Aloha,
A good friend of mine was assigned to read texts by McKenzie Wark, and that
prompted me to revisit her, which I had not done since the time she was a 'he'.
I read the Hacker Manifesto, could not make very much of it, and then 'they'
dropped out of my sight. But this interview gave me the feeling of making up
for lost time, hence 'filtered'.
Enjoy!
p+7D!
And if you want to read something much more recent, on a different subject by a
different author, and much more actual: Judith Butler in to-day's Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash
& now for Galloway and McKenzie Wark (my friend rightly asked why an interview
should 8or even can?) be peer-reviewed)
original to:
https://www.boundary2.org/2017/04/alexander-r-galloway-an-interview-with-mckenzie-wark/
An Interview with McKenzie Wark
by Alexander R. Galloway
This interview has been peer-reviewed by theboundary 2 onlineeditorial
collective.
Alexander R. Galloway: Critical theory tends to subdue biography, but I’d like
you to reflect on your own trajectory as a thinker. Your last few books all fit
together. How do you conceive of the project that began withThe Beach Beneath
the Street(2011), and continues throughThe Spectacle of Disintegration(2013),
up toMolecular Red (2015)? It’s a story about the Situationist International,
to be sure, but your story is both broader and longer than the specific locus
of the S.I. Did you set out to rewrite the history of radical modernity? What
stories do you want to tell next?
McKenzie Wark: I would include A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory
(2007) in that trajectory. Those books are already about the mode of production
after capitalism that runs on information. The former was a more optimistic
book about the new kinds of class conflict that could shape it; the latter a
more pessimistic one about its new modes of incorporation and control. But I
felt that nobody was quite getting the alternate path through the archive those
books implied. So I decided to write some more pedagogic books that laid out
the resources one could use to “leave the twenty-first century.”
That led to the three books you mentioned plus another to come that are indeed
a cycle about rewriting radical modernity. Not that this is the only alternate
path through the archive, but it’s an attempt to suggest a different relation
to the archive in general, to see it as a labyrinth rather than an apostolic
succession; a kind of “no-dads” theory, but full of queer uncles and batty
aunts.
Molecular Red has a bit about the moment of the October Revolution, rethought
through Bogdanov and Platonov. Then, second in the sequence, would come the one
I haven’t finished, about the British scientific left, the original
accelerationists and cyberfeminists. That covers the 1930s – ’50s. Then The
Beach Beneath the Street, which reads the situationists as radical theory, not
art, and expands the story beyond Guy Debord. The Spectacle of Disintegration
continues that dérive through the archive by way of the post-’68 moment. What
to do when the revolution fails? As a book-end, there is the last part of
Molecular Red about Donna Haraway, but read as a marxist as well as feminist
thinker, a reading I then take through a cluster of people with
Haraway-affinities.
My job at The New School is really not ideal as far as doing research is
concerned. So these are more writerly than scholarly books. They are meant to
legitimate spaces in which others might do more thorough work. I want to leave
nice, big attractive spaces for grad students or artists or activists to go set
up camp. And people do, which makes me happy. In my small way I think I enabled
some of the new work on Bogdanov, the Situationists, Haraway in relation to
Marx, and so on.
I find it enervating when people simply try to squeeze the present into the old
patterns set by Walter Benjamin or whomever, and add just a tiny bit of novelty
to how we read such a canonic figure. Why not read other people, or read the
present more in its own terms? Ironically, to best honor Marx or Benjamin one
should not simply be their exegetes. So my job is to corrupt other people’s
grad students. To be the odd uncle (or auntie) who whispers that one can
dissent from the great academic patriarchy (and even its subsidiary matriarchy)
where one only succeeds through obedience to the elders and the reproduction of
their thought.
AG: Can you also reflect on your move to the United States, where you’ve lived
now for over fifteen years? I know you’ve commented on how disconnected
American academia is from other parts of the world, particularly Australia–an
observation that could be spun negatively or positively. (American schools are
tuition-driven and hyper capitalist, yet ironically still largely free of
neoliberal bureaucratization along the lines of Britain’s onerous Research
Excellence Framework.) And you’ve also mentioned in the past how you received a
rather unique political education in Australia. Can you say more about your
life during the Twentieth Century?
MW: I had a great education of the provincial petit-bourgeois kind. I learned
at the feet of labor movement militants and later from various self-invented
avant-gardes and proto-queer bohemias. Things were already going badly in
Australia in the nineties so I wrote what I think of as my “popular front”
books. The Virtual Republic(1997) was about the culture wars, in the spirit of
Lyotard’s differend. I wrote another one about two versions of the popular:
social democratic and hyperreal. But then I fell in love with a New Yorker, so
I gave up tenure, moved to New York, and started over. Probably a lucky escape,
as so far the diversity of economic models has kept American universities in
better shape than in state systems such as the UK or Australia.
In Australia I was part of what Mark Gibson called the “republican school” of
cultural studies. Republican in the sense of the res publica, the public thing,
or more figuratively of cutting to the heart of a problem and exposing it. We
weren’t interested in cultural policy or simply doing critique from the
sidelines, but of trying to effect the national-popular space of cultural
conflict itself. But I was already a bit critical of the superstructural turn
cultural studies represented, its bracketing off of questions of media form,
and with them of the mode of production and historical stage. In Virtual
Geography (1994) I had already wanted more a theory of the media vector as
shaping a certain kind of space of action.
