Keith Hart on Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:02:16 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> The Hitman's Dilemma |
I am writing a short book of 30,000 words for Prickly Paradigm Press of Chicago (www.prickly-paradigm.com). It's title in /The Hitman's Dilemma: on business, personal and impersonal. /I enclose below the table of contents and first chapter. I will soon start a blog focused on writing this and another book in the works, T/he African Revolution /(Polity Press). http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog/simpleblog_view But first I thought I would solicit feedback from the nettime list which has provided me with much nourishment of the ideas I explore here. Keith Hart 1. 'Don't take this personal, it's just business' 2. The dilemma in fiction 3. The digital revolution 4. Private property 5. Business, personal and impersonal 6. Culture war: an overview 7. Culture war: from Hollywood to Bollywood 8. The crisis of the intellectuals 9. Rethinking the person in an impersonal world <>Chapter 1 'Don't take this personal, it's just business' <> You have probably heard the one about the deconstructionist mafioso who made someone an offer he couldn't understand. Well, this essay is about how social life hinges on the impersonal conditions for personal agency, a relationship that most people no longer understand, if they ever did. I use as my starting point a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, 'Don't take this personal, it's just business'. But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a 'person' is 'a living human being' and what could be more personal than taking his life' Perhaps the hitman is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a 'business' ('the occupation, work or trade in which a person is engaged'). Presumably also personal choice might enter into it: he might know the victim and enjoy ending his life. More likely, an ethos of detachment makes the work easier, but probably not without some emotional cost. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled with the person who practices it' Let's explore this tension a bit further. 'Personal' is defined as 'relating to a particular person, private; concerning a particular person's private business interests; aimed pointedly at the most intimate aspects of a person; relating to the body or physical being; (law) relating to moveable property'. So privacy seems to be intrinsic to whatever 'personal' means, but what makes it particular can be either mental or physical and it seems to include rather than be opposed to business. 'Private' in turn carries a freight of meaning: 'secluded from the sight, presence or intrusion of others; intended for ones exclusive use; confined to the individual, personal; not available for public use, control or participation; belonging to a particular person, as opposed to the public; not for public knowledge or disclosure, secret; not appropriate for public display, intimate; placing a high value on personal privacy.' To complete this round of definitions, someone or something is 'particular' when they are 'separate or distinct from others of the same category, group or nature'. It is in the nature of persons to be particular, or, in Blake's words, 'General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man.' Apparently, keeping that distinctiveness poses problems for which privacy offers a potential solution. This is especially so when we are confronted by 'the public' and, confusingly, by 'business' also, even though it expresses 'private' interests. Business is supposed to be 'impersonal': 'lacking personality, not being a person; showing no emotion; having no personal connection.' But businesses can be persons too. In law, a 'person' is 'a human being or an organization with legal rights and duties'. There are therefore real and artificial persons; and business corporations are the only organizations treated like individual citizens in law. Others such as churches and political parties, for instance, are not. And this right was won at a particular moment in history, the late nineteenth century. Since then, it has become more difficult to draw the line between living persons and abstract social entities that are much bigger and potentially longer-lasting than any human being. I will argue that our political and intellectual culture has become confused as a result, undermining the prospects for a genuine democracy and reinforcing rule by a remote oligarchy. No wonder the hitman is muddled. Business is supposed to be impersonal despite being usually transacted between persons as an expression of their private interests. Worse, there is no difference in law between Walmart and you or me, so why shouldn't a killer claim impersonal reasons for inflicting bodily harm on another person' It's all in the mind, after all. Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and therefore already personal, the hitman has to warn his victim (and perhaps himself) not to take it so. It would seem that the personal and the impersonal are hard to separate in practice. Our language and culture contain the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capitalism's moral economy; and gangster movies offer a vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions. Here is a violent criminal claiming a detachment that would grace a bank manager. It is ludicrous, but then perhaps the two types of business are not as far apart as we are encouraged to think. In this essay I will explore the historical relationship between human personality and impersonal society, focusing on two key aspects. The first is the institution of private property. This has somehow evolved in only a few centuries from being a source of personal autonomy in a citizen commonwealth to becoming the means whereby a few huge business corporations seek to dominate world economy. The question of money's role in society is obviously central to this; and indeed we will discover that money payments are often thought to render relations impersonal in capitalist societies. Meanwhile, property has shifted its main point of reference from things to ideas; having once been 'real', it is now crucially 'intellectual'. This development is related to my second concern, the revolution in digital communications that has begun to shrink our experience of distance in human relationships. For surely, what makes communication personal is when it takes place in the here and now, 'face-to-face'. But radical reductions in the cost of producing and transferring information through machines have injected a new dynamic into our relations, invoked by expressions like 'virtual reality'. And so the current crisis over 'intellectual property' is closely linked to a transformation that is pulling society towards an increasingly global frame of reference. Business, especially of the hitman's kind, is always personal at one level and impersonal at another. The trick is to learn how to manage the tension between them. Moreover, his 'business', the work of criminal gangs, is based on highly personal ties of loyalty to 'families' and systematic resort to violence outside the law, in principle the opposite of the bureaucratic universe where most of us live and work. We know that modern business corporations have been granted the same legal status as living persons. And so, just as the gangster thinks of himself as a professional businessman, it turns out that corporations are quite capable of behaving like gangsters, with equal contempt for human life. What the hitman would like his victim not to take personally is a contract, an impersonal act performed for money, but one intended to inflict personal injury. His business is violence, which is supposed to be the antithesis of modernity. The hitman is both modern and a residue of feudalism, of an age when men ruled in very personal ways through the threat of violence. Yet he cloaks himself in the language of 'business'. It is confusing, but then our times are confused. Maybe there is less difference between our times and those that preceded them than we would like to think. For this reason, Shakespeare, whose plays offer his extended reflections on the emergence of the Tudor state out of feudalism, has much to tell us about the tension between living persons and the impersonal offices they must fulfill. The hitman's dilemma is to be or not to be human, whether or not to give an idea, 'business', priority over life. So what does it take to be human' Rousseau claims in his Second Discourse (on inequality) that the two fundamental drives of human beings, which we share with the higher animals, are self-interest and compassion. The first says that each individual has a direct personal interest in self-preservation. The second is the Latin form for the Greek 'sympathy' and its equivalent in Germanic English is 'fellow feeling'. He believed that our self-interest, a solitary quality, is moderated by an instinctive feeling of sympathy for others, mainly for others like ourselves, but also perhaps for other living creatures in general. He added a third human universal, the drive for self-improvement, and explained the progressive trend of history as its consequence. So we are isolated individuals who take part in a society that links us to the rest of humanity in one way or another. Each of us then, in order to be human, must learn to be extraordinarily self-reliant. I call this 'the toothbrush syndrome' ' who will brush your teeth if not yourself' We also have to learn to belong to others. This isn't easy and it often appears to us that the two principles are in conflict. