McKenzie Wark on Sat, 18 Jan 97 12:25 MET |
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nettime: the liberty tree |
Some of our American friends like to think they invented this 'libertarian' idea -- be it cyber libertarian or the regular kind. Perhaps its a myth we ought to leave alone. Or perhaps there might be a bit more perspective to be had if we put it into some sort of context. American libertarian thought seems to me to have two characteristics that recurr in it pretty frequently. Firstly, it thinks of power as something negative. Power is just a limit, a fetter, an artifice. Left to their true nature, people will be free. The second characteristic is its optimism. Its the belief that liberty really can be acheived, if the negative restraint of power is removed. Following on from this double assumption, libertarians are obliged to make choices. Its a question of deciding where lies the evidence of our true, free nature, and of deciding what are the fetters placed upon it that it matters most to remove. American libertarians seem to me to divide on this, but nevertheless to share these common assumptions. For example, cyberlibertarians assume that the state and the broadcast model of media are the things that are fetters, and the market and the network model of media are the existing beginnings of our true, free selves. This suspicion of the state certainly has genuinely American roots. The American constitution must still be the only one written by people who were in the main fundamentally suspicious of the state, and who set about dividing and limiting its power as best they could. Jefferson's views aren't necessarily typical, but they were certainly influential. Limit the state to the role of policeman. It just performs the negative function of protecting life and property. The rest is to be left to citizens themselves. The paradox is that the American state is and remains, to my way of thinking, designed to function *badly*. And function badly it does. This can then be taken as evidence of why the state necessarily functions badly. So get it out of the way, and let the market take over. The optimism of the libertarian view sees this as simply clearing the way for an automatic, perhaps even 'natural' process of self organisation that can't go wrong, provided it is left to itself. Other libertarians may not have so much faith in the market as the natural expression of liberty -- but its likely they have an equally naturalistic understanding of liberty and an equally limited idea of power as a fetter on liberty. Libertarians may just as likely see big business as the no. 1 enemy of liberty (as indeed do most ordinary Americans, according to the polls). Libertarians may just as likely have a rural and collectivist model of the ture free nature of man as a market plus gadget one. But it seems to me that the argument still works according to the same terms. Now, there are at least two other kinds of libertarian thinking. Liberty is more a weed that grows out of lots of cracks in lots of cultures than a tree dreamed up by english gentlemen and planted by American small farmer-revolutionaries and somehow inherited by the farmers of patents in California. Sydney Libertarianism (or Freethought) was more pessismistic that optimistic. I grew up in the shadow of this particular tradition, and its one of the vantage points from which i look on to the American debates. A vantage point from which they appear a little odd. That Sydney had its own Libertarian tradition is probably of no interest to an international readership (although it gave the world Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes). I use it as my example of the idea that there are probably lots of mutant libertarian weeds out there. What its important for in this context is its pessimism. It was deeply suspicious of all save-the-world schemes, and all claims to leadership towards the promised land. It saw these as hold overs of religious thinking. The struggle to create zones of liberty was always something that would be conducted in the margin, by those few who chose to take the responsibility for their own liberty (an anticpation, among other tings, of Sartre). The idea of a libertarian popular movement of any kind looks deeply suspicious. In particular, the coercive side of cyber libertarianism comes into view from this pessimistic perspective. The way it announces itself first as an option and the reveals that it is compulsory. As in: wouldn't be great if we all just got on the net and sent out positive vibes and made the state go away. And by the way, if you don't get with program, your business will be ruined, your country will be impoverished, and your kids will be picking over garbage in some new addition to the third world. We can also question cyberlibertarianism from another angle. The assumption that power equals state power equals a negative restraint on liberty. While liberty equals nature -- as in Kevin Kelly's fabulously funny *unintentional* parody of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees: kick out the artificial structures and let the hive mind rule, OK? There was always another way of thinking in the English language tradition. David Hume overturned the assumptions of Hobbes and Locke that the role of the state is as negative limit. He saw the state as a collection of institutional forms of artifice that take our private and particular passions as their raw material, and reshape our nature in ways that make those passions productive and that maximise our free movement and creation. So rather than the state as just the policeman preventing the "war of all against all", its a collection of institutions that do not limit 'human nature', but rather reshape it into something else -- into our 'second nature'. Three institutions were particularly important to Hume: justice, property and conversation. These were the tools that provide the abstract landscape on which productive, collaborative forms of action can take place. Adam Smith, Hume's friend, was substantially in agreement with this. While Smith has become a posterboy for the market libertrians, its worth remembering that in the Wealth of Nations he was just as concerned with the artifice of instititions of both market and state. He saw both as equally creations of second nature, rather than as just naturally 'there'. He