Debates over property reveal some of the central antagonisms in modern political philosophy. In the broad landscape of modernity these tensions, and the social lives to which they have given meaning, have tended to coalesce around two general positions: one defined by private property and the other defined by collective ownership. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, advocates from one of these camps claimed that the question of the meaning of property, at least in its material manifestations, was now settled, and in their favor. Private property, they supposed, came out victorious. Positions advocating common or collective ownership of material property became increasingly viewed as outdated or outmoded, their conceptual language burdened by the collapse of the political regimes of communism, discredited as a variant of totalitarianism. By the late 1990s this victory seemed hyperreal, exaggerated to the point where the world might be considered to have reached an âend of history.â1 The world, in this view, had become a completely interlinked marketplace of private property, with capitalism solidifying its position as the pre-eminent economic, social, and ideological system. Notions of collective ownership of property as the foundation of political, economic, or social life, all-but faded away as politically viable alternatives, or retreated into isolated islands of dictatorship. The centuries-long property debate had, it seemed, subsided from its place in the center of mainstream political discourse.
However, through the 1990s we also experienced the intensification of the case for, or living realities of, another kind of epoch-defining shift, a shift toward a post-industrial information age. Interpretations of the distinctive character of this age were focused on a move toward knowledge work, and research-based production, and the emerging social and productive practices associated with digital technologies and communication networks, now becoming the core engines for social, political, and economic development. Although holding a privileged starting position, private property is no longer taken to be the default property logic for mediating the production and ownership of the defining good of this new age, a form of labor that I will term in this book, the work and play of the mind. In fact, in this so-called information age, private property becomes just one among several significant alternative conceptions, each defining the work and play of the mind as a different kind of property. These alternatives did not simply present themselves as theoretical propositions, but are embedded in, and argued through, real lifeworlds and knowledge production ecologies. Moreover, these alternative conceptions defining the work and play of the mind as property do not solely speak to the nature of property, but to what kind of world we were going to create. Who did we want to become as agents of human culture and knowledge? What kinds of opportunities for becoming is history now affording us? This book presents an account of the origins of four alternatives to the production and ownership of the work and play of the mind in the post-industrial information age. I will call these Information Privatization, Information Exceptionalism, Transformative Distribution, and Ecological Decolonization. I will ask how each model attempt to grapple with this question of human social becoming.
I use the phrase work and play of the mind to establish a particular starting position. The work and play of the mind need not be property. But it may be construed as property, it may become property, and this construal may take different paths. This starting point is motivated by a desire to allow that the historical emergence of each approach occurs in the practices of knowledge and cultural production themselves, activities of work and play, that only in certain historical circumstances become property, and then property of specific and varied kinds. Thus, my focus is on a certain kind of constitutive collective political action, the social action that of becoming property.
Another reason for this phraseology is to invoke the simultaneously disembodied and embodied nature of the work and play of the mind. The work and play of the mind is disembodied in a temporal sense. Its immaterial residues reach us from the long history of the human cultures and knowledge, disembodied in the disconnection from their original creators. It is also disembodied in a spatial sense: the vectors of cultural and epistemic production that do not fit naturally within any formal frames of territoriality. Knowledge and ideas flow without geographic friction, as if the distant were close, and vice versa. At the same time, the work and play of the mind is embodied in the same way that the mind is embodied. Mind touches the ground of material space with our bodily forms and our media productions. For these reasons, becoming property offers a basis to explore an antinomy in the framing of global space, defined by disembodied and embodied flows of culture and knowledge, or in opposition to them.
I am interested in the constitutive collective political action of becoming property at a normative level because the right to the work and play of the mind is today a central mediator of power and authority in our everyday lives. In the context of todayâs increasingly machine-mediated relations to nature and each other, this role is destined to increase in significance. I am also normatively motivated by a diagnosis of our current historical condition. From about 2008 there begins a wave of co-producing global crises. One of these is an economic crisis, where across the globe people have experienced the effects, or live in the ideological shadow, of a rationalism of austerity, at once fabricated and in its effects, real. Another is a crisis of culture and economic identity with the rise of nativist and populist movements, in part a reaction to the rigors of austerity. Yet another is an environmental crisis, presenting the challenge of climate change and the contestation of truth claims over our species effects on the pace and nature of that change. In at times unexpected and unassuming ways, the constitutive collective political actions represented in the models of becoming property that I will explore in this book offer a microcosm of the story of how we got to the difficult place we find ourselves today, the current state of emergency.
But there is also something about becoming property, a unique generative quality, that also makes it a useful site to think about collective political action, and possible emancipatory potentials within the work and play of the mind. The generative quality is as follows: theoretical moorings of the social utility of property come to demand an institutional form of some shapeâa law, regime, or common set of accepted norms. Until recently, the jurisdictional geography for real property was framed by the modern nation-state. Asserting the meaning and rule of property has in large part defined the purpose of the modern nation-state as the pre-eminent form of political community in global politics. Todayâs alternative interpretations and regimes of the work and play of the mind uniquely challenge this conventionally modern framing of global space. So, my questions become: what might be the new coordinates, and demands, for understanding political community as constitutive collective political action within the context of our age? My ambitious claim is that embedded in all four models for becoming property are the nascent logics for becoming political community. New opportunities emerge for political community as modes of collective political action, representing fundamental, democratic-constitutive acts. Will one or several come to dominate? Or will the future be one like the present, where paradigmatically different kinds of political community co-exist, albeit in difficult, mutually defining tension?
