<nettime> Fwd: Constitutioanl radicalism

On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Felix Stalder <[email protected]> wrote:

I think Latour's answer (and I would largely agree with him) is that
it's precisely the individual-society divide that its problematic,
first, because neither can exists without the other and, second, because
it implies that these two categories are the only ones that count.

Felix,

Bourgeois ideology and those who would abolish rather than change its premises insist that individual and society are opposed, not me.

Every human being is a unique person who lives in society. We are therefore all individual and social at the same time and the two are inseparable in our experience. Society is both inside and outside us; and a lot rides on our ability to tell the difference as well as to make a meaningful connection between them. Society is personal when it is lived by each of us in particular; it is impersonal when it takes the form of collective ideas. Life and ideas are likewise inseparable in practice, but they need sometimes to be distinguished.

It is therefore just as damaging to insist on a radical separation of individuals and society or of life and ideas as it is to collapse the difference between them. Modern capitalism rests on a division between personal and impersonal spheres of social life. The institution of private property initially drove a conceptual wedge between our individuality and an active sense of belonging to society. Indeed the latter was made invisible or at least unreachable for most of us. But then private property assumed the form of public ownership by large business corporations and even governments. It then became convenient to merge the personal and impersonal spheres in economic law, leaving a general confusion in political culture between the rights of individual citizens and those of abstract social entities wielding far more power than any human being ever could. The consequences for democracy are disastrous.

Is it so hard to distinguish between real persons and the impersonal organizations they live by? Bill Gates is Bill Gates, not Microsoft, and, when he plays bridge with Warren Buffet, they talk about money, with consequences for the rest of us. We have no difficulty with a play that represents modern physics as a meeting between Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen. The problem is that even the academic humanities have become so abstract that it has become quaintly old-fashioned to imagine that living people are what make society and ideas. The Anglophone founders of classical liberalism from Locke to Smith and Jefferson knew that and poets, from Milton to Blake, expressed it in words whose meaning we have forgotten. “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man.”

Keith

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