For the first time in my life, I am not celebrating — more accurately, I am not participating in — Thanksgiving. This is because I am out of the country, breathing the air of freedom (or at least of freedom-from-Bush) in Montreal. Canadian Thanksgiving is a completely different holiday, and it happened over a month ago in any case.
On the whole, I’m happy to be here. Though I miss my daughter, I miss the food (cranberry sauce especially), and I miss the opportunity to perform my own yearly Thanksgiving counter-ritual, which is to play my recording of William Burroughs reciting his Thanksgiving Prayer.
For the first time in my life, I am not celebrating — more accurately, I am not participating in — Thanksgiving. This is because I am out of the country, breathing the air of freedom (or at least of freedom-from-Bush) in Montreal. Canadian Thanksgiving is a completely different holiday, and it happened over a month ago in any case.
On the whole, I’m happy to be here. Though I miss my daughter, I miss the food (cranberry sauce especially), and I miss the opportunity to perform my own yearly Thanksgiving counter-ritual, which is to play my recording of William Burroughs reciting his Thanksgiving Prayer.
I’m not sure how much I can write about Shane Carruth’s Primer, since (like most viewers, apparently) I am unable to give a coherent summary of its plot after having seen it once. But not understanding the plot scarcely seems to matter. The film is dense, elliptical, and powerfully involving, and I doubt a point-by-point explanation of “what happens” would make much of a difference, in terms of its impact.
Primer is about two engineers, working in a garage in an anonymous suburb somewhere in the Sunbelt (the film was shot in the environs of Dallas), who stumble upon an amazing invention. They are really just tinkering, with no particular goal in mind aside from the vague hope of coming up with something that will make them money. But it turns out that they have devised a time travel machine: it looks sort of like a strongbox or a coffin, but if they crawl inside and stay for, say, six hours or so, when they emerge it’s twelve hours or so earlier than when they entered, so they have an entire day to live all over again.
Primer is intellectual SF, exploring its premise with no bells and whistles. The film contains no special effects: most of it is just naturalistic shots of the two engineers talking or arguing, without dramatic entrances or exits, and without any of the “action” actually happening onscreen. The time-travel devices themselves are nothing, really, to look at. Just as the protagonists only gradually infer what they have discovered, so we only gradually get a sense of what they are doing, and what the stakes are. There’s kind of a drift, and then an acceleration into paranoid complications and cross-purposes, but it’s all conveyed through a murk of low-affect, casual conversation, technospeak, offhand private allusions, elliptical cuts, and occasional anomalies that the characters themselves are unable to explain. The film is often overexposed, bleached out by the Texas sun; the mise-en-scene is cluttered and yet utterly mundane; the camerawork seems straightforward and documentary-like, but nonetheless it has a strangely alienated, claustrophobic feel (I have no idea how, technically speaking, Carruth attained this).
So: we have these two guys messing with time. At first, they do simple things like finding out the stock prices in the afternoon, then going back to the morning to buy/sell accordingly. (This is just reported to us through conversation, not shown onscreen). But gradually, they start messing with time in more complex ways. And in film terms, messing with time means messing with continuity. If you live through a day, then in the evening go back to the morning and live it again, there is no way to present this linearly (since subjective time and objective time are now out of sync: if you portray/represent either one, you cannot portray/represent the other in proper succession). Worse, it means there are now two of you around instead of one: what if you meet your other self, or if other people interact with the two of you in inconsistent ways? What if you multiply the effect by doing this more than once? What if you put a time machine inside a larger time machine, sending it back in time and in effect multiplying it as well? What if you record your conversations, and listen to them through an earpiece so that you can replicate them the second time around? All of these things happen in the second half of Primer. Time travel implies a logic of feedback and recursion, and this logic seeps into the form of the film (as well as its content, since in such a case the form is the content), and everything is swamped in a sort of fractal paranoia.
The film’s achievement is to make all this as visceral and affective as it is cerebral: by the end, we don’t quite know what’s going on, but we are drawn powerfully and disturbingly into the labyrinth. Primer unfolds with a suffocating, mysterious density — or better, viscosity. The film takes seriously the idea that engineering, or technical experimentation, is a form of imagination. Technology is a probe into the unknown: those things that we often think of just as “tools” or “instruments,” or at best as prosthetic extensions of ourselves, in fact redound back upon us, and change who/what we are. Primer proposes that the mysteries of technology, as well as those of representation, are ultimately the mysteries of Time itself. Carruth’s strange amalgam of McLuhan and Borges stands alongside such films as Code 46 and Demonlover as a brilliant exploration of the metamorphoses of the postmodern image.
I’m not sure how much I can write about Shane Carruth’s Primer, since (like most viewers, apparently) I am unable to give a coherent summary of its plot after having seen it once. But not understanding the plot scarcely seems to matter. The film is dense, elliptical, and powerfully involving, and I doubt a point-by-point explanation of “what happens” would make much of a difference, in terms of its impact.
Primer is about two engineers, working in a garage in an anonymous suburb somewhere in the Sunbelt (the film was shot in the environs of Dallas), who stumble upon an amazing invention. They are really just tinkering, with no particular goal in mind aside from the vague hope of coming up with something that will make them money. But it turns out that they have devised a time travel machine: it looks sort of like a strongbox or a coffin, but if they crawl inside and stay for, say, six hours or so, when they emerge it’s twelve hours or so earlier than when they entered, so they have an entire day to live all over again.
Primer is intellectual SF, exploring its premise with no bells and whistles. The film contains no special effects: most of it is just naturalistic shots of the two engineers talking or arguing, without dramatic entrances or exits, and without any of the “action” actually happening onscreen. The time-travel devices themselves are nothing, really, to look at. Just as the protagonists only gradually infer what they have discovered, so we only gradually get a sense of what they are doing, and what the stakes are. There’s kind of a drift, and then an acceleration into paranoid complications and cross-purposes, but it’s all conveyed through a murk of low-affect, casual conversation, technospeak, offhand private allusions, elliptical cuts, and occasional anomalies that the characters themselves are unable to explain. The film is often overexposed, bleached out by the Texas sun; the mise-en-scene is cluttered and yet utterly mundane; the camerawork seems straightforward and documentary-like, but nonetheless it has a strangely alienated, claustrophobic feel (I have no idea how, technically speaking, Carruth attained this).
So: we have these two guys messing with time. At first, they do simple things like finding out the stock prices in the afternoon, then going back to the morning to buy/sell accordingly. (This is just reported to us through conversation, not shown onscreen). But gradually, they start messing with time in more complex ways. And in film terms, messing with time means messing with continuity. If you live through a day, then in the evening go back to the morning and live it again, there is no way to present this linearly (since subjective time and objective time are now out of sync: if you portray/represent either one, you cannot portray/represent the other in proper succession). Worse, it means there are now two of you around instead of one: what if you meet your other self, or if other people interact with the two of you in inconsistent ways? What if you multiply the effect by doing this more than once? What if you put a time machine inside a larger time machine, sending it back in time and in effect multiplying it as well? What if you record your conversations, and listen to them through an earpiece so that you can replicate them the second time around? All of these things happen in the second half of Primer. Time travel implies a logic of feedback and recursion, and this logic seeps into the form of the film (as well as its content, since in such a case the form is the content), and everything is swamped in a sort of fractal paranoia.
