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Title: A Hacker's Manifesto Author: McKenzie Wark Date: May 2013 Language: en Topics: anarcho-transhumanism, hacking, hacktivism, manifesto Source: https://anarchotranshuman.org/post/49990204445/a-hackers-manifesto-by-mckenzie
There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The
fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it.
All contending classes—the landlords and farmers, the workers and
capitalists—revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on
which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one. The hacker
class.
Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math
or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things
entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but
new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any
production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information
can be extracted from it, and where in that information new
possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the
new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not
possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the
interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means
for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce—it
owns us.
And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our
distinctive existence as a group, as programmers, as artists or writers
or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing
ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still
struggling to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of
producing abstraction in the world. Geeks and freaks become what they
are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers are a class,
but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest
existence as itself.
Abstraction may be discovered or produced, may be material or
immaterial, but abstraction is what every hack produces and affirms. To
abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and
unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. It is
through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and
released. The virtual is not just the potential latent in matters, it is
the potential of potential. To hack is to produce or apply the abstract
to information and express the possibility of new worlds.
All abstractions are abstractions of nature. To abstract is to express
the virtuality of nature, to make known some instance of its manifold
possibilities, to actualise a relation out of infinite relationality.
Abstractions release the potential of physical matter. And yet
abstraction relies on something that has an independent existence to
physical matter -- information. Information is no less real than
physical matter, and is dependent on it for its existence. Since
information cannot exist in a pure, immaterial form, neither can the
hacker class. Of necessity it must deal with a ruling class that owns
the material means of extracting or distributing information, or with a
producing class that extracts and distributes. The class interest of
hackers lies in freeing information from its material constraints.
As the abstraction of private property was extended to information, it
produced the hacker class as a class. Hackers must sell their capacity
for abstraction to a class that owns the means of production, the
vectoralist class—the emergent ruling class of our time. The
vectorialist class is waging an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers
of their intellectual property.
Patents and copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators,
but of the vectoralist class that owns the means of realising the value
of these abstractions. The vectoralist class struggles to monopolise
abstraction. Hackers find themselves dispossessed both individually, and
as a class. Hackers come piecemeal to struggle against the particular
forms in which abstraction is commodified and made into the private
property of the vectoralist class. Hackers come to struggle collectively
against the usurious charges the vectoralists extort for access to the
information that hackers collectively produce, but that vectoralists
collectively come to own. Hackers come as a class to recognise their
class interest is best expressed through the struggle to free the
production of abstraction not just from the particular fetters of this
or that form of property, but to abstract the form of property itself.
What makes our times different is that what now appears on the horizon
is the possibility of a society finally set free from necessity, both
real and imagined, by an explosion in abstract innovations. Abstraction
with the potential once and for all to break the shackles holding
hacking fast to outdated and regressive class interests. The time is
past due when hackers must come together with all of the producing
classes of the world—to liberate productive and inventive resources from
the myth of scarcity. "The world already possesses the dream of a time
whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it."
Production produces all things, and all producers of things. Production
produces not only the object of the production process, but also the
producer as subject. Hacking is the production of production. The hack
produces a production of a new kind, which has as its result a singular
and unique product, and a singular and unique producer. Every hacker is
at one and the same time producer and product of the hack, and emerges
in its singularity as the memory of the hack as process.
Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack which gives to
production its formal, social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every
production is a hack formalised and repeated on the basis of its
representation. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate.
The hack produces both a useful and a useless surplus, although the
usefulness of any surplus is socially and historically determined. The
useful surplus goes into expanding the realm of freedom wrested from
necessity. The useless surplus is the surplus of freedom itself, the
margin of free production unconstrained by production for necessity.
The production of a surplus creates the possibility of the expansion of
freedom from necessity. But in class society, the production of a
surplus also creates new necessities. Class domination takes the form of
the capture of the productive potential of society and its harnessing to
the production, not of liberty, but of class domination itself. The
ruling class subordinates the hack to the production of forms of
production that may be harnessed to the enhancement of class power, and
the suppression or marginalisation of other forms of hacking. What the
producing classes—farmers, workers and hackers—have in common is an
interest in freeing production from its subordination to ruling classes
who turn production into the production of new necessities, who wrest
slavery from surplus. The elements of a free productivity exist already
in an atomised form, in the productive classes. What remains is the
release of its virtuality.
