A Hacker Manifesto by Mckenzie Wark

Author:Mckenzie Wark [McKenzie, Wark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0674015436
Publisher: Harvard University Press

STATE

[258]

The state is first and last an envelope, a permeable membrane, a skin, within which wells an interiority. This interiority comes to know itself as its representation—as a unified, abstract but limited plane—distinct from what it excludes as outside. But the state’s enclosure and interiority is only made possible by the vector, which provides the material means for producing the internal consistency of its abstract plane. This same vector which makes possible the envelope of the state is also the very thing that threatens to permeate it, opening holes in its enclosure that exceed the capacity of its representation as interiority to close.

[259]

The vector comes first, and then the envelope; the state is vectoral before it is “disciplinary.” First comes the capacity to subordinate the particulars of space to the abstraction of the vector, producing a homogenous space, bounded only by the limits of the vector. Extensive space is the precondition for intensive space, for the enclosing and monitoring of a world within, which may be classified and ordered.

[260]

The overdeveloped world becomes overdeveloped through its precocious capacity to project the vector across space, designating the underdeveloped world as one of objective and subjective resources for exploitation. The overdeveloped world protects itself within states that, at one and the same time, project a vector beyond, along which to draw resources, while limiting the capacity of the underdeveloped world to traffic along the same vector. The underdeveloped world acquires the envelope of the state reactively, as a protection of sorts against the vector, but depends in turn on the vector to construct its own internal abstract space. The vector is the double bind that both seals the bounds of the state and steals away through its skin.

[261]

It is the state that manages, records and verifies the representation of subjects and objects, citizens and their property. At the empty heart of the state, its camera obscura, is the primary act of violence by which it establishes the separation of objects from subjects, and its own prerogative in policing the plane upon which they may meet. The vectoral state, which employs every technology for the refinement of this most abstract plane upon which objects and subjects meet, produces the most pervasive and subtle terrain of conflict and negotiation for the contending classes. The state brings classes into being as a representative politics that is also a politics of representation. All classes struggle or collude with each other directly, but their direct contact is partial and particular. It is their contact upon the plane of representation created by the state that is abstract and formal.

[262]

The state is not only a machine for defining forms of property and arbitrating competing claims to property, it also transfers property through taxation and transfer. Classes struggle over who is taxed and at what rate, and also over the transfer of tax revenue by the state to classes or class fractions. Once the productive classes succeed, even in part, in their struggle to socialize property through the state, the property owning classes seek to limit the state’s redistributive powers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.