The film’s achievement is to make all this as visceral and affective as it is cerebral: by the end, we don’t quite know what’s going on, but we are drawn powerfully and disturbingly into the labyrinth. Primer unfolds with a suffocating, mysterious density — or better, viscosity. The film takes seriously the idea that engineering, or technical experimentation, is a form of imagination. Technology is a probe into the unknown: those things that we often think of just as “tools” or “instruments,” or at best as prosthetic extensions of ourselves, in fact redound back upon us, and change who/what we are. Primer proposes that the mysteries of technology, as well as those of representation, are ultimately the mysteries of Time itself. Carruth’s strange amalgam of McLuhan and Borges stands alongside such films as Code 46 and Demonlover as a brilliant exploration of the metamorphoses of the postmodern image.
I heard an excellent lecture/demonstration tonight by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. It was a heady evening of intellectual, visual and sonic montage. There was text from Miller’s book Rhythm Science and citations of postmodern thinkers and writers from Derrida to William Gibson, together with sound collages combining everything from Public Enemy to Miles Davis to Pierre Boulez, and video clips ranging from 1950s TV ads that featured electronic music to excerpts from Miller’s multimedia remix/deconstruction of Birth of a Nation.
Miller/Spooky is an important artist, both because of the sheer vitality of his sampled/remixed sounds, and because he so thoroughly registers and reflects upon what it means to live in our 21st century network culture. Miller speaks to and for a world in which everything is hybrid, everything is continually being transformed and “remediated” — but also everything is instantly commodified and branded, reduced to an identifiable and marketable tag. He reminds us that we are constantly being bathed — literally as well as metaphorically — in sound waves and electromagnetic waves of all conceivable frequencies, carrying messages intentional or not, and whether we are aware of all these messages or not. Miller plays with all these messages, both ironically and seriously, and encourages us to play with them in turn.
Everything is a sample, everything is waiting to be sampled; and everything is renewed when it is sampled, broken down, reconstructed and recontextualized. If architecture is, as they say, frozen music, then — Miller says — music is liquid architecture. Music fills and reconfigures space, puts it into motion. All that is solid melts into software — actually, into free software or shareware. I found Paul Miller’s lecture exhilarating, as it envisioned — but also pragmatically demonstrated, in brief — the utopian potentialities of postmodern culture. Remix/Remodel. Deform in order to Transform.
I heard an excellent lecture/demonstration tonight by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. It was a heady evening of intellectual, visual and sonic montage. There was text from Miller’s book Rhythm Science and citations of postmodern thinkers and writers from Derrida to William Gibson, together with sound collages combining everything from Public Enemy to Miles Davis to Pierre Boulez, and video clips ranging from 1950s TV ads that featured electronic music to excerpts from Miller’s multimedia remix/deconstruction of Birth of a Nation.
Miller/Spooky is an important artist, both because of the sheer vitality of his sampled/remixed sounds, and because he so thoroughly registers and reflects upon what it means to live in our 21st century network culture. Miller speaks to and for a world in which everything is hybrid, everything is continually being transformed and “remediated” — but also everything is instantly commodified and branded, reduced to an identifiable and marketable tag. He reminds us that we are constantly being bathed — literally as well as metaphorically — in sound waves and electromagnetic waves of all conceivable frequencies, carrying messages intentional or not, and whether we are aware of all these messages or not. Miller plays with all these messages, both ironically and seriously, and encourages us to play with them in turn.
Everything is a sample, everything is waiting to be sampled; and everything is renewed when it is sampled, broken down, reconstructed and recontextualized. If architecture is, as they say, frozen music, then — Miller says — music is liquid architecture. Music fills and reconfigures space, puts it into motion. All that is solid melts into software — actually, into free software or shareware. I found Paul Miller’s lecture exhilarating, as it envisioned — but also pragmatically demonstrated, in brief — the utopian potentialities of postmodern culture. Remix/Remodel. Deform in order to Transform.
I really have nothing to say about the election. I agree with my 83-year-old father, who said that it would take a century to undo the damage to the country that Bush will be responsible for in the next four years. That is to say, the damage will not be repaired in my lifetime, let alone his; and probably not in the lifetime of my daughter either. The United States, and the world, will be a meaner and more oppressive place, with the virtues of tolerance and compassion increasingly under siege, if not altogether obliterated. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
What interests me most, in a morbid sort of way, is the motives and desires of the voters on November 2nd. For make no mistake about it: the American people have willfully and knowingly chosen to embrace radical evil. Yes, this was an election about “values.”
The question, at a time like this, is always what causes people to vote, and to pledge their lives, against their own interests. Most of the people who voted for Bush will be deeply screwed by his policies. They will see many more of their sons and daughters die in foreign, imperialist wars; they will see their incomes go down, their savings wiped out, their old age security taken away, their medical care reduced to nothing, their freedoms curtailed.
The old-time Marxists used to explain things like this in terms of “false consciousness.” People acted against their own interests, the Marxists said, because they were deluded by ideologies, because they were fooled by empty promises, because they were tricked by the ruling class into misidentifying their enemies, the source of their misfortunes. (Thomas Frank still pretty much makes the same sort of argument today). But this line of approach seems to me to be deeply wrong. It’s condescending, for one thing; it assumes that those 59 million Bush voters didn’t know what they were doing, and that “we” (whoever constitutes this we) know their needs and desires better than they do. For another thing, it wildly overestimates the degree to which people in general act rationally; despite what the free-market economists tell us, we do not start out with bundles of “preferences,” and then work to logically maximize the satisfaction of those preferences. In fact, people are far less motivated by such calculations than they are by passions, desires, values, committments, and beliefs.
I think, rather, that 59 million people voted for Bush in full consciousness of what they were doing. They were aware of the harms that they would suffer from this action, but they were willing to put personal advantage aside in order to serve a higher duty. In other words, the reelection of George W. Bush was an ethical decision, a moral choice. Kant says that the only moral action is one not tainted by “pathological” motives, by which he means (among other things) personal advantage and satisfaction. Lacan, Zizek, and Badiou, in this respect following Kant quite closely, say that the only ground for ethics in our “postmodern” world is to remain true to one’s desire even at the price of one’s own comfort and well-being; or that it is “fidelity to an event” (Badiou) when this event ruptures the homogeneous order of the world and introduces absolute novelty. Under all these definitions — probably the only ones that are adequate to describing ethical experience, where pragmatic, naturalistic, and utilitarian approaches are not — the choice of, and committment, to Radical Evil is just as authentic and meaningful an ethical decision as any other. The American people have said, in effect, that no sacrifice is too great, no price is too high to pay, when it is a matter of affirming the Values of bigotry, torture, xenophobia, ignorance, and general social corruption. They have pledged themselves to radical evil, transcendently, knowingly, come what may.
And that is why I have nothing to say. I only hope that I remember, in the years to come, that however grievously my family and myself are harmed by the results of the American people’s moral choice (and this harm will not be negligable: I am likely to find myself destitute in old age, and bereft of the freedoms that I have, thus far, unquestioningly enjoyed and pretty much taken for granted; and my daughter is likely to have many paths of advancement closed off to her), that nonetheless we are still in a relatively privileged position, so that the ills we will suffer will be quite trivial in comparison to those that will be suffered by the vast majority of the population, both in the United States and throughout the world.
I really have nothing to say about the election. I agree with my 83-year-old father, who said that it would take a century to undo the damage to the country that Bush will be responsible for in the next four years. That is to say, the damage will not be repaired in my lifetime, let alone his; and probably not in the lifetime of my daughter either. The United States, and the world, will be a meaner and more oppressive place, with the virtues of tolerance and compassion increasingly under siege, if not altogether obliterated. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
What interests me most, in a morbid sort of way, is the motives and desires of the voters on November 2nd. For make no mistake about it: the American people have willfully and knowingly chosen to embrace radical evil. Yes, this was an election about “values.”
