliance of the Irish Free State (de Valeira), South Africa (Malan) and Canada (Mackenzie King), all of whom wanted to get out, but found it practical to stay in and make trouble. Imagine the Canadians in such company, but they wanted their independence too -- and got it. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The hope and reality of money
The link to Kushner on Miller should be http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050613s=kushner # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime The Ghost in the Network
In discussing the difference between the living and the nonliving, Aristotle points to the phenomena of self-organized animation and motility as the key aspects of a living thing. For Aristotle the form-giving Soul enables inanimate matter to become a living organism. If life is animation, then animation is driven by a final cause. But the cause is internal to the organism, not imposed from without as with machines. Network science takes up this idea on the mathematical plane, so that geometry is the soul of the network. Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule. Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality. I wasn't sure until the end if these guys were on Aristotle's side or not. But their resounding call to stop the world, I want to get off makes it clear that they share his reactionary conservatism. It is worth recalling that the great philosopher was tutor to the leader of those Macedonian thugs who finally pulled the plug on the first millennium BC's drive towards urban commercial civilisation and was the godfather of catholic apologists for the military agrarian complex like Aquinas. European socialism has long been in thrall to their anti-market ideology and this repudiation of an open source approach to network society is no different. Incidentally, graph theory has been pronounced out-of-date by the sources they cite -- for its assumptions of stasis, randomness and atomism which can't make sense of network growth with preferences. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime The Hit Man's Dilemma
I have completed my longish essay, The Hit Man's Dilemma: on business, personal and impersonal. Even if it is not obvious, it was written in some sort of dialogue with members of this list. It can be found at http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/thmd and will be published shortly by Prickly Paradigm through University of Chicago Press. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime The Hit Man's Dilemma
I have written a full draft of my little book, The Hit Man's Dilemma: on business, personal and impersonal. It is available for reading and possibly comment at www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog The essay is 25,000 words and will be published in the spring by Prickly Paradigm through University of Chicago Press (www.prickly-paradigm.com) and, after a year of being sold for $10, it will be posted on the creative commons website. It is aimed at a general audience, rather less sophisticated in most cases than members of this list when it comes to the politics of the new media. Table of contents 'Don't take this personal, it's just business' The moral dilemma in politics, law and business Impersonal society as a modern project Private property: a short history The digital revolution Intellectual property The crisis of the intellectuals revisited Conclusions Further reading The Hit Man's Dilemma is an attempt to draw on the classical liberal tradition to develop a critique of the neo-liberal world economy. The figure of the gangster is used to show up the contradictions in capitalism's moral economy. A minor theme is the shift of world production from West to East and India's centrality to this movement. Treading the thin line between profundity and banality, the concluding remarks run as follows: The formal conclusions of this essay are consistent with the late Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Every human being is a unique person who lives in society. We are therefore all individual and social at the same time and the two are inseparable in our experience. Society is both inside and outside us; and a lot rides on our ability to tell the difference. Society is personal when it is lived by each of us in particular; it is impersonal when it takes the form of collective ideas. Life and ideas are likewise inseparable in practice, but they need sometimes to be distinguished. It is therefore just as damaging to insist on a radical separation of individuals and society or of life and ideas as it is to collapse the difference between them. We have seen that modern capitalism rests on a division between personal and impersonal spheres of social life. The institution of private property initially drove a conceptual wedge between our individuality and an active sense of belonging to society. Indeed the latter was made invisible or at least unreachable for most of us. But then private property assumed the form of public ownership by large business corporations and even governments. It then became convenient to collapse the difference between personal and impersonal spheres, leaving the law and political culture in general unable to distinguish between the rights of individual citizens and those of abstract social entities wielding far more power than any human being could. The consequences for democracy are disastrous. The latest stage of the machine revolution, the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital network of communications, has speeded up human connection at the world level. Society now takes a number of forms =96 global, regional, national and local. We need new impersonal norms to guide our social interactions in such a world, but not at the expense of full recognition of our individual personalities. The stage is set for a new humanism capable of uniting these poles of our existence. We, the people, will make society on our own terms, but only if we master the means of its expression, machines and money. In the course of doing so, we will encounter immense social forces bent on denying the drive for a genuine democracy. My essay has aimed to clarify who the sides and what the stakes are in this struggle for world society. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettimethe dollar's demise (and the rise of Asia)