It just seemed untenable to do anything like the same sort of work in America,
where I had no access to the public sphere. I was nobody. And I already wanted
to move away from the post-Marxism of say Hall and Laclau and Mouffe, that turn
to either the cultural or political as autonomous or even ontological. That did
not make a lot of sense if you looked around at the big world a bit. So I went
back to my earlier formation in classical and western Marxism as well as in the
avant-gardes, and wrote A Hacker Manifesto. That was my first “American” book,
even though it came out of participating in the transnational digital
avant-gardes of the nineties, something of interest to me alongside the
“popular front” work I was doing at that time.
AG: Is it fair to say that you have a reticence toward high theory and big
thinkers, figures like Alain Badiou with his intricate if not onerous systems?
You are not a system builder, if I may speak plainly. Instead you are proud to
pursue a kind of “low theory.” Provisionality, tactical intervention, tinkering
and recombination, intellectual creativity, but also impurity–although I can
never tell if you are a pragmatist or an idealist! Can you comment on the
fascinating mixture that constitutes low theory?
MW: I was formed by the labor movement, and I remain in solidarity with it even
though it is in a sense a god that died. So how does one keep living and
working after defeat? There’s something to be said for knowing one is of a
defeated people. One is free from the silly chatter of optimism. And one knows
who one’s real comrades are. They are the ones you still have after the defeat.
I still retain that side, which for me is a kind of decision that can’t be
revoked, a picket line never to cross.
On the other hand, my other commitment is not to the community of labor but the
community of non-labor, or bohemia. Its expression is not the organized labor
movement but the disorganized avant-garde. It’s not uncommon to combine these
things, of course. But most often they are combined in the form of (sometimes
rather dreary) Marxist theories about the avant-garde, which nevertheless
remain very conventional in form. It seemed to me self-evident that one should
also reverse the procedure, and apply avant-garde techniques to the writing of
theory itself. Hence A Hacker Manifesto uses Situationist détournement and
Gamer Theory uses Oulipo-style constraints.
Low theory refers to the organic conceptual apparatus a milieu composes for
itself, at least partly outside of formal academic situations. Both the labor
movement and the avant-garde did that. I think it is useful to have that base,
even if it is an attenuated and defeated one. It’s useful to have some
perspective outside of the criteria of success of academia itself. After all,
many of the “greats” of low theory–Spinoza, Marx, Darwin, Freud–they were not
philosophers.
AG: So low theory means anti-philosophy? I’ve noticed that some commentators
prefer to define anti-philosophy as a kind of anti-rationalism (that being
Badiou’s gripe) or even some type of a mystical romanticism. But these
definitions of anti-philosophy never made sense to me.
MW: Badiou thinks philosophy has a monopoly on a certain kind of reason, but
more out of institutionalized habit than anything else. You could think of low
theory as what organic intellectuals do. It’s defined by who does it and why,
rather than by any particular cognitive style. I’m interested in how, after the
organic intellectuals of labor, there are organic intellectuals of social
movements, everyday life, the experience of women or the colonized, and of new
kinds of activity that are not traditional labor in fields like media and
computation. Concepts get formed differently and are meant to do different
things when you are trying to think through your own action in the world rather
that when you are a scholar of action in the world.
AG: I’m also intrigued by what you say about form, since this always struck me
as the central question for Marxism, if not for all attempts to think and act
politically. There’s the critique of the commodity of course, where form takes
a beating. But at the same time form–particularly as idea or concept–seems
absolutely crucial to me, not as the thing to be avoided, but as a scaffolding
to propel people forward. Do you think idea, concept, or form has a place in
Marxism?
MW: As extracts or abstracts from practice, concepts attempt to grasp a range
of practical particulars within a conceptual form. The concept is only going to
be slightly true, but about a lot of situations. As opposed to a fact, which is
mostly true, but about a particular. Concepts are handles for grabbing a lot of
facts. The thing to avoid however is the temptation to think the concept is
more true than the practice. As if it were some underlying essence or ontology.
I’d call that the “philosophical temptation.”
I think one has to wear one’s concepts lightly, and I think Marx did that, if
not consistently. His concepts modify over time as he gets further along in
thinking practice, and of course as the experience of living within capitalism
changes. Capitalism isn’t an eternal essence with changing appearances. This is
of course a mere thumbnail sketch of an epistemology, but then it ought not to
be too big a distraction. Knowledge practices are experiments. There’s no royal
road to science.
Form is however a rather larger question, particularly as forms, unlike
concepts, are embodied and implanted in social life itself. The commodity form,
for example. But they are still not essences. The commodity form mutates, and
not least in contact with other forms: the property form; technical forms. I’m
particularly interested in how the information form (a redundant phrase, I
know!) and the commodity form mutually transform each other. It is not that
information was subsumed within the commodity form, which remains the same
essence. Rather each changes the other. Which is maybe why this is not our
grandparents’ capitalism, if it is still capitalism at all. It may be a worse
ensemble of forms, including what Randy Martin calls the derivative form.