The question, at a time like this, is always what causes people to vote, and to pledge their lives, against their own interests. Most of the people who voted for Bush will be deeply screwed by his policies. They will see many more of their sons and daughters die in foreign, imperialist wars; they will see their incomes go down, their savings wiped out, their old age security taken away, their medical care reduced to nothing, their freedoms curtailed.
The old-time Marxists used to explain things like this in terms of “false consciousness.” People acted against their own interests, the Marxists said, because they were deluded by ideologies, because they were fooled by empty promises, because they were tricked by the ruling class into misidentifying their enemies, the source of their misfortunes. (Thomas Frank still pretty much makes the same sort of argument today). But this line of approach seems to me to be deeply wrong. It’s condescending, for one thing; it assumes that those 59 million Bush voters didn’t know what they were doing, and that “we” (whoever constitutes this we) know their needs and desires better than they do. For another thing, it wildly overestimates the degree to which people in general act rationally; despite what the free-market economists tell us, we do not start out with bundles of “preferences,” and then work to logically maximize the satisfaction of those preferences. In fact, people are far less motivated by such calculations than they are by passions, desires, values, committments, and beliefs.
I think, rather, that 59 million people voted for Bush in full consciousness of what they were doing. They were aware of the harms that they would suffer from this action, but they were willing to put personal advantage aside in order to serve a higher duty. In other words, the reelection of George W. Bush was an ethical decision, a moral choice. Kant says that the only moral action is one not tainted by “pathological” motives, by which he means (among other things) personal advantage and satisfaction. Lacan, Zizek, and Badiou, in this respect following Kant quite closely, say that the only ground for ethics in our “postmodern” world is to remain true to one’s desire even at the price of one’s own comfort and well-being; or that it is “fidelity to an event” (Badiou) when this event ruptures the homogeneous order of the world and introduces absolute novelty. Under all these definitions — probably the only ones that are adequate to describing ethical experience, where pragmatic, naturalistic, and utilitarian approaches are not — the choice of, and committment, to Radical Evil is just as authentic and meaningful an ethical decision as any other. The American people have said, in effect, that no sacrifice is too great, no price is too high to pay, when it is a matter of affirming the Values of bigotry, torture, xenophobia, ignorance, and general social corruption. They have pledged themselves to radical evil, transcendently, knowingly, come what may.
And that is why I have nothing to say. I only hope that I remember, in the years to come, that however grievously my family and myself are harmed by the results of the American people’s moral choice (and this harm will not be negligable: I am likely to find myself destitute in old age, and bereft of the freedoms that I have, thus far, unquestioningly enjoyed and pretty much taken for granted; and my daughter is likely to have many paths of advancement closed off to her), that nonetheless we are still in a relatively privileged position, so that the ills we will suffer will be quite trivial in comparison to those that will be suffered by the vast majority of the population, both in the United States and throughout the world.
No predictions. It’s a fool’s game to presume to predict the outcome of an election like this one. Tomorrow I will cast my vote for Kerry, then I will come home and turn on the TV and wait and watch, trying to Keep Hope Alive. Yes, I said Keep Hope Alive, despite being an inveterate pessimist.
I feel like the country is more divided now than ever. More even than in the 1960s. But without the utopianism of the 1960s. No counterculture, no dreams of revolution. Only this gulf. I do not understand the 50-million-odd Bush supporters; I do not know how to reason with them. I feel like we live on different planets.
All we ask is that the national nightmare be over. That we return to merely ordinary stupidity, incompetence, and oppression (sort of like how Freud said the aim of psychoanalysis was to dissolve neuroses, so that people could return to ordinary unhappiness, the intractable difficulties of just living). Doubtless Kerry will be a mediocre President. And the Iraq situation and the US economy are both in such a mess that, even in the best-case scenario, there is little he could do to make things better. But that sort of doesn’t matter. Voting out Bush is the only thing that matters, ending his four-year reign of terror, his assault on 9/10ths of the Bill of Rights, his Big Lie propaganda campaigns, his running amok over the rest of the world, his crony capitalism.
Nobody I’ve talked to is that enamored of Kerry. What we share, instead, is the sense that a vote for Kerry — really, a vote against Bush — is a minimal act of human decency, a simple effort of joining together to turn back the tide of ignorance and bigotry that otherwise threatens to engulf us. Which is why I’m trying to Keep Hope Alive.
No predictions. It’s a fool’s game to presume to predict the outcome of an election like this one. Tomorrow I will cast my vote for Kerry, then I will come home and turn on the TV and wait and watch, trying to Keep Hope Alive. Yes, I said Keep Hope Alive, despite being an inveterate pessimist.
I feel like the country is more divided now than ever. More even than in the 1960s. But without the utopianism of the 1960s. No counterculture, no dreams of revolution. Only this gulf. I do not understand the 50-million-odd Bush supporters; I do not know how to reason with them. I feel like we live on different planets.
All we ask is that the national nightmare be over. That we return to merely ordinary stupidity, incompetence, and oppression (sort of like how Freud said the aim of psychoanalysis was to dissolve neuroses, so that people could return to ordinary unhappiness, the intractable difficulties of just living). Doubtless Kerry will be a mediocre President. And the Iraq situation and the US economy are both in such a mess that, even in the best-case scenario, there is little he could do to make things better. But that sort of doesn’t matter. Voting out Bush is the only thing that matters, ending his four-year reign of terror, his assault on 9/10ths of the Bill of Rights, his Big Lie propaganda campaigns, his running amok over the rest of the world, his crony capitalism.
Nobody I’ve talked to is that enamored of Kerry. What we share, instead, is the sense that a vote for Kerry — really, a vote against Bush — is a minimal act of human decency, a simple effort of joining together to turn back the tide of ignorance and bigotry that otherwise threatens to engulf us. Which is why I’m trying to Keep Hope Alive.
I feel an “irrational exuberance” whenever I visit Los Angeles (which is something I only get the opportunity to do something like once every three or four years). Really, this happens whenever I visit California — but more strongly in LA than elsewhere. Maybe it’s the air, the palm trees, the sun. Or maybe it’s the traffic — I love it when somebody gives me a ride down the boulevards, past the strip malls and the mansions, through the neighborhoods (both residential ones unknown to me, and ones like Westwood, or Venice, or Hollywood, or wherever there is –atypically — lots of foot traffic, people shopping. Perhaps it’s something they put in the air, in the water? A friend who lives here told me that the happiness of southern California was simply this: people being fattened up, to be choice dishes at some sort of alien banquet (orchestrated, no doubt, by Governor Arnold). Today nobody gave me a ride; but, tired of all the bank skyscrapers downtown, I walked a few blocks east and enjoyed the funky vitality of Broadway. Maybe part of it was the nervous, slightly paranoid buzz I was feeling (I forgot to eat lunch, and instead drank way too much coffee — something that would never happen to me anyplace else).
When I’m here, I imagine an alternative life path for myself: if I knew how to drive; if I had gotten a job here. It would be like gliding, an endless exultant horizontal displacement, the sensuous enjoyment of surfaces (when in actuality I am not at all a sensuous person). California, the optical illusion at the end of the rainbow. Of course this alternate life path never happened, and never will (not even in all the plurality of worlds of quantum mechanics, or of David Lewis’ logic). And it’s no use mourning for the self you are not (not that this place puts me in the frame of mind in which I could mourn). But still…
I feel an “irrational exuberance” whenever I visit Los Angeles (which is something I only get the opportunity to do something like once every three or four years). Really, this happens whenever I visit California — but more strongly in LA than elsewhere. Maybe it’s the air, the palm trees, the sun. Or maybe it’s the traffic — I love it when somebody gives me a ride down the boulevards, past the strip malls and the mansions, through the neighborhoods (both residential ones unknown to me, and ones like Westwood, or Venice, or Hollywood, or wherever there is –atypically — lots of foot traffic, people shopping. Perhaps it’s something they put in the air, in the water? A friend who lives here told me that the happiness of southern California was simply this: people being fattened up, to be choice dishes at some sort of alien banquet (orchestrated, no doubt, by Governor Arnold). Today nobody gave me a ride; but, tired of all the bank skyscrapers downtown, I walked a few blocks east and enjoyed the funky vitality of Broadway. Maybe part of it was the nervous, slightly paranoid buzz I was feeling (I forgot to eat lunch, and instead drank way too much coffee — something that would never happen to me anyplace else).