The class struggle, in its endless setbacks, reversals and compromises
returns again and again to the unanswered question—property—and the
contending classes return again and again with new answers. The working
class questioned the necessity of private property, and the communist
party arose, claiming to answer the desires of the working class. The
answer, expressed in the Communist Manifesto was to "centralise all
instruments of production in the hands of the state." But making the
state the monopolist of property has only produced a new ruling class,
and a new and more brutal class struggle. But perhaps this was not the
final answer, and the course of the class struggle is not yet over.
Perhaps there is another class that can pose the property question in a
new way—and offer new answers to breaking the monopoly of the ruling
classes on property.
There is a class dynamic driving each stage of the development of the
vectoral world in which we now find ourselves. The pastoralist class
disperse the great mass of peasants who traditionally worked the land
under the thumb of feudal landlords. The pastoralists supplant the
feudal landlords, releasing the productivity of the land which they
claim as their private property. As new forms of abstraction make it
possible to produce a surplus from the land with fewer and fewer
farmers, pastoralists turn them off their land, depriving them of their
living. Dispossessed farmers seek work and a new home in cities. Here
farmers become workers, as capital puts them to work in its factories.
Capital as property gives rise to a class of capitalists who own the
means of production, and a class of workers, dispossessed of it—and by
it. Dispossessed farmers become workers, only to be dispossessed again.
Having lost their land, they lose in turn their culture. Capital
produces in its factories not just the necessities of existence, but a
way of life it expects its workers to consume. Commodified life
dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside
the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation
to the next, and replaces it with information in commodified form.
Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property
monopolised by a class of vectoralists, so named because they control
the vectors along which information is abstracted, just as capitalists
control the material means with which goods are produced, and
pastoralists the land with which food is produced. Information
circulated within working class culture as a social property belonging
to all. But when information in turn becomes a form of private property,
workers are dispossessed of it, and must buy their own culture back from
its owners, the vectoralist class. The whole of time, time itself,
becomes a commodified experience.
Vectoralists try to break capital's monopoly on the production process,
and subordinate the production of goods to the circulation of
information. The leading corporations divest themselves of their
productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. Their power
lies in monopolising intellectual property—patents and brands—and the
means of reproducing their value—the vectors of communication. The
privatisation of information becomes the dominant, rather than a
subsidiary, aspect of commodified life. As private property advances
from land to capital to information, property itself becomes more
abstract. As capital frees land from its spatial fixity, information as
property frees capital from its fixity in a particular object. The
hacker class, producer of new abstractions, becomes more important to
each successive ruling class, as each depends more and more on
information as a resource.
The hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into
property, in the form of intellectual property, including patents,
trademarks, copyright and the moral right of authors. The hacker class
is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object
and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which
they may be represented, but new kinds of relation beyond the property
form. The formation of the hacker class as a class comes at just this
moment when freedom from necessity and from class domination appears on
the horizon as a possibility.
Property constitutes an abstract plane upon which all things may be
things with one quality in common, the quality of property. Land is the
primary form of property. Pastoralists acquire land as private property
through the forced dispossession of peasants who once shared a portion
of it in a form of public ownership. Capital is the secondary form of
property, the privatisation of productive assets in the form of tools,
machines and working materials. Capital, unlike land, is not in fixed
supply or disposition. It can be made and remade, moved, aggregated and
dispersed. An infinitely greater degree of potential can be released
from the world as a productive resource once the abstract plane of
property includes both land and capital—such is capital's 'advance'.
The capitalist class recognises the value of the hack in the abstract,
whereas the pastoralists were slow to appreciate the productivity that
can flow from the application of abstraction to the production process.
Under the influence of capital, the state sanctions forms of
intellectual property, such as patents and copyrights, that secure an
independent existence for hackers as a class, and a flow of innovations
in culture as well as science from which development issues.
Information, once it becomes a form of property, develops beyond a mere
support for capital—it becomes the basis of a form of accumulation in
its own right.
Hackers must calculate their interests not as owners, but as producers,
for this is what distinguishes them from the vectoralist class. Hackers
do not merely own, and profit by owning information. They produce new
information, and as producers need access to it free from the absolute
domination of the commodity form. Hacking as a pure, free experimental
activity must be free from any constraint that is not self imposed. Only
out of its liberty will it produce the means of producing a surplus of
liberty and liberty as a surplus.