A pool of fools to buy it all the way down. The ASEAN-India-China summit is taking place in Laos this week, where a=20 major free trade pact to create the world's largest trading bloc between=20 Southeast Asia and China was signed yesterday. India will be signatory=20 to a similar but more gradually phased set of trade liberalisation=20 measures soon. In the meantime, the follopwing article appeared in The=20 Economist. My comments first. Thanks to Shekhar Krishnan for bringing it=20 my attention. Bush's economic policy should be seen as Keynesianism for the rich,=20 spending public money to line their pockets. Pat Buchanan has written a=20 fine book, Why the right went wrong, that forecasts the doom entailed in=20 Bush's rejection of the two cornerstones of republicanism -- balance the=20 budget and stay at home. Bush's bet is that the rest of the world can't=20 afford to call his bluff. First of all because the US economy is the=20 only one that is steaming ahead (on borrowed money) enough to buy their=20 exports. (The Chinese are booming but mainly importing raw materials=20 from the poor countries). This is linked to the American global policy=20 of threatening to exclude countries from the US market unless they sign=20 up bilaterally for a strict intellectual property treaty and another=20 exempting the US military from prosecution for war crimes. Second, as=20 this article makes clear, its main trading partners will keep up the=20 price of the dollar in order to protect their own assets, both in dollar=20 paper and US property. The EU is really caught, since home demand is=20 sluggish and an overpriced euro means they are priced out of the US marke= t. So the neocons have taken two huge gambles, based on impeccable logic,=20 that they are going to lose -- Iraq and the dollar. They really think=20 that being the only military superpower trumps all other factors and=20 they are wrong. God, I hope they are wrong, but I beleive they are. This=20 is my delayed reaction to the election result, that these bastards are=20 really going to reap the whirlwind they sowed. The other main feature of the article is the role that Asia now plays in=20 financing the US trade and budget deficits. (Have you seen the latest on=20 the projected social security bill that will involve incredible=20 government borrowing in order to give each citizen a personal account?=20 It really is a Keynesian recipe -- spend money you don't have and tell=20 the markets to get lost, except that globalisation and the money=20 slushing around the world today makes it a very different scene from the=20 1930s). So it is China and Japan that are holding the tab for America's=20 profligacy, plus some lesser Asian countries like Singapore. I like the=20 idea of calling it a cartel and waiting for the first member to break=20 ranks (a liberal economist's dream, but not always true to life). On=20 ideological grounds alone, India will probably go with the euro. But=20 this article doesn't mention the Saudis and all that Arab oil money.=20 Does Iraq make them more or less dependent on the USA? The neocons think=20 they can just take the Saudis over if they get obstreperous. But the=20 Pentagon is strapped for resources and Saudi Arabia is a very=20 complicated country to invade right now. Anyway, read on, nettimers, and contemplate the end of the world as we=20 know it. Or at least get out while you can. Keith Hart The dollar=92s demise Nov 23rd 2004 From The Economist Global Agenda http://www.economist.com/agenda Is the dollar=92s role as the world=92s reserve currency drawing to a clo= se? WHO believes in a strong dollar? Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton=92s treasury=20 secretary, most certainly did. John Snow, his successor but two, says he=20 does but nobody believes him=97if only because he wants other countries=92= =20 currencies, in particular the Chinese yuan, to go up. Mr Snow=92s boss,=20 President George Bush, in one of his mercifully rare forays into=20 economics last week, also said he wants a muscular currency: =93My nation= =20 is committed to a strong dollar.=94 Again, it would be fair to say that=20 this was not taken as a ringing endorsement. =93Bush=92s strong-dollar=20 policy is, in practical terms, to maintain a pool of fools to buy it all=20 the way down,=94 a fund manager was quoted by Bloomberg news agency as=20 saying. It does not help when the chairman of your central bank, Alan=20 Greenspan, whose utterances on the economy are taken rather more=20 seriously than Mr Bush=92s, has said the day before that the dollar seems= =20 likely to fall: =93Given the size of the current-account deficit, a=20 diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must occur at some=20 point,=94 were his exact words. The foreign-exchange market immediately=20 decided that it was sated, and the dollar fell to another record low=20 against the euro. America's Federal Reserve posts Alan Greenspan's comments. The US=20 Treasury
nettime The Hitman's Dilemma
I am writing a short book of 30,000 words for Prickly Paradigm Press
of Chicago (www.prickly-paradigm.com). It's title in /The Hitman's
Dilemma: on business, personal and impersonal. /I enclose below the
table of contents and first chapter. I will soon start a blog focused on
writing this and another book in the works, T/he African Revolution
/(Polity Press).
