Re: <nettime> RIP Keith Hart

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Thank you Ted. That's really appreciated.

Keith Hart was an incredible guy. A real character. Just a little bit
mentally unstable, actually - now, how could you not be, as a working-class
Manchester kid who ended up hanging out with petty thieves in Ghana,
coining the term "informal economy," and making friends with African
revolutionaries?

I used to visit him in Paris, and he came to Chicago once, where of course
he had been part of the scene around Marshall Sahlins, the Prickly Paradigm
press, etc. He always had anecdotes about CLR James, the Trinidadian
Marxist who had lived in Detroit led the Johnson-Forest tendency along with
Raya Dunayevskaya, and later, Grace Lee Boggs. He did a lot of contract
work for the World Bank, became very involved with the history of money and
continually expressed his ideas over the internet, notably on anthropology
blogs (his own and others) but also here on nettime. If you want an insight
into what a really unconventional intellectual is like, read Keith's
autobiography! I read the draft, congratulated him abundantly on it and
certain parts have just stuck in my mind ever since - including the bit
about playing the horses:

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HartSelf

Of course, people by and large don't give a shit about intellectuals and
Keith received the treatment that anyone else would have. After being
dissed and insulted, I think during the Trump 1 / "Morlock Elloi" period
when the list started to break down, he finally said that's it, I quit. And
that was basically the end of the really good period of nettime that had
lasted so long. What a shame. Of course it's more or less like everything.
A brilliant and hilarious individual in the eyes of some, is just a pretext
for mockery in the eyes of others. It reminds me of another dear departed,
Chris Marker, who used to say how great life had been in Europe until the
barbarians came in the 1930s. Well, I don't know how great it was, but we
definitely got the barbarians again....

Be well on further shores, John Keith Hart!

On Sat, Nov 8, 2025 at 7:12 AM GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> < https://johnkeithhart.muchloved.com/?brid=zNuPwEY7u-01h6x57VsZ8Q >
>
> Over the 25 years I co-moderated this list, I wrote lots of memorials. It
> felt like a burden, and now it’s someone else’s — or maybe no one’s. For
> now, it’s enough to say that Keith’s voice was profoundly important for
> nettime, in ways that were never fully acknowledged. Like many people whose
> intellect drove wide-ranging lives, he could be difficult at times. But
> that often reveals how difficult it is for them. In Keith’s case, his
> thinking was both encyclopedic and razor-sharp; and he brought that not
> just to traditional ways of understanding and applying anthropology, but
> also to less conventional fields — in particular, the relationships between
> memory and money or wealth or however we to accumulate. At some point he
> told me that as a youth he’d been at excellent at math(s), which enabled
> him to make a small fortune gambling; and that, in turn, had given him the
> freedom to study, think, travel, and live as he chose. In the course of
> that, he’d invested in a house near Durban, SA, I think — in part because
> he was pessimistic about the course the world is taking and had concluded
> that area would be one of the best to weather what’s coming. These days,
> that might sound a bit ‘preppy’ as (in in preppers), but it was more
> aligned to Fernand Braudel. For Keith, the challenge wasn’t just to find
> the world-historical in everyday details and vice versa, it was to do so in
> ways that enabled us to act rather than paralyze us. It was that
> relentlessly speculative drive that led him to nettime and kept him here
> for so long. This list is, as the metaphor goes, much richer for it; and
> though he hasn’t contributed in a long time, our imagined community is in
> some ways — not all — poorer for his loss.
>
> Ted
> --
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# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org