The experience of subjectivity is not universal. Just as it came into being with the enveloping state and the commodity economy, the subject can pass with the overcoming of these limited and partial abstractions.

Property produces, piece by piece, the armor of subjectivity. This armor is a hollow shell, separating the nothing that is the self from the nothing that is the means external to it by which it comes to believe it exists.

The subject is nothing but the ghostly residue of separation, opening the possibility of appropriating from the self the objective existence it labors to create, and presenting the subject with the objective world as something that it lacks. The subject comes to feel its existence only through its lack of the object, a lack never quite satisfied by any particular object.

The abstract subject develops incrementally, but develops apace with the objectification of the world. The history of the production of the world as a thing is at the same time the history of the production of the subject, which is to say, the production of the self as a thing that produces itself and its world as things.

The subject comes into existence as an abstract insufficiency, made more and more aware of its own lack and its own abstraction by its immersion in telesthesia. Where the capitalist class dangles before the productive classes the objects of their own labor as rare and out of reach, the vectoralist class transmits everywhere, via the vectors of telesthesia, endless images of objects of desire. Telesthesia replaces the object of desire with its image, an image that can be attached to any object, willy-nilly. At one and the same time, the vectoral transformation of desire raises the price of desire, and threatens to devalue it completely The vectoral class pushes commodified desire to the point where its very proliferation opens the possibility of its overcoming.

A t the dawn of the history of property’s abstraction of the world, the pastoralist class merely laid claim to the farmer’s labor, and at first got limited access even to that, not least because farmers retained some access to property, in the form of their immediate means of production. Under such conditions, the farmer experiences subjectivity only as external constraint imposed by the demands of meeting the rent and producing the necessities of life.

The seeds of subjectivity as a general condition are already present under pastoralist rule, however, in the form of the total and limitless demand that the spiritual state of the church makes on its victims. Theology presents the subject to itself as what it lacks, but it presents lack as spiritual, not material; as infinite, rather than finite. As such, the church acted as a fetter upon the development of a productive subjectivity.

Organized religion expresses the needs of the ruling class in the form of a demand upon the subject. That demand changes as class rule changes. Lack no longer appears as infinite, but finite, and the means to fill it, material, not spiritual. Or rather, the spiritual lack is to be filled by the attention to material lack. The theology of the soul becomes the theology of the commodity The capitalist class extended its claim upon the worker beyond external observance to the worker’s interiority. It brought down to earth the limitless debt of spiritual usury and forced upon the worker a subjectivity that viewed work as a debt owed at one and the same time to God and Mammon. Where once, as Marx wrote, “religion is the opium of the people,” now Opium™ is the religion of the people.¹Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 244. This is the significant mutation in the field of ideology: rather than being … Continue reading

At least outside of working hours the worker was free, and many workers lost the habit of devoting free time to working off yet another, more ethereal, debt. But theology lives on, and still makes its monstrous demands, if not from the pulpit, then in the classroom. If not in theology, then at least in theory Vaneigem: “Temporal power, which is firmly rooted in the worldly economy, has deconsecrated theology and turned it into philosophy, replacing a divine curse with an ontological one: the claim that it is inherent in man’s condition to be dispossessed of his own life.”²Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 37. Vaneigem, that cranky co-philosopher of the Situationist International, brings the hacker spirit to bear here in … Continue reading

Capital merely claims the body of the worker for the duration of the working day. The vectoralist class found the means to assert a claim to every aspect of being, via its power to designate any part of that being as a resource. The struggle to limit the working day, while salutary as a means of freeing the body from commodity labor, no longer frees the worker from the commodity, but merely releases the subject as producer for the even more burdensome task of being the subject as consumer.

In the age of telesthesia, the vector captures the body and mind and indeed soul of the dispossessed as never before. It comes closer to dispossession perfected than any other form of property. The subject at work becomes producer of commodities, and outside of work, is set to work again recognizing the worth of what the commodity represents, as its consumer.