AG: You always pull me back from the precipice of the concept! I value that
about your work. Although I can’t help but question the notion of “no royal
road,” and am reminded of larger discussions about the critique of method, or
the notion that method can’t or shouldn’t exist. Wouldn’t you agree that the
rejection of method is an ideology in itself, an ideology that, in fact, can be
isolated very precisely around a certain Anglo-American configuration of
empiricism, pragmatism, and realism?
MW: The shadow of not one, but two historical exclusions hangs over our
received ideas about all this. Certainly there is a Cold War in western
knowledge that has to do with suppressing anything that is not empiricism,
pragmatism and realism. Recall how the CIA funded Michael Polanyi’s efforts to
construct a philosophy of science that saw science as functioning best as a
“free market of ideas”–and at the very time it was becoming the exact opposite,
entangled as it was in the military industrial complex. This calls for some
detours into the archive to see what was excluded.
The new left rescued various philosophical alternatives, most notably what came
to be constructed as “western Marxism.” But it neglected certain other
suppressed traditions, the scientific socialism of Waddington, Bernal, Needham
and Haldane being just one of them. So I think there’s still a project there to
reclaim some other missing resources.
But there was another exclusion, which happened earlier, and within Marxism
itself. That was the suppression of the “Machists.” Both the Russian and German
strands of Machism, despite a lot of political and theoretical differences, had
one argument in common: that a merely philosophical materialism is no
materialism at all. A merely philosophical materialism will simply reify and
take as first principles some metaphors drawn from the science and industry of
its time. Rather, materialism ought to open philosophy to the world, to other
practices of knowledge and action, including those that generate low theory.
Philosophy can’t be sovereign. It has to accept comradely relations with other
practices, not one of command.
The decisions for or against a given configuration of knowledge tend to be
infused with the politics of their time. And sometimes one has to go back and
revise those decisions. One has to reverse the decision in the early part of
the twentieth century by the Leninists in favor of a dogmatic (and supposedly
“dialectical”) materialism. But one also has to reverse or at least qualify the
decision of the new left in favor of philosophy as a sovereign discourse.
Neither has the resources needed for the times. Neither is adequate to
understanding what the forces of production are about today, as expressed in
earth science, biology and information science.
AG: Can you also elaborate information form and its relation to commodity form?
I recall how the shape of information played an important role in your book A
Hacker Manifesto.
MW:Information, as a sort of real abstraction at work in the world, is one of
the key phenomena of our times. Obviously it is partly ideological, but then
all forms are. They are never pure. That there could be a method of purifying
concepts out of social-historical forms was the great fantasy of western
Marxism.
Information emerges historically. The key moment is the war and wartime
logistics. World War II demanded unprecedented scales of production, and
information emerged as a means of control for that production. At the time it
was understood to be a complex mode of production that included state politics,
military command, and vast business enterprises. After the war it continued in
much the same manner. The great postwar boom known as Fordism is in part a
state socialist achievement. Only later in the history of the development of
the forces of production does information become a means of radically
transforming the commodity form itself, and enabling new relations of
production and reproduction.
Rather than think of the commodity form philosophically, as a kind of eternal
essence of capital, I think it is more interesting to think about how the
information form comes into contact with the commodity form and forces it to
mutate. What emerges is a commodity form far more abstract than anything
hitherto, a derivative form, one that does not need any particular material
being at all, even though it is in no sense immaterial. Rather, the fact that
information can have an arbitrary relation to materiality infects the commodity
form itself. Property is no longer a thing. Whole new relations of production
have to be concocted to canalize information as a force of production into some
new exploitative economy, one now based in the first instance on asymmetries of
information. The “business model” of any contemporary corporation is to extract
surplus information from both labor and non-labor.
So it might be timely to think about what information actually is. How it came
to be. How it is ideological, and yet like all ideologies, actual as well. A
formal force in the world. Marx got as far as thinking through the implications
of thermodynamics for a low theory from the labor point of view. But
information did not even exist in his time in the sense we mean the word now,
and in the way it works now. So we have to reopen theory’s dialog with other
ways of knowing and acting in the world, in order to understand information.
AG: Or as you sometimes ask: what if we’re no longer living in capitalism, but
instead living in something much worse? I’m thinking of how you gave a name to
the “Carbon Liberation Front.” Is capitalism more avant-garde than the
avant-garde?
MW: Yes, one might argue that this is a new mode of production: not capitalism
but worse. “Not capitalism but better” is a quadrant of ideological space
already covered by “the post-industrial” and other cold war intellectual
products. But I thought “not capitalism but worse” was worth exploring. People
who think this is capitalism have very impoverished resources for thinking
historically. Either it is transformed into communism–and good luck with
that–or capitalism just goes on eternally. Capitalism stays the same in
essence, but its appearances change. Modifiers are thus attached: cognitive
capitalism, semio-capitalism, platform capitalism, postfordist capitalism,
neoliberal capitalism; but these are non-concepts. The thing itself is not
really thought through. It is like adding epicycles to an Earth-centric view of
the universe.
