Debord (Guy) Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

The Sublime Language of My Century

May 14, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism. And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think there is an eternal essence to capitalism, and only ...

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Marcel Mariën

January 27, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Mariën had a colorful life. From a working class family, he left school at fifteen to become an apprentice photographer, but after discovering René Magritte, became instead an apprentice to the Belgian Surrealists. Briefly a prisoner of war, he claimed to have spent the remainder of the war years smuggling ...

Theory & Practice

Anthropocene Denial Bingo

November 12, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

“We’re fucked. The only question is how soon and how badly.” (16) This is the refreshingly candid way Roy Scranton starts his small, intense book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, 2015). For Scranton, the first and last job of critical thought is to interrupt habits of ...

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Communicative Capitalism

March 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It seems I got the title for my book The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso 2013) from reading Jodi Dean. I read her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press, 2010) in manuscript. On re-reading it, I find this: “disintegrating spectacles allow for ever more ...

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Virno and History

February 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

He could have been talking about something that goes by many names in Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History, (Verso Futures, 2015). Sometimes Virno calls it potential, or the virtual, or memory, or faculty, or disposition, or even labor-power. This unquenchable fire is for Virno the source ...

History

Marx and Nature

January 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

"What Engels called “the monopolization of the earth by a few” has reached absurdist proportions as I was writing this. (60) It would appear that the 1% now own more than half the wealth of the planet. It is the greatest concentration of wealth ever, and yet it corresponds to ...

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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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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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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

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 ...

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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

No More Master Thinkers

March 20, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

How often it transpires that the interesting thinkers were monsters. Heidegger was a Nazi. Schmitt was a Nazi. De Man was a collaborator, a thief, a liar and – to cap it off – a bigamist. Or, case of a different kind: Althusser strangled his wife, and was probably none ...