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog/simpleblog_view
But first I thought I would solicit feedback from the nettime list which
has provided me with much nourishment of the ideas I explore here.
Keith Hart
1. 'Don't take this personal, it's just business'
2. The dilemma in fiction
3. The digital revolution
4. Private property
5. Business, personal and impersonal
6. Culture war: an overview
7. Culture war: from Hollywood to Bollywood
8. The crisis of the intellectuals
9. Rethinking the person in an impersonal world
Chapter 1
'Don't take this personal, it's just business'
You have probably heard the one about the deconstructionist mafioso who
made someone an offer he couldn't understand. Well, this essay is about
how social life hinges on the impersonal conditions for personal agency,
a relationship that most people no longer understand, if they ever did.
I use as my starting point a legendary remark made in a movie by a
professional killer to his victim, 'Don't take this personal, it's just
business'. But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a 'person'
is 'a living human being' and what could be more personal than taking
his life' Perhaps the hitman is referring to his own attitude, not to
the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a 'business'
('the occupation, work or trade in which a person is engaged').
Presumably also personal choice might enter into it: he might know the
victim and enjoy ending his life. More likely, an ethos of detachment
makes the work easier, but probably not without some emotional cost. Why
should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled
with the person who practices it'
Let's explore this tension a bit further. 'Personal' is defined as
'relating to a particular person, private; concerning a particular
person's private business interests; aimed pointedly at the most
intimate aspects of a person; relating to the body or physical being;
(law) relating to moveable property'. So privacy seems to be intrinsic
to whatever 'personal' means, but what makes it particular can be either
mental or physical and it seems to include rather than be opposed to
business. 'Private' in turn carries a freight of meaning: 'secluded from
the sight, presence or intrusion of others; intended for ones exclusive
use; confined to the individual, personal; not available for public use,
control or participation; belonging to a particular person, as opposed
to the public; not for public knowledge or disclosure, secret; not
appropriate for public display, intimate; placing a high value on
personal privacy.' To complete this round of definitions, someone or
something is 'particular' when they are 'separate or distinct from
others of the same category, group or nature'. It is in the nature of
persons to be particular, or, in Blake's words, 'General Forms have
their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man.'
Apparently, keeping that distinctiveness poses problems for which
privacy offers a potential solution. This is especially so when we are
confronted by 'the public' and, confusingly, by 'business' also, even
though it expresses 'private' interests. Business is supposed to be
'impersonal': 'lacking personality, not being a person; showing no
emotion; having no personal connection.' But businesses can be persons
too. In law, a 'person' is 'a human being or an organization with legal
rights and duties'. There are therefore real and artificial persons; and
business corporations are the only organizations treated like individual
citizens in law. Others such as churches and political parties, for
instance, are not. And this right was won at a particular moment in
history, the late nineteenth century. Since then, it has become more
difficult to draw the line between living persons and abstract social
entities that are much bigger and potentially longer-lasting than any
human being. I will argue that our political and intellectual culture
has become confused as a result, undermining the prospects for a genuine
democracy and reinforcing rule by a remote oligarchy.