Still, I’m reluctant to concede that whatever this mode of production is would
then supplant the avant-garde, even if it has now fully ingested the historical
avant-gardes. Social formations change through conflict. Struggles over
information shape the new mode of production, not the “genius” of the ruling
class or some intrinsic elan vitale of capital. I associate that with Nick
Land’s position. And for Land, a certain kind of Marxism only has itself to
blame. Such Marxists treated capital as an unfolding essence, and forgot all
about labor’s struggle in and against a nature it only perceives retroactively,
through the inhuman prosthesis of technology. They forgot all about the
specifics of how the forces of production develop. And while I think we can
have concepts about science and technology rather than just empirical
descriptions–our shared premise in Excommunication (2013)–I don’t think they
are concepts of philosophy.
Commodification always comes late to the game, wrapping its form around labors
of one kind or another. Commodification turns qualitative practices into
exchange value. It is pushed and mutated by social forces external to it. One
was labor; another was, in fact, the avant-gardes, including the one you and I
once belonged to, which tried to do a punk-rock refunctioning of the digital to
make a new commons. Well, we lost, like all avant-gardes. But we gave it a try.
Like Dada or the Situationists, we were not only absorbed into the commodity
form, it had to adapt and mutate to swallow us. History advances bad side
first, as Marx said.
AG: “Fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewerman cannot necessarily afford.”
That old line from Hans Magnus Enzensberger often comes to mind when reading
your work. Political thinkers, Marxists among them, have long struggled with
questions of perfection and purity if not cleanliness. How to form a more
perfect union? How to envision utopia? Fossil fuel pollution has brought on
global catastrophe. At the same time one might wish to shun “pristine
environments,” as Heather Davis calls them, clean environments like those
Roundup Ready fields, which of course are also dirty in a different sense. The
clean and the dirty, how do you determine which is which?
MW: It is a misunderstanding of the utopian strain to think it was always
interested in perfection and purity. Maybe Plato’s Republic is like that.
Morris’ News From Nowhere isn’t. Parliament is used for storing horse manure,
if I remember rightly. And from Wells onwards, including Bogdanov, utopians had
to deal with evolutionary time, in which there can be no final and perfect
form. JBS Haldane was probably the first to think this on a very, very long
time frame, where the human evolves and devolves and some other sentient
species evolves in our place.
So I don’t think utopia is about perfection. And in Fourier, it’s specifically
about shit. Compare to the emerging bourgeois novel of his time, Fourier was a
realist. He wanted to know who dealt with the poo. Shit and dirt and waste were
real problems for him. In short, I don’t see the utopian as “cognitive
estrangement” that posits realistic-detailed but ideal worlds. I see the
utopian as deeply pragmatic and realistic, particularly about entropy, waste,
impurity and so on. And of course the utopias all came true and are all more or
less functional. Not true as representations. The details look different. But
true as diagrams. We live in them as we propose new ones.
AG: Thinking more about utopia, I wonder if you have thoughts on Fredric
Jameson’s recent piece on the “universal army”? He’s also someone who refuses
to build grand systems; yet today he offers a modest proposal for how to build
communism in America. Indeed from a certain perverse point of view the U.S. is
already an advanced socialist economy, given the size of the military and its
socialist or quasi-socialist organization (single-payer health care, job
security, pension, subsidized education, etc.). Is the army the jobs program we
always needed?
MW: I’m fond of counter-intuitive ways of categorizing or narrating things. I
think it is worth arguing that the post-war American economy was successful
because of socialism. Not “socialism” in some ideal or perfect dream-form, but
socialism as a practical, existing set of social organizations. Certainly, the
great technical advances mostly came from the socialized science and
engineering of the war effort, for example. The capitalist part of the economy
built Fordism because there was a great reservoir of socialization to back it
up, from education to highway-construction. Capitalism is one of the
affordances of socialism, not vice-versa.
The kind of crash-course socialization of science and labor that made D-Day
possible might also be the only way we’re going to do anything about climate
disruption. It is an astonishing story, how the allies built artificial harbors
to make possible the greatest seaborne invasion of all time. At the moment I’m
quite interested in the communist, socialist and left-liberal scientists and
intellectuals involved in that effort, the ones who came away from D-Day with a
strong sense of what socialized labor, science and tech could achieve, because
they were the ones doing it. The very people Hayek targeted his theories
against had actually achieved what his theory said couldn’t be done.
AG: Who are you thinking about?
MW: Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is an armchair polemic. One of the people he
rants against is Conrad Waddington, a significant figure in biology. He coined
the concept of epigenetics. He was also involved in wartime operations research
and was a figure on the scientific left. Waddington published a wartime book
called The Scientific Attitude. It was published by Penguin, who were
instrumental at the time in publicizing a progressive scientific politics in
connection with the war effort. Waddington’s book is not the best expression of
the “attitude” of the times, and so Hayek was picking low hanging fruit. But
the fact is, people like Waddington were involved in an immense effort to
deploy a partly socialized economy, which brought together the forces of
science and labor, to defeat fascism.
AG:As you mentioned earlier, Donna Haraway figures prominently inMolecular Red.
Her mantra “stay with the trouble” might be your mantra as well. What interests
you most about “Haraway’s California,” as you call it?
MW: It started as making good on a missing footnote to A Hacker Manifesto. A
decade or so after that book, I was ready to assess more seriously my relation
to Haraway, starting with her “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Looking back, that
text was already a strong and rhetorically keen refutation of what Richard
Barbrook called the “California ideology,” that synthesis of Ayn Rand, hippy
effluvia and computation, pumped up on military-industrial-complex money.
