Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Telesthesia Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 1 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM For Christen Diane Clifford, with love. Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 2 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM Telesthesia Communication, Culture and Class McKenzie Wark polity Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 3 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM Copyright © McKenzie Wark 2012 The right of McKenzie Wark to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2012 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5398-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5399-0(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 4 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 How to Occupy an Abstraction 1 2 Fresh Maimed Babies 16 3 Neither Here Nor There 25 4 Speaking Trajectories 39 5 Cruising Virilio’s Overexposed City 49 6 Architectronics of the Multitude 55 7 Weird Global Media Event and Vectoral Unconscious 63 8 Securing Security 80 9 Game and Play in Everyday Life 90 10 The Gift Shop at the End of History 101 11 From Intellectual Persona to Hacker Interface 118 12 Disco Marxism vs Techno Marxism 127 Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 5 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM vi Contents 13 The Vectoral Class and Its Antipodes 137 14 From Disco Marxism to Praxis (Object Oriented) 149 15 Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto 163 16 After Politics: To the Vector, the Spoils 170 17 The Little Sisters Are Watching You 176 18 Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit 188 19 Last Words and Key Words 203 Notes and References 209 Index 229 Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 6 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM Acknowledgments My thanks to John Thompson, Jennifer Jahn, Neil de Cort, Helen Gray, and everyone at Polity. Previous versions of some of these essays appeared in the jour- nals Arena, Cultural Studies, Dissent, Mute, New Formations, Theory Culture & Society, Theory & Event, Rhizomes, Transition. My thanks to invitations to present versions of some of these essays at Ars Electronica, Albert Einstein Center, Aspen Institute, Biennale of Sydney, Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Sarai Media Center in Delhi, DeRoy Lecture Series at Wayne State Uni- versity, Tate Britain, University of Plymouth, McGill University, American University in Paris, Dartmouth College, Laboral in Gijon, Pompidou Center, Brown University, New Museum, Cal IT2 at UCSSD, and elsewhere. Special thanks to Joshua Clover for the epigram, which is from a work in progress, and to Trevor Paglen for the cover image, a detail from Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center, 2008 Groom Lake, NY, Distance ~26 Miles. The real movement is nothing but the laws of motion through which capitalism realizes and abolishes itself. This then is not a party or political form but the law of value as such: the dynamic which it sets loose and by which it is then borne along ineluctably toward that undiscovered country from which no value returns. Pr Joshua Clover McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 7 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WATPR.indd 8 2/20/2012 5:27:29 PM 1 How to Occupy an Abstraction Zuccotti Park, New York It started with a small and motley band, who took over a little park in downtown Manhattan and declared they had “occupied Wall Street.” The occupation wasn’t actually on Wall Street, of course. And while there is actually a street called Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, “Wall Street” is something of an abstrac- tion. So what the occupation did involved taking over a little (quasi-) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district, turning it into something like an allegory. Against the abstraction of Wall Street, it proposed another, perhaps no less abstract, story. The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us, in exchange for which we don’t seem to get very much. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: “What’s good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business.” This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the eighteenth century look like serious, well-organized admin- istrators. If the rhetoric of their media sockpuppets is to be believed, this rentier class are such hothouse flowers that they won’t get out of bed in the morning without the promise of a fat bonus, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says Pr McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WAT01.indd 1 2/20/2012 11:42:33 AM 2 How to Occupy an Abstraction anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They had, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business. The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one’s feet throughout the financial district. Let’s call this power the vectoral. It’s the combination of fiber-optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light.1 Perhaps we should welcome our new robot overlords, who might as well be from outer space. How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more-or-less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It was an occupation which, almost uniquely, made no demands.2 It had at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as the rentier class and Wall Street as the computerized vectors trading intan- gible assets? Some commentators saw the modesty of this request as a weak- ness of Occupy Wall Street.3 They wanted a list of demands, and they were not shy about proposing some. But perhaps the best thing about Occupy Wall Street was its reluctance to make demands. What remains of what was once called “politics” in the United States is full of demands: to reduce the debt, to cut taxes, to abolish regulations. Nobody even bothers with much justifica- tion for these demands any more. Somehow it is just assumed that only what matters to the rentier class matters at all. It’s not that the rentier class buys politicians in America. Why bother when you can rent them by the hour? In this context, the most interest- ing thing about Occupy Wall Street was its suggestion that the main thing that’s lacking is not demands, but process. What is lacking is politics itself. It may sound counterintuitive, but there really is no politics in Pr the United States. There is exploitation, oppression, inequality, McKenzie Wark—Telesthesia WAT01.indd 2 2/20/2012 11:42:33 AM How to Occupy an Abstraction 3 violence; there are rumors that there might still be a state. But there is no politics. There is only the semblance of politics. It’s mostly just professionals renting influence to favor their interests. The state seems no longer capable of negotiating the common interests of its ruling class. Politics from below is also simulated. The Tea Party was really just a great marketing campaign.4 It made the old rentier class demands seem at least temporarily appealing. Like fast food, it seemed delicious until the indigestion started. It’s the Contract on America, its Compassionate Conservatism, but with new ingredi- ents! The Tea Party was quite successful.