No wonder the hitman is muddled. Business is supposed to be impersonal
despite being usually transacted between persons as an expression of
their private interests. Worse, there is no difference in law between
Walmart and you or me, so why shouldn't a killer claim impersonal
reasons for inflicting bodily harm on another person' It's all in the
mind, after all. Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one
level, the issue is the relative priority
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
It's funny how some threads run past their sell-by date, especially in summer time. I know it's old-fashioned, but we can do better than dictionaries, anecdotes and introspection. Karl Marx has a theory of sweatshops which he lays out in a long section of Capital Volume 1 on 'absolute and relative surplus value' which contains the famous chapter on machines. It's a rollicking read, but also a few hundred pages. One of his reasons for making surplus value the focal point of his analysis was to show that capitalism is really feudalism in drag. Under feudalism, surplus labour is extracted from rural workers in a naked way -- they toil for nothing on the lord's estate or they hand over a big chunk of their harvest. The system is geared to extracting rent on threat of force, without any thought to the well-being of the peasants who work long hours for a miserable and precarious livelihood. Capitalism looks to be different, since workers are paid a money wage for producing commodities that can be represented as fair exchange. But Marx aimed to show that they were handing over an unfair portion of the value of their labour, under a similar threat of coercion, just like the serfs. The point of his analysis is that 'absolute surplus value' is a primitive form of capitalist extraction, as naked in its own way as feudal rent. The capitalist squeezes as much profit as possible from the workers, by paying them less, making them work longer hours, imposing hard and dangerous work conditions on them -- without worrying much about the efficiency of their labour which is often performed on outdated equipment. Anyone can see what is going on in this 'sweatshop capitalism' and it is easy to denigrate capitalism as a whole by reference to such examples. But this was not Marx's main point. There is a more progressive route to expanded profits and that is by 'relative surplus value'. There are three ways of raising the productivity of workers -- economies of scale, division of labour and deployment of machines. Of these by far the most important is the last and Marx was the first major economist to notice this. When labour is made more efficient by substituting machines for human effort, it is possible to raise their pay, education and work conditions while still making super-profits. Indeed he believed that this was the progressive route for capitalism, since more surplus value could be squeezed out of workers this way than by the sweatshop route. Higher paid workers are often exploited more in the technical sense of the ratio of proftis to wages, even as they may feel superior to the victims of sweatshops and organize themselves to resist being undercut by competition with them. Of course the process appears to be more benevolent. But Marx looked to mobilize the high productvity workforce, not to the emiserated peasants in the sweatshops, through a revolutionary critique of capitalism. That is why he wrote to the book. This dialectic has played on and on through all the phases of modern capitalism. I doubt if China could account for 40% of world economic growth last year by sweatshop methods alone, any more than Britain could in Marx's day. The principal moral of the story for me is that a focus on sweatshop conditions elsewhere diverts attention away from the exploitation of the higher paid workers producing relative surplus value in the so-called privileged centres of capitalism. Emphasizing sweatshop conditions in poorer countries is usually a way of cranking up support for more protectionism at home. Maybe artists are not immune to this tendency. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime christmas/chomsky/baghdad digest
Dan, Thanks for the moving and eloquent confession of an American activist. I don't doubt your honesty for a moment. But there is a blinkered aspect to the way you represent yourself and others like you. It seems as if you are trapped inside an insular American nationalism that your ancestors and many more recent immigrants would find difficult to grasp. I agree that civilization makes people soft (Ibn Khaldun) and a good thing too -- who would freely choose a hard life? But that hasn't prevented cadres of 'civilized' people from playing a decisive role in transnational struggles in the past, while for the most part protecting the comfort and safety they normally enjoyed. Take the movements to abolish slavery, colonialism and apartheid. It is surely the case that Toussaint's former slaves did more than anyone to bring about the end of slavery, by destroying an army of 60,000 British soldiers, among other things (CLR James). The same could be said of countless insurgencies against colonial regimes or of the youths on Soweto's streets. But in each case, there were others, occupying more privileged positions near the centres of power who completed the dialectic that brought unequal systems down. These included Philadelphia Quakers and their British or French counterparts, men like Thomas