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Subject: <nettime> All That is Solid Melts into Airwaves
From: mail@mail.thing.at (mail)
Date: 15 Mar 1998 09:35:26 +0100

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Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 18:10:39 +1100 (EST)
From: McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
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All That is Solid Melts into Airwaves
[For the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto]
McKenzie Wark

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby
the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary the first
condition of existence for all earlier... classes. Constant
revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All
fixed fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away. all new
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and
man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real
conditions of life and relations of his kind...1

This beautiful passage is open to at least two kinds of
reading. The first is a prophetic one, where everything
hinges on the direction of the passage -- its inexorable drive
towards that last climactic phrase "and man is at last
compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life
and his relations with his kind." At last! In this concluding
flourish, Marx declares and declaims that the violence of
capitalism's destruction of culture is not without meaning.
The long, barren trek across the desert, across the barren
wastelands of capitalism are not lost peregrinations, but a
purposive, goal directed, long march forward. It will be
worthwhile in the end for this negative, destructive process
has ends, a determinate momentum. 2

The unity of this momentum reveals itself at the end -- at
the end of this passage of writing no less than at the end of
the movement it thinks it describes. Capitalism here
progressively reveals its essence. In this way, Marx
summons up a sense of narrative closure, a sense of destiny.
Marx's text stands like a monument, erected at the
beginning of an epoch, on the lone and level sands,
announcing the coming of the next.

It is this rhetorical quality in the passage cited that allows us
to extract it, as so many have done before, as a monumental
quotation that will stand alone, as if carved from a sheer
block of solid language. In it the writer appears to stand
outside history, transcending it through his mastery of its
laws, subject and goals. This is a reading which could be
made germaine to both a scientific and a philosophical
version of Marx. In the scientific version, the certainty of the
text is a mark of scientific authority; in the Hegelian reading,
a sure sign of a correct interpretation of the unfolding of the
essence of capital. Either way, the passage assumes a vantage
point which is somehow not quite engulfed and overcome
by the very process it describes.

Perhaps at the time Marx wrote, the extension of commodity
relations and the techniques of industrial production to
communication had reached a point where Marx's own
practice was facilitated but not yet overwhelmed by the very
flows of information it relied upon. The collection and
interpretation of data on capital appeared to make things
clearer, to provide sober sense with which to guide action.
Capital was vast and expansive, but its relational form was
simple and clear. Yet just around the corner, flowing on
from the separation of communication from the transport
and production of goods, was not clarity but excess.

Consider Regis Debray's comments, in his Prison Writings,
on Marx's Capital: "To get some idea of the absolute
originality (and no-one since has attempted anything like it)
of Book I, we might imagine a rigorous analysis of the same
kind in our own day, considering the most recent
technological, scientific, demographic, financial and political
events, the latest trade statistics, the parliamentary
statements of the past year or two, and so on, none of which
we see as having any theoretical status, or even any
particular significance, since these very disparate elements
are not linked with any structure or organised movement
which would account for their appearance at this moment,
or in this particular form."3

Such a project today would probably be impossible, and
perhaps it already was when Marx attempted it. The volume
and velocity of such information is that much greater, the
texture and grain of events that circulate within it that much
finer, that no one theorist could articulate such a body of
data, let alone propose a theory of how such events are
constituted and constructed as well. For this reason, we
cannot say with Marx that 'man is at last forced to face his
relations with his kind.' In the absence of information one
can only guess in the dark. In the presence of a little
information things and their relations begin to take on the
outline of a definite form. Add more and then more
information and the outline blurs in a blizzard of opaque
data, and outline slips from view again.

So what happens if one takes away that last governing
clause? The one that says "...and man is at last compelled to
face with sober sense, his real conditions of life and his
relations with his kind." What if 'man' is not compelled to
face with sober sense his real conditions of life and his
relations with his kind; and at last all that is solid melts into
air, and all that is sacred is profaned -- and that is all? What
if, rather than sobriety and clarity comes a melting away of
sense itself, into complexity and flux, a loss of sense and of
place? What remains now of our contract with modernity
and modernisation? Rather than Marx's revolutionary
pledge, is it not now more like a Faustian bargain? The text
loses its sense of closure, but not its sense of the opening up
of possibilities, of change, of dynamism. What is left is an
indeterminate negation: the revolutionising of social
relations remains, but the status of the text changes. No
longer a monument to a prophesied future, it acts rather as a
document, situated in history. Nothing else remains.

