Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

Climate & Colonialism

November 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert. One could draw lines on a map of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia that mark the boundary between desert and conventionally ...

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Inventing the Future

October 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

“The ambition here is to take the future back from capitalism.” (127) Which would be all well and good if there still was a future. The encounter that never arrives in Srnicek and Williams (hereafter S+W) is with, say, the work of John Bellamy Foster or Jason Moore, which would ...

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The Capitalocene

On Jason Moore

October 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso 2015) is an important book, in that it brings together the immense resources of world systems theory, critical geography and a certain strain of ‘green’ Marxism. Even though it refuses such terms, it does ...

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Critical Media Theory

October 8, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

This semester (fall 15) I’m teaching Critical Media Theory (GLIB 5600) in the Liberal Studies program at the New School for Social Research. Critical Media Theory looks at a series of key texts that define pathways for thinking about media. They are critical in the sense of aiming to delineate limits ...

Theory & Practice

Molecular Red in Nine Minutes

September 29, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am happy to concede that Chehonadskih may indeed have mastery and ownership of the field of Russian letters and that I do not. Although one might pause to wonder what this might mean give that the authors in question here – Bogdanov and Platonov – were dedicated proletarian internationalists. ...

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Blog-Post for Cyborgs

On Donna Haraway

September 24, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Donna Haraway was born in the forties, trained as a biologist, and radicalized during the Vietnam war years. Lodged at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both cold war techno-science and the struggle ...

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Otaku Philosophy

On Hiroki Azuma

September 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Tokyo was a real metropolis centuries before any European city got much beyond the small town stage. By the 80s it had a heavy overlay of pervasive media culture, of a kind that would not happen anywhere else for decades. The contemporary media-urban landscape was born here. Not speaking the ...

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On Manovich

September 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I’m sure I’m not the only one annoyed by the seemingly constant interruptions to my work caused by my computer trying to update some part of the software that runs on it. As Cory Doctorow shows so clearly, the tech industry will not actually leave us to our own devices. I ...

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Benjamedia

August 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...

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On Wendy Brown

August 14, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Let’s start with an example. Brown discusses the 2003 Bremer Orders, issued by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the United States and its allies defeated Saddam Hussein and occupied the country. The Bremer Orders appear at first blush to be a classic instance of neoliberal ...

Theory & Practice

Pasolini: Sexting the World

July 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

His original and perceptive theory of neo-capitalism came from direct engagement with the problems of making a postwar, post-Fascist culture. His commitment to the Grand Old Cause of the people was both moral but also erotic, even carnal. He wanted – needed – to cock-suck the world. Such was his ...

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Wendy Chun, on software and the machine

July 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Is the relation between the analog and the digital itself analog or digital? That might be one way of thinking the relation between the work of Alexander Galloway and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. I wrote elsewhere about Galloway’s notion of software as a simulation of ideology. Here I take up Chun’s of software as ...