Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

April 25, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. Or so it has ...

Theory & Practice

Where Next for Media Theory?

April 9, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Where next for media theory? I’m thankful to Geert Lovink for his recent provocation on this question. Lovink thinks we have entered a post-Snowden era of media. So called ‘new’ media is dead, just as God is dead. Or, to vary the frame of reference, the ebullient schizo era of ...

Uncategorized

Birth of Thanaticism

April 3, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Even its adherents have no problem calling it capitalism any more. Its critics seem to be reduced to adding modifiers to it: postfordist, neoliberal, or the rather charmingly optimistic ‘late’ capitalism. A bittersweet term, that one, as capitalism seems destined to outlive us all. I awoke from a dream with the ...

Theory & Practice

No More Master Thinkers

March 20, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

How often it transpires that the interesting thinkers were monsters. Heidegger was a Nazi. Schmitt was a Nazi. De Man was a collaborator, a thief, a liar and – to cap it off – a bigamist. Or, case of a different kind: Althusser strangled his wife, and was probably none ...

Theory & Practice

Marxism for Unicorns

March 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin Kunkel is having a moment. New York magazine has called him a “Marxist public intellectual.” This caused steam to shoot out of the ears of Gawker, who can’t get over the fact that a “Marxist public intellectual” went to a fancy-pants liberal arts college and has a pied-a-terre in ...

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Blue Ruin: Totality and Acceleration

March 6, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Who could have guessed that when the flood came it would come in slow motion, over forty decades rather than forty nights? As the polar ice sheets unravel and plunge into the waters, whose who have so mismanaged the fate of all things cling to their private arks. The animals, ...

Theory & Practice

RIP Stuart Hall

February 10, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I was studying law when I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall. There were, and are, lots of ways into his work. The way he could find the tactical purchase of a concept or a tranche of historical data was one of his special qualities as an intellectual. Taking refuge ...

Uncategorized

A Tale of Zero Cities

January 27, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The protesters standing in front of Google buses in San Francisco have a point. Rents are rising, and they blame the influx of tech workers for this. The dedicated private buses that whisk them off to their Bay Area companies are a potent symbol of the divide between different kinds ...

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There is another world, and it is this one.

January 14, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Sometimes it is used to grace webpages about anti-globalization politics, but you can also find it adorning discussions of theology. But it is almost invariably given without a source. After a tenacious bit of googling, I think I may have found the source of it, and after a bit of time ...

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RIP Madeleine Gins

January 9, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Approximately Arakawa and Gins Or, G+A blew me away. McKenzie Wark 1. Not the least merit of this is that here writing resists the weapons of capture of other writing. This can’t be tackled with paraphrases, categories, or comparisons. There’s nothing here interested or interesting in being like something else. 2. This ...

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Andrey Platonov’s Factory of Literature, Uncreative Writing and the Networked Book

January 6, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Unfortunately, the English translation of his major work, Chevengur, has long been out of print, although a pdf of it is readily available. Most of his novella-length works and some of his classic stories have been carefully translated by Robert Chandler and various collaborators, and are available in excellent editions ...

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Andrey Platonov’s ‘Antisexus’ and the Sex-Gender Industrial Complex

December 29, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

Andrey Platonov is without question one of the great twentieth century writers. He is a rare witness to the early history of the Soviet Union, and at the same time the creator of a unique modern prose style. Unfortunately, the English translation of his major work, Chevengur, has long been ...