Research

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 Positions advocating common or collective ownership of material property became increasingly viewed as outdated or outmoded, their conceptual language burdened by the collapse of the political regimes of communism, discredited as a variant of totalitarianism.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 “end of history.” In this view, the world 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, are 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 toward a post-industrial information age. Interpretations of the distinctive character of this age were focused on a move toward knowledge work, 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 term “the work and play of the mind.”

This project attempts to account for the origins of four alternatives to the production and ownership of the “work and play of the mind” in the post-industrial information age; and how each model attempts to grapple with this question of social becoming.