When I’m here, I imagine an alternative life path for myself: if I knew how to drive; if I had gotten a job here. It would be like gliding, an endless exultant horizontal displacement, the sensuous enjoyment of surfaces (when in actuality I am not at all a sensuous person). California, the optical illusion at the end of the rainbow. Of course this alternate life path never happened, and never will (not even in all the plurality of worlds of quantum mechanics, or of David Lewis’ logic). And it’s no use mourning for the self you are not (not that this place puts me in the frame of mind in which I could mourn). But still…
Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude covers some of the same ground as the work of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The multitude, in contrast to older notions of the People or the proletariat, is a grouping without unity. People come together in the multitude, on the basis of what they have in common; but without becoming One, without subordinating their singularities or negating their differences. Virno, like Hardt and Negri, derives the concept of the multitude from Spinoza, and argues that this form of organization is especially suited to our postmodern, networked society (to what Hardt and Negri call Empire, and Virno — focused more closely on modes of production — calls “post-Fordist” society).
Many readers (myself included) have found Hardt and Negri’s utopian invocations of the multitude a bit vague; and it’s here that Virno’s book is especially useful. Virno offers a number of different perspectives on the multitude. Basically Virno argues that, in post-Fordist production, it is less “labor power” (the potential to produce) that is being mobilized by capitalism (which is the traditional marxist formulation) than it is what Marx called “general intellect,” or the entire range of human capacities and abilities, both mental and physical.
From one point of view this is quite horrific: it means that capital demands from workers, not just exertion for a set number of hours a day, but everything, all the time: our dreams and intuitions, our passions and pastimes, our leisure as well as our work. We can see this in the spread of notions of “intellectual property,” as well as in the ways that leisure time as well as work time is increasingly subjected to the full sweep of commodification and branding. And this totalization of what capitalism demands from the worker goes hand in hand with the strategies of “flexible accumulation,” with its emphasis on part-time work, overtime work, continual changes in roles, pressure for innovation in every activity, etc.: all of which not only relegates everyone (including “professionals” on the one hand, and the unemployed or underemployed on the other) to the status of being a worker, but puts all workers increasingly in the status of what Marx called the Industrial Reserve Army (no job is permanent, everyone is replaceable, etc).
These conditions produce the category of the multitude. Specialization, or the division of labor, is increasingly a thing of the past. In the post-Fordist world, everyone increasingly draws upon a generalized “sharing of communicative and cognitive abilities.” Labor becomes increasingly performative, in the sense that what produced is more the productive activities themselves, than the reified end products. (This corresponds to what Hardt and Negri call affective labor, and to what others call the service economy). This means that poesis (making) and praxis (political or collective activity) are unified, for perhaps the first time in human history. All industry is subsumed by the culture industry: it’s not that cars are not still being manufactured, but that every aspect of the automotive industry, from how work is done on the shop floor to how advertising gives automobiles their cultural cachet and signification, is controlled by technologies of information and communication, which involve human beings in depth, rather than just calling upon them for specialized forms of labor. “The communications industry,” Virno says, “plays the role of industry of the means of production.” There isn’t any such thing as the “hacker class” hypothesized by McKenzie Wark, because in effect everybody is a hacker, and all social activity is grounded upon hacking.
This still sounds pretty dystopian: capital now demands everything from me, 24/7, rather than just eight hours a day. But this is where Virno — more convincingly, to my mind, than Hardt and Negri — sees grounds for an inversion. He recommends strategies of “civil disobedience” and “exit”: forms of resistance that no longer rely on “the gloomy dialectic between acquiescence and transgression,” but simply shift the grounds of social activity elsewhere. (To my mind, downloading mp3s is a low-key example of what Virno recommends). But more importantly, Virno draws out qualities of the multitude that, even if originally elicited by capitalist exploitation, necessarily exist in excess to that exploitation. Capitalism works by appropriating the surplus that labor creates; but under the conditions of “general intellect,” produced by the post-Fordist economy itself, there’s a surplus that no regime of privatization is able to expropriate and contain. This is due, first of all, to the sheer fact that intellect is now “general”: creativity and expression are no longer personal and private. The more I express my own singularities, the more I reject conformity to externally imposed norms, the more I find that my own expressions are in fact collaborative: that they intersect with, call upon, presuppose, and interact with those of others. Just as hip hop producers are most original and creative when they work with — rework — samples drawn from prior songs. Property is theft. There really is no private language, as Wittgenstein said.
Virno analyzes this process in many ways. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon, he discusses the process of individuation in the multitude: the way I express my singularity in the commuunicative context of general intellect cuts across traditional divisions of private and public. Virno also analyzes categories such as the “idle talk” and “curiosity” so excoriated by Heidegger (who views them with horror and disgust as inauthentic ways of being of the ignorant masses), and shows how they might better be regarded as civic virtues, and sources of invention and renovation. And Virno considers the question of “the emotional tonalities of the multitude,” of the ways certain affects are not so much subjectively felt, as already built into our way of being in post-Fordist society (this discussion resonates strongly with some of the arguments made by Brian Massumi about pre-subjective affects: a subject I hope to go into more in detail at some future point).
I hope I’ve given some sense of the richness of Virno’s book, despite its brevity (barely over 100 pages). I’m still working through the consequences of his arguments. It’s only by delineating the new grounds of affect and subjectivity that characterize the post-Fordist, network society, that we can even begin to think about tactics of political transformation. This is what grounds my current work-in-progress on postmodern aestheticism, and I’ve found Virno’s book richly suggestive.
Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude covers some of the same ground as the work of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The multitude, in contrast to older notions of the People or the proletariat, is a grouping without unity. People come together in the multitude, on the basis of what they have in common; but without becoming One, without subordinating their singularities or negating their differences. Virno, like Hardt and Negri, derives the concept of the multitude from Spinoza, and argues that this form of organization is especially suited to our postmodern, networked society (to what Hardt and Negri call Empire, and Virno — focused more closely on modes of production — calls “post-Fordist” society).
Many readers (myself included) have found Hardt and Negri’s utopian invocations of the multitude a bit vague; and it’s here that Virno’s book is especially useful. Virno offers a number of different perspectives on the multitude. Basically Virno argues that, in post-Fordist production, it is less “labor power” (the potential to produce) that is being mobilized by capitalism (which is the traditional marxist formulation) than it is what Marx called “general intellect,” or the entire range of human capacities and abilities, both mental and physical.
From one point of view this is quite horrific: it means that capital demands from workers, not just exertion for a set number of hours a day, but everything, all the time: our dreams and intuitions, our passions and pastimes, our leisure as well as our work. We can see this in the spread of notions of “intellectual property,” as well as in the ways that leisure time as well as work time is increasingly subjected to the full sweep of commodification and branding. And this totalization of what capitalism demands from the worker goes hand in hand with the strategies of “flexible accumulation,” with its emphasis on part-time work, overtime work, continual changes in roles, pressure for innovation in every activity, etc.: all of which not only relegates everyone (including “professionals” on the one hand, and the unemployed or underemployed on the other) to the status of being a worker, but puts all workers increasingly in the status of what Marx called the Industrial Reserve Army (no job is permanent, everyone is replaceable, etc).
