Needham (Joseph) Archives - Public Seminar

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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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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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#Theory21c (part 1)

February 17, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

That agenda seems to me to have at least three major features. The first is the anthropocene. One can no longer bracket off nature from the social, and construct a theory exclusively on the terrain of the social. The second is the role of information in both production and reproduction. ...

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All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

January 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil (2)

November 30, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

When ever Marxists lift their attention from vulgar matters and start creating theories of the subject, it is always the bourgeois subject that seems to need theorizing. Perhaps there is no other kind. Althusser illustrates his theory of ideology with an anecdote about being hailed in the street by a cop: ...

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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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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: ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate and inertia

October 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...

Theory & Practice

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...

Theory & Practice

Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

September 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Like most people who teach in the humanities, I think that there are ways of understanding the present through the past. We return again and again to certain key authors as touchstones. There are two different ways of going about this, however. One is to take the succession of key authors ...