Levi Bryant writes, "McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?"

For the last couple of days, I’ve found my thoughts haunted by McKenzie Wark’sbrilliant interview over at Occupy Times.  Apart from Wark’s provocative claim that politics doesn’t exist– though perhaps it could come to exist, in a sense analogous to how Meillassoux talk of a “virtual god”? –this passage, in particular, stuck out to me:

…the problem is:  how do you occupy an abstraction?  Power has become vectoral.  It can move money and power anywhere on the planet with unprecedented speeds.  You can block a particular site of power, but vectoral power routes around such sites.

The abstraction Wark is talking about is, of course, contemporary capitalism.  Contemporary capitalism seems to be characterized by two features:  First, it has the characteristic of being everywhere and nowhere.  You can’t point to a particular site of contemporary capitalism and say “there it is!”.  Rather, it pervades every aspect of contemporary life, while nonetheless being absolutely non-localizable.  Contemporary capitalism is an example, I think, of what Tim Morton has in mind by “hyperobjects”.  


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"Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway...  Block the arteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself." L. Bryant 




Commercial transactions are "arteries" as well. 
Drop out.
EJW