Published Spring 2006
 
Revolution in Abstraction
(on Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture
of Information [U of Chicago P, 2004] and McKenzie Wark, A
Hacker Manifesto [Harvard UP, 2004])
Literary and technological cultures have been converging for some
decades, so goes one argument, maybe since C.P. Snow announced the
divergence of the twain. Complementarily, to justify the humanities
we increasingly need to show their utility. So Jay Clayton, for
instance, argues that "a critical engagement with technology, not
withdrawal, is the best hope for what were once called humanist
values. Celebrating nonconformity and disciplinary anarchism will
not suffice for people who care about creating a just society" (825).
In a statement supporting his candidacy to become the MLA's Second
Vice President, Gerald Graff writes that "to attract increased financial
support, higher education needs to become more aggressive in demonstrating
the usefulness of our scholarship and teaching to a wider range
of publics." These claims continue a trend begun at least in the
1970s, as Rita Raley writes, to see the academy converging with
networked business and technology.1 This position has received a
boost with the publication of Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool (2004).
Liu sees the "coolness" of tech culture as its compensation for
colluding with business interests, and proposes that "the humanities
and arts" become more tech-savvy, "adequate to an age of knowledge
work" (288). Against the Heideggerian position that the "essence"
of technology is destructive instrumentality (though Heidegger is
nowhere cited), Liu argues that "there can be something deeply humane,
and technologically aware, about technique" (307). The humanities
must begin to teach technical skills and become itself more like
science and business in its research and production models (312-13).
The key word in these accounts of harmonic convergence is "humanist":
Clayton calls for "humanist values," Liu for "humane" techne. That
is what separates their claims from McKenzie Wark's recent Hacker
Manifesto, though superficially they resemble each other. As Liu
wrote in an earlier essay:
My highest ambition for cultural criticism
and the creative arts, in short, is that they can in tandem become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work... . Many intellectuals and
artists will become so like the icy "New Class" of knowledge workers
that there will be no difference; they will be subsumed wholly within
their New Economy roles as symbolic analysts, consultants, and designers.
But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial,
professional, and clerical mainstream of knowledge work itself,
may break through the ice. (Clayton n.25)
It's Left-humanist agency
Liu wants – to be more efficient agents, possibly, for capitalism
with a human face (314). Wark opposes this construction from a structural,
materialist perspective. His call for a "hacker revolution," first
disseminated on the web, is predictable and workaday when it applies
Marxism in the electronic (if not entirely post-national) age, but
its logic overturns assumptions of Left studies of virtual culture
and intervenes in debates about radical difference and identity
politics. In the Manifesto startling ideas emerge from familiar
materialist assumptions about class, surplus, exploitation, and
social change. It is a manifesto not only because it energizes us
to action, but also because it values manifestation, embodiment
as praxis and as antidote to representation. Yet it may not be willing
to endorse all it embodies.
Wark's materialist scenario is familiar, but because it is written
under the sign of Deleuze as well as under the banner of Marx, it
opens (a good word in Wark's lexicon) the way to complexity: where
Marx's manifesto simplifies, Wark's investment in abstraction, new
modes of information, and difference complicates. Each mode of production
also produces its own ruling class: land the pastoralists, capital
the capitalists, and information the "vectoralists," a class that
profits from the management and control of information ("class"
31).2 Each mode is more abstract than its predecessor, and more vectoral
or given to change. Hackers by definition produce change and can
help transform the system and free the world for everyone. In this
way hackers can redeem themselves too from their having taken part,
rather willingly ("property" 196), in the production of HAL and
iTunes. The vector is any means for transporting things and bringing
about change (313). It is the potential to make anything a resource
and to put it into relation with anything else ("vector" 332). Unlike
capital, which is only an abstraction of property (315), the vector
is not simply the property of vectoralists but something more fundamental
and abstract, a principle of transformation and exchange, of surplus,
of differentiation that underlies previous modes of production as
well. Hence hackers are not the political interventionists valorized,
for example by Andrew Ross, when hacking first came up on the cultural
screen in the late 1980s (Ross paragraphs 1-2); nor are they only
the "intellectuals" with whom Eagleton identifies them in his review
of this book (Eagleton); they are any information workers who can
"hack" or intervene in and direct vectors.
