The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

134 Edges
things have been otherwise? What is it—can one ever claim with
certainty—that hasn’t happened, and how could it ever be achieved?
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting
to me,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on the
morning of February 12, 2002, responding to questions from the press
about the lack of evidence connecting Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
with terrorists. “Because as we know, there are known knowns;
there are things we know we know. We also know there are known un -
knowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we
don’t know.” There is the unknown soldier. But this is a known unknown,
a statistical process of elimination. It is the unknown unknown
that is the most interesting. It is a characteristic of present knowledge
that it cannot simply be negated to be gotten rid of; knowledge must be
negated twice. But the tragedy of the contemporary moment is that
this double negation is not, as it were, nonaligned; it is already under -
stood as a deficiency in one’s ability to imagine not utopia but dystopia:
the inability to imagine that terrorists would use planes as missiles, just
as it was the inability to imagine the kamikaze pilot at Pearl Harbor.
These are Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. The imagination of the
future, the vision of the new, is a vision of death, fear, and terror. So
not only is the unknown unknown a threat as such, and therefore
dif fi cult to bring into imagination as utopia or any another mode of
thought, but the very process of attempting to imagine the unknown
unknown drags into the light its opposite, the end of humanity.
Codification, Not Reification
An important future political problem will no longer be the alienation
of real social relations into objects, but the extraction of abstract
code from objects. In other words, codification not reification, is the
new concern. The code in question can be either machinic or genetic;
that is to say, it can be both the codification of motor phenomena or
the codification of essential patterns. The vulgar Marxist approach
decries the loss of authentic, qualitative social relations. But in fact
the transformation under capitalism is at the same time the movement
into the fetish of the qualitative—“Quantity has been trans-