Private property arose in opposition not only to feudal property, but
also to traditional forms of the gift economy, which were a fetter to
the increased productivity of the commodity economy. Qualitative, gift
exchange was superseded by quantified, monetised exchange. Money is the
medium through which land, capital, information and labour all confront
each other as abstract entities, reduced to an abstract plane of
measurement.The gift becomes a marginal form of property, everywhere
invaded by the commodity, and turned towards mere consumption. The gift
is marginal, but nevertheless plays a vital role in cementing reciprocal
and communal relations among people who otherwise can only confront each
other as buyer and sellers of commodities. As vectoral production
develops, the means appear for the renewal of the gift economy.
Everywhere that the vector reaches, it brings into the orbit of the
commodity. But everywhere the vector reaches, it also brings with it the
possibility of the gift relation.
The hacker class has a close affinity with the gift economy. The hacker
struggles to produce a subjectivity that is qualitative and singular, in
part through the act of the hack itself. The gift, as a qualitative
exchange between singular parties allows each party to be recognised as
a singular producer, as a subject of production, rather than as a
commodified and quantified object. The gift expresses in a social and
collective way the subjectivity of the production of production, whereas
commodified property represents the producer as an object, a
quantifiable commodity like any other, of relative value only. The gift
of information need not give rise to conflict over information as
property, for information need not suffer the artifice of scarcity once
freed from commodification.
The vectoralist class contributed, unwittingly, to the development of
the vectoral space within which the gift as property could return, but
quickly recognised its error. As the vectoral economy develops, less and
less of it takes the form of a social space of open and free gift
exchange, and more and more of it takes the form of commodified
production for private sale. The vectoralist class can grudgingly
accommodate some margin of socialised information, as the price it pays
in a democracy for the furtherance of its main interests. But the
vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to
its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual
proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a
class.
In epidemiology, a vector is the particular means by which a given
pathogen travels from one population to another. Water is a vector for
cholera, bodily fluids for HIV. By extension, a vector may be any means
by which information moves. Telegraph, telephone, television,
telecommunications: these terms name not just particular vectors, but a
general abstract capacity that they bring into the world and expand. All
are forms of telesthesia, or perception at a distance. A given media
vector has certain fixed properties of speed, bandwidth, scope and
scale, but may be deployed anywhere, at least in principle. The uneven
development of the vector is political and economic, not technical.
With the commodification of information comes its vectoralisation.
Extracting a surplus from information requires technologies capable of
transporting information through space, but also through time. The
archive is a vector through time just as communication is a vector that
crosses space. The vectoral class comes into its own once it is in
possession of powerful technologies for vectoralising information.
The vectoral class may commodify information stocks, flows, or vectors
themselves. A stock of information is an archive, a body of information
maintained through time that has enduring value. A flow of information
is the capacity to extract information of temporary value out of events
and to distribute it widely and quickly. A vector is the means of
achieving either the temporal distribution of a stock, or the spatial
distribution of a flow of information. Vectoral power is generally
sought through the ownership of all three aspects. The vectoral class
ascend to the illusion of an instantaneous and global plane of
calculation and control. But it is not the vectoralist class that comes
to hold subjective power over the objective world. The vector itself
usurps the subjective role, becoming the sole repository of will toward
a world that can be apprehended only in its commodified form. The reign
of the vector is one in which any and every thing can be apprehended as
a thing. The vector is a power over all of the world, but a power that
is not evenly distributed. Nothing in the technology of the vector
determines its possible use. All that is determined by the technology is
the form in which information is objectified.
The vectoral class struggles at every turn to maintain its subjective
power over the vector, but as it continues to profit by the
proliferation of the vector, some capacity over it always escapes
control. In order to market and profit by the information it peddles
over the vector, it must in some degree address the vast majority of the
producing classes as subjects, rather than as objects of
commodification. The hacker class seeks the liberation of the vector
from the reign of the commodity, but not to set it indiscriminately
free. Rather, to subject it to collective and democratic development.
The hacker class can release the virtuality of the vector only in
principle. It is up to an alliance of all the productive classes to turn
that potential to actuality, to organise themselves subjectively, and
use the available vectors for a collective and subjective becoming.
Education is slavery, it enchains the mind and makes it a resource for
class power. When the ruling class preaches the necessity of an
education it invariably means an education in necessity. Education is
not the same as knowledge. Nor is it the necessary means to acquire
knowledge. Education is the organisation of knowledge within the
constraints of scarcity. Education 'disciplines' knowledge, segregating
it into homogenous 'fields', presided over by suitably 'qualified'
guardians charged with policing the representation of the field. One may
acquire an education, as if it were a thing, but one becomes
knowledgeable, through a process of transformation. Knowledge, as such,
is only ever partially captured by education, its practice always eludes
and exceeds it.
