The hack expresses the nature of nature as its difference from itself—or at least its difference from its representation. The hack expresses the virtuality of nature and nature as the virtuality of expression.

Nature appears as a representation at the point at which what the representation designates disappears. Once collective agency has begun to wrest a portion of freedom from necessity, then nature in itself, as pure, unmediated experience, appears as the inaccessible object of a longing. Nature appears as precious and elusive, always just out of reach. It becomes the highest value, treasured for its very inaccessibility Contending forces wield it as a weapon in the struggle for the hearts and minds of a vectoral people, a people that desire a nature that it persuades itself can only be had for a price. Nature becomes a sign at stake in the class struggle.

Nature seized as property makes of it a thing that can be appropriated as a value. The property form turns nature into an object and its appropriator into a subject. Or so it appears in the representation that is the property relation. Property produces the appearance of separation from nature. Property produces the representation of a world that is “socially constructed,” by separating subjective possession from the object possessed.

Through collective action, the productive classes wrest freedom from necessity, in the form of a transformed nature, a second nature, more amenable to existence. The transformation of nature into second nature frees human existence from necessity, but creates new forms of necessity. Nietzsche: “Every victorious second nature will become a first nature.”¹Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 80. By standing outside both culture and education, Nietzsche was uniquely alive to the way both, as … Continue reading Thus is produced the appearance of the necessity of necessity, which is really no more than the appearance of appearance.

In the creation of a collective existence, in culture, society, economy and polity, collective agency alienates itself from nature, and nature from itself. It becomes the creator of its own nature, if not consciously, then at least collectively Only by apprehending this collective nature consciously, can the nature against which agency shapes itself be embraced in its difference. Nature “works”—on itself and against itself. Producing the difference that is its difference.

Nature seized as property becomes a resource for the creation of a second nature of commodified objects. History becomes an endless “development” in which nature is seized as an object, and made over in the form that suits a particular subjective interest. But because subjective interest is hitherto a class interest, a property interest, the transformation of nature into second nature produces freedom from necessity only for the ruling class and its favorites. For subordinate classes, it produces new necessities.

Class society, our second nature, becomes so natural that nature itself comes to be represented in its terms. Class is represented as what is natural; nature is represented as if it were just like class society As with every representation, this double displacement is a play of the false, and in this case, is a productive falsification of the false. Only the recovery of the history of class society, as the transformation of nature into second nature in the image of commodified competition, makes possible a recovery of the nature of nature, as itself a history which encompasses this class history, but does not of necessity conform to its representation, nor of necessity impose its inevitability on history.

Neither the appropriators of nature in the form of property nor the dispossessed who struggle for public property as compensation for their dispossession, have an immediate interest in nature as nature. Theirs is a struggle over second nature. Nature itself disappears in its transformation. It reappears as a limit to its endless exploitation only to the extent that it is appropriated as property. It reappears to both exploiting and producing classes as an inventory of property running out. But while the exploiting classes, whose rule is based on property, have no option but to see nature as property, and thus as limit, the producing classes express, in their productive nature, nature’s own productivity if only it could be freed from its representation as a thing exploited to the point of scarcity.

The subordinate classes of the overdeveloped world discover an interest in nature’s preservation at the point at which the development of second nature has in some degree freed them from nature’s necessities. But this discovery of an interest in nature puts the subordinate classes of the overdeveloped world at odds with those of the underdeveloped world, for whom nature is still in the process of disappearance, and still appears as grim necessity. Property produces both the appearance of the scarcity of nature for some, and the scarcity of second nature for others; the necessity of arresting second nature for some; the necessity of accelerating it for others. The producing classes as a whole can only reconcile their interests by freeing nature from the grip of property, which is what actually divides them.

Nature knows no objects, no subjects, and no representation. Its appearance in representation as object or subject is a false appearance. Yet it is only in its falsity that it can be apprehended in class society, which produces the relation between nature and second nature as an objectified relation. But to rediscover nature as difference, rather than falsity, requires the transformation of a world capable of sustaining itself only by objectifying nature.