There’s a tiresome line peddled now that anyone who ever took an interest in
technology must be a dupe of Silicon Valley and its “techno-utopianism.”
Haraway was so far ahead of that game.
And there’s a Marxist strand to her work. It’s less visible over time, but it’s
there. Partly it stems from Marcuse and the reception of western Marxism. But
she is also a reader of Joseph Needham’s synthesis of Darwin, Marx and
Whitehead. Needham gets a whole chapter in her first book. That aspect of
Haraway is about keeping open the question of how nature and culture are
related, how to be careful about importing undetected metaphors from one to the
other, and how other, more enabling metaphors are smuggled in. I saw that as a
sort of reinvention, out of materials at hand, of Bogdanov’s project.
Engels had realized that the fortunes of capitalism rested in part on the
development of the forces of production. That in turn depended on the sciences.
So one needs to know something about the sciences. He tried too hard to fit
them into a schematic version of dialectical materialism. But the basic
strategy was sound. Science is part of the labor of knowing and producing the
world. That became a somewhat neglected tradition in some quarters. One thinks
of Lukács’ absurd claim, based on nothing but philosophical arrogance, that
science is “reification” and nothing more. The connection between Marxist
thought and the sciences was repressed in the West by the Cold War. One of the
more interesting exceptions to that lacuna is Haraway, who then so usefully
connects it to feminist questions about science, particularly the life sciences.
AG: Joseph Needham, yes, I’m thinking of another reference too, Norman Brown
andLove’s Body, which helps Haraway return to eros and intimacy as a necessary
precondition for subjectivity. Haraway is a child of the sixties, to be sure,
but while reading Haraway’s defense of canine discipline–that it’s unethical
not to discipline your dog–I was reminded how Haraway was never a peacenik in
the feel-good hippy sense. She was never interested in conceiving the world
without power, like some new-age Pollyanna. Still, it’s somewhat disorienting
to read a feminist advocating dominion, if not domination, over other
creatures, even if such dominion is guided by health and a sense of
“flourishing,” a word that appears a few times in Haraway’s “Companion Species
Manifesto.” The left used to write about structure and hierarchy. Although
today it is more common to write about ethics and care. Does hierarchy still
matter? Or is it more important to address the ethical than structure per se?
MW: This connects back to something we touched on earlier: my instinctive
distrust of Badiou. If one reads some Darwin, one really has to give up on the
belief in formal or absolute equality as the meaning of communism. That really
starts to look like nothing more than a theological residue. (Here I am an
acommunist just as one might be an atheist). Indeed, one of Haldane’s books is
called The Inequality of Man. If one is a Marxist after Darwin, and Haldane is
one of the great figures in that dispersal–a term I prefer to camp or
lineage–then one has to confront inequality. And not just as an ethics. What’s
a politics, or a political economy even, of non-equality, and not just of “man”
but of multi-species being? Particularly if one has thus abandoned the
apartheid that separates the human from the non-human, considered as another
kind of theological residue. How can we all flourish in our differences?
Haraway is useful here, as one of the few inheritors of the Marx after Darwin
dispersal. Although one might want to connect her also to John Bellamy Foster,
not to mention Stephen Jay Gould and others who survived the Cold War by
treading very gently where overt political and philosophical affiliations were
concerned. Multi-species being can’t really be conceived via formal, abstract,
or absolute equality. Particularly if one accepts that domesticated animals
have to be thought as part of our multi species-being and not as either part of
a pure nature nor simply as individual animals. So you end up having to think a
political economy, or a nature-culture as Haraway says, of many species
together.
I once took the kids to a zoo that had a collection of domesticated animals
that had become endangered: chickens and sheep and so forth. Which made me
think, provocatively perhaps, that veganism can’t be ethical, because if one
made it a categorical imperative, then all these and many other domesticated
species are condemned to extinction. Of course the majority of species may be
condemned to extinction at the moment, so this may be the least of our worries,
but surely this is the great challenge the Anthropocene throws at theory.
Theory’s dominant traditions, which treat some version of the human or the
social or the historical as giving rise to concepts that can have an autonomous
existence apart from what the earth science and natural sciences describe–all
of that is just obsolete. I think we have to start over from elsewhere in the
archive, as existing critical theory owes too much to an a priori separation of
culture from nature.
Latour is unfortunately right about that, to the extent that one considers our
impoverished, Cold-War deformed inheritance from the archive as in any way
representative of what Marxism and critical theory really have to offer. But
Latour would steer us back to theology by another path, a post-Catholic one, a
sophisticated one in which “all things bright and beautiful” are equally
divine. And Haraway participates a bit in that too, even as she resists the
somewhat providential celebration of Gaia in Latour or Stengers. Her world is
more tentacular. For tactical reasons I have offered something of a
détournement of Haraway, pushing her off that path and back to Marx, as it were.
AG: Catholic indeed. And Haraway herself doesn’t hide her own Catholic
formation. Another way to stay with the trouble? I take it you are fairly
skeptical of the whole Christian turn in recent theory, Badiou’s Saint Paul,
Zizek’s Book of Job, Laruelle’s Christ, Agamben’s theodicy, etc?
