McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyse this new world of information, but the ones to change it, too.

Is This Something Worse?

Capital Is Dead

"What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave's sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital"--

Raving

Kathy Acker

Matias Viegener

John Kinsella

"Why am I telling you all this? Partly 'cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child's play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be." [M.W.] "It's two in the morning... I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn't for play I'd be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable... " [KA] -- from I'm Very into You After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace -- by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching. Their corresepondence is a Plato's Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I'm Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time.

Correspondence 1995--1996

I'm Very Into You

A guide to the thinkers and the ideas that will shape the future What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general intellects whose writing could, if read together, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. McKenzie Wark's distinctive readings are appreciations, but are also critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work to understand and change the world. The thinkers included are Amy Wendling, Kojin Karatani, Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Azumo Hiroki, Paul B. Pr�ciado, Wendy Chun, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway.

Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

General Intellects

Explains how the demands of companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the culture of file sharing has given rise to a class conflict in which creators of the information are lined up against a possessing class who monopolize what the hackers produce.

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self. Another genre for another gender. What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become. Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Reverse Cowgirl

Design, Politics, the Environment: a survey of the key thinkers and ideas that are rebuilding the world in the shadow of the anthropocene As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.

Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

Sensoria

What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

A transgender woman reflects on her late transition and coming out, trans politics and culture, motherhood and memory, in this provocative epistolary memoir for readers of Olivia Laing’s Everybody A breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memory After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all—love and money, sex and death. In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother’s early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn’s trans and raver communities.

Love and Money, Sex and Death

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov. The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.

Theory for the Anthropocene

Molecular Red

Gamer Theory

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides? Welcome to gamespace, the world in which we live. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark contends that digital computer games are our society's emergent cultural form, a utopian version of the world as it is. Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society.

Berit Fischer

Masha Tupitsyn

C. Spencer Yeh

Isiah Medina

Yaniya Lee

Love Sounds

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can.

The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International

The Beach Beneath the Street

McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker's writing to outline Acker's philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker

Philosophy for Spiders

Following the work of the Situationist International after May 1968, this companion volume to The Beach Beneath the Street puts the work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, documenting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity.

The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the Twentieth Century

Não é capitalismo, não é neoliberalismo - e se for algo pior? Neste novo livro radical e visionário, McKenzie Wark argumenta que a informação deu poder a um novo tipo de classe dominante. Por meio da propriedade e do controle da informação, esta classe emergente domina não apenas o trabalho, como também o capital - da maneira que tradicionalmente o compreendemos. Não são apenas as empresas de tecnologia como a Amazon e o Google, que podem dominar toda a cadeia de produção com a propriedade de nada além de marcas, patentes, copyrights e sistemas logísticos, mas também outras, como Walmart e Nike. Enquanto os entusiastas tecno-utópicos ainda celebram estas inovações bradando serem melhorias do capitalismo, para os trabalhadores - e para o planeta - elas são terríveis. Esta nova classe dominante usa os poderes da informação para burlar qualquer obstáculo levantado pelos movimentos trabalhistas e sociais. Então, como encontrar uma saída? "O Capital está Morto" oferece não apenas ferramentas teóricas para analisar este novo mundo, mas também formas de mudá-lo. Baseando-se no pensamento de um surpreendente espectro de teóricos clássicos e contemporâneos, Wark propõe uma visão esclarecedora e genuína da condição contemporânea e das forças de classe emergentes que a controlam e a contestam.

O capital está morto

"Um duplo assombra o mundo, o duplo da abstração. A fortuna de Estados e exércitos, empresas e comunidades depende dela. Todas as classes rivais, sejam elas dominantes ou dominadas, reverenciam-na – mas a temem (...) Todas as classes temem essa incansável abstração do mundo, da qual ainda depende sua fortuna. Todas as classes menos uma: a classe hacker" Recorrendo a Guy Debord e Gilles Deleuze, igualmente, Um manifesto do hacker, da escritora Mckenzie Wark, oferece uma reformulação do pensamento marxista para a era do ciberespaço e globalização. Na revolta generalizada contra a informação mercantilizada, a autora vê uma promessa utópica que vai além da forma da propriedade privada e uma nova classe progressista – a classe hacker – com interesse compartilhado em um novo bem comum: o acesso à informação. O domínio da chamada "propriedade intelectual" dá origem a um tipo inédito de conflito entre classes, que opõe criadores de informação – a classe hacker, composta por pesquisadores e autores, artistas e biólogos, químicos e músicos, filósofos e programadores – contra uma classe proprietária, que procura tomar o monopólio sobre as informações que a classe hacker produz. Wark define habilmente, para citar um exemplo, as disputas entre demandas cada vez mais estridentes de empresas, como as farmacêuticas, pela proteção de suas patentes e direitos autorais, e a cultura popular, difundida por meio de compartilhamento de arquivos e da pirataria. O objetivo audacioso da obra, ao longo de capítulos como "abstração", "classe", "produção", "revolta", entre muitos outros, é demonstrar as origens, propósitos e interesses dessa classe hacker emergente, responsável por criar um novo mundo e novas formas de associação capazes de nos afastar da destruição provocada pela exploração mercantilizada. Nas palavras da própria autora: "Os maiores hacks de nosso tempo podem vir a ser formas de organizar a livre expressão coletiva, de modo que, a partir de agora, a abstração esteja a serviço do povo, e não do povo a serviço da classe dominante"

McKenzie Wark

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