Introduction to the 2006 Reprinting of

About Possession: 

the Self as Private Property

by Jack Wikse, Ph.D.

     I began to write About Possession in 1967 as an MA Thesis in Political Theory entitled: “The Threat of Dependence:  a perspective on belonging.”   I experienced this project in terms Wittgenstein used to describe his aim in philosophy:  to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. (1)  I wished to find  a way out of what I considered to be my own idiocy (Gr. idiotes, private, separate person) by understanding the history and significance of the idea of oneself as one’s own private possession.  I can now say, after nearly 40 years of hindsight and the birth of a post modern discourse, that I intended to “deconstruct” myself.  
     Two experiences informed this early writing. The first was very personal.  I had given a jade engagement ring to my wife-to-be, but it fractured into pieces one day while she was closing a closet door.  She called me and said in tears:  “Now I don’t belong to anybody.”  At that very moment, the radio  was playing a song by Trini Lopez.  He sang:  “The rivers and the streams belong to the sea/ what have I got that belongs to me/ what do I have of my own, my own/ what do I have of my own?”  I was speechless.  It struck me most forcefully that ownership and possession were intimately connected with our experience of identity and belonging.
     The second experience was impersonal.  I had developed a habit of consulting the Oxford English Etymological Dictionary when studying a concept.  When I looked up the word “behavior” and discovered that its root could be rendered “about or concerned with having or possession” I was dumbstruck.  Our most generic modern term for human activity was rooted in the metaphor of possession.  I was also aware that Karl Marx, in his early philosophical and economic manuscripts, had written that with regard to each of our human relations to the world-- ...seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing,  acting, loving...private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object  is ours only when we have it....In place of all these physical and mental senses  there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses--the sense of having. (2)
     Thus I began to explore the idea of the self as private property. I considered this idea to be modern, in relationship to laissez faire economics and post renaissance individualism in the West, located along the path Max Weber called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”  I considered it to be an extension of John Locke’s understanding that “a man has property in himself.”  I viewed the image of the self as private property from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, thinking that how we think about ourselves evolves historically along with our assumptions about meaning and value, and that  the production of a “self” capable of being owned or possessed was intelligible as an expression of the mode of production of private property.  I conceived the framework of meanings of Maslowian self-actualization and of Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity as inseparable from this mode.
     In Ideology and Utopia, Karl Manheim had pointed out that the social factor in knowledge was hidden beneath the “fiction of the isolated and self-sufficient individual.”  He argued that the “original social nexus,” the “interdependence of the elements of the life process” had become invisible with the development of our modern individualistic form of society. (3)  Thus I formulated “private property” as what Michel Foucault called an “epistemological space.”  I knew that during the 17th Century the terms “reality and realty,” and “personality and personality” (movable personal property) were alternative spellings.  I related this to Hegel’s theory of the relationship between the development of private property and the “rights” of personhood.  (4) Locke thought there was no injury without property; Hegel contended that without property, there was no person. To bring my thinking into confrontation with such cultural koans along the development of modern Western identity--discovering that madness and authenticity shared the same assumptions--seemed to me to be a direction out of the conundrum of an essentially private self. In this way I contextualized and framed my experience of identity within the political-economic discourse rooted in the depth metaphor of possessive individualism.   Influenced by the writings of Hannah Arendt, I thought that the logic of the self as private property contradicted the very essence of politics:  belonging together with one’s equals in public.  We see this contradiction today in the project of the “privatization” of the political, including the attempt, as Grover Norquist has said, “to shrink government small enough so it could be drowned in the bathtub.”  This has been recently expressed through the idea of the “ownership” society.  As Colin Gordon has written, “If indeed capitalist thought ended by privatizing the individual, this may have been because it was unable to find an appropriate way of presenting him (sic) as a citizen.” (5)  
     But capitalism has not ended there.  The early 1970’s saw the beginnings of economic globalization, the cybernetic (systems in relationship) mode of technology and the gradual shifting of capital away from North American and European investment, with its attendant anti-governmental policy of deregulation, and the formation of expanded “free trade zones.”  The resulting rapacious “turbo” capitalism abroad and the unprecedented outsourcing, profit taking, and tax cutting at home has generated a new stage of economic ideology in which the very idea of social security (and the post New Deal system built on this concept) has come under attack.  The discourse of the self as private property began to give way against the increasingly cybernetic metaphors of identity that were developing new self-conceptions articulated as processes or relationships. (6)
     It was one thing for me to locate myself within this transformation from self as property to self as relationship in the unfolding of the cybernetic mode of production.  But then what?  While writing this book, I discovered the work of Trigant Burrow.  Burrow developed a discipline to observe the process through which we come to consciousness of “self.”  Since our consciousness of self is social--mediated by collective, symbolic mood states--Burrow saw that in order to understand oneself, there needed to be a group research method that could go beyond psychoanalysis to uncover shared assumptions about the “I-persona,“ a socio-therapy to reveal our common isolation. Burrow called this shared idiocy “our social neurosis,” and termed his method “group analysis.”  (7) The self-studying community Burrow founded  (the Lifwynn Foundation) continues to develop his work, studying the ways in which all of us, as Burrow put it, “have our being in a sea of bias and fantasy.” (8)
     Because I wished to bracket our preoccupation with private law (prive-lege) in order to clarify our vision of public things (res-publica), I did not raise the question of what a deeper meaning of authenticity might involve.  Late in life, Martin Heidegger began to work on (but did not complete) a translation of the Tao Te Ching (9).   Along this path, he might have found in the etymology of the Chinese character  “Te” such a meaning of genuine human being with others, unconditioned by ideological self-images.  “Te” is usually translated into English as “virtue.”  But early Taoism points before virtue, before rites and self righteousness.  As Victor Mair notes, the archaic Chinese character is composed by an eye looking straight ahead, and the heart, and a sign for movement or behavior. Mair translates “Te” as “integrity.” (10)  The challenge of our times is that we look clearly straight ahead through our current epidemic of apprehension and terror, speak from the heart, and act with integrity.
-----------
Works Cited:

1.   Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York. The Macmillan Co. 1958. #309.
2. Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed, Robert Tucker, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1978.  p. 87.
3. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia.  Trans. Edward Shills.  New York.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch.  1936. pp. 28, 29.
4. cf, pps. 76-84 below.
5. Gordon, Colin. “Foucault in Britain.” In Barry, A. et al. Foucault and Political Reason, The University of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1996. p. 255.
6. cf., Lifton, Robert. Boundaries.  New York.  Vintage Books  1969;  Gergen, Kenneth, The Saturated Self.  New York.  Harper and Row. 1991.
7.  Burrow, Trigant.  The Social Basis of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace and Co. London. 1927. 
8.  Burrow, Trigant, Science and Man’s Behavior.  New York. Philosophical Library.  1953. p. 26.  cf. http://www.lifwynnfoundation.org/.
9.  cf., Shih-yi Hsiao, Paul.  “Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao Te Ching.” In Parks, Graham (Ed).  Heidegger and Asian Thought.  Honolulu.  University Of Hawaii Press. 1987.
10.  Mair, Victor H., (trans).  Tao Te Ching, Bantam Books.  New York. 1990.  p. xiii.
(Thanks to Ken Anbender for pointing this out, and for suggesting the reprinting of this book)