To the extent that nature exists even in its disappearance, it exists as expression. Nature still exists, not as the other of the social, but as the multiplicity of forces that the human in concert with the nonhuman articulate and express. In differ- entiating itself from nature, human agency does not alienate itself from nature, it merely brings into being yet one more aspect of nature’s multiplicity. Rectifying the exploitation of nature does not mean a return to a representation of it prior to its transformation, which can only appear as a false image, as it too is produced by the very transformation experienced as alienating. Rather, out of the multiplicity of natures, collective human agency can join its productive energies with those that affirm nature’s own productivity. “We are not in the world, we become with the world.”²Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1990), p. 169. One of the great merits of D+G’s eccentric body of work is the way it cuts across the natural / social divide … Continue reading

The representation of nature as God’s estate, as the engine of competition, as complex data networks—all of these abstractions of nature abolish it in their representation of it, and yet are partial expressions of its multiplicity. Education teaches the model of nature that corresponds to the property form of the day—land, capital, information. Each appears as more true than the last at the point at which the form of property from which it derives has become second nature. As each representation of property installs itself in the world, falsifying the world itself in its image, it falsifies the previous false representation of nature—and validates as true the one that mirrors it back in its own mirror. Liberating nature from its representation is the liberation of knowledge from education, which is to say, from property.

To the hacker, nature is another name for the virtual. It is another way of representing the unrepresentable multiplicity from which the hack expresses its ever-renewable forms. There is an interest that the hacker class has in nature, but it is not in a representation of nature’s “harmony,” that nostalgia that may be comfortably indulged in overdeveloped world. The hacker interest is in another nature altogether, in a nature expressing the limitless multiplicity of things. This is the nature from which any and every hack derives. The hacker interest in nature is not in its scarcity, but in its multiplicity.

In the overdeveloped world, the total transformation of nature into second nature does more than complete the disappearance of nature as nature and lead to its return as the representation of what desire lacks. The transformation of nature into second nature becomes the transformation of second nature into third nature. This latter-day transformation is driven in no small part by the desire to reconstitute nature at least as an image of a lost desire. Third nature appears as the totality of images and stories that provide for second nature a context, an environment, within which it comes to represent itself as the spectacle of a natural order.

Once the vector reaches the point of the development of telesthesia — the perception at a distance of the telegraph, telephone, television — it effects a separation of the flow of communication from the flow of objects and subjects, and thus produces the appearance of information as a world apart. Information — in the commodified form of communication — becomes the governing metaphor for the world precisely because it dominates it in actuality. Third nature emerges, as did second nature, out of the representation of nature as property. Seized as information, not merely as physical resource, the genetic makeup of the whole biosphere can become property, be it as public or private property. This may indeed be the last frontier in the struggle to appropriate the world as a resource. This appropriation is no less false and partial than its predecessors. It is an illusory reality that conforms to the real illusion of property in our time.

Third nature, in its very totality, its spectacle of vectors and vectors of spectacle, becomes an ecology of images which may yet become an image of a possible ecology. Third nature relentlessly enfolds the subject in images of the world as its object. But in its very ubiquity, it dissolves the particular relations of subjects to objects, and represents subjects as a whole with the image of an objective world as a whole. In its very falsity, it represents the relation between subject and object as a false relation, but nevertheless as a relation. Third nature reveals its own nature to be something produced.

Third nature reveals itself as something not only produced, but productive. Information appears as expression, not just as representation, as something produced in its difference from the world. The world appears as something produced through the expression of collective action. Third nature may come into existence to render quantities of objects to subjects as if they were qualities, but it ends up revealing the qualitative production of production itself. Or at least, this virtuality hovers over third nature as its promise. There may be no return to nature, but as third nature extends itself in time and space, it becomes the medium of expression of the production of a fourth nature, a fifth — nature to infinity — natures which may overcome the destructive limits of the second nature produced by class society.