Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

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Class, Gender and Creative Industries

June 1, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

The fate of cultural studies in the United States appears to be twofold. On the one hand, it still generates moral panic. Right-wing nut-jobbers think that "cultural Marxism" is some insidious, decadent creed, probably created by Jews and Blacks to destroy America. On the other hand, it has finally become ...

Feature

The Sublime Language of My Century

May 14, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism. And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think there is an eternal essence to capitalism, and only ...

Theory & Practice

The Spectacle of Disintegration

March 4, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Turn to any screen and you can witness the current stage of spectacular life exposing itself in its ruined perfection. This spectacle has a history. Its current stage is what I have called, in a book of the same name, the spectacle of disintegration. I wrote it a few years ...

Theory & Practice

Althusserians Anonymous (the relapse)

February 26, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

1. Old versus Young Marx I am a recovering Althusserian. For decades now I have been Althusser-free, for the most part, but we all have our lapses. The first step to becoming a recovering Althusserian is to recognize that you have no control and are unconsciously always a little bit Althusserian ...

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Erik Olin Wright & Class Today

February 9, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

------ What if we tried a thought experiment? Just for shits and giggles? The thought experiment runs as follows: What if this was no longer capitalism, but something worse? Could we start by describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the newest features, and work back and ...

Literature

RetroDada Manifesto

February 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

The RetroDada Manifesto was written at the invitation of Anita Hugi and David Dufresne for an event at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, 4 & 5 March 2016, to celebrate the Dada centenary, in there place where it all began. For more information on that event, and related projects see http://dada-data.net/en/ Below ...

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Marcel Mariën

January 27, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Mariën had a colorful life. From a working class family, he left school at fifteen to become an apprentice photographer, but after discovering René Magritte, became instead an apprentice to the Belgian Surrealists. Briefly a prisoner of war, he claimed to have spent the remainder of the war years smuggling ...

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A Slow Reader’s Books of the Year

January 10, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

So I managed to read, and write about some twenty-odd books in 2015. I’m a slow reader, so they were not all published in that year. Some go back four or five years, and have sat on my shelves demanding attention for so long that I finally felt like I ...

Science & Technology

Barbarism or Barbarism?

December 28, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Timothy Morton proposes an ecology without nature. In Molecular Red I thought it made more sense to think a nature without ecology, as nature is the more capacious and historically variable term, whereas a logos of the oikos – ecology – is precisely what can no longer be said to ...

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From OOO to P(OO)

December 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have been reading the work of Timothy Morton with pleasure for many years now. Originally a scholar of English romantic poetry, I find his work reads best as poetry, or perhaps a poetics, as a singular Mortonian vision of the world – or in this case, a vision of ...

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Imaginal Politics

November 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

To any follower of the news, it may seem these days harder than ever to figure out what is real and what is delusional, and whether the delusional is an individual psychopathology or perhaps something more general. As Chiara Bottici puts it: “We live in a society of spectacles that ...

Theory & Practice

Anthropocene Denial Bingo

November 12, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

“We’re fucked. The only question is how soon and how badly.” (16) This is the refreshingly candid way Roy Scranton starts his small, intense book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, 2015). For Scranton, the first and last job of critical thought is to interrupt habits of ...