The pastoralist class has resisted education, other than as
indoctrination in obedience. When capital required 'hands' to do its
dirty work, the bulk of education was devoted to training useful hands
to tend the machines, and docile bodies who would accept as natural the
social order in which they found themselves. When capital required
brains, both to run its increasingly complex operations and to apply
themselves to the work of consuming its products, more time spent in the
prison house of education was required for admission to the ranks of the
paid working class.
The so-called middle class achieve their privileged access to
consumption and security through education, in which they are obliged to
invest a substantial part of their income. But most remain workers, even
though they work with information rather than cotton or metal. They work
in factories, but are trained to think of them as offices. They take
home wages, but are trained to think of it as a salary. They wear a
uniform, but are trained to think of it as a suit. The only difference
is that education has taught them to give different names to the
instruments of exploitation, and to despise those their own class who
name them differently.
Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the
vectoralist class sees it as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to
make education a profitable industry in its own right, based on the
securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. To the
vectoralists, education, like culture, is just 'content' for
commodification.
The hacker class have an ambivalent relationship to education. The
hacker class desires knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into
being though the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself. The hack
expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions
that do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime of managing and
commodifying education. . Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a
politics of free information, free learning, the gift of the result to a
network of peers. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge
subject to the claims of public interest and free from subordination to
commodity production. This puts the hacker into an antagonistic
relationship to the struggle of the capitalist class to make education
an induction into wage slavery.
Only one intellectual conflict has any real bearing on the class issue
for hackers: Whose property is knowledge? Is it the role of knowledge to
authorise subjects through education that are recognised only by their
function in an economy by manipulating its authorised representations as
objects? Or is it the function of knowledge to produce the ever
different phenomena of the hack, in which subjects become other than
themselves, and discover the objective world to contain potentials other
than it appears?
The virtual is the true domain of the hacker. It is from the virtual
that the hacker produces ever-new expressions of the actual. To the
hacker, what is represented as being real is always partial, limited,
perhaps even false. To the hacker there is always a surplus of
possibility expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual.
This is the inexhaustible domain of what is real without being actual,
what is not but which may be. To hack is to release the virtual into the
actual, to express the difference of the real.
Through the application of abstraction, the hacker class produces the
possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and
with the world—and of living off the surplus produced by the application
of abstraction to nature—to any nature. Through the production of new
forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the
future—not just 'the' future, but an infinite possible array of futures,
the future itself as virtuality.
Under the sanction of law, the hack becomes a finite property, and the
hacker class emerges, as all classes emerge, out of a relation to a
property form. Like all forms of property, intellectual property
enforces a relation of scarcity. It assigns a right to a property to an
owner at the expense of non-owners, to a class of possessors at the
expense of the dispossessed.
By its very nature, the act of hacking overcomes the limits property
imposes on it. New hacks supersede old hacks, and devalues them as
property. The hack as new information is produced out of already
existing information. This gives the hacker class an interest in its
free availability more than in an exclusive right. The immaterial nature
of information means that the possession by one of information need not
deprive another of it.
To the extent that the hack embodies itself in the form of property, it
gives the hacker class interests quite different from other classes, be
they exploiting or exploited classes. The interest of the hacker class
lies first and foremost in a free circulation of information, this being
the necessary condition for the renewed statement of the hack. But the
hacker class as class also has an interest in the representation of the
hack as property, as something from which a source of income may be
derived that gives the hacker some independence from the ruling classes.
The very nature of the hack gives the hacker a crisis of identity. The
hacker searches for a representation of what it is to be a hacker in the
identities of other classes. Some see themselves as vectoralists,
trading on thescarcity of their property. Some see themselves as
workers, but as privileged ones in a hierarchy of wage earners. The
hacker class has produces itself as itself, but not for itself. It does
not (yet) possess a consciousness of its consciousness. It is not aware
of its own virtuality. It has to distinguish between its competitive
interest in the hack, and its collective interest in discovering a
relation among hackers that expresses an open and ongoing future.
Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. Information is
the potential of potential. When unfettered it releases the latent
capacities of all things and people, objects and subjects. Information
is indeed the very potential for there to be objects and subjects. It is
the medium in which objects and subjects actually come into existence,
and is the medium in which their virtuality resides. When information is
not free, then the class that owns or controls it turns its capacity
toward its own interest and away from its own inherent virtuality.
Information has nothing to do with communication, or with media. "We do
not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack
creation. We lack resistance to the present." Information is precisely
this resistance, this friction. At the urgings of the vectoralist class,
the state recognises as property any communication, any media product
with some minimal degree of difference recognisable in commodity
exchange. Where communication merely requires the repetition of this
commodified difference, information is the production of the difference
of difference.