MW: I take the theological turn to be a covert admission of exhaustion. A
certain kind of philosophy can no longer stand on its own. But rather than go
backwards to theology, I wanted to go forward. What if some of our received
ideas about the sciences are simply out of date? How does climate science work
as a simulation science? That way one gets away from the transcendent God
lurking in the theological turn. But then various flavors of an immanent God
re-emerge, whether it be in the so-called new materialism, in speculative
realism, or in actor-network theory. There again Haraway is useful, because she
consistently takes a hard line against revivals of vitalism, for which Deleuze
should cop some of the blame.
But then as Bogdanov might point out, one just generalizes from the metaphors
one inherits, the metaphors that give shape to one’s labors, inflating them
into a worldview. Bogdanov’s observation is as true of me as of anyone else. In
my case, it’s third generation protestant atheism, with an understanding of
labor that comes from experiencing the transition from analog to digital, and
with an education marked by immersion in the tail end of the old labor
movement, the new social movements, and so on. The key is not to take one’s
particular worldview generated from one’s particular experience as a universal
valid for everyone, while still maintaining its universality for one’s
particular experience. It may have component parts that work for others; others
may have parts that work for me. So, fine, others will find theo-critical
theory explains their world. It can be locally useful. The bigger problem is an
organization of labor that can share and mix and coexist using all such
worldviews as can be considered functional for life.
AG: Haraway is a Westerner as well, a Colorado kid who moved to California.
That hadn’t registered for me in the past, but it clicked after reading some of
her recent interviews. She has a bit of country outlaw in her. At the same time
she’s quick to acknowledge the bloody history of manifest destiny and settler
colonialism; the real world is ideologically messy and that’s not a bad thing,
as she might say. I wonder if there is an American regionalism at play here?
For example, this city where we’ve both migrated to, New York, might be the
center of the art world, and perhaps the center of finance capital, but it’s
never had a monopoly on intellectual production, far from it. Do you still
believe in regional knowledges? Or has globalization and the Internet done away
with all of that?
MW: One has to look at two things there. As far as history goes: how do the
trans-regional relations of war, trade and migration retroactively produce
regionalism? If one tracks not just the settling of people and their moving but
also the movement of commodities and information, one ends up with a much less
contained sense of place. But then that history rests on top of a geography,
even a geology. To really understand place means to abandon romantic notions of
a people and their place. Place is a non-human thing, made on very large scales
and times.
Of course one’s answer to the question of the regional and the global depends
not just on which region but which “global” one is from. I was very influenced
by the Australian Marxist art historian Bernard Smith’s work, particularly
European Vision and the South Pacific. Smith argues that James Cook’s voyages
in the Pacific yielded information that exceeded the categories in which
English scientists and intellectuals expected to put it. The Great Chain of
Being fell apart, and in its place went a more flexible relationship between
category and content, a relationship that holds for geology, flora, fauna and
“native” peoples. That book is a neglected masterpiece, revealing the
significance of the 18th Century naval vector.
I was also influenced by Eric Michaels, Stephen Muecke and others who were
breaking with anthropological studies of Aboriginality. They were interested in
particular Aboriginal practices of communication and philosophy, respectively.
It is interesting how certain Aboriginal peoples came to treat information as
value to be shared in very selective gift practices. And how those practices
could have a kind of error correction procedure that seems like it has worked
pretty well for some thousands of years. Then there was Vivien Johnson’s work
on secret, sacred Aboriginal information that was being used as “designs” on
tea-towels and the like, because there was no “copyright” on it. That really
broke open for me all the assumptions of the postmodern era, of appropriation
and unoriginality. The postmodern worldview was completely incompatible with
this other, indigenous one. I became less interested in differences against the
totality and more interested in totalities against each other.
AG: A revealing comment, particularly since I so closely associate you with
appropriation and unoriginality–not that your work is unoriginal! I’m thinking
of détournement, and your affection for Situationist tactics of all kinds.
“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.” Debord said it, but so have
you. Or am I wrong? Have you soured on appropriation?
MW: The western desert Aboriginal world Michaels studies was as modern as any
other, but it was based on oral transmission. His whole project was to
introduce video within the existing cultural forms, to strengthen rather than
obliterate them. It was a great lesson in the possibility that, even with
standard media tech, maybe someone could build really different kinds of
relations. Questions of copy, original, ownership, asymmetry and so forth could
play out very differently. Which was also one of the lessons of Situationist
theory and practice: that the ownership of information was a late and only
partial accretion on top of quite other practices–of which détournement was
only one. Détournement did, however, target what Marx took to be crucial, the
property question.
Détournement was the dialectical complement to spectacle in Debord. It was the
means to abolish private property at least in the sphere of information. I
developed that into a class analysis in A Hacker Manifesto. What intellectual
property obscures is the difference between being the class that makes
information and the class that owns it.
But at the time it was not entirely clear how détournement was to be
recuperated. There was indeed a social movement in all but name that freed
information from property, but the leading edge of the vectoralist class worked
out how to adapt. The vectoralist class built vectors for precisely that free
information, while retaining the keys for themselves. They said, in essence:
You can have the data, but not the meta-data. You can have the information of
your most personal desires, but in exchange we will retain the totality of
those desires. So one must shift from being data punks to meta-data punks in
order to continue the struggle in and against a mode of production based not in
the first instance on surplus value, but on asymmetries of information.
