Envy is on the rise. It seems strange to say that about something as timeless – or at least as biblical – as envy, but historically speaking, phenomena like envy tend to wax and wane in keeping with broader economic trends. To acknowledge that is to recognise that envy is not so much a psychological category as an economic one; more precisely, it is the psychological reaction to a regime of scarcity.
That was how I had intended to begin my piece when I was asked to write this Afterthought for Bidoun. Then something slightly unexpected happened. I was fired from my job. It’s always a great feeling when that happens. Not that I had much of a job to speak of anyway: as regional editor of an art magazine, I was participating less in a life-sustaining wage economy than in a symbolic, reputational, envy-engendering economy. And that’s why I got fired: the more information I produced, the more envy became an inevitable by-product for the editor-in-chief. Anyway, to celebrate this fleeting euphoric moment, I went out for a few dozen beers with some fellow immaterial labourers – fellow members of the new international “cognitariat”. “You mustn’t take it personally,” commiserated one friend. “The boss was envious – as if there wasn’t enough to go around.” I guess some people take getting fired personally, and transferring the blame to the other party struck me as testimony that we get by with a little help from our friends. Cheers! Our other friend disagreed: “Congratulations,” he said, “you produced a surplus, and the boss had to forcibly impose scarcity – always the last-ditch effort of a system unable to face its contradictions.” “Actually,” he added offhandedly, “I feel kind of envious.” It struck me that their very different usage of the word “envy” is not so much due to idiosyncrasy as it is reflective of a shift in the objective conditions of envy production in the global economy today. In the first instance, envy is linked to an artificial economy of scarcity – there’s not enough to go around and we are envious of what we don’t have – whereas in the latter position, envy is the expression of desire to be freed from this artificially maintained scarcity.
It so happened that one of my last self-appointed duties at the magazine was to review a book by McKenzie Wark called A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), which by any account is a fascinating book, but which under the circumstances provided me with the conceptual tools, none of which are obscure, just a little estranged from mainstream usage, that I was able to use to link my personal encounter with envy with the broader economy of envy in our society. It is a rare thing, and the measure of genuine intellectual creativity, when a writer is able to develop and deploy a fully-fledged, conceptual vocabulary and use it in a sustained way. The book becomes at once the staging ground and the first application of a new way of talking. A hacker, in Wark’s lexicon, is very different from the image of the super-specialised anarcho-programmer which the term still conjures up for most people; indeed it was only in reading the book that I came to realise I too was a sort of hacker. For a hacker, he claims, is someone who hacks into knowledge production networks of any kind, and liberates that knowledge from an economy of scarcity. In a society based on private property relations, scarcity is always being presented as if it were natural; but in the contemporary context, where intellectual property is the dominant property form, scarcity is artificial, counter-productive – and the bane of all hackers – for the simple reason that appropriating knowledge and information by no means deprives anyone else of it. This is a key issue in art-related practice – indeed, Wark discusses hacking as if it were an art-related practice – for the system of value-production in the mainstream artworld is also premised on an envy-fermenting regime of scarcity, underpinned by the author’s signature.
Wark hacks his rather unorthodox theory out of Marxism: like Marx, Wark believes human history can be conceptualised in terms of class relations and conflict. Today, he argues, this conflict is most acute between what he calls the “vectoralist” class (which has come to supplant the hegemony of the capitalist class) and the new productive class that Wark describes as hackers. He derives this name for the new dominant class from its ownership of the “vectors” of our society. A vector is the means by which anything moves: vectors of transport move objects and subjects; vectors of communication move information. Hackers, on the other hand, are the abstract producers of all that flows through the vectors. For now, Wark admits, hackers like artists continue to regard one another enviously as rivals, rather than as fellow members of a class with shared interests – a problem that he elegantly side-steps by arguing that “the hacker class does not need unity in identity but seeks multiplicity in difference.” In Wark’s mind, it seems, hackers of the world need not so much unite as continue to untie, freeing knowledge from illusions of scarcity. For those who might find Wark’s picture overly rosy, the book is full of accounts of actually existing zones of hacker liberty, including this gem from free software advocate and producer, Richard Stallman: “It was a bit like the garden of Eden. It hadn’t occurred to us not to co-operate.”