saw both as necessary for liberty and prosperity. Here we start to undermine the assumption in cyberliberarian thinking that it shares with a lot of its American sparring partners -- the idea of power as artificial limit and liberty as nature. Perhaps its no accident that when Gilles Deleuze started looking for intellectual bases for a 'new' concept of liberty, the first place he looked was David Hume. His first book, on Hume, is where I first found hispositive valuation of Hume's concept of the artifice of institutions and their contribution to creating spaces of liberty out of the particulars of desire. I've since discovered that the Oxford philosopher J. L. Mackie, one of the most distingusihed products of Sydney Libertarianism, has thought along the same lines. But back to Deleuze. His work, together with that of Michel Foucault, represent an attempt to think liberty on quite other grounds than the removal of repressive limits on 'nature'. Suspicious, like Hume, of all appeals to 'human nature', they argue that, regardless of what human nature may once have been, it is also something radically refashioned by institutions of desire, in Deleuze's terms, or of power (Foucault). Deleuze was interested in the way people come to desire their own oppression. The way desire forms a symbiotic and self- limiting relation with institutions that make it reproduce that instituition as just more of the same. State and market institutions both do this in their own ways. Even the supposedly liberatory market calls on desire to free itself from its investments in simply reproducing the old, calls on desire to differentiate itself only to the extent that the result can be captured again by the market itself. The market encourages liberated desire only to the extent that it expands the market. Its just another case of desire producing more of the same. One can take this though and look at cyberlibertarianism: the great freedom of the market plus the network seems to produce the liberation of the most banal desires. You get to shoot things, fuck things, feel like a million bucks. Or be what Lovink and others called a datadandy, holed up in some perverse and geekish corner of the information landscape. At this point, cue the old Peggy Lee song: "Is that all there is? Is *that* all there is? If that's all there is my friend, then lets keep dancing. Lets break out the beer, and have, a ball." -- and no doubt i owe someone for permission to quote it. Rather than see power as a negative limit, Foucault saw it as positive, productive. As actually producing the things that in the old framework it was help to repress. His example was the sexuality of Victorian England. Far from being repressed, this was a time, he found, when sex was *everywhere*. Discussed as taste, morality, science -- everywhere. Most of his work was on disciplinary apparatuses -- those enclosed spaces on the fringes of the market that are the other side of the modern experience of the social world. He was interested in the extent to which we are produced by the apparatuses through which we pass -- schools, hospitals, clinics, workplaces. Its a view in which the 'natural' self just disappears. We are entirely shaped by the institutions of second nature, working on the raw material of the body and forming it in its productive shapes. This is a perverse way of looking at David Hume. Its no accident that Foucault's main example was Jeremy Bentham, Hume's English disciple. But while Foucault's early work is a bleak catalogue of institutions that are anything but liberty enhancing, his late work looked at the positive idea of liberty as self-formation. Here we come to the main break Deleuze, Foucault and their mad pal Felix Guattari made with the libertarian thinking they inherited. Like their American counterparts, they came across people like Wilhelm Reich who were firmly of the view that if one stripped away a couple of layers of 'false' character structure, our true, free nature would be revealed, underneath. But where in America the trend was mostly to keep this structure of though and simply change the poles of its opposition and its optimism, Deleuze and co. rehtought the whole business along new lines. In particular, they rejected the oppositional nature of libertarian thought. When libertarians oppose themselves to the state, they all too often are just an undeclared alternative state-in-waiting. One that offers no less open and productive an institutional guarrantee for liberty than the one already in effect. When Wired moved from purely negative critiques of the state to 'Netizen', this became all too obvious. Its not that I find Netizen all that bad an idea. A lot of the proposals are pretty sound, reformist, dare i say oddly social democratic stuff. Its the bad faith that I object to. On the one hand, the unexamined principles of the old libertarian ideology. On the other, the shrug of the shoulders: well, you just have to make compromises to get anyuthing done, etc. We've heard it all before. Wouldn't it be better to rethink the whole thing, not as opposition to the state, but as a philosophy of fashioning institutions that produce productive, self organising outcomes? If we let go of the oppositional thinking: state-bad / market-good (which of course opposes itself to imaginary opposite doctrines...), then we can think about practices of forming heterogeneous institutional forms that have elements of these forms of organisation -- and many others as well. None of which is terribly startling. A Humean libertarian philosophy would be practical, sceptical. Its not the only kind of libertaarian thought one might want to see flourishing. Its not about opposing cyberlibertarian thought with a single alternative. There's a whole other understnading of power, of desire to be found, for example, in Spinoza. Liberty is a weed that grows in lots of places -- perhaps everywhere. As I write, Korean workers are fighting in the streets with cops. Its a scene that makes the old May 68 in Paris look like a tea party. The axes of struggle have shifted in the world. Marx said that in his day, the Germans thought about it and the French did it. Now one could say the Europeans think about it while Asia does it. Fight for liberty, that is -- under whatever name. McKenzie Wark netletter #9 18th 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