Wark - Mathias

McKenzie Wark interviews Paul Mathias
(Dec.'06 — Jan.'07)

KW01.—So Paul, when you chose from, and re-arranged some of the numbered sections of my book /A Hacker Manifesto/, what was your principle of selection?

PM.—/A Hacker Manifesto/ follows the logic of a dictionary, cataloging the main sociopolitical as well as economical or cultural issues of our contemporary world. I believe its alphabetical order is not meant to show that we just need to face a more or less arbitrary series of issues, and that there is no unity in these as they are determined by 'hacking' and/or 'vectoralism'. In other words, I don't see the whole book as a catalog, one chapter or another — any chapter — being read without any consideration for what other chapters are dealing with (as would be the case if you had to check this or that word in a dictionary).

In my opinion, /because/ they are arbitrarily arranged, the chapters in /A Hacker Manifesto/ tend to enhance the idea that there are multiple entries into /the/ problem of our world, its (post)modernity seen as a consequence of secular tensions between 'hacking' and 'vectoralization'. This outlines the fact that there are obviously various areas of our lives at stake when any of the issues you mention are encountered: 'education', 'information', 'property', 'world', to mention only a few. I see each and every single one of these issues as forming a unified pattern of problems, so that shifting from one chapter to the next only enhances the gravity of them all.

This said, it seems to me /A Hacker Manifesto/ focuses on two main 'unified patterns of problems': one is political, and concerns hacking as a way of dealing with and opposing 'vectoralism'; the other is more strictly theoretical and outlines the creative dimension of hacking. This is not to imply that the practical and the speculative approach are distinct from one another. More so, it means that understanding the 'affordances' of hacking is /both/ a matter of understanding what creation is, and its relation to nature as being-there; and of taking the responsibility to act by making real the virtualities of hacking. If I'm not mistaken, in /A Hacker Manifesto/ the creative process is understood as a pragmatic one of politically, economically, socially, and culturally transforming he world.

Now you may notice that 'my' re-arrangement starts with: 'A hacker history knows only the present tense'; and ends with: 'Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains' — let's say it begins with Nietzsche, and ends up with Rousseau!

Being a hacker is being creative, with only one interest, which is precisely to be creative, not to store up or accumulate knowledge as if it were a commodity. That's why it relates to the nietzschean /amor fati/, which is but the creative love for the Present, for Being. But on the other hand, it is also obvious that 'hacking' has also been a way of struggling against the commodification not of knowledge only, but of life /as such/. Whence my rousseauist ending, which is not meant to close the problem in a fatalist's view, but to reopen a horizon both practical and theoretical, struggling still being a possibility, and theorizing its goals and means a necessity.

Everything that comes in between these two aphorisms either describes and enhances, or tries to overcome the tensions opposing 'hacking' to its other: 'vectoralism'. Somehow, I see this 'entre-deux' as a pragmatic as well as Aristotelian way of describing what dealing practically with the world is about.

KW02.—How did you choose what order to put them in?

PM.—I would describe that order as 'speculative', in the sense that it is meant to develop some — not all — of the ideas that are important in /A Hacker Manifesto/. I wanted to start with 'hacking', which is of course central to the book, and try and show what it meant to you, namely the 'abs-tracting of new worlds' — which is also a way of “ex-tracting” them from nature itself (160a to 010). Being thus related to knowledge and information, hacking has to have something to do with subjectivity and freedom (296 to 128). That's where 'property' comes in, together with 'vectoralism' and the commodification of information/knowledge, thus 'power' (296 to 320).

Which calls for an exploration of the 'vectoral class' against 'vectoral subjectivity', the latter being subverted from its authentic ontology (318 to 042). The main consequence being 'the reign of the vector' (332), I also wanted to show — with your words — that 'the great challenge to the hacker class' (344) does not imply it is meant to be submerged by 'value', but allows for 'hack as pure hack' (159) or 'freeing the concept of the hacker' (072), which is also a way of bringing in 'a new world and a new being' (ibid.).

KW03.—Why did you suggest the title 'Hacker's Delight'?

PM.—/A Hacker Manifesto/ is a hack in itself, and a delightful one too, I think. Marxist, Nietzschean, even somehow Aristotelian in inspiration, it re-arranges and applies new curves to traditional patterns of thought. From a purely sensitive and aesthetic point of view, it reminded me of one of the first rap tunes — at least one of the first well-known to the general public —, the famous /Rapper's Delight/ by The Sugarhill Gang. Whence the title that I chose to describe your work, and mine by analogy — me hacking your hack, or rapping your rap!

