wark, m.- designs for a new world (article-2014)

8/10/2019 Wark, M.- Designs for a New World (Article-2014)

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McKenzie Wark

Designs for aNew World

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The sort of things that get called ÒartÓ these daysexist on a continuum which, if it keepsstretching, will probably break. On one end, artbecomes a kind of financial instrument based onsingularizing money into an ÒobjectÓ that canhave provenance. It can be any kind of object Ðconceptual, imaginary Ð all that matters is thatthere is a document stating who bought it fromwho. Mind you, pictures work particularly well as

such instruments, particularly if they look goodin the .jpeg sent to potential buyerÕs iPhone.What we might designate as the Òart worldÓ isthis subsidiary financial market, one with sideeffects such as dissipating boredom, fosteringart-fair tourism, and giving todayÕs rentier classconversation pieces and home decoration.Artrank.com is this version of an art worldperfected.

At the other end of the art continuum,thereÕs the attempt to inhabit those spaces ofproduction that the art world requires as its

hinterlands Ð to do something else. Usually, ittakes the form of experimenting in those spaceswith practices of everyday life that could eitherhave a negative, critical function or anaffirmative, constructive function. Some old-fashioned art theorists insist on the negative roleof art, as if still hankering for that industrialsolvent smell of high modernism. But the jig isup. ItÕs probably time to start focusing on theaffirmative, constructive side, as Chris Krausdoes in her brief but illuminating text Lost

Properties. The design component is nosideshow. Once one starts looking afresh at theart-historical past, it is actually the main event.ÒFine artÓ was an historical dead end, no longerof much interest. The avant-gardes really aimedto Òchange life!Ó Ð and did.

For Asger Jorn, the artistÕs role is asproposer of forms. He saw fine art as atemporary aberration, not least in its modernistincarnation. Capitalism split production into twoseparate domains: the production of form andthe production of content. Labor gets reduced tothe production of content, to the filling in of pre-given forms. Artists belong to another class, the

class of form makers, makers of symbolic form,ritual form, social form, and so on. Art is a subsetof design. But it is a marginalized kind of design.The strategy then is firstly to assert the role ofart as design, and secondly to overcome theseparation of form and content in production.

JornÕs image of that production was the tinof soup, which is the separation between formand content taken to the limit. It doesnÕt matterwhat content fills the can, it is just goop. Hewrote about this before Warhol stepped off thepath of trying to make new forms and started

representing what the complete separation ofform from content looked like. Art world versions

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of Òcontemporary artÓ stem from this retreatfrom the challenge of being experimenters andproposers of form. From Warhol comes art asfinancial instrument, art completely separatedfrom anything but a container function.

To what class then do artists belong? Towhat many years ago I called the hacker class.The figure of the hacker is perhaps a morecompromised one than when I proposed it, but

that only shows that thereÕs something at stakein such a term. Artists belong to that class whichmakes the new out of the old, which transformsforms. It includes not just artists but alsoscientists and engineers. It is a class of all thosewhose efforts are captured by the form ofÒintellectual propertyÓ and made equivalent assuch. It is a class which, whatever its Òvirtuality,Óis still obliged to work in conditions not of itsmaking.

Of course labor still exists. Most of theworld is still being proletarianized. But it is

increasingly as labor which makes contentswithin elaborately designed forms. Labor iscaptured in forms that have both technical andaesthetic dimensions, and the hacker class,including ÒartistsÓ and most certainly designers,have to make the forms that will capture labor.Those forms still sometimes look like soup cans,

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but sometimes they look like iPads. You can thinkof an iPad as a CampbellÕs soup can meant tohold not food goop but brain goop. It is your brainreduced to digitized slurry.

So the thing to think about is whether therecan be alliances as well as conflicts between twosubordinate classes: worker and hacker. Theattempts to disrupt the Google buses in SanFrancisco actually demonstrates both. On the

one hand, itÕs workers against hackers, throwingrocks at their buses. On the other hand, itÕs morecomplicated. The bus protesters had insideinformation from people working within Google.Not everyone who designs code is aÒbrogrammerÓ who worships Ayn Rand.

Google is itself aware of the dangers of ahacker-worker alliance, as is well captured inAndrew Norman WilsonÕs Workers Leaving the

Googleplex . The intense stratification ofemployees, with different colored badgesoffering different grades of privilege, shows

among other things a certain nervousness aboutsuch alliances. When Wilson videotaped Googleworkers Ð people who scan books all day and arenot allowed to ride the bus or eat the free lunch Ðhe was instantly fired and his video confiscated.

Perhaps what weÕre dealing with now isnÕtactually capitalism any more Ð but something

Asger Jorn, FraternitŽ avant tout,1962. Oil on canvas. Silkeborg

Kunstmuseum. Photo: Lars Bay;Copyright: Donation Jorn,Silkeborg/VBK, Wien 2006.

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worse. Companies like Google are in the businessof surplus information, not surplus labor power.The goal is to build and own an infrastructurethat enforces an asymmetry of information,where for whatever information the user gets,much, much more is harvested. It no longer evenmatters whether this information is culled fromwork. It can also be extracted from everyday life.And lest one think Google is something of an

outlier: take a look at the Fortune 500 companiesand it turns out that most of them are now, inpart or in whole, in the information business.Even the biggest of them, Walmart. Those big-box stores are just a physical manifestation of afinancial and logistical data system. They aremoney and information congealed into a thing inthe landscape. In that regard they are rather likeart world works of art.

