<nettime> parliament of thing digest [morton, hart]

["nettime's_ruling_robert" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Re: <nettime> parliament of things
     Will Morton <will.morton@irmplc.com>
     Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>

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Subject: Re: <nettime> parliament of things
From: Will Morton <will.morton@irmplc.com>
Date: 28 May 2002 16:54:42 +0100

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 04:55, Kermit Snelson wrote:

> Both kinds of error, however, are equally beneficial to the powerful. [1]
> Toni Negri took it upon himself in _Empire_ [p.156] to "correct" the New
> Testament by declaring that "truth will not make us free, but taking control
> of the production of the truth will."  Again, I'm not personally a believer.
> But I think that the New Testament may have something a bit more profound to
> say than Toni Negri does on this issue.  Truth, in fact, has always been the
> great liberator of humanity.  It's precisely the kind of people who talk
> about "taking control of the production of the truth" in the name of
> freedom, however, who have brought about history's most Orwellian, fascist
> despotisms.
> 
	Most definitely. I'd say that *lack* of control over the truth is the
great liberator of humanity (which I think is what you're saying). The
Empire quotation you give is a perfect example of my central contention
with Hardt and Negri - the idea that if 'they' control the truth, we get
oppressed, whereas if 'we' control the truth, we will become free,
missing the point that the gap between 'we' and 'they' may only be a few
years, or perhaps an election. I would have hoped that we'd have learnt
to avoid such clear dichotomies in our political thinking.

	Oops, topic drift. Sorry. :o)

	W

-- 
   "Monkey's nature was irrepressible!"

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Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 14:58:19 -0400
From: Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> parliament of things

I have long thought that it was wise to maintain some sort of distinction
between subjects and objects, if for no other reason than the anti-humanism
of abolishing it. In academic circles over the last two decades or so, I
have been made to feel something of a neanderthal for holding this
position. Kermit's exchange with Felix has shored me up a bit. At one point
Kermit drew an analogy between postmodern thinkers and the sophists. Some
may find the analogy strained. But the history of the ancient Mediterranean
has a direct relevance to the political conflicts we face today. 

The concept of modernity is based on the idea that capitalism has made an
irreversible break with its precursor, agrarian civilization. In the fifth
century BC, Athens' maritime commercial empire and urban democracy would
have led one to suppose something similar. Yet for a thousand years
coalitions based on property in land and money respectively slugged it out
for domination of the region: Phoenicians and Assyrians, Greeks and
Persians, Athenians and Spartans, Carthaginians and Romans. Rome's victory
made that world safe for landed aristocracy for next millennium and a half.
The arguments of Socrates and Plato about the nature of truth were part of
that long drawn out struggle for control of society's trajectory. 

In the case of the modern world, there was a period of some centuries from
the Renaissance to the industrial revolution when the western middle
classes set out to make a society based on property in money rather than
property in land. They seemed to be winning thanks to their ability to
accumulate capital and then dealt themselves the trump card of machine
production. The proletariat they subsequently called into being was,
however, such a frightening prospect to the owners that they formed an
alliance with the representatives of the old regime to keep the workers
down. This is the specific origin of state capitalism (the attempt to
manage markets and money through national bureaucracy) and its effective
crucible was the first world war. 

The last two decades and particularly the bubble of the 90s lent support to
the notion that some other regime was being born,perhaps more global in
scope. But the barbarism of our world and the speciousness of its
intellectuals would suggest that the old regime of agrarian civilization
may prove to be more adaptable than was once thought, easily able in fact
to absorb the consequences of a machine revolution and a wholesale shift to
city life. In many ways, the political conflict today between international
and national interests is being waged for the future of territorial states
(the key institution of agrarian civilization) as much as it is over
capitalism. And the USA now, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, bears an
uncanny resemblance to the Athenian empire at the time of the Peloponnesian
war.

It is dangerous, I think, to imagine that we western intellectuals are an
avant garde of anything, least of all the new wave of a society that has
put modernity behind itself. For as Bruno Latour also said, we have never
been modern.

Keith Hart

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