KW04.—I can see the way in which /A Hacker Manifesto/ is both a Marxian and a Nietzschian text, if not quite in the usual combination. But in what sense is it Aristotelian?

PM.—Among other things, /A Hacker Manifesto/ deals with 'the creative production of abstraction' (071), and insists upon the fact that abstraction consists in 'construct[ing] a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations' (008). To me the relation to Aristotle seemed very obvious, at least by inspiration. In writing this, you were indeed describing a process that consists in bringing together the heterogeneous by means of a 'plane', that is an intellectual vision, whatever its focus may be. This I believe is close to the way Aristotle defines /poiesis/, while insisting that you need to deliberate to choose the right connections between what you call 'unrelated matters'. Of course one could also refer to Hegel and the /Phenomenology of Mind/, but in my case the name of Aristotle just came first.

KW05.—The idea, or rather the process, of 'abstracting' is the first concept in the original text, but as you say, it sometimes means something more like extracting. Might there be work that this term ought to do in the framework of the text?

PM.—The idea of substituting 'extraction' for 'abstraction' is suggested by the way parts of your essay were sometimes translated into French. Sometimes the choice was made to translate the latter (English) into the former (French). For instance 'we are the abstracters of new worlds' was translated into '/nous sommes les extracteurs des nouveaux mondes/' (002). I believe there is ground to do so. The process of 'abstracting' is one of getting rid of/depreciating parts of something as well as appreciating/choosing to overvalue some other part(s) of the same thing. Generally speaking, that is what happens with 'nature', or to be more precise 'matter', for instance.

In the process of exploitation, what we do relates to purification (of metal, oil, gas, water, etc.), and purification is but a choice to exploit one property of matter to the detriment of another. The same happens with design and forms, which at first are simplifications of natural figures, then enhancements of these figures into 'abstractions', which in turn become 'pure forms' that can be dealt with notwithstanding any reference to their 'natural' origins. In this sense, abstraction may be considered a process of extraction, our practical or theoretical exploitation of nature — or reality in general — being the tearing out of forms/information.

The way I understand /A Hacker Manifesto/, the abstraction/ extraction semantic contiguity relates to your idea of 'hacking'. 'Hacking' does not at all look to me as the uncovering of hidden data — hidden in nature or a text — but rather like the rendering of one state of the real we are focusing on in the (new) terms of a newly processing and inventive intelligence. 'Hacking' is making things SAY what there are not supposed to say. That white spot we call Venus was not supposed to tell Galileo that it was a planet, not a star; Galilee MADE it say that, by staring at it in a peculiar/technological way and interpreting the /shades/ he could notice on its surface. Same thing with oil or diamonds for instance: the Earth does say/show where the things we're interested in are lying, we have to interpret its surface and/or structure to uncover them. Interpreting a text is also hacking it, in more or less talented ways, not all of us having Plutarch's or Montaigne's genius!

Of course, the interesting thing is that where 'hacking' occurs, exploitation comes right after it, or vectoralization. And that's exactly what /A Hacker Manifesto/ is about. It is true as far as exploiting nature is concerned, as far as research and its economics are concerned, it is also true as far as the Symbolic is concerned and interpreters, intellectuals, readers are involved. After all, your idea of 'education' goes to show that it is not at all about Truth or the Good, but mainly about 'vectoralizing' the processes of the intellect. You may need a gun to look for gold in the Amazonian jungle; an Abraham tank to look for oil in the desert; a letter of recommendation will do the job in Academia. Because 'abstracting' is 'extracting', 'hacking' is bound to end up or be subverted to 'vectoralizing'.

KW06.—Can one really make a claim these days for an 'authentic ontology', and argue that there is a kind of power which diverts us from it? Since the whole text quite diligently refuses to even mention Heidegger, do you think there is really a wager here on a renewal of an ontological reading of Marx? Ernesto Laclau proposes in /Emancipation(s)/ that there are three kinds of reading, after Marx: the deconstructive, the ethical and the ontological. Perhaps finally here is the return of the third...

