Re: From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes
Response by McKenzie Wark From: McKenzie Wark
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital
Multitudes
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 01:26:33 -0500
Lovink and Schneider ask the right question in 'A
Virtual World is Possible'. What is to be done?
Unfortunately, they have not done it. Yes, there is a
need for a political position outside of the dialectic
of the street and cyberspace. Yes, there is a need for
a new position for new media outside of the dialectic
of the media market and the art market. And yes, the
place to look is in deconstructing the
techno-libertarian ideologies of the 90s. But what is
required at this juncture is a tool with which to
prise it open to discover how it worked.
He was wrong about a lot of things, but Marx did
enjoin us to ask what he called "the property
question", and insisted that it was where the critical
spirit begins and ends. And what if we ask the
"property question" of the jumble of symptoms with
which Lovink & Schneider confront us? The network of
power starts to reveal itself more clearly.
Did the new movements arise out of thin air? Or did
they arise out of a new stage in the development of
the commodity economy? At both the level of the tools
it had at its disposal, and the range of issues it
confronted, the new movement confronts a new class
power. Only rarely is this class power named and
identified at an abstract level. The symptoms of its
(mis)rule have been charted by brave advocates and
actvists. But we are all merely blind folks touching
different parts of an elephant and trying to describe
the totality from the detail we sense before us, in
our fragment of everyday life.
So let's ask the property question of all the
fragments of resistance that appear to us in everyday
life. Start in the underdeveloped world. How is it
possible that the productive engines of commodity
society find themselves shipped, by and large, out of
the overdeveloped world and into the under- dveloped
world? What new power makes it possible to consign the
manufacturing level of production to places deprived
of technical and knowledge infrastructure? A new
division of labour makes it possible to cut the mere
making of things off from all of their other
properties. The research, design and marketing will
remain, on the whole, in the over- developed world,
and will be protected by a new and increasingly global
regime of property, intellectual property. As for the
rest, whole continents can compete for dubious honour
of mere manufacturing.
What makes this separation possible is at one and the
same time a legal and a technical distinction.
Information emerges as a separate realm, a world apart
as Lovink has perceptively argued for some time. But
he has not stopped to inquire is to how or why, and
without first asking how or why we cannot get far with
the big question,: what is to be done. So let's look
closely at the way the development of a *vectoral*
technology has made possible a relative separation
from its materiality. Which is not to say that
information is immaterial. Rather, it has an
*abstract* relation to the material. It no longer
matters to its integrity as information whether it is
embodied in this cd-rom or that flashcard or that
stack of paper.
A virtual world is indeed possible, precisely because
of this coming into existence of abstract information.
But what is information? The product of a labor of
encoding and decoding. Just as the commodity economy
made manual labor abstract in the machine age, so too
it has made intellectual labor abstract in the
information age.
But the virtual world finds itself constrained by a
form of property alien to it. No longer confine to a
particular materiality, information really does yearn
to be free. But it is not free, it is everywhere in
chains. It is forced into the constraint of a very new
creation – intellectual property. On the ruins of the
commons that copyright and patent were once supposed
to guarrantee arises an absolute privatisation of
information as property.
And so, with a whole new – virtual – continent to
claim as its own, class power finds a new basis, and
remakes that other world, the everyday world, in its
image. The abstraction of information from materiality
as a legal and technical possibility becomes the shape
of the world. A world in which the mere embodiment of
a concept in a commodity can be consigned to bidding
wars between the desperate.
This bifurcation affects both the agricultural and the
manufacturing economies. The patents on seed stocks
are of a piece with the copyrights on designer logos.
Both are a means by which a new class power asserts
its place in the world, based not on the ownership of
land or of physical maunfacturing plant, but in the
concepts and designs on which the world will be set to
labour.
In the overdeveloped world, one discovers symptoms of
the same emerging totality. Workers in manufacturing
struggle to hang on to jobs in an economy that they
alone are no longer the only ones equipped to do. So
called 'state monopoly capital' is a mere husk of its
former self. The emerging class interest has a very
different relation to the state.
Meanwhile, there are the various phenomena of the 'new
economy'. While the bubble may have burst, there is a
risk in too low an evaluation of the significance of
the media and communication revolution as an over
reaction to the excessive optimism of the 90s. Just as
railways and the telegraph created a boom and bust,
but also created an enduring geography of economic and
strategic power, so too has the latest, digital, phase
in the development of the vector.
One should not right off the military dimension to the
new class power quite as readily as Lovink and
Schneider do, either. On the one hand it is the old
oil-power politics. But there is a new dimension, a
new confidence in the ability to use the new vectoral
military technologies as a cheap and efficient way of
achieving global redistirbutions of power. The same
abstraction of information from materiality that
happens in technology and is sanctioned by
intellectual property law is happening in military
technology. The military wing of the new class
interest wants a 'new' new world order to ratify its
exercise.
This is not your grandparents ruling class we are
confronting here. It is a new entity, or a new entity
in formation. Perhaps it is a new fraction of capital.
Perhaps it is a new kind of ruling class altogether.
Remember, there have been two, not one but two, phases
to rule in the commodity econmy era. It has already
passed through an agricultural and a manufacturing
phase. In each case it developed out of the a
distictive step in the abstraction of property law.
First came the privatisation of land, and out of it a
landlord class. Then came the privatisation of
productive resources, a more mobile, labile kind of
property, and a new ruling class – the capitalist
class proper. And perhaps, with the emergence of the
new global regime of intellectual property, we witness
the emergence of a new ruling class, what I would call
the vectoralist class.
As each ruling class is based on a more abstract form
of property, and a more flexible kind of vector, than
its predecessor, its mode of ruling also becomes more
abstract, more intangible. Its ideologues would love
to persuade us that the ruling class no longer even
exists. And yet its handiwork are everywhere, in the
subordination of the underdeveloped world to new
regimes of slavery, to the slow motion implosion of
maunfacturing economy in the overdeveloped world, to
the deployment of ever faster, ever sleeker vectors
along which ever more abstract flows of information
shuttle, making the world over in the abstract image
of the commodity.
And what is to be done? One does not confront the new
abstract totality with rhetorics of multiplicity
alone. Rather, one looks for the abstraction at work
in the world that is capable of producing such a
multiplicity of everyday experiences of frustration,
boredom and suffering. One asks the property question,
and in asking it is lef toward a practice that
constitutes the answer.
This is where so-called new media art has proven to be
both so useful at times, but so willing to cooperate
in its own cooptation. When artists explore not just
the technology, but its property dimension as well,
then they create work that has the capacity to point
beyond the privatisation of information that forms the
basis of the power of the vectoral class. The new
media art that matters is counter-vectoral. It offers
itself as a tool for prising open the privatisation of
information.
"Information merely circles in a parallel world of its
own", as Lovink and Schneider say, precisely because
of the abstraction it undergoes when it becomes
vectoral. The counter-vectoral reconnects information
to the multiplicity by freeing it from the
straightjacket of private property. Indeed, there can
be no talk of 'multitude' until this aspect of its
existence is properly understood. Multitudes do not
exist independently of their means of communication.
The freeing of that means of communication from the
abstraction of the commodity form is the necessary
step towards realising the counter-abstraction that is
latent in the formal concept of the multitude. A
virtual world – virtual in the true sense – is
indeed possible. It is what is to be done.
McKenzie Wark
see also:
A hacker manifesto
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html
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Wark's response to Lovink/Schneider
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Type: discussion