Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

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No-Futurism

June 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

As a tenured academic I am one of the last of an almost extinct social class – the bourgeois. Unlike the capitalist, who owns capital, the bourgeois is the professional who keeps the superstructures of capitalism going, including those of art and knowledge. Our job is to be a superstructure ...

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On Galloway

June 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Take the tv show, 24. In what sense could one say that the show is ‘political’? It certainly appears so in a ‘red state’ sort of way. The Jack Bauer character commits all sorts of crimes, including torture, in the name of ‘national security.’ But perhaps there’s more to it. Galloway draws ...

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Lazzarato and Pasolini

June 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have a passing acquaintance with the work of Felix Guattari, but the person who perhaps knows his work best is Maurizio Lazzarato. His recently translated book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014) shows the ongoing usefulness of the “anti-sociology” (120) that Guattari elaborated, both alone and in ...

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From Metaphyiscs to Meatphysics

June 10, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The mark of a major body of work is that it will support more than one interpretation, all of which are coherent and persuasive, and each of which is open-ended enough for further elaboration. So it is with Marx. But at least one possible path of interpretation and elaboration seems ...

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Where Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri were born in the 30s, Berardi (1948) belongs with Paolo Virno (1952) and Silvia Federici (1942) to a second wave of Italian Marxist thinkers who grew out of the workerist current that struck out on its own path, diverging from the official Gramscian postures of the ...

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Communal Luxury

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the constant labors required of an open, creative, critical and radical thought is a constant reconstitution of the archive from which present conceptual armatures might most usefully be drawn. Its not just a question of harping on certain well-known proper names, but constituting, over and over, a milieu ...

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Zizek and me

June 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...

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Fury Road

May 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Australian film-maker George Miller is a master of the horizontal in cinema, of a certain kind of movement-image, where the landscape sliding away across the screen is a double of the movement of the frames of celluloid through the projector. At his best, Miller makes a cinema of pure kinetics, ...

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Animal Spirits

May 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Rather than read books when they come out, I like to lay them down for a while. Sometimes their flavors get richer, just like wine – and sometimes they turn out to be vinegar. I set aside Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (NAi, 2008) because I did not ...

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Cognitive Mapping

May 1, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am inordinately fond of a crappy TV show called Leverage. Its about a little band of hackers, grifters and second-story artists who steal from the rich to give to the poor. Perhaps I like it because it reminds me of my favorite childhood TV show, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Made ...

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Laruelle’s Kinky Syntax

April 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the most original and eccentric flavor of Marxism in these times is that of François Laruelle. Introduction to Non-Marxism, (Univocal, 2015) is a translation of a book from fifteen years ago, with a rather striking new last chapter. The world might now finally be ready for him. Here are some ...

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On Hito Steyerl

April 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Hito Steyerl is from that era when the politics of culture was all about representation. Sometimes the emphasis was on the question of who was represented; sometimes on the question of how. The latter question drove a series of inquiries and experiments in form. These experiments tended to focus fairly ...