PM.—I wonder what was happening /before/ Marx or /during/ his endeavor to describe the industrial world. It seems to me he deconstructed Hegel and Idealism, indulged in ethical considerations, and was obviously an onto-anthropologist, though he may not have been a rigorous onto-theologist... And wasn't Aristotle deconstructing Presocratism in the first book of his /Peri Phuseos/, wasn't Epicurus 'ethical' or Plato an 'ontologist'...? Or maybe what is meant here is that ontology is 'naive', 'ethics' somehow bourgeois, and deconstruction 'awesome'! Or I may be totally out of line here...

Now the way I read it, /A Hacker Manifesto/ IS a work of ontology. This doesn't mean it deals with Being 'as such', or the Dasein — dressed up in hackers clothes and camouflaged behind a large computer scientist's beard — but it definitely describes the process of life in terms of shared intelligence (hacking) and forces exerted against it (vectoralization). This may not be an ontology of matter and form, or a new sort of mental/physical dualism, but it certainly sounds to me like something I would call 'processualism' (if nobody else is using the term for anything else), the idea being that reality — our reality — is the result of intellectual as well as practical processes implying not only the use of intelligence, but also forces, natural and political, economical, social, cultural, etc.

Indeed, the 'struggle' you describe between hackers and the 'vectoralist world' doesn't look like an accident in human history, but a rendering of what constitutes it intimately and — ontologically! Your refusal to mention Heidegger doesn't have to mean your refusal to be somewhat of an ontologist. Besides, I don't see why there should be a heideggerian monopoly on ontology! After all hackers should reclaim the right to be ontologists too. And doing so is understanding language as THE hack as such — the rendering of 'nature' by means of information. Which is equal to translating 'nature' in terms of information; which is the same as constituting 'nature' as an informative horizon; which is the same as 'creating new worlds';
which is the same as 'hacking'.

KW07.—The distinction between abstracting and extracting is not in the English edition, but it seems to me very helpful. Maybe its a two stage operation: extract, then abstract. The would describe the hack, cut and construction.

PM.—I wouldn't 'dualize' the hack that way. I would rather consider it as double-sided, abstraction and extraction being inflections of one process, not two processes or parts of a process. When you dig a hole into the earth to extract iron or whatever else, abstraction doesn't come afterwards; the digging and the hole(=extraction) are in themselves a process of abstraction, since they outline the significance of that very earth as a technological means. This is also true if you consider extraction/abstraction in 'the symbolic'. The 'truth' you're supposed to recognize in a text, for instance, is 'extracted' from its literality while at the same time the text is 'abstracted', in the sense that it becomes the 'lesson' and the 'truth' you understand. Again, there is no need for separating these 'inflections', suffice that you consider them as describing the hacking process as such.

KW08.—Yes, abstraction and extraction are implied in each other. Is translation also a kind of hack? I wrote /A Hacker Manifesto/ in a language that doesn't exist. I wrote it in 'European'. A 'European' that has nothing to do with the EU, or a shared identity or anything like that, but to do with transversal flows of languages, particularly fallen ones: Latin, Marxism, 'business English'. Do you think its possible to conceive of language outside of being the property of the nation? Would that be to 'hack' it?

PM.—Translating is definitely hacking, simply because it is not transliteration, and cannot be automatized. Google's translation services came up lately with a very funny result: translated into French, the 'J. Edgar Hoover' article in Wikipedia comes out as 'J. Edgar Aspirateur', since Hoover (the brand) is renowned for its vacuum cleaners (aspirateurs)... This is no 'hack', only mechanics! When translating, you obviously need to re-create the text you're working on, by extracting/abstracting the meaning that lies within.

The nuances you're talking about are totally new to me, both because (a) I've read the book in French, and unfortunately the nuances don't show — I'd say the tone is rather academia-oriented; and because (b) I haven't been able to notice the variations of tone in the English/European parts of the text that you copied for me. I find it an extremely interesting literary attempt to mingle the registries you're referring to and to create/hack the English language by imposing on it the various tones required by the other languages it is thriving on.