To objectify all of space is to subjectify all of time. Property invades time as well as space, and this is where its greatest impact on the subject is to be felt. Time was once a property farmers disposed of as they pleased, provided they could meet their obligation to the pastoralist master. Then time became divided into work time and “leisure.” Only the latter remained the property of the worker. But now all time belongs to property.

Time itself becomes the object of temporary outbreaks of revolt, ever since the farsighted communards smashed the time clocks in the workshops. But while there are temporary halts and interruptions to time in which the subject reclaims itself as something beyond itself, the totality of property encroaches even upon revolt itself, which, like exotic religions, is offered to the subject in commodified form. What would otherwise be the history of the subject’s struggle to overcome itself and revolt against scarcity, becomes instead the commodity of revolt, which affirms the subject merely in its lack of the very revolt the commodity memorializes in its collector’s editions.

Scarcity is based on the notion that subjective desires are infinite, but material goods are few. Therefore some power is called into being that allocates scarce resources. Liberal “theology” is usually represented as a neutral objective principle, an “invisible hand,” when actually what allocates resources comes to be a class power. The notion of scarcity subjectifies desire and objectifies the means to desire’s satisfaction. They are conceived as separate things that confront each other as if across a metaphysical chasm. It is as if all that is desired is an object, and all objects exist to be possessed in the name of desire.

It is the propagation of the myth of scarcity itself that creates the abstraction of objectified wants and subjective desires that can only be met in commodified form. It is only in the theory of scarcity that desire need be thought of as having an object, and that this object need be thought of as the commodity True desire is desire for the virtual, not the actual. Productivity is desire, desire as becoming in the world. The struggle to free the productive classes from the commodity is the struggle to free desire from the myth of its lack. Deleuze: ‘All of this constitutes what might be called a right to desire.”³Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 147. The liberation of desire, not just from the objective, from mere things, but also from the subjective, … Continue reading

In the overdeveloped world, some of the producing classes capture enough of the surplus to satiate their needs, if not their desires. Their desires become their needs. Those not working to produce commodified life work to produce new necessities that will call into being still new objects of commodification, saturated in the images of desire. And there is still more work to do: every subject is enjoined to work on itself, to educate itself in its own limitless capacity to desire limited things. And yet this great production of the subjectivity of the object and the objectivity of the subject threat ens to slump again and again, as subjects weary of carrying the burdensome armor of their double location as producers and consumers of necessity. At such times the state steps in to declare boredom the enemy of all the national envelope claims to secure, and enjoins the subject to labor on it self, if not for itself, as a patriotic duty.

Belief in scarcity redirects the subject’s experience of its own desire from the desire for its own experience, and to wards images that appear to negate the subject’s powers, and taunt the subject with its limits. Desire becomes a self inflicting wound. And so in the overdeveloped world, desire comes to desire images of suffering from the underdevel oped world that seem at once “justified,” in the sense of being the product of truly monstrous abuses of power, and yet far enough away as to render the subject who views the image as helpless to respond to the suffering in the image as the subject in the image is helpless to overcome their torture. Global victimization, the feeling of the self as always “at risk,” is the vectoral mode of ideology. Only it is no longer global capital, but the global vector, which at one and the same time produces the actual victim, “over there,” the vicarious suffering subject, “over here”—and the vector of telesthesia that governs their (non) relation.

The liberal economic theory of the scarcity of objects and the psychoanalytical theory of desire as subjective lack are one and the same theory, and both serve the same class interest. They are means by which subjects are recruited for the production of objects and objects are presented as what desire lacks. Both distract from the production of free subjectivity, which not only frees the subject from objectified desire but frees the subject from itself as subject, into the absolute freedom of pure becoming as expression.

