Re: nettime: the liberty tree

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

I don't think Mark Stahlman and I will ever agree on
the details of the past history of the idea of liberty,
si i don't see any reason to bore the list with all that.
Its only interesting to the extent that exploring that
prehistory gives some insight into the potential for other
ways of thinking about liberty in the present.

To clear up one thing, my opening remarks in the the 
netletter on 'the liberty tree' were a parody of accepted
cyberlib wisdom on the subject, not my own views. Mark
neglected to turn his irony filter on at that point,
eveidently. We arer actually in agreement that the accepted
fable about the origins of the idea of liberty are 
misleading at best.

While i find a lot of'The English Ideology' persuasive, i'm
not so sure it is actually 'English'. Neither Smith nor
Hume were English. To characterise them as such confuses
things. On the other hand, i do see more continuity between
English and American revolutionary ideas of liberty. My
source for that is Pocock's _The Macchiavellian Momemt.

Everybody knows that England pursued empire at home at the
same time as liberty abroad. So did the United States,
perhaps from the time of Polk's Presidency, when O'Sullivan's
doctrine of 'manifest destiny' is extended beyond the
bounds of the American continent, and the idea becomes
naturalised in American thought that empire abroad defends
liberty at home. 

I think that, like the English empire before it, the 
American empire is losing its grip of geopolitical space. 
So as in the case of England, a question arises as to
whether liberty at home can be maintained at a time of 
relative retrenchment abroad. Can one exist without the other?
I think it can, and I think it matters. 

This debate usually takes the form of people affirming
liberty as a good, and extolling its benefits, or critiquing
it in the name of its dark side. Well, once everybody knows
liberty has its dark side, what next? Does that negate
the whole idea of liberty? I don't think so. Rather, its
a question of what need be added to a polity to ensure
other kinds of public good that the institutions of liberty
do not guarrantee. 

Where the real debate takes place, i think, is among 
institutional pluralists, interested in the balance, mix,
and interaction of kinds of institutional shapings of
passion into interest. Or to put it another way, we are
all Humeans now. 

The application of this way of thinking to the net seems
to me pretty straightforward. The net is not one thing. It
doesn't have an essence. It lends itself to incorporation
in all kinds of institutional forms, be they market, communuty,
state based, or what have you. There will be benefits and
dangers in all of those. One discovers those experimentally.
Its not something you can argue from 'first principles'. 

For example, as I write, The Economist has attacked the influence
of sponsorhip and ownership on what certain webzines publish.
Wired, Suck and some others come in for a serve. The article
points to a real problem in web journalism generated by the
current institutional forms of business on which it is based.
There's a pretty pathetic reply up on Suck's page. Basically
they've been caught with their pants down and are too smug to
admit it. But what's interesting to me is that the self interest
of web publishers, a product of the competitive environment, saw
to it that The Economist would see it as in their interest to
get stuck in to this issue. 

But one has to ask: what kinds of issues are *not* getting
covered? What does commerically based journalistic competition
not talk about? Might not state-funded or community based
net media work better in some cases, and if so, which? And so on. 

Now, to a Humean, community or state institutions are not more or
less essentially 'good' than market ones. *That*, to return to
Mark's interests, would be a 'christian' perspective. To Hume, 
all institutions mere take the passions of ordinary people as
their raw material, in particular our 'sympathies' for whoever
is closest to us. Institutions extend and fashion those raw
passions into broader interests. Clearly, community based net media
do this too. For example, just look at the productive use a
passion like personal vanity can be put to in a community media
institution. 

In short, a plurality of institutions shape private passions into
public interests, of which there are more than one. We all have
an interest in liberty, but in a great deal more than liberty as
well. 

McKenzie Wark
Netletter #10


__________________________________________
"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