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In the 1999-2000 academic year the Critical Theory Institute
at the University of California, Irvine began its new three-year research
project, “The Futures of Property and Personhood.” In its focus
on property, the topic explores the challenges to social and cultural theory
posed by privatization and its broader political, cultural and institutional
effects. It considers, too, the manifold changes in the status of personhood
brought about by the forces of privatization and globalization, as well as
the new technologies that facilitate the remaking of human bodies and determine
the politics of reproduction. The most pervasive effects of privatization
include a general weakening of liberalism’s hold on the social imaginary,
a trend that profoundly affects state practices, socio-cultural reproduction,
and the institutional production of knowledge. By exploring the synergy and
dissonance between conceptions of the private as marketable and the private
as inalienable, the CTI poses the question of how critical theory can productively
engage with the contemporary transformations and futures of notions such as
property, personhood, and related concepts of citizenship, state, culture,
and knowledge.
Since the Enlightenment, definitions of property have entailed corresponding
configurations of the person who owned, and/or was subjected to, property.
In the past three decades, critical theories have devised and debated new
models to respond to historical changes in the relation between property and
personhood. Most of these theories challenge the classical paradigms of liberalism,
Marxism, and psychoanalysis, expanding their focus to include issues such
as symbolic economies, regimes of power and knowledge, or the superimposition
of commodity and sexual fetishism. Many of these theories rethink the legacy
of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud from the vantage point of the new economies of
a global corporate media culture and its continually changing impact on relations
between property and personhood. Today, new forms of privatization demand
that we rethink the range of available models of subjectivity in relation
to late capitalist, global and corporate economies and their effects on personhood.
We need to ask whether contemporary critiques of the subject are adequate
to challenge narratives of the triumph of the market and the privatization
of knowledges, persons, and life itself.
Privatization, as we understand it, refers to a complex array of interconnected
processes and relationships through which political rights, social membership,
knowledge production, and the related spheres that constitute personhood are
increasingly brought within the ambit of the capitalist marketplace. We are
currently living through a profound acceleration of such processes of privatization
and their far-reaching effects on the social and cultural imaginary. Among
such effects we may count the economic, political, and epistemological reworking
of notions of citizenship, the re-definition of the nation-state in relation
to a transnational economy and its global markets, and the privatization of
services formerly under state management. Similarly, privatization deeply
affects social and cultural identities, subjectivities, and cosmologies of
personhood. Niche marketing and demographic “indicators” of consumer
preference, for example, are rendered as self-identity. Moreover, identity
itself is increasingly framed through acquisitive individualism. Self-identity
becomes a product to be worked on, invested in, and competitively performed
and deployed as a social currency. In a similar vein, identitarian forms of
social protest are increasingly recoded as consumptive and private. We witness
a pervasive expansion and transformation of property, accompanied by concomitant
changes in the self-as-proprietor and the self-as-investor. Newly expanded
property constructs and laws extend from rights in potential and future ideas,
to rights in cells, organs, and genetic material.
These complicated economic, legal, and social changes are also transforming
the very category of culture. As the concept itself comes under scrutiny in
the anthropological and literary circles that made it their hallmark for the
greater part of the century, culture is now increasingly recoded in proprietary
terms. Collectivities and corporations battle over knowledges and practices
newly configured as potentially alienable and commodifiable cultural properties.
Individuals protect cultural works through the apparatus of patent and copyright.
Opponents of a neo-liberal stance often frame their project in terms of claiming
collective properties, re-imagining the commons, and reinvigorating the community.
But what is the status of commonality and community when culture itself —
in Marilyn Strathern’s phrase — has been “enterprized up?”
What happens if culture can be both chosen and selected from a seemingly infinite
array of patented goods for consumption? What are the consequences when culture
is deemed intrinsic to identity and becomes the object of collective property
rights?
These processes are transforming not only the world at large, but also the
immediate environment of our intellectual activity. Everyday practices of
privatization in the academy include the university’s use of market models
to guide curricular changes and the privatization of knowledge — from
information technologies and copyright restrictions impacting the classroom,
to modes of knowing and new categories of the known.These practices are radically
transforming the most fundamental relations concerning the conceptions of
person, knowledge, and property on which intellectual production has long
rested. The consequences of such transformations have yet to be fully anticipated
and explored.
The proposed project identifies three rubrics within which to focus its analysis
of how privatization and the related reconfiguration of the social imaginary
pose a challenge
for contemporary debates in critical theory:
