Sharon Daniel
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Re:Public Secrets & Private Property - 2006/05/13 18:09
Joline, I am very interested in your analysis of the Commons/creative commons as a safety zone or “reservation” that is embedded in, and therefore reaffirms, the system of private property. I think your critique is consistent with a critique of Left-Legalism [see Left Legalism/Left Critique, Wendy Brown, et. al., Duke Univ. Press] which makes a compelling case for extra-legal, transgressive practices that begin with a refusal to recognize the law as regulator of property, identity, citizenship, and the body. I wonder if you are familiar with (and would be willing to comment on) two projects by Amy Balkan - This is the Public Domain http://www.thisisthepublicdomain.org/ and Public Smog http://publicsmog.org. These are very smart conceptual and practical projects that attack the problem of private property (from the perspective of Environmental Justice) from within the legal and regulatory systems. While I respect this approach I am also interested, like you are I think, in the possibility of operating outside legal and regulatory structures – what happens when we refuse to acknowledge the power of the state to regulate space, property, information? How then can we identify and articulate what are “rights” – human, civil, and property.
A thorough answer to your question about a possible relation between the “"feminized" prisons of meatspace in hacker mythology” and the reality of female prisoners would require a lengthy exposition on the Prison Industrial Complex and anecdotal evidence given by incarcerated women. [see an essay I wrote with incarcerated women for the Sarai Reader 05, Bare Acts, at http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader_05.html or http://arts.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/further/sarai_essay.pdf] Certainly, this reality is a kind of “meatspace” in which the prisoner is reduced to a mere biological subject or what Giorgio Agamben refers to as “bare life”. A prisoner’s right to free speech, her claim to intellectual property, her personhood and her citizenship are all contested. The prisoner is a ‘legal subject’ subordinate to the rule of the state but denied the right to political participation that should be assumed by citizens. The prisoner is de-subjectified – in every sense of the word ‘subject’ – political, psychological, and philosophical. She is denied agency, stripped of her individuality, subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment, and literally objectified. For example, a prisoner’s body is the property of the state – a legal object. In California, a prisoner who attemps suicide unsuccessfully can actually be charged with destruction of state property.
This brings another question about property into play – state property. Is identity – or political subjectivity – a kind of property of the state which the state has the power to dispatch, retract, regulate or deny at will – if so where does this leave the politically disenfranchised, the immigrant or the refugee – especially when there is no un-colonized frontier left to escape to?
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