Friday, 26th September. Mackenzie Wark's 'A Hacker Manifesto'

Well attended meeting in the rampART library gathered around a chess game with Bryn and Sayeed multitasking (forgot to ask who won). So... we've had ping pong with Bourdieu and chess with Wark - a nice coincidence considering the similarities between the field in which hacking operates and the binary move/counter-move and constant displacements/replacements of chess (but I have no idea how to play the game so please feel free to violently disagree with me). Anyway, the meeting seemed to be characterised by a tension between hacking enthusiasts and those of us that preferred to read Wark as using hacking as a metaphor for any kind of intervention that disrupts the flows of commodified information. In this sense, of course, he can be read as advocating strategies similar to the SI's 'anti-art' so that hacking becomes somewhat indistinguishable from detournement. On the other hand, as the hacking enthusiasts seemed to be pointing out, Richard Stallman's advocation of 'copyleft' practices is also informed by a politics which understands the field on which the reification of information proceeds to be open to practices which undermine the commodity form. This, we thought, was what Wark's manifesto was advocating but on a wider field, taking into account the possibilities for re-conceptualising the term in the Bergsonian/Deleuzian concept of virtuality. The 'virtual' in this sense, becomes, not only the space in which hacking occurs but the generally unrecognised potential prior to all forms of representation. That he devotes a section of the manifesto to discussing representation, as well as the striated forms of contemporary education, we found instructive.
Another tension that we discussed was between the generally accepted definition of hacking as an 'illegal' activity and Stallman's call for the open production of software. Hackers, in other words, have become subject to a form of representation in which they are characterised as 'criminal' which has the effect of establishing the understanding of information in terms of private property. Any radical intervention must therefore proceed on the basis of, as Wark suggests, hacking the forms of representation (my words, not his). In a sense, this is not so very different from practical applications of deconstruction and other critical practices. On the other hand, what he is primarily interested in is that hackers should recognise themselves as a class. Despite his reference to artists, musicians etc. which would seem to be exclusive and only pertain to certain kinds of creative practice, his comments on class would seem to indicate that he is using hacking as a term to distinguish the productive class of the information age, no matter what forms of production are involved. Virtuality would make sense here as a concept which refers to emergent subjectivities.
We discussed the fact that the manifesto would have seemed utopian in the days before the bursting of the dotcom bubble and that now it seemed somewhat tired and parochial and unaware of the imbalance of access to information globally. But we also discussed the fact that the hacker class would necessarily involve those involved in the manufacture of computer components and everyone representationally affected by global information flows and the hegemony of what Wark calls the 'vectoralist class'. We thought the idea of vectoralism to be the most useful concept emerging from the manifesto as it designates a new bourgeois class invested in the abstraction of information and its valorisation as the only legitimate form of knowledge. We ended by returning to the sense in which hacking can be understood as a concept which can be applied to all forms of radical interventions, including techniques such as William Burroughs' 'cut-up' method. Aided by a website making some (in some cases, rather odd) suggestions for reading for left libertarians (an American site, so using the term somewhat 'liberally'?) we selected 'The Cut-Up Method of Bryon Gysin' and a chapter from Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night for our next reading.