AG: Yes of course I agree–but all data is meta-data! We know this from
examining the nested structure of the protocols. It’s meta-data all the way
down (and up too). That’s something that I never understood about the Snowden
revelations: skim people’s data, no one cares; but call it a theft of “meta”
data, and people start to balk. The meta seems scarier, or somehow more real;
it’s a very modern problem. Or am I being overly pedantic? Maybe these kinds of
technical analyses of data infrastructure are disconnected from everyday
politics?
MW: Well, this might be what the slogan “meta-data punk” is about. Or in old
fashioned post-structuralist terms, you could think of it as reversing the
relation between data and meta-data, and making meta-data primary and data
derivative. But in any case I think understanding how data infrastructure
actually works would be an excellent project, to which your own Protocol was a
signal contribution. Data infrastructure is now a key component of the forces
of production, which have already pushed the mode of production into some weird
new shape. So rather than do the “quantitiative” digital humanities we might do
the “qualitative” digital humanities, which is about understanding phenomena at
the level of form rather than content. (And here our old friend “form” returns
again…)
I’m surprised anyone was surprised by Snowden. You may remember in the ’90s
there was a story going around nettime.org and rhizome.org about Project
Echelon, an inter-agency project to scrape, archive and search everybody’s
emails, news of which allegedly leaked in New Zealand. I have no idea if that
story was true, and it doesn’t matter anyway. All that matters is that it was
technically feasible at the time. With the rapid drop in cost of digital
storage, one could expect that eventually all signals of all kinds would be
collected, archived and searched. If a technology is technically feasible, one
should assume the security state has the technology at their disposal.
One should assume the ruling class has it as well, although people seem less
concerned about that. It makes sense to assume that all major corporations are
now in the “meta-data business.” On the other hand, we’re no longer simply
individual subjects to be disciplined until we internalize the law. We’re not
even split subjects caught between drive and desire. We are, as Hiroki Azuma
says, “data-base animals.” Power is now about seeking advantage from
asymmetries of information in a volatile and noisy world, in which the human is
just another random bag of attributes resonant in disparate fields of
information.
AG: Also, any indictment of the NSA entails an indictment of Web 2.0 and social
media companies. Google and the NSA perform the same basic function: they both
build secondary graphs from primary ones (ours). And they both do it under
dubious conditions of “permission,” even if Google still has the public’s trust
if not always its confidence. It’s a PR game; NSA is bad at it, but Google is
better, at least so far. One of the key reasons why it has been so hard to
critique much less curtail the NSA–hard psychically I mean–is that people
implicitly understand the hypocrisy in slamming the NSA while loving Twitter.
Result is, both organizations get a pass. The theme is similar to my previous
question: what happens when an argument bumps into a desire? We used to solve
that problem via critique. But today critique is passé.
I love your point about asymmetries of information. One of the great myths of
distributed networks is that they are “smooth” or “flat” or otherwise
equitable. In reality, they are nothing but an accumulation of asymmetries, of
difference itself congealed into infrastructure. Is this what you meant, inA
Hacker Manifesto, by vectors and the vectoral class?
MW: One of the reasons to spend so much time writing about Bogdanov’s
Proletkult, the Situationists, and Haraway and her kith is that I think these
were examples of how to be critical and inventive at the same time. Bogdanov
thought that ideologies–or what he preferred to call worldviews–were an
inevitable substitution outwards from our forms of organization to assumptions
regarding the workings of the world. But he also thought worldviews were what
motivated people emotionally to work together. (He was already doing a bit of
affect theory!) So it is a matter of inventing the worldview best suited to our
organizational practices while at the same time maintaining a critique of those
that don’t grow organically out of our labors.
So what’s the worldview of people who don’t do labor in the strict sense? They
don’t work against the clock, filling a form with content. Their job is to
design the form. There may still be deadlines, but there isn’t an assembly
line. What they produce isn’t actually a product. It is a “unique” arrangement
of information–unique enough to be considered a distinct piece of property
under intellectual property law. If what they came up with is very valuable,
they probably won’t get most of the value out of it, even if they retain
ownership, as they own just the intellectual property, not the means of
production. What class is this? I called them the hacker class, but it involves
anyone whose efforts produce intellectual property.
In retrospect, A Hacker Manifesto leaned more on an understanding of law,
something superstructural, than on understanding what had happened to the
forces of production. I’m a law school drop-out, but I read my Evegy Pashukanis
and critical legal theory. I sensed that the rapid evolution of intellectual
property law in the late Twentieth Century probably corresponded to significant
changes in the mode of production. It relied more and more on a new kind of
effort that wasn’t quite labor, that of the hacker class. It gave rise to a new
class of owners of the means of production, what I called the vectoralist class.