These conditions produce the category of the multitude. Specialization, or the division of labor, is increasingly a thing of the past. In the post-Fordist world, everyone increasingly draws upon a generalized “sharing of communicative and cognitive abilities.” Labor becomes increasingly performative, in the sense that what produced is more the productive activities themselves, than the reified end products. (This corresponds to what Hardt and Negri call affective labor, and to what others call the service economy). This means that poesis (making) and praxis (political or collective activity) are unified, for perhaps the first time in human history. All industry is subsumed by the culture industry: it’s not that cars are not still being manufactured, but that every aspect of the automotive industry, from how work is done on the shop floor to how advertising gives automobiles their cultural cachet and signification, is controlled by technologies of information and communication, which involve human beings in depth, rather than just calling upon them for specialized forms of labor. “The communications industry,” Virno says, “plays the role of industry of the means of production.” There isn’t any such thing as the “hacker class” hypothesized by McKenzie Wark, because in effect everybody is a hacker, and all social activity is grounded upon hacking.
This still sounds pretty dystopian: capital now demands everything from me, 24/7, rather than just eight hours a day. But this is where Virno — more convincingly, to my mind, than Hardt and Negri — sees grounds for an inversion. He recommends strategies of “civil disobedience” and “exit”: forms of resistance that no longer rely on “the gloomy dialectic between acquiescence and transgression,” but simply shift the grounds of social activity elsewhere. (To my mind, downloading mp3s is a low-key example of what Virno recommends). But more importantly, Virno draws out qualities of the multitude that, even if originally elicited by capitalist exploitation, necessarily exist in excess to that exploitation. Capitalism works by appropriating the surplus that labor creates; but under the conditions of “general intellect,” produced by the post-Fordist economy itself, there’s a surplus that no regime of privatization is able to expropriate and contain. This is due, first of all, to the sheer fact that intellect is now “general”: creativity and expression are no longer personal and private. The more I express my own singularities, the more I reject conformity to externally imposed norms, the more I find that my own expressions are in fact collaborative: that they intersect with, call upon, presuppose, and interact with those of others. Just as hip hop producers are most original and creative when they work with — rework — samples drawn from prior songs. Property is theft. There really is no private language, as Wittgenstein said.
Virno analyzes this process in many ways. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon, he discusses the process of individuation in the multitude: the way I express my singularity in the commuunicative context of general intellect cuts across traditional divisions of private and public. Virno also analyzes categories such as the “idle talk” and “curiosity” so excoriated by Heidegger (who views them with horror and disgust as inauthentic ways of being of the ignorant masses), and shows how they might better be regarded as civic virtues, and sources of invention and renovation. And Virno considers the question of “the emotional tonalities of the multitude,” of the ways certain affects are not so much subjectively felt, as already built into our way of being in post-Fordist society (this discussion resonates strongly with some of the arguments made by Brian Massumi about pre-subjective affects: a subject I hope to go into more in detail at some future point).
I hope I’ve given some sense of the richness of Virno’s book, despite its brevity (barely over 100 pages). I’m still working through the consequences of his arguments. It’s only by delineating the new grounds of affect and subjectivity that characterize the post-Fordist, network society, that we can even begin to think about tactics of political transformation. This is what grounds my current work-in-progress on postmodern aestheticism, and I’ve found Virno’s book richly suggestive.
I’ve seen this in a number of places (Slashdot refers me both to the Wired article and to the original press release): Thomas DeMarse, of the University of Florida, has cultivated a culture of 25,000 living rat neurons, and hooked up the culture to a computer running flight simulator software. The neurons have learned, in effect, to fly the simulated plane.
This is fascinating on a number of grounds. The neurons constitute, in effect, an artificial bio-brain. The neurons have hooked up with one another for the first time, in the same way that neurons actually do hook up in a developing human’s or animal’s brain; and an interface has been successfully established between this bio-brain and the silicon computational machinery of a computer. Strong-AI enthusiasts like Ray Kurzweil fantasize about replacing human neurons with silicon chips, one by one, until the mind has been entirely translated or downloaded into a computer. But neurons and silicon logic chips in fact function in quite different ways, so the idea of interfacing neurons and digital computers, as DeMarse and others have done, is in fact much more plausible. Brains need to be embodied, in a way that electronic computing machines don’t; but an experiment like this suggests a way that this embodiment could in fact be made entirely simulacral, like in the old (updated-Cartesian) ‘brain in a vat’ scenario.
The whole experiment turns on the fact that brains don’t operate the way digital computers do. Brains signal chemically as well as electronically, which makes them different by nature from computer chips; and from what little evidence we have on the subject, it would seem that (as Gerald Edelman, among others, argues), brains are not in fact Turing machines, but operate according to entirely different principles. Indeed, DeMarse’s goal is less to train the neurons to do useful computational work, than he is “to learn how the brain does its computation.”
The SF writer Peter Watts in fact deals with all these questions in his “Rifters” novels Starfish and Maelstrom (I haven’t yet read the just-published third volume in the series, Behemoth: B-Max; a fourth and final volume is scheduled to come out next year). In these novels, neural cultures called “smart gels” do computational tasks — involving pattern recognition, nuanced judgments involving various qualitative factors, and so on — that digital computers are ill-suited for. But the fact that “smart gels” are required to make human-style judgments, but are devoid of human personalities and emotions, itself leads to disturbing and disastrous consequences…. It’s always a problem when “intelligence” is divorced from context.
I’ve seen this in a number of places (Slashdot refers me both to the Wired article and to the original press release): Thomas DeMarse, of the University of Florida, has cultivated a culture of 25,000 living rat neurons, and hooked up the culture to a computer running flight simulator software. The neurons have learned, in effect, to fly the simulated plane.
This is fascinating on a number of grounds. The neurons constitute, in effect, an artificial bio-brain. The neurons have hooked up with one another for the first time, in the same way that neurons actually do hook up in a developing human’s or animal’s brain; and an interface has been successfully established between this bio-brain and the silicon computational machinery of a computer. Strong-AI enthusiasts like Ray Kurzweil fantasize about replacing human neurons with silicon chips, one by one, until the mind has been entirely translated or downloaded into a computer. But neurons and silicon logic chips in fact function in quite different ways, so the idea of interfacing neurons and digital computers, as DeMarse and others have done, is in fact much more plausible. Brains need to be embodied, in a way that electronic computing machines don’t; but an experiment like this suggests a way that this embodiment could in fact be made entirely simulacral, like in the old (updated-Cartesian) ‘brain in a vat’ scenario.
The whole experiment turns on the fact that brains don’t operate the way digital computers do. Brains signal chemically as well as electronically, which makes them different by nature from computer chips; and from what little evidence we have on the subject, it would seem that (as Gerald Edelman, among others, argues), brains are not in fact Turing machines, but operate according to entirely different principles. Indeed, DeMarse’s goal is less to train the neurons to do useful computational work, than he is “to learn how the brain does its computation.”
The SF writer Peter Watts in fact deals with all these questions in his “Rifters” novels Starfish and Maelstrom (I haven’t yet read the just-published third volume in the series, Behemoth: B-Max; a fourth and final volume is scheduled to come out next year). In these novels, neural cultures called “smart gels” do computational tasks — involving pattern recognition, nuanced judgments involving various qualitative factors, and so on — that digital computers are ill-suited for. But the fact that “smart gels” are required to make human-style judgments, but are devoid of human personalities and emotions, itself leads to disturbing and disastrous consequences…. It’s always a problem when “intelligence” is divorced from context.
