Friday 29th August 2008, Kant

Back at rampART and a pretty small meeting compared to the Bowl Court months. So, six of us established that a primary problem with reading Kant is that we are, well.... post-Kantian and, therefore, are not reading to determine the meaning of the text so much as to bridge the historical gap between the inception of an idea and its realisation (if, indeed, it has been realised. Perhaps not?). Most of our discussion was about his concepts of public and private and the problems that they pose for contemporary readers used to using the terms to designate (highly politicised) notions of space. Thinking through the problem of space in terms of public and private led us to other dichotomies such as that between the state and civil society. It was suggested, for instance, that Kant's 'private' could be equated to hegemonic modes of thought whereas the 'public' could be understood as counter-hegemonic. The apparent injunction to 'obey' in private (which, for him, is what we now think of as public, eg., when at work), we decided was less an injunction than a rational response to the need to maintain social order while, at the same time, 'public' thought was associated with progress through questioning the status quo. Hegel briefly came into the discussion here because there seemed to be a sense in which 'enlightenment' was a function of the ability to think our way to a future in which the injunction to obey no longer makes sense. In other words, when we have achieved what Kant calls 'maturity', we won't need to defer to any sort of higher authority (like god). But we returned to the idea of space because 'public' thought, we decided, must require a location. We considered the idea of the agora and how this might be considered both a physical space and a concept which might enable us to get to grips with public thought and this led us to a discussion of whether this could be equated with the idea of a 'commons' - a space which enables free thought and discussion and which, in the 90s, it was thought would be found on the internet. We decided that we would explore this idea in our next reading which would be Mackenzie Wark's Hacker Manifesto