Keith Hart on Mon, 5 Mar 2012 15:21:15 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Political-Economy and Desire |
Mark, There are two types of error: telling someone something they know already and not telling them something they don't know. I would rather commit the first type of error, but most of the people I know commit the second. So here goes. Louis Dumont is best known for his work on India. He wrote a book, Homo Aequalis, on western notions of the economy. This was translated into English as From Mandeveille to Marx. He wrote the foreword to the French edition of Polanyi's The Great Transformation in 1983. Vincent Descombes recently published an article on Dumont as a political thinker: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Louis-Dumont-comment-penser-le.html?lang=fr. I was struck reading your two posts by the possible relevance of H.C. Binswanger's Money and Magic (A Critique of the Modern Economy in Light of Goethe's Faust). There's a review by Herman Daly here: http://www.jayhanson.us/page71.htm. Obviously there are many ways of approaching the idea that we are at a turning point in human history. For some time now, I have been pursuing a line that is closer to Felix's in the Facebook thread (posted today). This is that the old and the new spend some time together and are never completely separated. In particular, the decay of modernity since the 70s (I prefer to call it national capitalism) involves to some extent a reversion to what it originally claimed to supplant. Thus "neoliberalism" reverts to the Old Regime with its addiction to rentseeking behaviour while hiding behind the smokescreen of the free market (an issue raised by Lorenzo Tripodi in the other thread). This raises the question of whether a history of ideas is enough, given the confused social reality. I respond to this situation by supposing that Rousseau, Kant and Goethe have something to tell us because of their understanding of that previous transition which we repeat even as something unheard of also emerges. I like Hegel a lot and don;t think he deserves the bum rap Marx tried to pin on him. Moreover, he is the godfather of national capitalism (most explicitly in The Philosophy of Right). But he put the boot into Kant and this move has been repeated by all his epigones. Yet, for all the luminous moral/political philosophy and anthropology of Kant's last years, his crowning achievement was his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, which has a claim to having been the most influential book in the 19th century. So even if we stick to the history of ideas, there is the problem of radical shifts in fashion concerning what is important. In any case, for the question you raise about a revival of moral politics, I would feel obliged to start with Hegel's revolution against Kant when the categorical imperative was dismissed as bourgeois individualism. In my book The Memory Bank, I started out with a hypothesis not a million miles from yours conerning the rebirth of humanity in the digital revolution. I imagined that the impersonal society of the twentieth century was being replaced by the new scope for personalization offered by cheap information. But long before I finished the book, I realised that I was not describing a radical switch from impersonal to personal, but rather exploring how the relationship constituted by the personal/impersonal pair was changing under contemporary conditions. I think this is still important, but it grabs the attention less readily than my initial formulation. Maybe more pople will read your book than did mine. that's a consideration too. Best, Keith On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 4:42 PM, <Newmedia@aol.com> wrote: > Brian: > > > Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. > > Thanks. Here's some more . . . > > > The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these > socio-economic transitions. > > # 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org