McKenzie Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkable and beautiful book: cogent, radical, and exhilarating, a politico-aesthetic call to arms for the digital age.
The book really is, as its title says, a manifesto: a public declaration of principles for a radically new vision, and a call to action based on that vision. It’s written as a series of short, numbered paragraphs or theses; the writing is tight, compressed, and aphoristic, or a Wark himself likes to say, “abstract.” It’s not “difficult” in the way that certain “post-structuralist” philosophical texts (Derrida, Lacan, etc) are difficult; rather, A Hacker Manifesto is characterized by an intense lucidity, as if the writing had been subjected to intense atmospheric pressure, so that it could say the most in the least possible space. Deleuze writes somewhere that an aphorism is a field of forces in tension; Wark’s writing is aphoristic in precisely this sense. I read the book with both delight and excitement, even when I didn’t altogether agree with everything that Wark said.
A Hacker Manifesto owes something — both in form and content — to Marx and Engels, and more to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (a book about which I feel deeply ambivalent). Wark’s ambition (which he calls “crypto-marxist”) is to apply Marx’s ideas to our current age of digitization and “intellectual property.” Unlike cultural marxists and “post-marxists” (who tend to refer to Marx’s general spirit more than his actual ideas), Wark focuses squarely on “the property question,” which is to say, on issues of economic production, of ownership of the means of production and the results of the production process, and therefore of exploitation and expropriation. Class is the central category of Wark’s analysis, and Wark defines class as Marx defined it, as grounded in people’s diverse relations to production and property, rather than using the vaguer sociological sense (a group of people with a common sense of identity and values) that is most often used today. It’s always a question of conflicting interests between the producers of value, and the legal owners who gain profit from the producers’ labor, and who control the surplus that the producers produce.
Modern capitalism begins in the 16th and 17th centuries, when — in the wake of the decline of feudalism — wealthy landowners expropriate formerly common lands, reducing farmers or peasants to the status of (at best) paid laborers (but more often, landless people who own nothing, and can’t even find work). (This is the stage of what Marx calls “primitive accumulation,” a useful term that Wark oddly fails to employ). Capitalism then intensifies in the 18th and especially the 19th century, when industrial workers, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists, who control the means of production, and who reap the profits from the massive economic expansion of industrialization. Wark sees a third version of this process in our contemporary Information Age, where the producers of information (understood in the widest sense: artists, scientists, software developers, and all sorts of innovators, anyone in short who produces knowledge) find their labor expropriated from them by large corporations which own patents and copyrights on their inventions. Wark calls the information producers “hackers,” and refers to the owners/expropriators of information as “the vectorialist class” (since “information” travels along “vectors” as it is reproduced and transmitted from place to place).
This formulation allows Wark to synthesize and combine a wide range of insights about the politics and economics of information. As many observers have noted, what used to be an information “commons” is increasingly being privatized (just as common land was privatized 500 years ago). Corporations trademark well-known expressions, copyright texts and data that used to circulate in the public domain, and even patent entire genomes. The irony is, that even as new technologies make possible the proliferation and new creation of all sorts of knowledge and information (from mash-up recordings to database correlations to software improvements to genetic alterations), the rules of “intellectual property” have increasingly restricted this proliferation. It’s paradoxical that downloading mp3s should be policed in the same way as physical property is protected from theft; since if I steal your car, you no longer have it, but when I copy your music file I don’t deprive you of anything. Culture has always worked by mixing and matching and altering, taking what’s already there and messing with it; but now for the first time such tinkering is becoming illegal, since the very contents of our common culture have been redefined as private property. As I’m always telling my students, under contemporary laws Shakespeare never could have written his plays. Though nothing is valued more highly in our world today than “innovation,” the rules of intellectual property increasingly shackle innovation, because only large corporations can afford to practice it.
Wark makes sense of these developments as nobody else has, by locating them, in his “crypto-marxist” terms, as phenomena of “the property question” and class struggle. “Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains” (#126). This means also that the struggle over information is more crucial, more central, than traditional marxists (still too wedded to the industrial paradigm) have been willing to notice. While previous forms of economic exploitation have often been (dubiously) justified on grounds of scarcity, Wark points out that for information this justification becomes completely absurd. Information is cheap and abundant, and it takes all sorts of convolutions to bring it under the rule of scarcity. This alone reveals the idiocy of “intellectual property.” Individual hackers (software engineers, say, or songwriters) might feel they have something to gain economically by controlling (and making sure they get paid for) the product of their particular informational labors; but in a larger sense, their “class interest” lies in free information, because only in that way do they have access to the body of information or culture that is the “raw material” for their own creations. And the fact is that, by dint of their ownership of this raw material, it is always the “vectorlist class” who will profit from new creations, rather than the creators/hackers themselves.
In making his arguments, Wark brings together a number of different currents. If his Manifesto has its deepest roots in the Western Marxist tradition, from Marx himself through Lukacs and Benjamin to the Situationists, it also draws heavily on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the “virtual,” as well as Mauss’ theory of the gift. At the same time, it relates directly to the practices (and the ethos) of the free software movement, of DJs producing mash-ups, and of radical Net and software artists. (Indeed, much of the book originally appeared on the nettime listserv).
Much of the power of A Hacker Manifesto comes from the way that it “abstracts” and coordinates such a wide range of sources. Wark argues that the power of “information” lies largely in its capacity to make ever-larger “abstractions”: “to abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature, to make known some instance of its possibilities, to actualize a relation out of infinite relationality, to manifest the manifold” (#008). Abstraction is the power behind our current servitude, but it is also the source of our potential expanded freedom. The regime of intellectual property abstracts away from our everyday experience, turning it into a controlled stream of 1s and 0s. But the answer to this expropriation is to push abstraction still further, to unleash the potentialities that the “vectorialist” regime still restricts. A Hacker Manifesto is already, in itself, such an act of further abstraction; it charts a path from already-existing forms of resistance and creation to a more generalized (more abstract) mode of action.
There are various points, I admit, at which I am not entirely convinced. Wark makes, for instance, too much of a separation between industrial workers and hackers, as between capitalists and vectorialists; this underestimates the continuity of the history of expropriation; I’d be happier with a term like Hardt and Negri’s multitude, vague and undefined as it is, than I am with Wark’s too-rigid separation between industrial production and knowledge production. Hardt and Negri have a more generous understanding than Wark does of the ways in which the information economy creates the common. I’m also, I fear, too cynical to accept the historical optimism that Wark in fact shares with Hardt and Negri; in the world today, I think, in both rich countries and poor, our affective investments in commodification and consumerism are far too strong for our desires to really become aligned with our actual class interests (however powerful a case these theorists make for what those interests are).
Nonetheless, I don’t want to end this review on such a (mildly) negative note. If anything, I fear that my comments here have failed to give a sense of the full breadth of Wark’s argument: of the full scope of his references, of how much ground he covers, of the intensity and uncompromising radicality of his vision. Whether or not A Hacker Manifesto succeeds in rousing people to action, it’s a book that anyone who’s serious about understanding the changes wrought by digital culture will have to take into consideration.
McKenzie Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkable and beautiful book: cogent, radical, and exhilarating, a politico-aesthetic call to arms for the digital age.
The book really is, as its title says, a manifesto: a public declaration of principles for a radically new vision, and a call to action based on that vision. It’s written as a series of short, numbered paragraphs or theses; the writing is tight, compressed, and aphoristic, or a Wark himself likes to say, “abstract.” It’s not “difficult” in the way that certain “post-structuralist” philosophical texts (Derrida, Lacan, etc) are difficult; rather, A Hacker Manifesto is characterized by an intense lucidity, as if the writing had been subjected to intense atmospheric pressure, so that it could say the most in the least possible space. Deleuze writes somewhere that an aphorism is a field of forces in tension; Wark’s writing is aphoristic in precisely this sense. I read the book with both delight and excitement, even when I didn’t altogether agree with everything that Wark said.