Wark’s book, it seems to me, has everything to do with art. Of course the artworld is rife with envy from top to bottom, north to south; still, it would be rash to simply present artworlders as a bunch of jealousy-smitten strategists, intent on one-upmanship like everyone else, if only because that would miss the key to the story, which is how the symbolic economies of the artworld mirror those of the world at large. The artworld is so good at the strategic exploitation of inequalities in symbolic capital (which it persists in referring to as "talent", so as to sweeten the pill and give culture the airs of a natural science), and having artists and writers not merely accept but actually insist upon non-monetary remuneration and interpersonal competition – which is a fancy way of describing envy – that it has become a model that is studied in MBA-level management courses. But art also has an heuristic approach to the problem. Take one example: one of the vectors of access to the prestige economy of the international artworld is the English language. This point was underscored with corrosive and insolent matter-of-factness in 1992 by Zagreb conceptualist Mladen Stilinovic’s embroidered work entitled An Artist Who Speaks No English is No Artist. Whereas that sort of quip had critical overtones some fifteen years ago, it has today become a statement of mere fact. And this is the sense of Prishtina-based artist Jakup Ferri’s recent video piece of the same title: the artist, in a close-cropped head shot addresses the viewer, apparently in English. The words, at any rate, are English and in profusion, but they appear strung together by some random alien logic, intent on pulling the language apart. The result is utter gibberish and the effect is dizzying to the point of nausea – like trying to walk a straight line while drunk. Indeed, one cannot but wonder if one is not slightly drunk, and seeks to concentrate more closely – to no avail. In this film, Ferri breaks with omnipresent “English envy,” displacing scarcity with a deluge of surplus.
But of course the experience of envy is as widespread as it is oppressive. It is so because the experience of scarcity in the world is all too real. “As more and more of nature becomes a quantifiable resource for commodity production, so the producing classes in the overdeveloped and underdeveloped world alike come to perceive the power the vectoral class has brought in the world: the power to steer development here or there at will, creating sudden bursts of productive wealth, and, just as suddenly, famine, poverty, unemployment, and scarcity.” On a more positive note, however, Wark senses “a detectable air of desperation in the work of the vectoral class, a constant anxiety about the durability of a commodified regime of desire built on a scarcity that has no necessary basis in the material world.” Scarcity, in other words, is the product of class rule, and not an objective fact of nature. That is an admittedly counterintuitive point of view. But until we can grasp that, envy too will appear an objective fact of interpersonal psychology. Perhaps in a pastoral society there is an objectively limited amount of arable land – though it is vastly greater than what is required to sustain human needs, and historically was transformed into a scarcity only through forced displacement and enclosures, as Olivier Razac has demonstrated in his devastating study on the Political History of Barbed Wire. Under industrial capitalism, scarcity was maintained by the cunning ploy of paying workers slightly higher wages enabling them to buy back at the end of the day a portion of the goods they had just finished producing. But under vectoral capitalism, scarcity has become hard to sell. “The vectoral class commodifies information as if it were an object of desire, under the sign of scarcity. The producing classes rightly take all commodified information to be their own collective production. We, the producers, are the source of all the images, the stories, the wild profusions of all that culture becomes.”
And it is just that wild profusion which may well make scarcity itself a scarcity! This is truly the irony of ironies because it is precisely that profusion which the vectoralist class relies on to produce a surplus of desire (to consume) along with the scarcity of the desired object. There can be no fundamental limiting on the free productivity of the hacker class – whose role it is to fuel the free productivity of desire with images and stories, new vectors in which to channel them, new means of perceiving them – and so the system induces the very productivity that exceeds the commodity itself. Scarcity is destined to being outstripped by surplus, and it is worthwhile imagining the difference between an abstract theory of the productive development of human society framed in terms of scarcity and one premised on surplus. The first instance leads to legitimising a ruling class taking charge of scarce resources; the second insists on how the productive classes produce more than their immediate needs and are deprived of this surplus – and want it back. In this respect, the liberal economic theory of the scarcity of objects and the psychoanalytical theory of desire as subjective lack – rather than as overbrimming, overflowing surplus – are one and the same theory, and both serve the same class interest.
That is basically what I had intended to say. Until reality intervened, as it always must, bringing envy closer to home than I had anticipated, and making me aware that the only way to thwart envy is to hack into the lack that produces it. Envy is not so much human as it is individual. Is there such a thing as collective envy? I’m not sure there is and the reasons for that are worth contemplating. But suffice it to say that the only way to combat scarcity is with surplus – with the corrosive and strangely envy-eroding logic of the gift, the true bedrock of human sociality.