The vectoralists charge usuriously for access to information ("abstraction"
22) and enforce a myth of scarcity ("abstraction" 23). They reduce
information to communication (abstraction to utility), just as they
reduce expression to representation and productivity to commodities
("production" 174). They monopolize information, as land and property
have been monopolized in turn by previous regimes, "because they
control the vectors along which information is abstracted" ("class"
29). How these vectors work isn't a concern in Wark's study. For
Wark, this information can be hoarded and monopolized: yet it might
escape efforts to control it, and not simply by the agency of hackers.
And isn't that information self-differential to the point that,
whenever it is used or created, it is already multiple, a double
of itself, as Wark implies in the echoing first line of the manifesto
("A double spooks the world")?
The first of Wark's seventeen sections is "abstraction," the second
"class." As a manifesto about contemporary material organization
this work is abstract, and its performance of abstraction is one
of its contributions to the theory of information as a commodity.
If for Marx abstraction is unusefully superstructural, here it is
part of the political activity that will overthrow vectoralism from
within ("surplus" 309). Hackers are an abstract class ("abstraction"
6), abstractly speaking, but they have not quite cohered into a
regular class, "a class for itself" ("hacking" 82, and see "hacking"
86). Because they produce new means of production, they have a special
place in the history of productive classes ("history" 114). In fact
the farmers and workers have failed to overthrow class rule in the
past because "the property form is not yet abstract enough to release
the virtuality of classlessness that is latent in the productive
energies of abstraction" ("abstraction" 19). The hacker class must
help farmers and workers discover that "information wants to be
free" ("surplus" 311) – a phrase authored by Stewart Brand, the
publisher of The Well and of the Whole Earth Catalog, at the first
Hacker's Conference in 1984 (Liu 426 n.161). Unlike traditional
property, information is abstract and in principle classless, so
it can be the agent in reform that traditional property could not
be. It is in principle universal, and infinite in its potential
("history" 123). Here is another of those places in Wark where the
predictable turns unpredictable. Where for the Rousseauvian tradition
abstraction is a cultural product, restrained and social, for Wark
it is "the nature of nature," a second nature of nature which allows
for free production and creativity ("hacking" 75). In other words,
here the social is free and natural, so long as it is truly abstract.
It is abstraction that drives social change, and for that reason
hackers, who multiply abstraction, are special agents of change.
Hackers and the productive classes are the source of all creativity—"all
the images, the stories, the wild profusions of all that culture
becomes" ("surplus" 308). Capital was more abstract than land, and
so had more revolutionary potential ("history" 107). Information
is more abstract still. Correspondingly, society is increasingly
governed by law because as it develops it produces more abstraction,
and it is law that regulates abstract property ("history" 108).
This implicit intervention into the "force of law" debate (Derrida's
phrase is repeated) demonstrates an advantage of thinking with Wark's
reframed paradigm and its emphasis on abstraction. By this logic,
however, the social change that did take place shows the work of
abstraction and of hacking. The left has failed to mobilize the
workers around revolt: 1989 only reinforced global vectoralist interests
("revolt" 242). Instead there is a "third way" of hacking – an expressive
hacking without or outside of representation ("revolt" 251). This
is said to be not a utopian notion ("representation" 231) but a
practical one, and holds on to that praxis with its one example:
information. All other forms of property are exclusive ("revolt"
253).
If abstraction is a kind of action – at least the differential
Deleuzian kind of abstraction – then some action can seem remote,
vague, and complacent. Wark has been critiqued for writing about
hacking but leaving out cyberspace in the Manifesto and in his Virtual
Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Chris McGahan notes:
An unfortunate feature of these books is the degree to which they
speak about hackers (however broadly categorized) or the mythical "digital sublime" while paying little attention to what actually
happens when hackers become involved in or are subjected to Internet
social networks, institutional protocols, and cultural genres. One
can search almost entirely in vain in these texts for specific instances
of cybercultural practice. (McGahan paragraph 4)
There are, one
can add along these lines, practical hacking how-to zines that tutor
digital revolutionariness. While I understand why critics might
want Wark to speak to pressing social issues in what the Revolutionary
Communist Party refers to as "these dangerous times" (RCP), this
complaint misses the point of the manifesto's focus. Such critique
sides in principle with Alan Liu and others who are interested in
social studies of internet culture. For Liu, the investment in particular
social practices and institutions comes precisely because he does
not believe the abstract hype. He writes that "knowledge workers
embarrass the Marxist binary between capitalists and workers" (Liu
31)—"fatally." The new information industry has changed the dynamic
of social forces, according to Liu: "groups and classes among knowledge
workers have now been neutralized where they most count – in the
culture of production – even as the need for the identity function
they once supplied continues unabated" (70). Thus a social account
of internet practices stands opposed to Wark's theoretical Marxism.