The history this text finds itself within is a double history: a
history of territory redoubled and anticipated on the map of
a burgeoning flow of information. As already mentioned;
the sense of temporal certainty in this passage is a product of
its rhetorical construction, its construction as text. Its
effectiveness does not lie in the accuracy with which it
'predicts' a history in the process of becoming. Such a view
would rely on the metaphysics of a history with a subject
and a goal, no less than a history which is unitary and not
subjected to the separation of the information landscape
from the territory of social relations. Its effectiveness lies in
its very nature. It is an exemplary rhetorical text, and one
put into circulation with remarkably effectiveness,
particularly given the rather modest resources of the
Communist League of the time.

The Manifesto has come to have a dispersal and a longevity
on the information landscape way out of proportion to the
resources of those who launched its career there. Of course,
this text comes to have effects in the territory of local
struggles as well, to the extent that it is archived and
circulated by organisations tied to the territory and its
relations. Indeed, it is even put in circulation these days in
universities. It resides in the archive. Nevertheless, its
major career is as pure information, not tied to any given
place, circulating far more rapidly and far further than the
forms of organisation which nurtured it. The Manifesto
itself succeeds to the extent that it became -- and remains --
pure information in circulation on the information
landscape. It fails to the extent that this very mobility
prevents it from taking root.

This writing belongs, not to a monument outside the history
it narrates, nor to a philosophical system of the kind Marx
was striving to leave behind, but to a practice of
communication, a process of writing and rewriting, what the
Situationists called "detourning", or the appropriation and
retooling of phrases, terms, polemics. Which is why, as the
Situationists said, "Marx needs to be detourned by those who
are continuing on this historical path, not idiotically quoted
by the thousand varieties of recouperators."4 As the famous
passage makes clear, overcoming of Marxist texts, 'before
they can ossify' is a necessity imposed by the dynamics of
capitalism itself. This is why one must return to the text and
recuperate Marxism at a faster rate than the normal pace of
scholarship.

Marxism is a discourse which tries to pass into the
information landscape of its time, and as such act as a tool, a
stylus, for inscribing the social relations occupying the
territory of capital beneath. Marxism hypothesises a dynamic
capital, capital as an abstract form of relation which achieves
its precarious unity only at the price of a ceaseless process of
separation and division. That process of separation has come
to split the social relations of information from those of all
other kinds of production. The information landscape
emerges from this division of labour as a sphere with its
own process of development and its own speed of
movement.5 The form and style of intervention in the
information landscape and its possible relations with the
social relations of the territory are thus also subject to this
dynamic process. This is why the hypothesis of the
postmodern is significant to Marxists. Not as a new object for
the same old kinds of textual speculations, but because it
would announce the necessity of new forms of information
practice, of praxis per se.

When he writes of all that is solid melting into air, Marx
describes the movement of capital from the point of view of
appearances, from the point of view of the information
landscape. In this passage from the Grundrisse, the same
movement is described from the other side, as it were, from
the side of capital's movement over the territory.
"...capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as
much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional,
confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present
needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive
towards all of this, and constantly revolutionises it, tearing
down all the barriers which hem in the development of the
forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided
development of production, and the exploitation and
exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that
capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets
ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has
really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts
its character, its production moves in contradictions which
are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. ...
The universality towards which it irresistibly strives
encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a
certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as
being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence
will drive towards its own suspension."6

Once again Marx characterises capitalism as a dynamic,
modernising force, one which, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari would say, "deterritorialises".7 Capital overcomes
barriers, sets in motion flows of people, money,
commodities, cultures. He characterises capital as a
universalising tendency which gets caught up in its own
complexities, which in attempting to overcome external
barriers, becomes its own internal barrier, "constantly
overcome and constantly posited". The idea is a powerful
one, but ultimately rhetorical: capital overcomes barriers,
that it needs to overcome barriers becomes the barrier.

Here again is the danger of imposing a narrative line on the
future direction of capitalism -- as if something so dynamic
and mutable could have ends that could be given in
advance. There is also a danger in seeing this process as
something transparent, something graspable as a whole.
While capitalism liquidates old ideological forms,
transmitting itself through walls, rendering them
transparent, it also fabricates new ones, no less opaque than
their predecessors. Moreover, capitalism seems to ceaselessly
add to the complexity of the division of labour, not least of
intellectual labour, thereby making a transparent rendering
of the whole more and more difficult.

