Wednesday, December 13, 2006


Scarcity of Representation, Surplus of Expression

Bruce over at the River Blog linked to a great exegesis by Inspector Lohmann on hiding in plain sight. I've no idea what he's talking about, but it sounds fun. As does "Building Invisible Comic Community Through Interdimensional Travel," and again, I have no idea what he's talking about. He may mean blogs are a communist plot. Or he may think that the cool thing about blogs is they're self-selecting. Or both. I don't even fully comprehend the quote the good inspector used from The Hacker Manifesto to kick off his essay. But it may be what I believe.
There can be no one book, no master thinker for these times. What is called for is a practice of combining heterogeneous modes of perception, thought and feeling, different styles of researching and writing, different kinds of connection to different readers, proliferation of information across different media, all practiced within a gift economy, expressing and elaborating differences, rather than broad-casting a dogma, a slogan, a critique or line.
⋅ ⋅ ⋅
This expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the state, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence. It spreads the seeds of an alternate practice of everyday life.
⋅ ⋅ ⋅
Everywhere that desire throws off the heavy armor of lack and expresses its own joyful plenitude, it quickly finds itself captured as an image and offered back to itself as representation. Thus the strategy for any desire that would arm itself with its own self-unfolding is to create for itself a vector outside of commodification, as a first step toward accelerating the surplus of expression, rather than the scarcity of representation.
—McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure I understand it either (and i wrote it...). But yes -- it is what i believe.

MarcLord said...

M. Wark, honored you stopped by. The wire-archy is just about ready.