Clarkson, backed by substantial middle and working class sentiment in their own countries; supporters of Panafricanism in America and Europe who were personally far removed from the imperial jackboot, men like WEB Dubois: campaigners against apartheid at many levels around the world; and so on. Who would care to measure the relative effect of the defeat of South African troops in Angola or pressure brought on US foreign policy by the Congressional Black American caucus? American activists who feel, let us say, uncomfortable about their country's current posture in the world bring immense cultural resources to transnational political movements aiming to redress global injustices: their money, their technology, their education, their strategic access to imperial bureaucracy, even their liberal political traditions. The problem is not that they are reluctant to give up what they already have. Who wouldn't be? It is more that they don't know what the target is, what the alliance is about or their own relationship to it. Which are the sides in any political struggle worth making the smallest of sacrifices for? Vague talk of Empire and multitudes may go down well on the Left Bank or in Bologna, but it doesn't really do the job for most people. And straight anti-Americanism and anti-semitism lead backwards not forwards. The crux of the matter is that, in order to fight something, it usually has to be outside us and most of the social causes of inequality and injustice in our world have been internalised by every member of this list, not just the Americans. This is what I found most hopeful about your confession, that you recognize the need to turn critically inwards before setting out on some brave struggle to eliminate someone else's wrongs. It's not easy. But the first step would be to refuse to be defined as American just becaiuse you live in America or at least to acknowledge that even soft Americans bring valuable means to common political ends. Actually I know of some Americans who do compromise their personal safety in pursuit of their beliefs. The pitfalls of national consciousness (Fanon) still plague our faltering attempts to make a better world. That's where I would start. The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity. (Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch, 1795). If Kant's confident claim seems less plausible now, it is not because his world was more integrated than ours, it is because he did not have two centuries of national society to overcome. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime New Media Education and Its Discontent
It is these places [some universities] that are the guardians of intellectual lifeThey cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. Everything else is secondary. Equality of opportunity to come to the university is secondary. The matters that concern both dons and administrators are secondary. The need to mix classes, nationalities and races together is secondary. The agonies and gaieties of student life are secondary. So are the rules, customs, pay and promotion of the academic staff and their debates on changing the curricula or procuring facilities for research. Even the awakening of a sense of beauty or the life-giving shock of new experience, or the pursuit of goodness itself -- all these are secondary to the cultivation, training and exercise of the intellect. Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. The most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories and to enable the young to see those rare scholars who have put on one side the world of material success, both in and outside the university, in order to study with single-minded devotion some topic because that above all seems important to them. A university is dead if the dons cannot in some way communicate to the students the struggle -- and the disappointments as well as the triumphs in that struggle -- to produce out of the chaos of human experience some grain of order won by the intellect. That is the end to which all the arrangements of the university should be directed. Noel Annan The Dons: mentors, eccentrics and geniuses, University of Chicago Press,1999, pp. 3-4. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
text warez wrote: you completly misunderstood the role of an author. There is no identification of the person addressed as you, but I will fill in. What interests me is that you think there is only one role of the author and that whoever doesn't share your idea of it has misunderstood. You didn't have to give clues to the genealogy of your line (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault -- why not list all the usual suspects?). This line on authorship is a key plank in the case for denying personal responsibility, first principle of the anti-liberal movement. After all, the ones who count are just ghost writers in the machine, so why bother? Each to their own alienation, but there is no need to be sectarian about it. I agree that individual authorship can be over-rated and I am writing against the idea of intellectual property that has become the general justificiation for corporate private property. We are all in a long conversation about a better human society. I still pay attention to some voices that you find it convenient to ignore. This thread has been quite a vindication for the free cooperation and exchange that nettime makes possible. Let's hear it for commons-based peer production (Brian Holmes, personal communication). You can fool some of the people all of the time And you can fool all of the people some of the time But you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Abraham Lincoln said that. You can be in my dream if I can be in yours. And I said that. Talking World War III Blues Bob Dylan There is no need to feel guilty just because they only hand out brains one at a time.And my friend Jim Murray said that. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
