Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

Thanks to Eduardo, Aliette, Saul, Brad, Kate,
Raul. Here's some comments in reply to the
thread in general and comments on A Hacker
Manifesto in particular.

In Kurosawa?s Seven Samurai, two classes form
an alliance, a common project, but without
erasing their differences. Peasants are still
peasants; samurai are still samurai. That?s the
image I was thinking about in saying that
hackers could be imagined as samurai.

I agree with Eduardo that there?s problems
with the image, so I would not want to make
too much of it. In order to talk about class, one
is continually having to use new language. A
class society is one that constantly erases its
status as such.

But rather than a somewhat amorphous
multitude, why not revisit the old problem of
the relations between farmers and workers as a
class alliance, rather than collapsing the
difference? And why not think the question of
?the intellectuals? on the basis of their relation to
the new forms of property ? which have solved
in material terms the question of their status
that no amount of theorizing ever could.

Intellectual property creates new class relations.
It turns the old negotiated rights of copyright
and patent into private property rights, and
produces a class which owns the means of
realizing their value, confronting a class that has
to sell what it produces ? new information.

Unlike Saul, I think the commodity economy has
changed, and we can?t describe it in the old
language. The property-form has changed. It
has extended from land to capital to
information, becoming the nexus for different
class relations at each stage: farmer/pastoralist;
worker/capitalist; hacker/vectoralist.

And so: what relations can hold between the
producing classes? What is the relationship
between underdeveloped and what I call
overdeveloped worlds?

Raul says that "a lot of people in our territories
are not interested in new technologies". Fair
enough, but the new technologies are
sometimes interested in you. If one wants to
understand power one has to understand it in
its own terms, as a power of abstraction, that
comes from without. One?s own particular
experience is only a partial knowledge.

Which is not to say one shouldn?t imagine ways
of working outwards from one?s particular
locus to rediscover abstract social relations in a
new way ? which might be what Kate et al are
trying to do with ?Matrixial space?.

It is simply not true as Raul claims, that Marx
was uninterested in "the conditions of women
and the slave". As WEB DeBois says: "It was
Karl Marx who made the great unanswerable
charge of the sources of capitalism in African
slavery." (The World and Africa, 1965, p56).
And see also Capital, the chapter on ?Primitive
Accumulation?.

I?m not positing an historicism here, where one
stage necessarily develops into the other.
Rather, it?s a question of how the space of
possibility changes. It?s a question of thinking
the ?virtual? historically, as something that has
variable parameters, called into being by the
contingencies of history. A Hacker Manifesto is
not a ?Hegelian? text at all in this sense.

This is a bit of a fault-line these days. You have
your ?post hegelians? (Butler, Bhabba) and your
?non hegelians?? (Deleuze, Negri). I?m in the
latter camp. Which is to say, really not
interested in ?liminality? or ?the other?. That to
me is connected to the emerging global ?neo-
bourgeois? culture which is interested in a
connective tissue outside of national spaces that
can make the world safe for a post national
ruling class. It?s very interested in differences
so long as those differences don?t really include
questions of class. It?s very interested in ethics
(and moral one-upmanship) so long as one
doesn?t really talk about politics.

____________________________________
McKenzie Wark     http://www.ludiccrew.org
A Hacker Manifesto (English edition)
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
Hacker Manifest (German Edition)
http://rsw.beck.de/rsw/shop/default.asp?docid=132408&docClass=PRODUKT&from=LSW.1380
Un Manifesto Hacker (Italian Edition)
http://www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaAnticipazioni?id_volume=5000425