Haraway (Donna) Archives - Public Seminar

Race

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

December 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...

Theory & Practice

Chthulucene, Capitalocene, Anthropocene

September 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

It’s a time naming things in another way, because the thing that needs to be named is a certain strange quality of time. Here’s a marvelous sentence by Donna Haraway, with three names for three kinds of time, all in the one sentence, overlapping but not the same: "The unfinished ...

Feature

Friction

September 5, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has just published a brilliant book on the global trade in a certain kind of mushroom. As much as I’d like to report on it, I feel like I have to get my head around a previous landmark work of hers before attempting it. Here ...

Reviews

I Love Dick

August 25, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

My prayer to the TV gods when the pilot of I Love Dick screened was “please, let it not suck!” My concern was mostly for the author of the book of the same name on which it is based – Chris Kraus. I want people to read her books. ...

Science & Technology

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...

Theory & Practice

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

on Paolo Virno

July 2, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Paolo Virno offers a curious diagnosis of the times. In A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004), he writes of the communism of capital. It’s a thought that has some pedigree in Marx, who made a similar observation in his own time about the formation of the joint-stock company, which ...

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

Uncategorized

Make Kith Not Kin!

On Donna Haraway

June 24, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. ...

Theory & Practice

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

June 8, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...

Science & Technology

Barbarism or Barbarism?

December 28, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Timothy Morton proposes an ecology without nature. In Molecular Red I thought it made more sense to think a nature without ecology, as nature is the more capacious and historically variable term, whereas a logos of the oikos – ecology – is precisely what can no longer be said to ...

Uncategorized

From OOO to P(OO)

December 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have been reading the work of Timothy Morton with pleasure for many years now. Originally a scholar of English romantic poetry, I find his work reads best as poetry, or perhaps a poetics, as a singular Mortonian vision of the world – or in this case, a vision of ...

Uncategorized

The Capitalocene

On Jason Moore

October 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso 2015) is an important book, in that it brings together the immense resources of world systems theory, critical geography and a certain strain of ‘green’ Marxism. Even though it refuses such terms, it does ...

Theory & Practice

Molecular Red in Nine Minutes

September 29, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am happy to concede that Chehonadskih may indeed have mastery and ownership of the field of Russian letters and that I do not. Although one might pause to wonder what this might mean give that the authors in question here – Bogdanov and Platonov – were dedicated proletarian internationalists. ...