Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

November 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the first thing to know about Zizek is that his work entails a certain interpretive strategy, which in his new book Absolute Recoil he calls brachylogia, (41) which refers to statements of excessive brevity, with words left out. This can be coupled with Zizek’s insistence that authors misrecognize their more ...

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Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...

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Postpolitical Infrastructures

November 17, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

As a kid I was always fascinated by my father’s work as an architect. He used to take me to building sites and explain what was going on. But I was particularly interested in how he made the plans. These he drew by hand on a huge drafting table, with ...

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The Nothingness That Speaks French

November 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren (published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press, and elegantly translated by Robin Mackay) is quite simply the most beautiful book by a philosopher that I have read for many years. It is a highly original reading of Stéphane Mallarmé's Coup De Dés. If the objective of Meillassoux’s ...

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Fall of the Berlin Wall as Weird Global Media Event

November 12, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, here is a small piece of my first book, Virtual Geography (Indiana 1994) on it as a weird global media event. The proposition of that book was that one might understand the functioning of global media in those moments ...

Fall of the Berlin Wall as Weird Global Media Event

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The Drone of Minerva

November 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...

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William Gibson’s The Peripheral

November 2, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The new Gibson novel seems to me to be about three things: space, time and class. In classic Gibsonesque style, it threads together stories that begin in two different places. One is the kind of landscape I recognize from spending time in upstate New York. A rural, mostly working class, mostly ...

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Can Anyone Even Remember Postmodernism?

October 31, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If one teaches the ‘postmodern’ moment to today’s students, it is worth remembering that when pomo was a big deal, they had probably not even been born. If ‘retro’ was one of the characteristic style moves of pomo, then there is now even retro-pomo, a kind of meta-retro, or meta-pomo, ...

Politics

The Empty Chair: On Reading Jameson

His texts are allegorical readings of the Marxist classics, the texts of and for a people, their being and their destiny

October 31, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

—Guy Debord, Panegyric Hermeneutics has its roots in the practice of reading the old testament through the new one. The sacred Jewish texts are at one and the same time a book of and a book for a people; at one and the same time the text of that people’s being ...

Theory & Practice

The Long Counter-Revolution

October 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I like to peek at what other people in coffee-shops are doing on their laptops. Sometimes it is spreadsheets. Very, vary rarely it is code. Practically everyone else is doing the sort of stuff that might get them labeled in today culture as 'creatives'. A 'creative' seems to mean anyone ...

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Utopian Realism

October 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I once asked Jean Baudrillard for his impressions of his tour of the colleges of America. “Boring,” he said, “like any realized utopia.” This was a provocation on several levels. In the cold war, realized utopia mean Soviet terror, not American prosperity. And of course Baudrillard was as aware as Jameson ...

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Althusserians Anonymous (4)

October 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has been revised here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ The real significance of Althusser is in the transition from a Marxism of the party to a Marxism of the academy. The means via which he got us from one to the other are now moot. It is rather like the fable of Captain Cook’s axe: ...