Liu proposes to get humanities departments to teach practical
technical skills (Liu 312-15) – more instrumental action than the
abstract Deleuzian production advocated in Wark. While education,
for Wark, is not knowledge (Wark "education" 57) – in fact it is
slavery – and while academics can be absorbed, a la Adorno and Horkheimer's
culture industry, into vectoralist interests ("education" 67, "representation"
211, "representation" 225), there are ways academics can struggle
for the autonomy of knowledge ("education" 63). These include solidarity
with workers and working toward democratic institutions. But can
knowledge be autonomous? Is there, with Deleuze, a knowledge that
is not by definition a commodity? Data that is all noise?
These questions dog Wark's way around the problem of his own abstraction,
which is to short-circuit the importance of historical knowledge
for reform. Wark presents a tacit reply to Walter Benn Michaels,
who argues that we have no obligation to the past because it is
not ours in the present (e.g. Michaels 129-68). For Wark we do have
an obligation, which is to live based on the struggles of the past,
to keep them going. The historical knowledge hackers lack is embodied
in the working classes ("production" 173), and it is from them that
this knowledge can be had, as it were, without knowing it – through
living and praxis. This is an unusually disengaged argument, even
as it relies on embodiment.
Wark is consistent in arguing for praxis based in abstract history
rather than for a kind of classless instrumentalism, and yet in
developing this position he appears to separate living from knowing,
rather than to combine them: the hackers are subjective, the workers
and farmers objective ("production" 174). Further, both workers
and history are connected to a natural world that precedes social
construction. That, I think, is the more pressing problem with Wark's
use of history, and it takes several forms in the work. The Manifesto seems to subscribe to a form of naturalism, as when it assumes that
people hack new concepts "out of raw data" ("abstraction" 2). Is
there such a thing as "raw data"? If in the age of digital information
"the virtuality of nature" is "released into the world" ("vector"
324), does that mean that there is a quality of nature that is there
to be released. And if it's not an essence or a property of nature,
something natural to it, then what is it? One of the projects of
the work seems to be to rehabilitate the concept of "nature" for
Marxist analysis in an age that at least considers the concept challenging.
"Nature" is one of the book's chapter-categories, where Wark makes
it clear that he does not call for a nostalgic return to a nature
that precedes the social ("nature" 150); he agrees that a wholeness
of being is imaginary ("production" 171). Yet he writes that hackers
work to give "the world as a whole the right to manage its own development"
("abstraction" 12), and that collective human productivity affirms
"nature's own productivity" ("nature" 150).
Wark's attack on representation also follows from his Deleuzian
assumptions. Where for Liu information workers provide identity
and style – "cool" – for Wark they help fight identity and representation.
In Wark's vocabulary, representation is bad, expression good. Property
is representation ("representation" 209), and hacking of virtual
potential is expression. Hence the production of virtual reality
is a form of praxis ("representation" 210) redeemed from the idea
that it is idle bourgeois waste. Self-representation has an important
place in Wark's account of social change. It is the traditional
work of the intelligentsia to help raise class consciousness. But
this work is achieved mostly by hacking, broadly conceived. Hackers
must fight the state, which is the prime agent for representation,
channeling people's ideas of themselves. This is particularly true
of the productive classes, which seem in more danger than other
classes from the pull of state-sponsored nationalism and identity
politics ("world" 375-76). Without the redemptive consciousness
of hackers, the workers remain too much in the realm of representation
("world" 384).