The connection between language and nation is a romantic one, rooted in the thought of thinkers like the Germans Humboldt or Herder, among others. I wouldn't even say that the Greeks, who were so keen on their language, would connect language and nation, since the equivalent to our 'nation' was their 'city' — and there were so many
of them, speaking the same language. Then 'language is the 'property of a nation' when and only when you consider the 'nation' as a territory for a /Volksgeist/ to develop, and this is quite recent, as well as, I think: /obsolete/. The most eloquent example is English, which is the language of all nations/no nation in particular. There is Oxford English as there is Bronx English; British as well as Latino; American as well as Canadian, etc. English is no singularity, it's a complex linguistic phenomenon, perpetually 'auto-hacked'. This is not to say that connecting language to 'nation' is useless. I think it has its ethical/political importance, especially when forgotten or very little spoken languages are concerned. With their disappearance, people and cultures are so to say 'erased' from the surface of the Earth or Humankind. So while I believe the connection between language and nation is a 'romantic formalization', I also think that the connection should be made/sustained/defended for ethical-political reasons/ purposes.

KW09.—Can we conceive of 'poiesis' without Hegel? The 'poetics' of /A Hacker Manifesto/ owes a lot to what the Situationists called ‘détournement’, but as something quite different to Debord's occasional Hegelianism. Can we extract poiesis from this clumsy language of contradiction, negation, dialectic? Processualism might not be a bad word for it.

PM.—We could try and put Hegel between Aristotle and 'processualism'. With Aristotle, 'poiesis' is a disruption in the natural unity of the 'causes', since an agent is one who has to multiply the points of view that are coalesced in nature's ontological upbringing of things. To Hegel, there is one essential thing that does not exist in Aristotle, and that is 'the Subject'. Poiesis is the 'work' of the Subject, who transforms him/herself while transforming the world. To a large extent, the Subject is the center of gravity of the phenomenon of poiesis — and Spirit is the end and the soul of its own 'auto-poiesis'. 'Processualism' does not refer to the Subject, since the Subject is depropriated from his/her subjectivity — mainly to the benefit of the Network. And it does not either refer to teleology, as in Aristotle, things happening without any comprehensible goal. This might be a reason why 'hacking' is such a good idea for describing the way life 'works' in its complicatedness.

KW10.—If Marx was an onto-anthropologist but not a rigorous onto-theologist, do we need to be? Is that a necessary aspect of the project?

PM.—Even if we have to consider 'the real' is nothing but ideas, discourse, facts and trends, what we do need to focus on is what we call and try to describe as 'the real'. We certainly do not need to be ontologists for that, though it is rather difficult, I believe, not to be anthropologists of some sort. Surely we don't need to be inhabited by the idea of Man or Mankind, but we need to cope with the fact that /we/ live (together), share, fight, talk, imagine, think, etc. The 'hack' is a good way of considering all that in its essential diversity.

KW11.—Your 'remix' concentrates on the figure of hacking. Why choose this rather than, say, class, property, or surplus? The larger thesis of /A Hacker Manifesto/ is that intellectual property creates a new class relation, but that this relation is a fetter, given that information really can escape scarcity.

PM.—Considering 'class', 'property', 'surplus', one notices that they all belong to the same category of economical/political thought. And indeed, that's one of the main goals of your book: to comprehend and describe the economical/political consequences of 'vectoralization'. I had to make choices: either to summarize the various aspects of your work, or to focus and remix one or the other. I chose the latter, both because it allowed more precise 'hacking' to be done, and because (personally) I'm pretty much interested in the creative process and the way we 'give birth' to our ideas and 'loose' them as soon as we become aware of them — sort of, at least. In fact the very scheme of 'hacking' shows very accurately, I believe, the way reading leads to appropriating through the /working/ of texts, in the sense that working is like transforming them and producing/creating intellectual effects like papers and/or books.

Though your vocabulary (poetic and creative) and mine (academic) were quite different, what you wrote about 'hacking' as an intellectual process related very closely to what I had been writing about the French Montaigne and his own understanding of reading/writing — it also related to the way I understand our experience of the networks, at least as far as they include some form of creativity and are not reduced to consuming data.

There are many pieces in the /Essays/ where you experience Montaigne's own idea of 'thought hacking thought' (read all about it in my book /Montaigne ou l'Usage du monde/!). Thus the connection was very easy between your 'figure of hacking' and what I had and still have a true passion for.

KW12.—While its first language was English, some key reference points for /A Hacker Manifesto/ are French. It 'hacks' these in the sense that it pays no attention to the French context and appropriates them for its own purposes. But how to you see that being 'written back', as it were, to the French context, now that there is a French translation?

PM.—I'm not sure I can answer this question... You may be referring to those I call 'The Unreadables', such as Debord — not because I disagree with them, but because I just can't connect to the way they write... for that matter, I'll have to confess that my mind is irremediably stuck in 1592! ;-)

KW13.—How do you think /A Hacker Manifesto/ relates to the other contributions to this issue of /Rue Descartes/?