The arrest of the free flow of information means the enslavement of the
world to the interests of those who profit from information's scarcity,
the vectoral class. The enslavement of information means the enslavement
of its producers to the interests of its owners. It is the hacker class
that taps the virtuality of information, but it is the vectoralist class
that owns and controls the means of production of information on an
industrial scale. Privatising culture, education and communication as
commodified content,distorts and deforms its free development, and
prevents the very concept of its freedom from its own free development.
While information remains subordinated to ownership, it is not possible
for its producers to freely calculate their interests, or to discover
what the true freedom of information might potentially produce in the
world.
Free information must be free in all its aspects—as a stock, as a flow,
and as a vector. The stock of information is the raw material out of
which history is abstracted. The flow of information is the raw material
out of which the present is abstracted, a present that forms the horizon
the abstract line of an historical knowledge crosses, indicating a
future in its sights. Neither stocks nor flows of information exist
without vectors along which they may be actualised. The spatial and
temporal axes of free information must do more offer a representation of
things, as a thing apart. They must become the means of coordination of
the statement of a movement, at once objective and subjective, capable
of connecting the objective representation of things to the presentation
of a subjective action.
It is not just information that must be free, but the knowledge of how
to use it. Information in itself is a mere thing. It requires an active,
subjective capacity to become productive. Information is free not for
the purpose of representing the world perfectly, but for expressing its
difference from what is, and for expressing the cooperative force that
transforms what is into what may be. The test of a free society is not
the liberty to consume information, nor to produce it, nor even to
implement its potential in private world of one's choosing. The test of
a free society is the liberty for the collective transformation of the
world through abstractions freely chosen and freely actualised.
All representation is false. A likeness differs of necessity from what
it represents. If it did not, it would be what it represents, and thus
not a representation. The only truly false representation is the belief
in the possibility of true representation. Critique is not a solution,
but the problem itself. Critique is a police action in representation,
of service only to the maintenance of the value of property through the
establishment of its value.
The politics of representation is always the politics of the state. The
state is nothing but the policing of representation's adequacy to the
body of what it represents. Even in its most radical form, the politics
of representation always presupposes an abstract or ideal state that
would act as guarantor of its chosen representations. It yearns for a
state that would recognise this oppressed ethnicity, or sexuality, but
which is nevertheless still a desire for a state, and a state that, in
the process, is not challenged as an statement of class interest, but is
accepted as the judge of representation.
And always, what is excluded even from this enlightened, imaginary
state, would be those who refuse representation, namely, the hacker
class as a class. To hack is to refuse representation, to make matters
express themselves otherwise. To hack is always to produce a difference,
if only a minute difference, in the production of information. To hack
is to trouble the object or the subject, by transforming in some way the
very process of production by which objects and subjects come into being
and recognise each other by their representations.
The politics of information, of knowledge, advances not through a
critical negation of false representations but a positive politics of
the virtuality of statement. The inexhaustible surplus of statement is
that aspect of information upon which the class interest of hackers
depends. Hacking brings into existence the inexhaustible multiplicity of
all codes, be they natural or social, programmed or poetic. But as it is
the act of hacking that composes, at one and the same time, the hacker
and the hack, hacking recognises no artificial scarcity, no official
licence, no credentialing police force other than that composed by the
gift economy among hackers themselves.
A politics that embraces its existence as statement, as affirmative
difference, not as negation can escape the politics of the state. To
ignore or plagiarise representation, to refuse to give it what it claims
as its due, is to begin a politics of statelessness. A politics which
refuses the state's authority to authorise what is a valued statement
and what isn't. A politics which is always temporary, always becoming
something other than itself. Even useless hacks may come, perversely
enough, to be valued for the purity of their uselessness. There is
nothing that can't be valued as a representation. The hack always has to
move on.
Everywhere dissatisfaction with representations is spreading. Sometimes
its a matter of breaking a few shop windows, sometimes of breaking a few
heads. So-called 'violence' against the state, which rarely amounts to
more than throwing rocks at its police, is merely the desire for the
state expressed in its masochistic form. Where some call for a state
that recognises their representation, others call for a state that beats
them to a pulp. Neither is a politics that escapes the desire cultivated
within the subject by the educational apparatus.
