The state is first and last an envelope, a permeable membrane, a skin, within which wells an interiority. This inte riority comes to know itself as its representation — as a unified, abstract but limited plane — distinct from what it ex cludes as outside. But the state’s enclosure and interiority is only made possible by the vector, which provides the mate rial means for producing the internal consistency of its ab stract plane. This same vector which makes possible the en velope 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.

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.

The overdeveloped world becomes overdeveloped through its precocious capacity to project the vector across space, designating the underdeveloped world as one of objectiveand 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.

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.

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.

The state constitutes the plane upon which classes come to represent their interests as class interests, but also where classes seek to turn local and particular conflicts not of a class nature to their advantage. Through its disposition of the share of the surplus it appropriates as taxation, the state gives expression to existing interests. There may be representatives of collective regional interest, the interests of generations or genders, ethnicities or industries. The state may also create interests through its transfers of socialized property, such as pensioners, civil servants or the military. Thus the state, besides constituting the plane of abstraction for class conflict, adds to it dimensions of possible conflict and alliance by providing resources and recognition for other interests and desires. Whatever desire exceeds or falls short of commodification seeks a home in the state.

All of these other representative interests have the power to limit the capacity for action of the state, or even to thwart its capacity to function. Yet it is only the interests of classes that determine the positive dynamic of state and society. Other representations may capture the state, causing the state, in turn, to capture development and retard it. Only class interests prod and push the state toward the production of a surplus and the production of history.

As a class finds an abstraction that suits its interests, that presents a plane upon which to develop and turn the general development to its advantage, it seeks through the state to represent this interest as if it were the general interest, and to use the state to head off the development of abstractions that do not enhance and affirm its power. Through its ability to police representation, the state acts as a brake on new expressions which fall outside what the state recognizes as licit relations between objects and subjects. When the state recognizes intellectual property, it creates a plane upon which the vectoral class can develop as the leading class, the one in possession of the most abstract plane upon which objects and subjects may be brought together productively. At the same time, the state takes it upon itself to police the vector, to contain information within property, to halt any hack outside the class interest of the vectoral class.

The vectoral class seeks to capture the state by depriving other classes of the free flow of information with which they may contest its representations of the collective interest. The vectoral class captures information flows within the commodity form and perverts the free flow of information. This deprives the hacker class of a considerable part of its capacity for free expression and forces it into a subordinate relation to the vectoralist interest. It also deprives other classes of their means of contesting the grip on the state of the vectoral interest, and the representation of the vectoral interest as the general interest.

The state polices the rights of subjects as well as the properties of objects. The state may be an abstract state or it may be a particular state. A particular state is one in which some subjective representations have superior rights to others. While all states exclude some representations, and maintain their envelope through this capacity to exclude, the abstract state embraces the widest range of representations as holding equally valid claims and does not question them as to their truth-value. The particular state arises out of the exploitation of non-class antagonisms for class ends. The ruling classes exploit ethnic, religious or gender differences among the producing classes to divide and rule. This rule is purchased at the price of the suppression of some part of the productive capacity of the subordinate classes.

The abstract state will always be the most just and efficient vehicle for managing representations, but there is always something that is beyond its ken. There is always some hack that eludes or escapes its representational net. The hacker interest always points beyond a given abstraction of the state. Only after the state has accepted without question the most obvious differences of race, gender, sexuality or faith is the hacker state even conceivable, as a space for expression free from the sanction of the policing of representation. But while there may be an interest for hackers in preferring certain kinds of state to others, the state is still always a vehicle that is caught up in the violence of representation and counter representation, upon which flows of resource or liberty may hinge, but which is ultimately only in existence to help or hinder the establishment of a productive relation between classes.

The vectoral class also presents itself as the advocate and defender of the abstract state. The vectoral class is all for tolerance and diversity, even affirmative action — so long as this applies only to representations. To the vectoral class, all representations ought to be free to find their value as objects of commodification; all subjects ought to be free to find the representations they want to value. To the vectoral class, the abstract state is the state best able to open the whole of culture to commodification. But that is as far as it goes. The vectoral state is an abstract state, but not one that can look beyond a purely formal equality of representations toward an equal share of the surplus, let alone embrace a politics of expression beyond representation. The vectoral state encourages diversity in the content of representations as a cover while abolishing diversity in the form of representations. All information is to be subordinated to the private property form.

The domination of one form of property is not conducive to the interests of the hacker class. Where the gift relation dominates, as in traditional societies, reciprocal obligation in predetermined forms renders the hack reactive and particular. It rarely reaches its fully abstract form. Where collectivized state property dominates, the hack is impeded by the direct dependence of the hacker on the bureaucratic form of capitalist and pastoralist domination. Where private property dominates, as in the vectoral world, it accelerates the hack by recognizing it as private property, but thereby channels the hack into the relentless reproduction of the commodity form.

The hacker class knows that while it exceeds every representation, and expresses the virtuality of matter and information in its innovation, it is also potentially the producer of a host of dangers. The hack may be as destructive as it is productive—but only potentially. It is not hackers who poison the waters, or enrich the plutonium, or genetically modify the crops, or inculcate the dangerous creeds, but it is hackers who hack these bright new possibilities into being. It is the ruling classes who subordinate the potential of the hack to its commodified form, who turn potential dangers into actual ones. Yet they deflect the legitimate fears of the other productive classes onto the hacker class, and confirm it with selective uses of the punitive powers of the state to contain the productive potential of the hack. The vectoral class practices this kind of statecraft as a veritable art-form, stroking popular anxiety by criminalizing some marginal forms of hacking that would assert their independence from the commodifed form.

The class interest of the working and farming classes is in the production of a surplus, the wresting of freedom from necessity. The class interest of hackers is in the free and open expression of virtuality. These interests converge in a state form that is at once abstract in relation to representation, and plural in relation to forms of property. Yet this is the bare beginnings of what the combined productive classes may desire. They desire a state that is abstract enough, plural enough, virtual enough to create openings beyond scarcity and the commodity.

The state has its limits. It may be everywhere and nowhere, impressed in the very pores and particles of its subjects through its management of education and culture, but still it has its limits. One limit is the violence with which it founds its claim to be sovereign over the laws of representation. Challenging this limit merely affirms the injustice at the heart of the state, without in any way escaping from it. The state is limit, interiority envelope. Transgression merely confirms it. An expressive politics is not transgressive. It seeks to escape, not confront, the state. Those who confront the state, meeting its violence with violence, always harbor the reactive desire to become what they behold.

The limit of representation itself is a limit to the state. Agamben: “In the final analysis the state can recognize any claim for identity . . . But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging.”¹Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 87. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). … Continue reading The class that can express its desires, rather than represent them, is the class that escapes the violence of the law. That which cannot be named, cannot be identified, cannot be charged, cannot be convicted. Abstraction without authority or authorization opens the free virtuality outside the law. For contrary to the repetitive chant of the state’s witting and unwitting apologists, there is always something, and something other than violence, outside its law