Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

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Psychogeography and Speculative Design

October 9, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Another City for Another Life: I’m starting work on a course, possibly a collaborative one, that would have three components. 1. Psychogeography, as a way of moving through the city, gathering a knowledge of its ambiences, but concentrating on its special moments. 2. Unitary Urbanism, or the practice of imagining another ...

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Africa contra Hegel

September 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might ...

Theory & Practice

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

September 11, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Asger Jorn is acknowledged to be one of the great artists of the postwar years. Even more impressive in my estimation is his theoretical work. I made the case for this in The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). Since then, two collections of Jorn’s writings have appeared in English: ...

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

Theory & Practice

Chthulucene, Capitalocene, Anthropocene

September 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

It’s a time naming things in another way, because the thing that needs to be named is a certain strange quality of time. Here’s a marvelous sentence by Donna Haraway, with three names for three kinds of time, all in the one sentence, overlapping but not the same: "The unfinished ...

Feature

Friction

September 5, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has just published a brilliant book on the global trade in a certain kind of mushroom. As much as I’d like to report on it, I feel like I have to get my head around a previous landmark work of hers before attempting it. Here ...

Reviews

I Love Dick

August 25, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

My prayer to the TV gods when the pilot of I Love Dick screened was “please, let it not suck!” My concern was mostly for the author of the book of the same name on which it is based – Chris Kraus. I want people to read her books. ...

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Issues in 21c Critical Theory

August 23, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Below is the course I'll be offering in the Liberal Studies Masters program at the New School for Social Research this semester. There's links below to (most of) the blog posts that will serve as lecture notes. GLIB 5555 | LCST 4458 | Issues in 21 Century Critical Theory | How ...

Science & Technology

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...

Theory & Practice

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

on Paolo Virno

July 2, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Paolo Virno offers a curious diagnosis of the times. In A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004), he writes of the communism of capital. It’s a thought that has some pedigree in Marx, who made a similar observation in his own time about the formation of the joint-stock company, which ...

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

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Make Kith Not Kin!

On Donna Haraway

June 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. ...

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Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

June 17, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Watching the American Presidential Primaries and now the 'Brexit' vote in the UK on leaving the European Union, I am struck by how apt the political theory of Chantal Mouffe is to both situations. Both in the US and the UK, there was a contest as to whether liberal democracy ...

Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

Theory & Practice

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

June 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...