Political Community as Constitutive Collective Political Action
Modes of political community have provided one of the dominant interpretative coordinates from which we have made sense of global space. The Westphalian age is defined by reference to the modern nation-state. At the most elementary level the emergence of the modern nation-state was a certain kind of constitutive collective political action. Within its original historical context this political action evolved to include an ideal of a shift in power to the peopleâpopular sovereignty, where affinities are ostensibly based on shared historical experience and community is bound together by common institutions. The institutional legitimacy of the modern nation-state is established in a series of relational obligations to its members: their security, economic well-being, and sense of belonging.
It is now almost taken as a given that technologies of interconnectionâmodes of transport, markets, and communicationâincreasingly challenge the central meaning-making functions and institutional authority of modern nation-state. If we commonly accept these global historical changes are taking place, the normative purpose and institutional shape of the modern nation-state may not align with the demands of the lives of its people. If that is the case, what is the future of popular sovereignty? If there is decay in this mode of social organization, then what is replacing it? How does the spatiality of shared historical experience map the new realities where global institutions shape everyday life?
These challenges to the framing of global space are uniquely, and productively, born out in production and ownership of the work and play of the mind. Looking through the production of the work and play of the mind, these challenges are brought to the surface in the realities of experiences of life mediated by digital communication systems. These communication systems have connected spaces of information, knowledge, and cultural production in ways that generate new kinds of de-territorialized shared meanings, allowing the production of new kinds of affinities and relations of global social life. Moreover, the form of the production of informational goods reveals a new labor spatiality, not primarily defined by the physical boundaries of territoriality, but a new kind of lived labor, symbolically and materially rendering obsolete the boundaries of life and labor understood previously through the modern nation-state. Looking through the ownership of the work and play of the mind, processes guaranteeing the right to the work and play of the mind also represent a destabilization of the traditional frames of global space. At one extreme we see the emergence of global legal frameworks that undermine the property sovereignty of the modern nation-state from above, and at the other, common regimes that undermine the property sovereignty of the modern nation-state from below.
Within the study of global politics, particularly in the fields of International Relations and Political Geography, a series of epistemological conundrums tend to ossify our thinking on the nature of political community, as constitutive collective political action.2 For positivist approaches, as well as the Realist, Neo-Realist, or Behaviorist traditions, the challenge of reconceiving the nature and form of political community is compromised, to the extent that these traditions posit the modern nation-state as integral to their conception of global politics. The modern nation-state is the epistemological mooring for claims to the significance of empirical phenomena, with the law-like behavior and predictive capacities of analysis based on the relationships established between modern nation-states. Visions of political community outside of the modern nation-state, while not entirely discredited, are nonetheless relegated to the less significant normative âought.â The effect is to reify the modern nation-state as the telos of political community.
Critical approaches in the form of Critical International Relations Theory, Constructivism, Post-Modernist, or Feminist Theory have attempted to reconsider the fundamental nature and traditional forms of political community. However, in pursuing their various agendas they face a strategic dilemma: whether the primary locus of analysis must scale up and be generalizable to the global, or scale down to grounded, localized, or specific communities of practice. This strategic dilemma, on one hand, directs our attention to the exclusionary and deterministic nature of scaling up and, with such scaling, a need to resort to universalizing and thus homogenizing accounts of reason, ethics, morality, and justice. On the other hand, while emphasizing identity and differences as critical denominators in a normative geopolitical landscape, scaling down to specifics and the contingencies of difference directs our attention to the implications of narrowing our attention to the scope of affinity beyond the specifics of stratified groupings. This strategic dilemma of normative and institutional scale generates a rich debate about the future of political community at a normative theoretical level, at times falling short of providing a meaningful explanation of what makes political community as collective political action, as an institutional form and embodied in political organization. The local and specific may be described empirically, but often this is at the expense of generalizable interpretation.
These established theoretical models can create path dependencies that produce unintentional blindness to emerging alternatives, embryonic forms, and new kinds of political community that do not fit the Westphalian model. These may be camouflaged by divergent discourses and complex realities in the thick of global life. Not to simply rehearse old arguments, or to create a property reductionism, but if guaranteeing the right to property was so important in the definition of political community of the Westphalian system and its primary unit, the modern nation-state, what impact do new frames for regulating the work and play of the mind, whether sourced from above and below the level of the nation-state, have on the âold orderâ? To return to my more ambitious line of questioning, what are the constitutive collective political actions represented by each of the approaches that I will describe on this book, of becoming property? What traces of nascent political communities, as theoretical propositions or as empirical phenomena, do they reveal? To approach these questions and dust off the telos of the nation-state, I of...