Class is a product of false representation, a form of identity
politics ("representation" 215-217) refereed by the state (218).
Two classes avoid this statist fate: the ruling classes, which escape
representation (218, 221), and the hackers, who reject it (222).
The state regulates and assigns identity politics. In the vectoralist
age, the state's work of representation has been largely taken over
by the transnational vectoralists ("history" 117). Far from flattening
the earth, vectoral interests produce its representations. Here
Wark is closer to Hardt and Negri's Empire (which he criticizes
astutely in a note to "revolt" 240) – sadly there is no index to
this Manifesto, though discursive notes focus discussion of recent
scholarship – and repeats aspects of the old model of Marxist struggle
that precedes "late-capitalism."
The price of representation (identity politics) is that one then
becomes the agent of the state ("representation" 230). Desire to
support the state and desire to destroy the state both take state
representations and identity politics too much to heart:
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 embraces their
representation, others call for a state that beats them up. Neither
is a politics that escapes the desire cultivated within the subject
by the educational apparatus – the state of desire that is merely
desire for the state. ("representation" 227, and see "state" 273)
Against state-made identity, Wark turns to a Deleuzian refusal of
representation itself, which, though Wark rejects critical negation
in favor of "a positive hacking" ("representation" 207), turns out
to be a version of Adorno's negative position after all ("representation"
231). Anything can be turned into a representation (Adorno), except
the hack that renews difference itself (Deleuze) ("representation"
225). Hackers, again, escape representation because they express
their desire rather than represent it ("state" 274). In his argument
about representation Wark stages an implicit contest between Adorno
and Deleuze in which the two emerge as compatible after all.
The great force fighting representation and vectoralist control
is differentiation. Hackers can succeed against the empire because
they use the force – they are agents of difference. Wark assumes
that "to hack is to differ" ("abstraction" 3). It could be that
difference is a good in itself as an agent of change and as a quality
of social experience ("class" 44, "education" 69). This assumption
has been challenged by centrists like Walter Benn Michaels and Richard
Rorty: Rorty sees difference everywhere between and within social
bodies, so that cultural differences in the US have not grown or
diminished over the last century (e.g., Rorty, et al. 22-29), whereas
Michaels has a hard time seeing difference at all. For example,
he thinks social class is only determined by how much money you
have (e.g., Michaels 150-51), as though all cultural capital translates
directly into cash. Both think we can leave our pasts (hence cultural
differences) largely behind us. But it is hard to dismiss the importance
of difference. Without diversity there is less chance for difference
or dissent to be legitimate, and it is only difference as a social
condition that challenges the absolutism and naturalism of the norm.
For Wark the valorization of difference comes more from Deleuze
than from arguments on the Left about that very point ("information"
130). Free information expresses difference, and difference expresses
information ("information" 139). For Wark, heterogeneity is assumed
to reflect free expression ("world" 373), whereas the vectoralist
interest homogenizes the world into one giant shopping mall.
One logical product of the Manifesto's investment in difference
is that, as the first line implies, it sees doubling as an historical
logic. Most things can double. For example, through labor, class
becomes the second nature of nature ("vector" 323), and is then
seen as nature itself ("nature" 146); that process then repeats
– indeed it can keep repeating ("nature" 156) – and the representation
and contextualization of second nature appears as a third nature
(153-56). Likewise hacking is "the production of production" ("production"
158), and abstract finance is the vampire of the vampire that is
the ruling class ("production" 169).
But there are dangers to Wark's investment in difference. It totalizes
social and political classes and nation states, and endorses a simple
binary: the good are differential, the bad are unitary. It may also
deny the forces of difference within social or political bodies.
The book does not see hacking as a principle of difference within
bodies, but as a force that opposes such bodies and interests, particularly
those of the vectoralists. There are other problems with this vision
of hacking as the agent of difference. Hackers alone discover means
of creating new worlds ("abstraction" 4). Does this mean that only
"we" create the new worlds, or that whoever participates in creating
them is de facto a hacker? Through difference, hackers redeem not
only themselves but, in effect, a version of the current system
– except that in the redeemed system information would be free and
vectoralists would not profit at the expense of the productive classes.