in this period, novels and movies. Public education has largely been based on the hose and bucket principle that students should leave their personal experience at home, while they allow themselves to be filled up with impersonal knowledge in the classroom. Probably the apogee of dehumanised intellectualism was French structuralism in the 1960s, a response to American systems approaches which dumped the subject, history, dialectic and all the other baggage of the German tradition. Not many intellectuals actually kill someone, but Althusser did. At the same time, the debasement of the liberal tradition into economics and its apotheosis as state capitalism encouraged an anti-liberal strand, now in the ascendent in dissident circles. What is common to both sides is indifference to the need to hold the personal and impersonal dimensions of life in some dialectical relationship, as they were in the liberal Enlightenment. Brian Holmes wrote: Acknowledging that inheritance seems to me like buying with one's spiritual faculties into a status quo of inequality, oppression and domination I do not aspire to be in the liberal Enlightenment any more than I would want to live in Europe's religious wars. Nor can I understand how individuals like Locke, Rousseau and Hume can be identified with what they were fighting against. I just think that the weakening of state capitalism, under social and technological conditions we may summarise as the digital revolution, opens up new opportunities for us to reconfigure relations between the personal and impersonal dimensions of human experience, whether as practising intellectuals or not. In this regard, I find more food for thought in the eighteenth century than among the neo-liberals and anti-liberals of our time. This is why I resist Kermit's conflation of a series of posts into his persecution of writers theme or indeed the intellectuals as killers motif on which I have hung this post. Voltaire's duplicitous exercises in character assassination stood in dialectical relationship to Rousseau's platform of authorial transparency. I am drawn to (and sometimes appalled by) the latter's conception of the writer's public responsibility which can and must involve being personal at times, but should not, according to him, impinge unnecessarily on his audience's sensibilities. This contradictory rule of style is hard to follow in practice and may account for the lapse of judgment at the end of my previous post. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
the border if things got hot. He needed to stay the right side of the Geneva authorities from whom Rousseau, although a citizen, was estranged for several reasons including his conversion to Catholicism. Rousseau got his own back on Voltaire in Letters Written from the Mountain, defending the Social Contract and Emile from censorship in Geneva. In it he makes up a speech in the name of Voltaire in the course of which he, Voltaire, admits authorship of The Oath of the Fifty. Voltaire, who had never liked Rousseau, was now outraged and published anonymously the most damaging pamphlet written against J-J, Sentiment of the Citizens, where he revealed that Rousseau sent the offspring of his servant mistress to the orphanage (true), a crime for which his contemporaries and posterity never forgave him. Rousseau refused to believe that Voltaire could have written such scurrilous stuff and wrote a pamphlet of his own accusing a Genevan pastor of being the author. Voltaire also wrote many private letters accusing Rousseau of further heinous crimes, including that of being an informer. He then secretly informed on Rousseau himself. Voltaire later published anonymously Lettre de M. de Voltaire au docteur Jean-Jacques Pansophe, claiming that he was being stitched upo be the real author. Rousseau complained about it in writing to Hume who published his letter in English. Voltaire seized on this as proof that Rousseau was an unscrupulous liar. And so it goes, most of the information in this paragraph being taken from Kelly's enthralling book. So what's the point for nettimers or wikipedia? I have several in mind, but I prefer for now to ask you, dear reader, what you think it might be. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime basic terms in the IP discusssion
