Keith Hart on Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:22:42 +0100 (CET) |
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<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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net