The ruling class itself has changed form.ThatÕs part of the reason the art world changedform. Art has a new kind of patron. One much

less interested in the making of things than inthe reaping of surplus from information. Its goalis the commodification of information flows. Assuch it undermines all of the old gift exchangesvia which information used to flow, in the family,the community, via schooling, and so forth. Whatthe capitalists did for the production of things,the new ruling class is doing for the production ofinformation. I call them the vectoralist class.

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They rule through the ownership and control ofthe vectors of information, its stocks, its flows,its design.

The Òdematerialization of artÓ washomologous with this transformation ofcapitalism into something else, something evenmore abstracted. Conceptual art is a side effectof the rise of conceptual business. But it wasmore a shift in the relation between information

and its material form than a dematerialization.What transpired was an abstracting ofinformation from any particular materialexpression, but not from materiality in general.

Incidentally, this is why I always dissentedfrom certain categories made popular by Hardtand Negri. ÒImmaterial laborÓ is just anabsurdity. A non-concept. What the hacker classdoes is neither labor as traditionally understood,nor is it Òimmaterial.Ó Nothing could be morematerial than the information-abstractinginfrastructure in which we now are obliged to

live. Nor is it the case that labor became morecooperative or collaborative. On the contrary,what the hacker class is obliged to design is theexact opposite: commodified, individualizedforms of information exchange. So while I salutethe fact that Hardt and Negri were at leastpaying attention to the right things rather thandroning on about Saint Paul, I donÕt think theiranalysis fit the lineaments of whatÕs transpired

Andrew Norman Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex , 2011. Courtesy of the artist. For more info see here https://vimeo.com/15852288

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Workers produce the Guy Fawkes masks used by Anonymous at a factory in Brazil. Photo: Reuters

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Medeco key hack as presented at DefCon, the hacker conference in Las Vegas. Marc Weber Tobias and his team of lock crackers allegedly debunked thecompany's high-security locks at 2008 DefCon. Photo: Dave Bullock

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all that closely.Both the worker and the hacker are drafted

into the production of a world against their will,and in a manner designed to pit them againsteach other in a war of all against all. Inequalityand precarity are built into the infrastructure oflabor and the everyday by design. Even thehacker class finds its conditions of existenceradically bifurcated by the winner-take-all

culture of the start-up. Unable to really measurethe ÒoutputÓ of form-designing practices, thevectoral class would rather just outsource italtogether. The start-up is the perfect model ofself-exploitation, where the hacker bears by farthe most risk, while the vectoral class gets tohedge its bets and collect the rents on anyintellectual property that might result.

IÕm glad that Elizabeth Povinelli addressesthe question of the effort that is involved in anykind of form-designing activity. Laboring iseffort, but usually effort that has been

standardized and segmented. Capitalism wasabout making labor time measurable, breaking itdown into pieces and putting a price on each unitof it as time. Hacking is also about effort, but itisnÕt so easy to break it down and quantify it,because itÕs a kind of effort that makesqualitative differences. ÒInformation is thedifference that makes a difference,Ó as GregoryBateson put it. It is very, very hard. But doing itmight involve long naps on the couch, a walkaround the block, waking up in the middle of thenight and banging away at something until dawn.ItÕs a different kind of effort, with a differentrelation to time.

It is not ÒimmaterialÓ effort. Such language just sleds us back to old-fashioned romanticideas about where ideas come from. Nothingcould be more material than producing newideas, forms, or designs. But thereÕs a certainnonstandard use of the material resources. Youcould call it play, or experiment. You can fetishizethe nonproductive aspect, particularly from anart historical point of view, but from a designpoint of view, what results is only secondarilynegation. What results is new forms, and the very

form of the new. All of what the avant-gardes didin the end is design.

Effort takes energy. The hack requires asurplus of energy. ÒBataille was right.Ó ItÕs what acivilization does with its surplus that defines it,shapes it, prefigures its future. What ourcivilization chose to do with energy is make itmeasurable. And so we know that, going by themeasure, this civilization canÕt last. Its time isalready up. It has lost all confidence in itself. Wecan measure exactly whatÕs gone wrong withwhat this civilization does with energy, but its

ruling class canÕt or wonÕt make the effort to doanything about it. The art they hoard shows it:

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this is a ruling class in decline. The obsessiveideological bleating about ÒpivotingÓ andÒdisruptingÓ is a cover for a glacial stasis.

And so thereÕs nothing for it but to take theirmoney, live as best we can, and try to buildprototypes for another life in the margins. Anyand every space might be a site for this. Theresults will likely be modest. LetÕs experiment!Who knows which new forms will take off and

take hold? If the continuum connecting realcreation to the art world breaks, so be it. It needsus more than we need it. For those of us from theart and language academy, perhaps the key isgetting out of our deeply conservative, evenreactionary, adherence to specialized traditions.LetÕs have done with fine art history and thehistory of continental high theory. No moreHeidegger; no more Duchamp. We need a newarchive of the present for a new kind of presenttime. And we need to collaborate more widely, tobe in dialog with very different domains of both

technical and aesthetic counter-production.Or as Mich•le Bernstein put it: Òmonsters ofall lands, unite!Ó

!

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McKenzie Wark is the co-author of Excommunication:

Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (University ofChicago Press, 2013) and the author of The Beach

Beneath the Street (Verso 2011) and The Spectacle of

Disintegration (Verso 2012), among other things. Heteaches at the New School for Social Research.

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wark, m.- designs for a new world (article-2014)

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