Yet there is much in this passage that seems a fabulous
commentary on recent events. The "exploitation and
exchange of natural and mental forces" has indeed been
preceding apace, but at different paces. Mental forces, the
spectacle has been proliferating apace, even where the social
relations of the territory it covers have not yet become
modern. Thus the "expansion of needs" outstrips the
expansion of production, and the revolt indeed occurs, but
in favour of more expansion, not its suspension. The
'ideological' appears, not as a distorted reflection, but a
narrative anticipation of the expansion of the infrastructure.
It appears to lead, not follow. The infrastructure may be
determinate in the last instance, but the ideological appears
to be prior and leading. The barriers we have all just
watched being overcome appear to include a rigid and
dogmatic Marxism, one which ossified, which has now been
profaned.

In the movement of the abstraction that is capital, its great
unification of the world under the sign of the world market
takes place as an endless process of overcoming which is also
an endless process of division and separation. This division
and separation, as it becomes more and more complex,
requires more than markets to thread it together. It requires
an information network which precedes the movement of
labour and materials and goods around in its abstracted
territory. Or in other words, the partially abstracted territory
requires a fully abstracted information landscape in order to
function. As suggested previously, this separation is
significant enough to warrant the speculation that it entails
a further development of the division of labour that is
qualitatively distinct, and which may have given rise to a
new class.

As ought to be clear by now, the aspect of Marx that I would
want to bring back from the archive in this time machine is
his writing practice, rather than any particular writings.
Detached from their original context as mass pamphlets, or
printed in fabulously inventive forms of newspaper, one all
too easily loses sight of Marx's communication practice. This
practice was always a search for what was modern: leaving
poetry for philosophy, philosophy for journalism can be
read as a search for the modern form.

As Marshall Berman shows in his magnificent book All
That is Solid Melts into Air, Marx was optimistic about the
modernisation of society and the modernity of culture.8 I
think it fair to say he was straining for a communication
practice appropriate to it. The tragedy lies in the fact that
Marx did not take his own analysis of the dynamic
movement of capital quite seriously enough. It was a
remarkable feat of research to discover, in a tiny corner of
the globe, a kind of social relation which would devour the
whole the world in the eyeblink of a century.

Now that capital is so well on the way to digesting the globe,
bringing east and west under its law of perpetual change,
and perpetually changing law, perhaps its time to turn to a
no less gifted writer in the European revolutionary traditon,
Guy Debord, who rephrases "all that is solid" in a rather
more sardonic and contemporary tone:
"It has become ungovernable, this 'wasteland', where new
sufferings are disguised with the name of former pleasures;
and where people are so afraid they go around and around
in the night and are consumed by fire. They wake up
startled, and, fumbling, search for life. Rumour has it that
those who were stealing it have, to crown it all, mislaid it.
Here then is a civilisation which is on fire, capsizing and
sinking completely. Ah! Fine torpedoeing!" 9

-----------------

1 Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin in association with New
Left Review, London, 1973, pp70-1.

2 At this point we can note that Marx's view of modernity and
modernisation is unequivocably an Hegelian one, in the sense that the
destructive impulses of capitalism are seen as a negation in the sense of
determinate negation - the transformation of a thing into something
else.cf the critical discussion of determinate negation and the unity of
movement in Michael Rosen, Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism,
Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1982

3 Regis Debray, 'Time and Politics', in Prison Writings, The Pelican Latin
American Library, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1975, p87-88

4Mustapha Khayati, 'Captive Words. Preface to a Situationist Dictionary',
in Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public
Secrets, Berkeley CA, 1981, p171

5 See McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media
Events, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994

6 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin in association with New Left Review,
Harmondsworth, 1977, p410

7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia Vol. 1, Athlone Press, London, 1984

8 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Verso, London, 1983

9 Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, Pelagian Press,
Londin, 1991, p. 74

McKenzie Wark lectures in media studies at Macquarie University, and is
the author of Virtual Geography (Indiana) and The Virtual Republic
(Allen & Unwin). He writes a column for the Higher Education
Supplement of The Australian and describes himself as "yet another
lapsed Marxist in the pay of Rupert Murdoch."

mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au


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