Sometimes direct democracy is posited as the alternative. But this
merely changes the moment of representation—it puts politics in the
hands of claimants to an activist representation, in place of an
electoral one. Sometimes what is demanded of the politics of
representation is that it recognise a new subject. Minorities of race,
gender, preference demand the right to representation. But soon enough
they discover the cost. They must now police the meaning of this
representation, and police the adherence of its members to it. Even at
its best, in its most abstract form, on its best behaviour, the colour
blind, gender neutral, multicultural state just hands the value of
representation over to the commodity form. While this is progress,
particularly for those formerly oppressed by the state's failure to
recognise their identity as legitimate, it stops short at the
recognition of expressions of subjectivity that seeks to become
something other than a representation that the state can recognise and
the market can value.
But there is something else hovering on the horizon of the
representable. There is a politics of the unrepresentable, a politics of
the presentation of the non-negotiable demand. This is politics as the
refusal of representation itself, not the politics of refusing this or
that representation. A politics which, while abstract, is not utopian.
In its infinite and limitless demand, it may even be the best way of
extracting concessions precisely through its refusal to put a name—or a
price—on what revolt desires.
The revolts of 1989 are the signal events of our time. What the revolts
of 1989 achieved was the overthrow of regimes so impervious to the
recognition of the value of the hack that they had starved not only
their hackers but also their workers and farmers of any increase in the
surplus. With their cronyism and kleptocracy, their bureaucracy and
ideology, their police and spies, they starved even their pastoralists
and capitalists of innovative transformation and growth.
The revolts of 1989 overthrew boredom and necessity. At least for a
time. They put back on the world historical agenda the limitless demand
for free statement. At least for a time. They revealed the latent
destiny of world history to express the pure virtuality of becoming. At
least for a time, before new states cobbled themselves together and
claimed legitimacy as representations of what revolt desired. The
revolts of 1989 opened the portal to the virtual, but the states that
regrouped around this opening soon closed it. What the revolts really
achieved was the making of the world safe for vectoral power.
The so-called anti-globalisation protests of the 90s are a ripple caused
by the wake of these signal events, but a ripple that did not know the
current to which it truly belonged. This movement of revolt in the
overdeveloped world identifies the rising vectoral power as a class
enemy, but all too often it allowed itself to be captured by the partial
and temporary interests of local capitalist and pastoralist classes. It
was a revolt is in its infancy that has yet to discover the connection
between its engine of limitless desire and free statement, and the art
of making tactical demands.
The class struggle within nations and the imperial struggle between
nations has taken shape as two forms of politics. One kind of politics
is regressive. It seeks to return to an imagined past. It seeks to use
national borders as a new wall, a neon screen behind which unlikely
alliances might protect their existing interests in the name of a
glorious past. The other form is the progressive politics of movement.
The politics of movement seeks to accelerate toward an unknown future.
It seeks to use international flows of information, trade or activism as
the eclectic means for struggling for new sources of wealth or liberty
that overcomes the limitations imposed by national coalitions.
Neither of these politics corresponds to the old notion of a left or
right, which the revolutions of 1989 have definitively overcome.
Regressive politics brings together luddite impulses from the left with
racist and reactionary impulses from the right in an unholy alliance
against new sources of power. Progressive politics rarely takes the form
of an alliance, but constitutes two parallel processes locked in a
dialogue of mutual suspicion, in which the liberalising forces of the
right and the social justice and human rights forces of the left both
seek non-national and transnational solutions to unblocking the system
of power which still accumulates at the national level.
There is a third politics, which stands outside the alliances and
compromises of the post-89 world. Where both progressive and regressive
politics are representative politics, which deal with aggregate party
alliances and interests, this third politics is a stateless politics,
which seeks escape from politics as such. A politics of the hack,
inventing relations outside of representation. Expressive politics is a
struggle against commodity property itself.
Expressive politics is not the struggle to collectivise property, for
that is still a form of property. Expressive politics is the struggle to
free what can be free from both versions of the commodity form—its
totalising market form, and its bureaucratic state form. What may be
free from the commodity form altogether is not land, not capital, but
information. All other forms of property are exclusive. The ownership by
one excludes, by definition, the ownership by another. But information
as property may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity.
Information is that which can escape the commodity form.
Politics can become expressive only when it is a politics of freeing the
virtuality of information. In liberating information from its
objectification as a commodity, it liberates also the subjective force
of statement. Subject and object meet each other outside of their mere
lack of each other, by their desire merely for each other. Expressive
politics does not seek to overthrow the existing society, or to reform
its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an
existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states
with a new state of existence, spreading the seeds of an alternative
practice of everyday life.