A Hacker Manifesto owes something — both in form and content — to Marx and Engels, and more to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (a book about which I feel deeply ambivalent). Wark’s ambition (which he calls “crypto-marxist”) is to apply Marx’s ideas to our current age of digitization and “intellectual property.” Unlike cultural marxists and “post-marxists” (who tend to refer to Marx’s general spirit more than his actual ideas), Wark focuses squarely on “the property question,” which is to say, on issues of economic production, of ownership of the means of production and the results of the production process, and therefore of exploitation and expropriation. Class is the central category of Wark’s analysis, and Wark defines class as Marx defined it, as grounded in people’s diverse relations to production and property, rather than using the vaguer sociological sense (a group of people with a common sense of identity and values) that is most often used today. It’s always a question of conflicting interests between the producers of value, and the legal owners who gain profit from the producers’ labor, and who control the surplus that the producers produce.
Modern capitalism begins in the 16th and 17th centuries, when — in the wake of the decline of feudalism — wealthy landowners expropriate formerly common lands, reducing farmers or peasants to the status of (at best) paid laborers (but more often, landless people who own nothing, and can’t even find work). (This is the stage of what Marx calls “primitive accumulation,” a useful term that Wark oddly fails to employ). Capitalism then intensifies in the 18th and especially the 19th century, when industrial workers, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists, who control the means of production, and who reap the profits from the massive economic expansion of industrialization. Wark sees a third version of this process in our contemporary Information Age, where the producers of information (understood in the widest sense: artists, scientists, software developers, and all sorts of innovators, anyone in short who produces knowledge) find their labor expropriated from them by large corporations which own patents and copyrights on their inventions. Wark calls the information producers “hackers,” and refers to the owners/expropriators of information as “the vectorialist class” (since “information” travels along “vectors” as it is reproduced and transmitted from place to place).
This formulation allows Wark to synthesize and combine a wide range of insights about the politics and economics of information. As many observers have noted, what used to be an information “commons” is increasingly being privatized (just as common land was privatized 500 years ago). Corporations trademark well-known expressions, copyright texts and data that used to circulate in the public domain, and even patent entire genomes. The irony is, that even as new technologies make possible the proliferation and new creation of all sorts of knowledge and information (from mash-up recordings to database correlations to software improvements to genetic alterations), the rules of “intellectual property” have increasingly restricted this proliferation. It’s paradoxical that downloading mp3s should be policed in the same way as physical property is protected from theft; since if I steal your car, you no longer have it, but when I copy your music file I don’t deprive you of anything. Culture has always worked by mixing and matching and altering, taking what’s already there and messing with it; but now for the first time such tinkering is becoming illegal, since the very contents of our common culture have been redefined as private property. As I’m always telling my students, under contemporary laws Shakespeare never could have written his plays. Though nothing is valued more highly in our world today than “innovation,” the rules of intellectual property increasingly shackle innovation, because only large corporations can afford to practice it.
Wark makes sense of these developments as nobody else has, by locating them, in his “crypto-marxist” terms, as phenomena of “the property question” and class struggle. “Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains” (#126). This means also that the struggle over information is more crucial, more central, than traditional marxists (still too wedded to the industrial paradigm) have been willing to notice. While previous forms of economic exploitation have often been (dubiously) justified on grounds of scarcity, Wark points out that for information this justification becomes completely absurd. Information is cheap and abundant, and it takes all sorts of convolutions to bring it under the rule of scarcity. This alone reveals the idiocy of “intellectual property.” Individual hackers (software engineers, say, or songwriters) might feel they have something to gain economically by controlling (and making sure they get paid for) the product of their particular informational labors; but in a larger sense, their “class interest” lies in free information, because only in that way do they have access to the body of information or culture that is the “raw material” for their own creations. And the fact is that, by dint of their ownership of this raw material, it is always the “vectorlist class” who will profit from new creations, rather than the creators/hackers themselves.
In making his arguments, Wark brings together a number of different currents. If his Manifesto has its deepest roots in the Western Marxist tradition, from Marx himself through Lukacs and Benjamin to the Situationists, it also draws heavily on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the “virtual,” as well as Mauss’ theory of the gift. At the same time, it relates directly to the practices (and the ethos) of the free software movement, of DJs producing mash-ups, and of radical Net and software artists. (Indeed, much of the book originally appeared on the nettime listserv).
Much of the power of A Hacker Manifesto comes from the way that it “abstracts” and coordinates such a wide range of sources. Wark argues that the power of “information” lies largely in its capacity to make ever-larger “abstractions”: “to abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature, to make known some instance of its possibilities, to actualize a relation out of infinite relationality, to manifest the manifold” (#008). Abstraction is the power behind our current servitude, but it is also the source of our potential expanded freedom. The regime of intellectual property abstracts away from our everyday experience, turning it into a controlled stream of 1s and 0s. But the answer to this expropriation is to push abstraction still further, to unleash the potentialities that the “vectorialist” regime still restricts. A Hacker Manifesto is already, in itself, such an act of further abstraction; it charts a path from already-existing forms of resistance and creation to a more generalized (more abstract) mode of action.
There are various points, I admit, at which I am not entirely convinced. Wark makes, for instance, too much of a separation between industrial workers and hackers, as between capitalists and vectorialists; this underestimates the continuity of the history of expropriation; I’d be happier with a term like Hardt and Negri’s multitude, vague and undefined as it is, than I am with Wark’s too-rigid separation between industrial production and knowledge production. Hardt and Negri have a more generous understanding than Wark does of the ways in which the information economy creates the common. I’m also, I fear, too cynical to accept the historical optimism that Wark in fact shares with Hardt and Negri; in the world today, I think, in both rich countries and poor, our affective investments in commodification and consumerism are far too strong for our desires to really become aligned with our actual class interests (however powerful a case these theorists make for what those interests are).
Nonetheless, I don’t want to end this review on such a (mildly) negative note. If anything, I fear that my comments here have failed to give a sense of the full breadth of Wark’s argument: of the full scope of his references, of how much ground he covers, of the intensity and uncompromising radicality of his vision. Whether or not A Hacker Manifesto succeeds in rousing people to action, it’s a book that anyone who’s serious about understanding the changes wrought by digital culture will have to take into consideration.
Jonathan Couette’s Tarnation is an astonishing, heartbreakingly beautiful film. It’s autobiography transfigured, and life as performance. It’s a survivor’s diary, and it’s a love letter without hope, yet unquelled by the absence of hope. It’s a psychedelic, avant-garde, experimental film, and yet it’s a pure documentary, concerned with the Real, only the Real.
Jonathan Couette’s mother Belle was and is crazy: after an incident of (what Freud would have called) hysterical paralysis when she was 12, she was given hundreds of shock treatments, which unhinged her for good. She gave birth to Jonathan when she was 19; his father was already gone from the picture. Jonathan remembers seeing Belle raped in front of him when he was three. She got even crazier after that, and he was taken from her; after a few years in foster homes (where he remembers being abused), he was raised by his grandparents (Belle’s parents), while Belle herself spent years going into and out of various psychiatric institutions. Growing up, Jonathan suffered from “depersonalization disorder” (a sort of dissociation that leads to one’s viewing oneself and one’s body affectlessly, as if from the outside, and being tormented with a continuing sense of unreality). But he also discovered that he was gay, and found in his gayness, and in his passion for acting and filmmaking, ways of escaping the familial horror that nonetheless continues to haunt him.