There are hackers of subjective desire just as there are hackers of the objectified world, and just as the latter hack toward the free expressivity of nature from which all objectifications arise, so too do the former hack beyond the constraints of the subject limited to its apprehension of itself and the existing order. “No society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.”⁴Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 116. This exemplary crypto-Marxist work attempts to invent and apply tools of analysis … Continue reading But what is “real desire” if not the hack—the desire to release the virtual from the actual? Desire itself calls for hacking, to release it from false representation as lack, opening its expression with the knowledge that it lacks only the absence of lack. Hack the lack that lacks the hack.

The producing classes may or may not aspire to pure be- coming, but still yet come to grasp their class interest in freeing desire from the constraint of commodifed objects and subjects. The producing classes continually free themselves from particular objects of desire, and free themselves from subjectivities thrust upon them in the interests of enslaving that subjectivity to particular objects of desire. While the producing classes free themselves from particular desires, they do not always take the next step, to the abstraction of desire itself from commodification. This is where hackers of both the objective world and of subjectivity can affirm their productive relation to the producing classes.

Vectoral power has to respond periodically to the demand for desire as surplus rather than lack, when it breaks out from the margins into the centre of the culture. The history of culture is alive with instances of the spontaneous hacking open of information, expressing the virtuality of desire and desire as virtuality. When in power, the pastoralist and capitalist classes respond to these outbreaks with suppression, lending glamor to their legend, creating both popular revolt and the avant gardes. When in power, the vectoralist class responds very differently. It embraces surplus desire and rapidly commodifies its image. 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.

The abstraction of the objective and subjective worlds into information freely circulating via the vector opens up the virtuality of desire and its potential liberation from commodification. Information is “non-rivalrous”—it knows no natural scarcity Unlike the objectified products of land and capital, one’s consumption of information need not deprive another of it. Surplus appears in its absolute form. The struggle becomes one between the hacking of the vector to open it toward the virtual and the commodification of information as scarcity and mere representation. The possibility of an overcoming of subjectivity rests on this infrastructural struggle. The means of production of desire—the vectors along which can flow an immaterial surplus of information, is the first and last point at which the struggle to free subjectivity is to be waged. Any particular image of the subject in revolt can be turned into the image of an object to desire, but the vector itself is another matter. The liberation of the vector is the one absolute prohibition of the vectoral world, and the point at which to challenge it.

The coming into being of vectors along which information flows freely, if not universally, around the world appears to usher in a new regime of scarcity even more total than that of the reign of capital before it. Everywhere are signs presented as the commodifed answer to desire; everywhere there are subjects bamboozled into thinking of themselves as negated by the signs they do not possess. Sometimes this provokes a reactive hardening of the subject. This produces a bunkering within the envelope of some tradition or other that appears to predate the vectoral world, even if, paradoxically enough, the vectoral is now the only means by which the traditional reproduces itself, as a representation of tradition. Sometimes this hardening and bunkering in tradition produces a violence that strikes out, if none too clearly, at what it takes to be the images of a vectoral power this false tradition would resist. The vector produces its own vectoral reaction, with the paradoxical effect of accelerating the vectoral itself. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.

The vectoral class detach desire from the object, and attach it to the sign. These signs of what is to be desired proliferate, even though what they signify is scarcity itself. But popular desire is never without resources, and vectoral power can be caught napping. Popular desire quickly learns to counterfeit the sign that in the first place is a counterfeit of itself. It reappropriates itself as itself, but twice removed, coveting the false and then falsifying the coveted. All that remains is to hack a path from desire’s own plenitude to the immaterial multiplicity of information.

There is a detectable air of desperation in the work of the vectoral class, a constant anxiety about the durability of a commodifed regime of desire built on a scarcity that has no necessary basis in the material world. The producing classes come again and again to the threshold of perceiving themselves as capable of the self affirmation of their desires, and to a realisation that subjectivity merely binds them to the commodity, and that scarcity is the product of class rule, not an objective fact of nature. The old mole of popular desire works steadily beneath the foundations of vectoral power, undermining it from below.