Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

Kierkegaard’s Frenemies: From Adorno to Zizek

December 23, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

2013 was Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday. I am grateful to Mark Taylor for asking me to contribute something to his birthday celebration, and also for not giving us any time to prepare for it. Had he done so I might have had to do more than say what I think I know. Marx ...

Kierkegaard’s Frenemies: From Adorno to Zizek

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The Forces of Reproduction

Testo Junkie, by Paul Préciado

December 7, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

“Humanity does not exist under the sign of the divine… but of the monstrous.” -- Paul Préciado “Read, this!,” he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript into my hands. “It will change your life!” Then he disappeared back into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to ...

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Against Social Determinism

December 5, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

Getting anything done generally requires the collaboration of people who do different kinds of work, and whose various kinds of work has shaped various kinds of thinking. It calls for some kind of translation or code switching. It can be hard enough getting people who do different kinds of intellectual ...

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On Scrooge and His Art Collection: A Little Xmas Offering

December 3, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

“Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.” --Oscar Wilde 1. Let’s start with a defense of Xmas, or of what is essential to it: that there is a ...

On Scrooge and His Art Collection: A Little Xmas Offering

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A Working Class Hero(ine) is Something to Be.

November 27, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

Its been a bizarre kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Mark Fisher called out the leftish commentariat for their barely restrained petit bourgeois moralism, and for his troubles has been hit by a wave of – petit bourgeois moralism. What set this off was the spectacle – there’s no other word – ...

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A Ludic Century?

Games, Aesthetics, the twenty-first century

November 22, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

Could we call this a ‘ludic century’? That’s the provocation of game designer Eric Zimmerman and game journalist Heather Chaplin. His ‘Manifesto for a Ludic Century’ and her commentary on it have lit up the game world like a pinball machine. But I think their provocation calls for a wider ...

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Accelerationism

November 18, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the decline of Marxism. It began with the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw capitalism as a sort ...

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How to Beat Writer’s Block

Try these games to unblock the flow, or direct it somewhere new.

November 8, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

These games are offered as solutions for two kinds of problems. One is writer’s block. Let’s be done with the waiting for ‘inspiration’. Let’s just get to work. All one has to overcome is one’s resistance to labor. The other problem is the opposite: our facility with writing, but always ...