In this Wark recognizes implicitly the potential for radical individuality
at the heart of Marx's collective vision. For Wark "democracy" is
not a bad word, and surplus is also a good. He indicts some aspects
of modern society here and there – he subpoenas religion in passing
("subject" 283) – but he does not update Marx's attacks on marriage
as prostitution or on the family as unpaid labor resource. Does
the commitment to radical difference assume that role? Occasionally
Wark sounds angry – no indignity is too great in the name of profit,
he says rightly ("history" 102) – but his focus on principles excludes
not only history but specific grievances as well.
While the manifesto agrees with and updates Marx, it also rewrites
Marx. Certainly much remains from the mid-1800s. The idealist potential
of the (hacker) revolution is still to arrive at "a world free from
necessity" and want ("abstraction" 11); the enemy is still the ruling
(vectoralist) class that seeks to control innovation and to profit
from it. The "property" section is the least interesting in the
book, because it recounts the familiar Marxist paradigm of class
exploitation (e.g., 186); it is animated more by a desire for completeness
that is inimical to the manifesto spirit evident elsewhere. If the
form of property has changed, from land to products to information,
the paradigm of property and its control obtains since feudalism
("class" 33, "production" 175). But Marx is not the same after Deleuze.
With difference a new key, and revolution a continual process of
emancipation through hacking, the old terms no longer work as they
did. Even class is revised. The new qualities of information, including
abstractness, have a chance of undermining the exclusive system
of ownership based on artificial lack. Under the sign of information,
class struggle promotes abstraction ("class" 38), and that can make
all the difference.
An ad for Apple's Macintosh shows the computer and Karl Marx together
and announces: "It was about time a capitalist started a revolution"
(Dean 51). That was in 1984, the year of the first Hacker Conference.
In the twenty years since then, Apple has been proven right, except
that the electronic revolution has not been the sort one can start,
and Apple didn't start it. Their point in the ad is that Apple empowers
the little people against big IBM and Microsoft – a line some Apple
customers still buy – but the model of such empowerment sides with
the humanist action structure that helps Microsoft rule the world.
The capitalist revolution is part of capitalism, not part of revolution.
Apple may use its workers differently than HAL does, but Google's
position that "You can make money without doing evil" (Google) cannot
work realistically for them, so long as they operate in the only
world we have. If Google works in China, it is doing evil along
with whatever else it is doing.
That sort of injunction motivates efforts to make education more
productive in the technological environment, to involve students
and teachers in the practical needs of business, to develop long-distance
teaching models for the university, and the like. As Jodi Dean argues:
Technoculture is not a nightmarish technocracy ruled by an autocratic
Big Brother. Instead, it's a new power formation where the ideals
of publicity, of equal access, free information and non-stop, multichanneled
communication, support the digital networks of global capital. In
this context, publicity serves the information age. If technocracy
aimed to eliminate politics in the name of efficient administration,
technoculture forecloses politics in the name of communication.
(Dean 78)
We can be realistic pragmatists, with the humanists, and
get with the program, or we can join the heroic resistance. Either
way we lose, because even the corporate counter-culturalist, as
an agent, is a contradiction in terms and serves the fantasy of
Apple's good capitalism, nothing less. The way forward, as Wark
seems to see it, is to dissolve into the fabric of things, to hack
from within, with the differential powers of language on our side.
It's the idealism of materialism – available from your server –
and we really want it now.
* * *
Notes
1. Raley writes that:
The popularization of these discussions in Europe and the United States was initiated, in some sense, by Nora and Minc's report to the President of France; Marc Porat's nine-volume report, The Information Economy: Sources and Methods for Measuring the Primary Information Sector (Detailed Industry Reports) (1977); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973); Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses, eds., The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (1979); Christopher Evans, The Mighty Micro: The Impact of the Computer Revolution (1979); Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976); and the continual recovery, "translation," and reference to the work of Norbert Weiner, particularly The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950). (139 n.11)
2. Wark numbers paragraphs and not pages; parenthetical citation numbers for material from Wark refer to paragraphs in his work, and are preceded by the title of the chapter or section in which they appear. The Manifesto shows section titles either in all-caps or in lower case, so I adopt the latter notational practice here.
* * *
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