Felix, You have opened up a can of worms with these definitions which seem to float between universal usage and specific application to information. I have always found the introductory chapter of C.B. Macpherson ed Property (U. of Toronto Press, 1978), The meaning of property, useful and enlightening. He distinguishes between common, private and state property rights. Common property is created by the guarantee to each individual that he will not be excluded from the use or benefit of something; private property is created by the guarantee that an individual can exclude others from th euse or benefit of something. Both kinds of property, being guarantees to individual persons, are individual rights. In th ecase of private property, the right may, of course be held by an artificial person, that is, by a corporation or an unincorporated grouping created or recognized by the state as having the same (or similar) property rights as a natural individualCorporate property is thus an extension of individual private propertyState property consists of rights which the state has not only created but has kept for itself or has taken over from private individuals or corporations[These] rights are akin to private property rights for they consist of th eright to the use and benefit, and the right to exclude others from the use and benefit of something. In effect, the state itself is taking and exercising the powers of a corporation: it is acting as an artificial personState property, then, is to be classed as corporate property which is exclusive property, and not as common property, which is non-exclusive property. State property is an exclusive right of an artificial person. (pp. 5-6) We do not have to be bound by this discussion, which comes out of the political realist tradition rather than that of idealist philosophy, But it does point to the abiding confusion when a simple antinomy, public vs. private is applied to property rights in western societies. Its historical origin is in the second half of the nineteenth century when states where formed to manage industrial capitalism. These then created the legal basis for modern corporations, while granting them the common law rights of ordinary citizens, thereby allowing both parties to hold on to the rhetoric, but not the substance of the liberal revolutions.One can see how problematic the property forms of state socialism might be under these conditions and how misleading were the slogans that animated the Cold War. It is also relevant that these words cannot easily be abstracted from their own linguistic history. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the public is taken to be an extension of relations between private persons. Macpherson's interpretation reflects this. Whereas in most Continental European languages state-made law is held to be separate from the law of persons, giving rise to the use of two words (as in the Latin lex and ius) for the English one, It would not be surprising then if the idea of a public good would be different in these cultures. And so far we have not even stepped out of Europe and North America. How will standard definitions translate into Chinese, Arabic and Hindi? It would be good to extricate ourselves from this mess somehow, but it might take the talents of a Dr.Johnson to do so by means of a dictionary. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Rhizome's revenge
home life enjoyable. There are those who commit themselves wholly to work or public life; but this reproduces the division between paid and unpaid labour, rather than subverting it. Either markets are universal and everything is bought and sold, as some economists insist, or personality is universally acknowledged to be intrinsic to social relations, as most humanists would argue. But institutional dualism of the sort I have outlined here, forcing individuals to divide themselves, asks too much of us. Consequently, not only has the structure never been fully realized in practice, but it has been breaking down for some time in the face of people's need to integrate the personal and impersonal dimensions of their lives. They want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between themselves as subjects and society as an object. This process has been aided by the fact that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why the project of bringing together the different spheres of exchange into some meaningful unity is more likely to succeed through developing new approaches to money than by turning our backs on it. Let me spell out why the division between paid and unpaid labour lies at the core of capitalism's moral economy. At the end of the 20th century, people have never been more conscious of themselves as unique personalities seeking full expression of their subjectivity in the world. Scientific knowledge has lent to that consciousness the promise of increased collective control over the material conditions that before placed severe limits on human aspirations. Why then do most people feel so powerless in the face of the forces governing their co-existence? The answer is obvious. Society is unknowably large and complex, being driven by impersonal institutions whose effects can be devastating (war, mass unemployment), while the actions of individuals are trivial and meaningless. Between self and society there is an apparently unbridgeable gap which leaves most of us alienated from the sources of our collective being, confining our energies and ambitions to the petty projects of everyday life. It was once the task of religion to fill that gap; and, for many of the world's dispossessed, it still is. Today money is both a principal reason for our vulnerability in experiencing society as a remote external object and a means of connection between the two, a practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful. If Durkheim said we worship society and call it God, then money is the God of capitalist society. Only in retrospect will the work patterns of the 20th century be revealed as the bizarre deviations from normal human life that they were. Men working outside the home for almost all the hours available to them in order to prove their devotion to their jobs; returning to wives who barely managed to get out of the house at any time; travelling to city offices from far suburbs daily in order to put as much distance as possible between work and home. While well-paid workaholics cling to the few remaining jobs of a traditional kind, for most young people entering the labour market today the prospects are rather different. For there has been a revolution in the organization of production during the last two decades, mainly but not exclusively in America. This has in turn been shaped by developments in information technology and money markets, as well of course as by the emancipation of women since the 1960s. So, if capitalism's moral economy is still with us, its social and technological foundations are definitely moving fast. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime revenge of the concept
Brian Holmes' reply to my reply is very much in the spirit of progressive conversation. It turns out that the differences between us as quite nuanced (as I already knew), but they can be exaggerated by a language of contrast. Thus we can agree on this: The problem is making the social institutions of reciprocity work for people, different kinds of people, without destroying their sustaining environment. The constructive question is how to make new social forms that better conform to a principle of economic democracy. But rejection of the way society is currently organised can lead to the assimilation of all commerce to an extreme form of capitalist domination. And hence to a romanticization of the gift as being somehow outside all that. Tell the people working for today's interim agencies, or at your local supermarket, that they can walk away free and equal from their contract with their employer! Free and equal to starve or obey, I guess. I organised my recent book, Money in an Unequal World, around the attempt to distinguish markets from capitalism, basing it on the following anecdote: Not long ago I attended a meeting of old Trotskyites. It was principally a celebration of an author who was in his nineties. The atmosphere was warm and mutually supportive. At the end, a man stood up and said Comrades, tea is now available. Unfortunately, because we live in a capitalist society, we will have to charge you 30 pence a cup. I almost wept, for the confusion between markets and capitalism is as deeply rooted on the left as it is in right-wing ideology. Markets require money and people with lots of money exercise disproportionate power in them. Capitalism may be said to be that variant of market economy in which the owners of big money control, for example, the right of most people to work for a living. But when a few friends make a service available to those who choose it and seek to recover their costs by charging a price below the public norm, that is not capitalism. The rejection of market civilisation which led to some fairly disastrous experiments in state socialism was based on this confusion. Accordingly, I have built the argument around a fundamental distinction between making money with money, the sparsest definition of capitalism, and buying and selling with money, the timeless formula for the market. The first half of the book examines that conjuncture of money and machines which makes our phase of economic history capitalist. The second half is devoted to an exploration of money and markets from a humanist point of view. In the book I seek to enrol Mauss in support of this project. He put a lot of effort into supporting a consumer co-op which actually led to his losing a lot of money. Obviously he was interested in developing new social forms of market activity, much as today's adherents of LETS or SEL try to build their own circuits of market exchange. He knew that gifts could be as unequal as parent-child relations or, as the Inuit say, that Gifts make slaves like whips make dogs. He knew that gift-giving could be highly individualistic and competitive as well as a way of creating spiritual solidarity where it did not exist before. To say that many market contracts have elements of the gift in them is to say that they are not always impersonal and do contain the possibility of sustaining human relations. It goes in both directions. In order to be human, we have to learn to be individually self-reliant and to belong to others in society. Reconciling those poles can be difficult. We do it through exchange in various forms. I am sure that many nettimers have encountered, among the free software people for example, the idea that any hint of exchange is a sell-out to capitalism. This is not Brian's position. What I don't want to do is abandon the distinction between reciprocal exchanges of human speech, and the totalizing form of exploitation and accumulation-for-accumulation's-sake that's currently being passed off as the universal, abstract language of self-regulating markets. Amen to that. So let's get on with making the economic forms we need, not just protesting against them. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime revenge of the concept
, Graeber deals mainly in exotic ethnography. This is one dualism, enshrined in an anti-market ideology, that we would be well-advised to try to correct. Have we learned nothing from 20th century experience? At the very least, read Mauss's essay and ask yourself what you think he is trying to say. Keith Hart # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