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how hard it is to be individually self-interested and at the same time socially responsible, even compassionate, to be economic as well as social, we might say. Under these circumstances, when culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. There are societies in history that have encouraged the unity of public and private interest. Our hitman does not live in one of these, however, since he must separate 'business' from fellow feeling in his work. At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion of people, things and ideas. We no longer know how to act or in what context of mutual interdependence. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. The political too is often necessarily personal. But, if we relied on persons alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafias. There must be impersonal institutions that generally work for everyone, regardless of who they are or who they know. We have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities; yet the impersonal engines of society lie far beyond our grasp. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by' This is the hit-man's dilemma and it is ours too. These are quite abstract issues, but they take on a more concrete significance in the historical context of the digital revolution and contemporary transformations of world economy. The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth's natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The age of information has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. So the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might have been considered shared culture to which all had free and equal access. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody: 1. Music. File-sharing of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, pits the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. 2. The moving image. The world of film, television and video is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. 3. Language, literature and law. In many ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright, .as in the reproduction of case law or the claim of copyright in normal words by businesses. 4. The internet. What began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations, governments and an army of hackers. 5. Software. The free software and open source movement, setting Linux and the said army of hackers against Microsoft's monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. 6. GMOs. The shift to manufacture of food varieties linked to proprietary chemicals and seeds has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. 7. Pharmaceuticals. The big drugs companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. 8. The universities. The slogan is 'intellectual property rights' and the culture of the academic intellectuals themselves has undergone a shift from communal sharing to private ownership of ideas. These developments have their specific origin in the 1860s and subsequent decades, when the liberal revolutions of the 17th to mid-19th centuries gave way in the leading industrial countries to a system of national capitalism, the management of accumulation and markets by central bureaucracies. Faced with unruly urban populations, big money made an alliance with the traditional ruling classes to secure unequal contracts between owners and workers, sellers and buyers, lenders and borrowers. The problem then and now is, how do you make people pay up' New legal frameworks were devised granting to corporations both limited liability and the Lockean private property rights of individual citizens. In its heyday, national capitalism was able to police this confusing situation in the interests of large-scale bureaucracy. But developments in the last quarter-century, leading to the emergence of increasingly powerful transnational actors, have made this increasingly difficult. That is why we are now witnessing what might otherwise seem absurd corporate encroachments on public culture. The crux of the matter is the shift from an 18th century moral politics of persons acting within institutional frameworks (as envisaged by the writers of the US constitution) to one where personal and impersonal agency have been merged, to the detriment of our ability to distinguish between living individuals and abstract social entities. This last is the metaphysical ground for rising lawlessness and imperialism, even fascism, on the part of transnational corporations and national governments taking their lead from Bush's USA. Effective resistance to privatization of the cultural commons requires us to revisit the entire modern history of capitalism. At the same time, production is being relocated in Asia, so that the increasingly strident efforts of the West to control the 'neo-liberal' world economy are opposed by the rising economic power of the East. It will be necessary also to mark the differences as well as the similarities between America and Europe in this respect. The organization of the essay is as follows. I begin in Chapter 2 with the dilemma of personal agency in impersonal society as we encounter it in fiction ' novels, plays and movies. Here I juxtapose West and East, gangster flicks from Hollywood and Bollywood, historical tragedies by Shakespeare and Kurasawa, to show the universal contradiction between the conduct of public institutions and the living persons who embody them. Chapter 3 sketches the defining feature of our moment in history, when a digital revolution in communications has speeded up the formation of world society as a single interactive network, mainly as a network of markets. This leads in Chapter 4 to a short history of private property from its modern origins in the liberal revolutions of 17th century England to the instrument of corporate global domination it has become today. The shift in emphasis from 'real' to 'intellectual' property is the main theme of this section. Chapter 5 outlines the attempt to construct separate spheres of personal and impersonal relations in modern capitalist economies and the confusion arising from the collapse of the legal distinction between living persons and business corporations. Chapters 6 and 7 address the world war for the cultural commons outlined above, first in general and then through a case study of the film industry. Hollywood is where it is as a result of evading the restrictions imposed by Edison's east coast monopoly a century ago; now it seeks to impose its own monopoly on the 'piracy' rampant in Asia and elsewhere. In Chapter 8 I revisit the crisis of the universities and of western intellectuals in general which launched Prickly Paradigm's predecessor imprint, before concluding in Chapter 9 with some reflections on philosophy and politics as they bear on the main question addressed here. How is democracy attainable unless each of us can determine our own personal responsibility in a world driven by unknowably remote impersonal forces' What is at stake is the urgent need for a new humanism that meets the measure of our common humanity # 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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net