McKenzie Wark on Fri, 10 Jan 97 02:20 MET |
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nettime: Wired discovers Kant |
Browsing around for the morning's news, I discover the lead story under 'Politics' on the Wired page at the moment is about the Enlightenment. Jan Katz proposes the Enlightenment as the precursor to digital Libertarianism. He seems to have come across one of Peter Gay's books on the Enlightenment, as Gay appears to be the only contemporary author cited. What's truly funny is that Katz' example of the Enlightenment philosophe is Immanuel Kant. Now, it has to be said, there are worse choices. That irrasible old publicist Rousseau, fo example -- more of a communitarian than a libertarian, one would have thought. David Hume would also be a bit troublesome -- a lowlander not in the least bothered by the forced suppression of highland culture by the English after the '45 jacobite rebellion. Montesquiou, perhaps? Who, like most enlightenment thinkers, was concerned with the ideal form of the state, not with its abolition. But Kant seems to me a very unlikely candidate. For one thing, Kant thought of Enlightenment as something it was not possible for any individual to achieve. It was, and remains, a collective project, stretching into the future. We have a duty to get as far as we can, and pass on our modest achievements towards enlightenment to the future. Hardly a doctrine convivial to the belief that Microsoft Encarta is enlightenment in a can. Also somewhat difficult for the Libertarian appropriation of Kant is Kant's understanding of liberty. Liberty, for Kant, is obedience to the law. Kant was interested in the actions appropriate to the free society, not with the actions of free individuals. Kant split the model of the good subject into a thinking being and an acting being. The acting being obeys the law. The thinking being can think whatever it likes, in accordance with its own reason, and ought to be able to express those thoughts. Thus Kant thought even a military officer ought to able to criticise the king, provided his obedience to his orders was complete. One could go on. What's striking is ability of 'Calideology', or digital libertarianism, to eat its own past and present, digest it and shit it out as more of the same -- evidence for itself. Take a few key signifiers that float around the back of memory -- Kant, Enlightenment. Empty them of content. Make them emblems of one's ideology -- and then as an afterthought, add a link to Microsoft's Encarta. (This, incidentally, gives a perfectly competent explanation of Kantian epistemology, but is a bit behind the times in its downplaying of Kant's political thought. Kant's political essays have only been available in English for a short time.) The speed with which this anti-intelellectual rape of the past, in the service of the present can work its way through the key signifiers of cultural and intellectual history is remarkable. Its getting to the stage where there is barely enough past to support the market for it in the present. And so, the most utterly implausible material will have to serve -- like Kant, for example. Next we'll discover that Ghengis Kahn was a Libertarian. For all its talk about individuality, Calideology is really about the reduction of everything to the same. Everything is about individuality. But this individuality only produces itself in relation to the bad other of statism. It is not something that produces itself for itself. And so, the endless repetition of operation, where everything is appropriated and made to stand on one side or other of the state/individual divide. The exercise is of course arbitrary -- how else can one account for Kant ending up on the libertarian side of the divide? In one thing, Wired really is the inheritor of the Enlightenment. Its endless hubris. The sheer unreflective confidence with which, having mastered a few things, it assumes it can master anything and everything. The world exists only to be subjected to the relentless process of makig it over in the image of Calideology. McKenzie Wark netletter #7 10th January 1997 __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de