ulrike bergermann, property — review
a refined but iterative text on property, and one thats more likely to make you appreciate property rather than detest it
bergermann has had a long career as a professor in media studies in hamburg, releasing articles in german dating all the way back to 2002, with the oldest title i could find being "hollywood's reproductions: mothers, clones, aliens". her work in studies surrounding power discourses have more themtically expansive titles than the usual themes evaluated in this field, which makes for some interesting thematic expansion, more specifically, in 2023 she released an article called "deep empire" which is about how dinosaurs (and fossils more broadly) were made meaningful in modern science and culture, and how that process is tied to european/american imperial history, racism, and masculinist “explorer” myths.
this topic of western hero myths actually extends to this work as well, where she explicitly argues against the way in which colonial expansion and its violent history wasnt only covered up by hero myths, but through expansionist rhetoric actually covered up the way in which colonial proprietors themselves were constantly anxious and often times themselves harmed through their violent overthrowing of existing clans, and in a state of constant self-induced procarity.
this reflexivity toward institutional heroism is increasingly visible even outside academic discourse, where visitors of museums are more likely to question the placement of dinosaurs as a sign of conquest or the way in which early cavemen are archetypally portrayed.
in the first chapter "primal scenes of property", bergermann connects loss prevention with property acquisition both externally and internally, where property is both the loss of communal practices + the loss of property is a constant self-iniating fear that removes any benefit you can get from it anyways. bergermann ties property with logistics (economic regulation) through fred and moten, haunting (phantom loss), raciality through bhandar and radin and intersectionality with ownership and violent loss (rot), or the idea that property and commodities are deeply tied and contain historically contingent rather than fixed origins, and ownership through property as an inherently racialized and gendered construct.
the chapter begins through its conceptualization of rousseau, hobbes, grotius, locke and kant in this order as progenitors of the concept of property, thinkers who not only conceptualized it but built and justified it through their own experiences in ownership and possession. the arguments flow extremely continously and are embedded correctly at this point, but the conceptual exploration of their terms is mostly polemical (and by that of course i mean that the structure is intentionally seperating condition from formation so that it can correctly advance a rhetoric, and is not a comment on style or tone). the inner dynamics of enlightenment thinkers arent fully discovered, but some more than curious remarks are justifiably made. the association between their private exploits and philosophy is argued smoothly, where hobbes, kant and locke are all exposed in more or less equal amounts. that isnt to say that she doesnt treat their philosophy retrospectively at all, but that the amount leans towards explicating their exploits unevenly compared to the arguments they make.
at one point the referentiality passes from locke to savoy to federici and into moten with no middle-men in between, retrospecting well known theorists, well understood anthropological accounts and minor theoretical literature that doesnt necessarily conflict with bergermann's posited narrative, a narrative that is dissapointingly entirely emptied of an inner voice specifically when it comes to her prioritizing of theoretical aggregation over conceptual intervention, except in minor historicizings, which bergermann is partially voicing herself, but which unfortunately present the least amount of stakes on the narrative itself. the tone is however appropriately self-assured given the discipline its in, but still feels slightly depersonalized compared to some contemporaries like tia trafford who explicates the same ideas with far more polemical originality, like for example in "property is a plantation" where locke's signing of the constitution of the carolinas follows two seperate paragraphs where trafford personally and with an inner voice lays out how safeguarding property is legitimized by an arbitrary juxtaposition against a state of nature. she also uses goodell to show how bodily rights simultaneously dont hold and are yet for slaves nonetheless punished as responsible conduct, an argument similar to bergermann's own, where she uses loick, patel and moore for similarly pointing at the contradiction between conceptual philosophy and historical formulation, but without the personal style.
as for the structure, there is little to no cross-explication between the subchapters, which present us with one concept each. there is however an implicit conceptual interlinking, where as discussed earlier, the narrative force of property is delianted through the rebuking of savagery, and only then into the muddying of natural and civil law, raciality comes before the problematizing of ownership which is also correct, and then into phantom loss experienced by the bourgeoise as they feel the counterweight of their own force, and only then into whiteness as the defining signifier, which feels right on time when compared with the opposite idea - where whiteness would have arrived early if it was introduced before the hauntology could already contaminate and corrupt white stakes on property posession and law.
bergermann does offer us a very finely placed meta-historical account, successfully managing to explicate the idea that natural and civil law are attached or detached from the flow of history based on both colonial regimes and their developments and the intrinsic intentions of economists that react to historical developments in real time, imposing how the law reacts to property depending on the way sovereignity interacts with bodies, and on the way in which new regimes reappropriate concepts based on convinience rather than pertinance.
von redecker is the primary force when it comes to the way imposition relates to sovereignity, where she is used quite heavily as a reference because she helps to problematize concepts ranging from kant's racist exclusion of anthropological accounts to how colonial uses of christian debates on property reassimilated closed jurisdictionary roman debates on law, and even problematizing the witch hunts and how property relates intrinsically to rape, where lack of property itself was an exclusionary feature, where propertyless white men were allowed to discharge their lack of status onto powerless subjects who could never even gain property to begin with. redecker's arguments are suprisingly broad and surprisingly sharp, but bergermann, even in the notes which half of the time take up half the page, still only manages to graze the few essential points of the theory, making it so that both the main narrative and notes chapter only follow one conceptual development at a time, usually both seperate from one another, and usually both introductory in tone, muddying the conviction slightly, but with the latent benefit of being both extremely easy to read and pleasantly insightful.
this chapter is definitely weakest when it comes to association, a lot of the historicizing happens to sit not outside the theory but besides it, or in other terms, the conceptual relay between historical scene and theoretical claim is occasionally underarticulated. for example in "racial regimes of ownership", bergermann shows how possession and property contradict ownership rhetoric due to the way in which race depends on economic ideologies that make it contingent on existing property relations and later racially re-assimilates these constructs as givens, transposing bhandar and lowe against locke and hobbes correclty, but then following it up with radin's thoughts on personhood and appropriation, which are seperate concepts, and although they do fit into the conceptual evolution of the narrative, none of the four previously mentioned theorists actually fit into the discussion or have anything to say about the new concepts in the piece, the subchapter simply ends just as fast and abruptly as it beings to develop a seperate conceptual development.