“Vector” I got from Paul Virilio. It is a shorthand way of describing technical
relations that have specific affordances. In geometry, a vector is a line of
fixed length but of no fixed position. So it is a kind of “technological
constructionism,” in that a given techne does indeed have a determining form,
but also some openness as well. Critical media theory is about understanding
both at the same time. A Hacker Manifesto rested on this very general theory of
the technical relation. And regarding the openness of a given vector, one can
ask: what shuts down any particular affordances that may exist? The information
vector, product of a particular historical moment in the development of the
forces of production, reveals an ontological property of information: that it
can exist without scarcity.
The hacker class is producing something that for the first time can really be
common, while the vectoralist class has to stuff it back into the property form
to survive, by means of legal and technical coercion. Or, it can concede the
battle, and let a portion of information flow freely, but win the war through
control of the infrastructure in which it is shared. That’s about where we are
now: the commodification of the information produced by non-labor as free
shared activity. Just as capitalism is an affordance of socialism; vectoral
commodified information is an affordance of the abstracted gift practices of
the information commons.
AG: I remember reading versions ofA Hacker Manifesto that you would post to the
Nettime email list, and getting very jealous that I hadn’t written it! There’s
a lot more I want to ask you about, but let’s skip to, why not, the chapter on
“Revolt.” There you contrast a “representational” politics with an “expressive”
politics, the latter being a stateless politics or an escape from politics as
such. What does that mean exactly, and have your thoughts on stateless politics
evolved at all in the intervening years?
MW: It turns out something similar to what I called an expressive post-politics
was being thought as exodus or self-valorization by the Italians. I never liked
their somewhat idealist take on “general intellect” and “immaterial labor,” but
it was interesting to see these ideas of forms of organization outside politics
taking off there. In General Intellects (forthcoming) I look at both theorists
of exodus and hegemony (or “representation”). The shorthand would be that both
are going on simultaneously, but perhaps the belief in the political is
evaporating. Another stage in the endless rediscovery of the fact that god is
dead. It is no accident that attempts to revive political theory overlap with
the theological turn in critical theory. Both illustrate a longing for what’s
passing.
Starting in Virtual Geography I was interested in the vector as something that
distributes information, globally but not equally, and which gives rise to
turbulence and noise. One of my case studies was Tiananmen square in 1989, a
sometimes overlooked precursor to the “movement of the squares.” Another was
the Black Monday stock market crash, again a precursor. I think I was already
sensing in a partial way the rise of a new vectoral infrastructure that
bypasses the old envelopes of the state form. The new infrastructure both
erodes the old state form, and also paradoxically allows it to return in a hard
and reactive way.
In Gamer Theory I was thinking of this as a movement from topography to
topology, where geo-strategic and geo-commodified space can no longer be mapped
on a plane, but rather, as in topology, they appear more like vectors that can
bend space and connect points, points which on the surface of a planar Earth
appear far apart. (This idea has also been picked up by Benjamin Bratton.) I
think we’re a long way from being able to think topological space, where points
on the surface of the Earth can be connected and disconnected. It is quite
different to any kind of political conception of power. It is what I call
vectoral power. We still have simulations of politics, or for that matter
culture, but perhaps they are things of the past now. But this is of course not
to be optimistic about technology. All that what replaced them is probably
worse.
AG: We’ve been having this dialog over email for a few days now, but today is
November 9, 2016 and Trump is president-elect. As a final question, what are
your thoughts on American fascism? It’s an old theme, in fact…
MW: It’s curious that the political categories of liberal, conservative and so
forth are treated as trans-historical, but you are not supposed to use the
category of fascism outside of a specific historical context. There are
self-described neoconservatives, and even supposed Marxists have taken the
neoliberals at their word and used their choice of name without much
reflection, calling this “neoliberal capitalism.” But somehow there’s
resistance to talking about fascism outside of its historical context. I have
often been waved off as hysterical for wanting to talk about it as a living,
present term.
Even if it is admitted to the contemporary lexicon, it is treated as something
exceptional. Maybe we should treat it not as the exception but the norm. What
needs explaining is not fascism but its absence. What kinds of popular front
movements can restrain it, and for how long? Or, we could see it as a “first
world” variant of the normal colonial state, and even of many variants of what
Achille Mbembe calls the “postcolony.”
Further along those lines: maybe fascism is what happens when the ruling class
really wins. When it no longer faces an opponent in whose struggle against it
the ruling class can at least recognize itself. And when it no longer knows
itself, it can only discover itself again through excess, opulence, vanity,
self-regard. Our ruling class of today is like that. They not only want us to
recognize their business acumen, but also that they are thought leaders and
taste makers and moral exemplars. They want to occupy the whole field of
mythic-avatars. But our recognition doesn’t quite do the trick because we’re
just nobodies. So they heap more glory on themselves and more violence on
someone else.
Maybe any regime of power is necessarily one of misrecognition. All it can
perceive is shaped by its own struggles. But the fascist regime, the default
setting of modernity and its successors, is doubly so. It can recognize neither
its real enemies or itself. There is some small irony in an election being won
because Florida voted Republican, when the Republican plan to accelerate the
shit out of climate disruption may start putting Florida under water in our
life time. I’m reminded of a line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a
failure to communicate.” Fascism keeps punching away at the other but never
finds even its own interests in the process. Hence its obsession with poll
numbers and data surveillance. The ruling class keep heaping up data about us,
but because it has expunged our negativity from its perceptual field, it cannot
find itself mediated by any resistance.
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