Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

["Aliette Guibert" <guibertc@criticalsecret.com>]

Hello Ken! what event to see you at last!

Hello all!

To see below my answer:


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>
To: <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters


> Aliette, Eduardo,
>      It's always interesting to me to read what others make of A Hacker
> Manifesto. There are some things i would like to clear up, however.
>
> 1. I do not propose hackers as a new "universal class". Quite the
contrary.
> They are if anything a liminal class, always 'in between', a small class
> with ambivalent interests. There is a reading of Lukacs in the book, but
it
> is not of the 'end of history' type. I think Aliette puts it well when she
> says that hackers are "high slaves" or samurai. Which reminds me of what
> friends say is happening in the anime industry in Japan, where the working
> week just keeps getting longer and longer. This might be an example of
what
> happens when hackers -- producers of the new -- do not control their own
> labor process.

thanks
>
> 2. It really doesn't matter whether hackers are "diverse individuals" as
> Eduardo puts it. All classes are made up of diverse individuals. All
classes
> are culturally diverse, and also increasingly diverse from the point of
view
> of the division of labor. Bourgeois thought makes a fetish of this
> 'diversity'. What matters from a critical point of view is that private
> property and the wage relation are forms of abstraction that makes these
> differences irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you are a programmer or a
> musician or a writer or a chemist. X amount of patents are worth Y amount
of
> copyrights. The market makes all kinds of hacking equivalent.
>
> 3. It may well be that smart hackers (broadly defined) are figuring out
how
> to contribute to the gift economies of creative commons, free software,
> listservers (etc) with an eye to reaping bankable value in the long run.
> Nowhere do I ask of anyone that they do anything but consider their own
self
> interest. Mine is not a moral work.

:)

> It's a political-economic one. If the
> private vices of vanity and narcissism lead people to seek recognition in
> gift economies which both reward that person while contributing to the
> greater good, that's fine.

===> Cunning dialectic but an alienating definition - addictive - of
socio-economic connections and solutions...

> The point is that gift economies now how powerful
> abstract tools. Self interest can now work through the gift and produce
the
> commons as easily as through the commodity and the reproduction of private
> property.

... But of "commons": here you interest me:)


>
> 4. However, what confronts us is a new class which seeks to control the
> production process through turning once negotiable rights (patent,
> copyright) into absolute private property rights (more along the lines of

===V Ok Ken . If you do not mean 'resocrats concerning the oligarchy for a
part, so what? We'll see again before the print but it is to think more in
French of this word.

> in the French translation, precisely because it downplays the element of
> ownership. What this new class owns is vectors -- the lines along which
> information moves and is stored.

===> I translate : Dans la traduction française, précisément parce qu'il
minimise l'élément de propriété. Ce que cette nouvelle classe possède sont
des vecteurs - les lignes le long desquelles l'information se déplace et est
stockée : Is it that you mean ?
===> In French "vector" is not the line but the flow. But right now you have
given a definition which gives a light in that it is necessary to try to
find another word. It is the first time when I am convinced of it.

>
> 5. "Resistance is not enough". Here I agree entirely with Eduardo. My book
> is not a theory that anticipates a practice. The practices are already
> there, all around us.


===> Exactly my opinion ; it is not the subject of the book. Anyway it is
the question of the power and that historical of the organization of former
marxist-leninists. Which and how to get it. Here is the question of the
century and the possible divide between neo-materialist activists.
We'll go back or we'll go forward as all which happens today in Europe:)
It is indécidable except by the voice of the populations:))


> All I did was analyse what they have in common, as a
> contribution to seeing beyond the fragmented world that appears before us
as
> 'spectacle' (if one still wants to speak in that language).

===> Digit information as communication they are not spectacle it is
structure. But as this structure of the information integrates everything,
it stays the illusion of the previous spectacular state. It is the
meta-spectacular society (after the stage of the goods ; now the goods are
not signs but those of the power).

> BY all means
> read Benjamin. The whol e of A Hacker Manifesto can be seen as flwoing out
> of his 'theses on the philosophy of history' and 'the author as producer'.
> But let's not fall into the tarpit of mysticism that has become Benjamin
> studies...

>
> 6. Of course, the whole book can be read as a fiction. Perhaps its a
fiction
> of action, or perhaps its about the action of fiction. It is not meant to
be
> sectarian or dogmatic. There one would hope to have learned something from
> what Guattari calls the ''sad militants' of 68.

===> Apparently everything appoints that regrettably we can go forward the
same as before...
But th eworst : the only part able to invent would appear to be the
contemporary totalitarism of the laws : the laws as the double part of the
goods (as before it was the sign). So what for the another part ? Something
powerful but not power, please !
===> For my part I see any creative vision in A hacker manifesto as a part
of several visions which interest us at the first level : changing the
view - the landscape is not the spectacle it is the environment which act
us - the same as for cancer - (as in the time of "spectacle" one could ses a
preview of our actual times, while one was still to act the things we were
not in a digit world (that of the numerical code) we were in a technical
word as extensive tool of the human body to transform the world - the same
stage was of the social and of the politics and of the existencial citizen).


Cheers

A.

>
>
>
> ____________________________________
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