The Freedom of Things: An Ethnology of Control

by Peter Harrison

Overview

With remarkable clarity, Peter Harrison reveals how the assumed escape from 'savagery' the Enlightenment promised was ever only the transformation of humans into commodities freely available in a market: independence and autonomy being replaced by dependence and drudgery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983298212
Publisher:	Transformative Studies Institute
Publication date:	01/12/2017
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Pete Harrison was born in Brisbane but grew up in the UK, where he was involved in workplace, anarchist and ultra-left activism through the 1980's and '90's. He is half of the duo who wrote Nihilist Communism ('still one of the most hard-nosed books to call the left to account'). Since becoming a teacher he has also written for Mathematics Teaching. Pete and Willie Brim have had work published in the National Indigenous Times and elsewhere, and are presenters on an Indigenous literacy project called Yarning Strong, produced by Oxford University Press. They operate an embryonic website: www.bulwaicollective.org.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface

Introduction: Four Preludes
Prelude One
Prelude Two
Prelude Three
Prelude Four: Autonomic

1. Notes for the Imagining of the Paradoxical Contra-Historical Society
Interesting Materialism versus Comedic Teleology
Imagining the Tribal Zone
The Neoplastic, or Extrasomatic, State
History Idling

2. The Emancipation of Production
The Productivist Discourse
They Know Not What They Do
Replacing People with Sheep
Communal Production
Production for Use
Drudgery
Centrifugal Society

3. The Emancipation of Labour
The Liberation of Things
The Precipice of Sovereignty
The Cruelty of Humanism
Population Mystifications
Not Enduring

4. Community and Community-ism
Data and Discombobulation
Community-ism
Gulag Channel
Community Style

5. An Outline of a Theory of Limits
Fields and Fences
The Faulty Mechanics of Hope

6. Dependence
Accidental Community
Real Movement-ism Reloaded
Immaterial Community

7. Violence
A Passionate Devotion
Violence, Morality, and Other-Control
Feuding as Social Control
Holy Freedom's Laws
Violence and Civilisation
Circumscription and Unification
Enemy Relations
The Gender Factory
Refractory Logic
Self-Control and Pain

8. The Prize of Peace and Leaderless Leninism
The Philosopher's Truncheon
For Violence?
You Don't Know What's Good for You

9. Perspective (with Willie Brim)
Perspective and Soul
Modes of Living
Villages in Time
Civilisation and Capitalism
Marching from Left to Right with Rousseau and Hobbes
Indigeneity and Capitalism

10. Knowledge
The Indigenous Obstacle
Knowing and Learning
Reconciliation/Empowerment/Subjugation?
Gift or Similitude

Bibliography
Index