PM.—All the contributions in /Rue Descartes/ deal with particular issues regarding the networks, be it their structure, the way they allow for the development of original forms of political or social activism, their economy, even the way they encourage some sort of a 'new deal' involving our laws and the way we think about them, recreating the spaces in which they evolve.

Now you might remember Hegel's /Philosophy of Right/ and its 'Preface' ending with this: 'The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering'. I felt that closing the journal by 'hacking your hack' was like letting go the 'owl of Minerva', implying at least two things:
(a) The time to go and experience the 'affordances' of the networks is now, and 'hacking' is the way we should understand the principles of our textual being and togetherness, since it is not only about playing with words and things, but about appropriation/depropriation, and in a very literal sense /taking care of things/. Of course there's a trivial meaning to this expression, but if you think about it, it says that among our possibilities one is to take things in our hands and care for them, for their sake and not ours. Which is what reading and commenting is about: caring about something in such a way that it becomes fertile and a new creation can come out of it.
(b) Also 'Hacking' was like opening, not closing the journal. Our experience of the networks seems to be caught in a grip, between its infinite 'freedom' and the risk of 'alienation' that if brings with it — whence the choice of my first and last extracts in 'Hacker's Delight'. To a large extent, referring to /A Hacker Manifesto/ was like bearing light upon the reflections that were carried out by the journal as a whole, and announcing that anything IS still possible because the networks are fertile with their own creativity (action, art, knowledge) or destined to their own death (vectoralization, alienation, ultimate commodification, etc.).

To summarise my point, /A Hacker Manifesto/ could be considered a /mise en abyme/ of the relation between the networks and our reflection, such as it was developed by the various contributors to 'Webbed philosophies'.

KW14.—The verb 'to essay' is now rare in English, but it means to attempt something, or to strike out toward something. Might Montaigne be a good reference point for hacking, given that he writes with some distance from the discursive world of the church but is not yet caught up in a bourgeois subjectivity of the writer as the owner of his own words? Could we go back to Montaigne to go forward, toward a new model of writing as creation?

PM.—Though accidental up to a certain point, my meeting with both Montaigne and the networks is not accidental /in itself/ or /essentially/. Structurally, Montaigne's /Essays/ are as much a world as the web or internetworked thinking and knowledge, because they are deeply rooted into Ancient and Modern literature, philosophy, religious thought, and they are like a general (and generous) hack of that intellectual history-what Montaigne does being merely a 'hack' of so many authors and their writings. And he doesn't simply copy-paste their sentences and thoughts, he integrates them into a larger discourse, commenting upon them and in the course of the commentary freely transforming his 'matter' (or not) to liberate what he feels is lying within. Furthermore, this is not just a literary trick, something that would 'work' easily but without great attention to the very process of transformation. On the contrary, Montaigne claims that 'contradiction' is not an issue: 'I may perhaps gaine-say my selfe, but truth (as Demades said) I never gaine-say' (III.2, 'On Repentence'). Also: 'I have read in Titus Livius a number of things, which peradventure others never read, in whom Plutarke haply read a hundred more than ever I could read, which perhaps the author himselfe did never intend to set downe' (I.25, 'Of the Institution and Education of Children' — both citations in Florio's translation). What he obviously means — and that's why I think he is such a (post)modern thinker and writer — is that all (great and not so great) writers can be developed in thoughts way further than what they themselves might have imagined, and in this sense, quite obviously, that no one is the 'owner' of anything intellectually relevant. Ideas are connections, not substances, and what gives them their meaning is the way their are bound to one another, not their supposed 'author'.

This is not to say that Montaigne does not recognize the authors and their work — recognition needs to be separated from ownership. He clearly does recognize their work, in so far as he expresses and shows his respect for Plutarch, Cicero, Lucretius, etc. But precisely, what 'recognition' is about is the understanding and extraction/abstraction of an author's fertility, through the 'hacking' of his texts, and the connecting of newly created/written text to older ones, though newly enlightened by the very hack.

To a great extent, being a reader is always being a re-reader, and being a writer a re-writer; what it requires is mainly the ability to 'surf' within a network of ideas.

Montaigne himself was a recursive self-rereader and a self-rewriter — a manifest hacker, so to say!