[Proudhon-seminar] So, what IS property?

[shawn wilbur]

--- On Sun, 7/13/08, roger <dodger at drizzle.com> wrote:
> From: roger <dodger at drizzle.com>
> Shawn said:
> >> We've got an interesting array of positions
> represented. My own thoughts 
> >> are currently in pretty rapid evolution. I've
> been working, for about a 
> >> year now, on a kind of extrapolation from what
> seems to be the basic 
> >> intuition of Locke's property theory: property
> is the extension of the 
> >> self through activity into the world, the mixing
> of the self with raw 
> >> nature, and the self's consequent
> extension.<<
> 
> several of us mentioned the 'relational' nature of
> property.  if one were 
> alone in nature, could you even have the concept of
> 'property?'  isn't it 
> really, on one level, just a status game?  

I think that really depends on how you understand "property;" in part, it depends on whether you think "property" is primarily a matter of rights or of facts (or of "social facts.)

> we are social animals and seem to 
> create dominance hierarchies as a matter of course. 
> isn't 'property' just a 
> historically conditioned manifestation of this?  physical
> control of 
> valuable resources is a characteristic of dominant
> individuals in most every 
> species of social animals.  why should we be different and
> does 'property' 
> require any further explanation that this, admittedly,
> reductionist one?

Well, where does the reductionist explanation leave us? With something hardwired in us as members of the animal kingdom? 

I guess I'm not certain that what you're talking about is "property," in any event, rather than, say, a tendency to acquisitiveness which we use "property" to justify. 

> isn't the idea that property is 'the extension of
> the self through activity 
> into the world' another way of talking about
> 'territoriality?'  

Well, at some level, it's really just a description of subsistence. At another, it is a recognition that human beings have projects. Perhaps the fact that we have projects is analogous to dam-making behavior in beavers, or nest-building in birds. And, certainly, territoriality is related in animals to subsistence and/or to other sorts of "projects." 

> property, at 
> least historically and on one level, is obviously about
> land and territory. 
> again, biology tells us that we are very intimately linked
> to the land 
> (whether we know it or not).  it's not farfetched to
> postulate a human 
> propensity to control territory.  thus property is the
> abstraction of this tendency.

OK. But what does that mean for all of these centuries of chatter about property "rights," or about "justice" in the working out of the "mine and thine"? 

> another argument based on brain biology could go something
> like this:  one 
> of the most significant stages of individual human
> cognitive development is 
> the early ability (developed as an infant) to distinguish
> between the 'self' 
> and the outside world.  generally, we do a good job of
> this, but sometimes 
> this process is not complete.  one could look at the ideas
> of property and 
> ownership as a failure of this separation to fully take
> hold.  property is 
> really just an abstract extension of our rejection of our
> contingent (and 
> utterly final and complete) separation from the world. 
> property arises 
> where we refuse to recognize the trauma of individuation. 
> we refuse to 
> acknowledge our alienation from the world by trying to
> control and own it, 
> even beyond the needs of survival or rational calculation. 
> property is a 
> genetic defect defined as an inability to accept the
> individual's 
> existential plight.

I'm sympathetic, at least in part. I've already suggested that the political-economic problem of "property" (the "owned") is tied up with the issue of what is proper to the individual (the "own.") Whether or not we have individuation axieties, our identities seem to bleed a bit around the edges. But explaining the sources of the concern for property doesn't take us any distance towards working out our issues. 

> i kind of like this last idea, even if it is totally
> goofball, because it 
> goes along with my primary explanation for all of our
> problems:  evolution 
> operates at the level of the allele (or gene), not at the
> level of the 
> individual, or even the species.  as individuals, we are
> just bags of 
> organic soup that operate as temporary storage facilities
> for the 
> 'replicators' that are the real game in town.  we
> are carrying alleles in 
> our genetic code that could be half a billion years old and
> that are shared 
> across multiple species.  that's what's really
> going on.  we are just 
> epiphenomenal (but what a GREAT view from here).  rather
> humbling, but 
> extremely enlightening realization.

I'm always puzzled by this tendency to claim that the "real action" is happening at some other level. Even if, by some cosmic yardstick, it was true that the most important thing was the play of information at the genetic level, I have yet to see a very convincing argument that that is all that is going on. And, from my point of view, as an individual at another level, epiphenomenon or not, my selfish genes can go on with their selfish business, but I have my own fish to fry, thanks. The "epiphenomenal" realm of human interaction seems to need constant upkeep and whether or not it's just the alleles talking, there seems to be work to do. 

Now, I'm inclined to acknowledge action at quite a variety of levels. I'm currently wrestling with the stuff in Proudhon about how individual dogmatism is the key to collective wisdom. I'll acknowledge Roger's alleles as part of that immanent law of relation that makes me tick, but there is, to speak in Proudhonian terms, a collective force involved in my personhood (a force Proudhon identifies as my liberty) that is not simply the sum of the parts, and which ramifies upward/outward ("Yes, M. Proudhon, bad analogies...") into collective beings that rely on things like just property conventions for their functioning. 

-shawn

ps: Any job news yet, Roger?