Tarnation is about — no, Tarnation is — Couette’s self-healing and self-overcoming, together with his infinite love for Belle, the mother who was literally never able to be “there” for him. The film contains some reenactments, but mostly it’s composed of the Super-8 films (and later the videos) of his own life that he started shooting when he was 11 years old (he is now 31 or so). Footage of himself and his family and his real-life dilemmas; and parallel footage of his acting, his trying out of different personas. On the one hand, we see him at 11, in drag, putting on the role of a Southern belle with a young child, who was raped much like he remembered his mother being: there’s incredible nervousness in this performance, but also an over-the-top melodramatic flair, as if such role-playing could exorcize the pain by some sort of homeopathic ritual. On the other hand, we see him as an adult, in the present, trying to interview his mother, trying to make some sense of her mood swings, her inconsistencies, her bitterness and anger, her inability to focus or to make anything of herself.
But Tarnation is not a film of pathos and victimization. It’s quite harrowing in parts, depressing and devastating and overwhelmingly sad; but it’s also a powerful act of reimagining and reinventing, the creation and projection of a new sensibility, a new subjectivity. And as such, there’s something exuberant, even (dare I say it?) exhilarating about it.
A formalist would call it a triumph of montage. The film is a swirl of fragmentary images, unexpected leaps and associations, and soundtrack music that both intensifies and distances the material being presented on the screen. Couette mixes his personal, archival footage with bits and pieces of movies, TV shows, and pop songs; he cuts his images up, sometimes playing them out of sequence, or repeating them like musical motifs or dividing and multiplying them on the screen. A lot of the recorded speech is barely audible, while crucial details of his life story are distanced by being narrated only by terse third-person printed titles.
In all these ways, the form of the film matches the content. Not just in terms of schizophrenic disintegration, but much more importantly as an act of reconstruction. For Tarnation doesn’t try to restore a “normal” life, to establish a straightforward (or straight) narrative; it doesn’t offer consolation. What it does do, beautifully and astoundingly, is produce a subjectivity (for the film, and hopefully for the director/protagonist as well) that is capable of enduring (of living through, of not just surviving, but persisting in the face of) the traumas and tribulations of its history. Tarnation expresses and embodies a mode of being-in-the-world that is absolutely singular, rich and strange, yet at the same time completely comprehensible and recognizable to the spectator (watching the film, I find myself utterly captivated by and immersed in its alien and unsettling world, while at the same time understanding that this world is not all that strange and alien after all, since it is also my own, the very same world that I myself inhabit). It’s something about the third person titles, the acting and role-playing, the interweaving of personal footage with media footage, the continual metamorphoses of images in the frame, the rush of events punctuated by moments of stillness.
The emotion that makes it all work, and that is embedded deeply in every frame of the film, is Couette’s love for his mother: a love that is absolute and unconditional (as any true love must ultimately be), at the same time that it is impossible (and recognized as impossible): impossible for anybody, in any circumstances, of course, but all the more so with a mother as unstable, unavailable, unreachable as Belle. Tarnation is, you might say, a melodramatic fiction: not fiction in the sense of illusion, however, but a fiction that is entirely actualized, wholly present, in Couette’s own life, and that also becomes actual for us, as we watch the film.
Jonathan Couette’s Tarnation is an astonishing, heartbreakingly beautiful film. It’s autobiography transfigured, and life as performance. It’s a survivor’s diary, and it’s a love letter without hope, yet unquelled by the absence of hope. It’s a psychedelic, avant-garde, experimental film, and yet it’s a pure documentary, concerned with the Real, only the Real.
Jonathan Couette’s mother Belle was and is crazy: after an incident of (what Freud would have called) hysterical paralysis when she was 12, she was given hundreds of shock treatments, which unhinged her for good. She gave birth to Jonathan when she was 19; his father was already gone from the picture. Jonathan remembers seeing Belle raped in front of him when he was three. She got even crazier after that, and he was taken from her; after a few years in foster homes (where he remembers being abused), he was raised by his grandparents (Belle’s parents), while Belle herself spent years going into and out of various psychiatric institutions. Growing up, Jonathan suffered from “depersonalization disorder” (a sort of dissociation that leads to one’s viewing oneself and one’s body affectlessly, as if from the outside, and being tormented with a continuing sense of unreality). But he also discovered that he was gay, and found in his gayness, and in his passion for acting and filmmaking, ways of escaping the familial horror that nonetheless continues to haunt him.
Tarnation is about — no, Tarnation is — Couette’s self-healing and self-overcoming, together with his infinite love for Belle, the mother who was literally never able to be “there” for him. The film contains some reenactments, but mostly it’s composed of the Super-8 films (and later the videos) of his own life that he started shooting when he was 11 years old (he is now 31 or so). Footage of himself and his family and his real-life dilemmas; and parallel footage of his acting, his trying out of different personas. On the one hand, we see him at 11, in drag, putting on the role of a Southern belle with a young child, who was raped much like he remembered his mother being: there’s incredible nervousness in this performance, but also an over-the-top melodramatic flair, as if such role-playing could exorcize the pain by some sort of homeopathic ritual. On the other hand, we see him as an adult, in the present, trying to interview his mother, trying to make some sense of her mood swings, her inconsistencies, her bitterness and anger, her inability to focus or to make anything of herself.
But Tarnation is not a film of pathos and victimization. It’s quite harrowing in parts, depressing and devastating and overwhelmingly sad; but it’s also a powerful act of reimagining and reinventing, the creation and projection of a new sensibility, a new subjectivity. And as such, there’s something exuberant, even (dare I say it?) exhilarating about it.
A formalist would call it a triumph of montage. The film is a swirl of fragmentary images, unexpected leaps and associations, and soundtrack music that both intensifies and distances the material being presented on the screen. Couette mixes his personal, archival footage with bits and pieces of movies, TV shows, and pop songs; he cuts his images up, sometimes playing them out of sequence, or repeating them like musical motifs or dividing and multiplying them on the screen. A lot of the recorded speech is barely audible, while crucial details of his life story are distanced by being narrated only by terse third-person printed titles.
In all these ways, the form of the film matches the content. Not just in terms of schizophrenic disintegration, but much more importantly as an act of reconstruction. For Tarnation doesn’t try to restore a “normal” life, to establish a straightforward (or straight) narrative; it doesn’t offer consolation. What it does do, beautifully and astoundingly, is produce a subjectivity (for the film, and hopefully for the director/protagonist as well) that is capable of enduring (of living through, of not just surviving, but persisting in the face of) the traumas and tribulations of its history. Tarnation expresses and embodies a mode of being-in-the-world that is absolutely singular, rich and strange, yet at the same time completely comprehensible and recognizable to the spectator (watching the film, I find myself utterly captivated by and immersed in its alien and unsettling world, while at the same time understanding that this world is not all that strange and alien after all, since it is also my own, the very same world that I myself inhabit). It’s something about the third person titles, the acting and role-playing, the interweaving of personal footage with media footage, the continual metamorphoses of images in the frame, the rush of events punctuated by moments of stillness.
The emotion that makes it all work, and that is embedded deeply in every frame of the film, is Couette’s love for his mother: a love that is absolute and unconditional (as any true love must ultimately be), at the same time that it is impossible (and recognized as impossible): impossible for anybody, in any circumstances, of course, but all the more so with a mother as unstable, unavailable, unreachable as Belle. Tarnation is, you might say, a melodramatic fiction: not fiction in the sense of illusion, however, but a fiction that is entirely actualized, wholly present, in Couette’s own life, and that also becomes actual for us, as we watch the film.