Lazzarato (Maurizio) Archives

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

September 11, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Asger Jorn is acknowledged to be one of the great artists of the postwar years. Even more impressive in my estimation is his theoretical work. I made the case for this in The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). Since then, two collections of Jorn’s writings have appeared in English: ...

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

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 ...

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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. ...

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Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

June 17, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Watching the American Presidential Primaries and now the 'Brexit' vote in the UK on leaving the European Union, I am struck by how apt the political theory of Chantal Mouffe is to both situations. Both in the US and the UK, there was a contest as to whether liberal democracy ...

Chantal Mouffe on the crisis within liberal democracy

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 ...

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Class, Gender and Creative Industries

June 1, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

The fate of cultural studies in the United States appears to be twofold. On the one hand, it still generates moral panic. Right-wing nut-jobbers think that "cultural Marxism" is some insidious, decadent creed, probably created by Jews and Blacks to destroy America. On the other hand, it has finally become ...

Theory & Practice

Pasolini: Sexting the World

July 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

His original and perceptive theory of neo-capitalism came from direct engagement with the problems of making a postwar, post-Fascist culture. His commitment to the Grand Old Cause of the people was both moral but also erotic, even carnal. He wanted – needed – to cock-suck the world. Such was his ...

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Lazzarato and Pasolini

June 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have a passing acquaintance with the work of Felix Guattari, but the person who perhaps knows his work best is Maurizio Lazzarato. His recently translated book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014) shows the ongoing usefulness of the “anti-sociology” (120) that Guattari elaborated, both alone and in ...

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Cognitive Capitalism

February 19, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The second is able to think more historically. For example the regulation school came up with a convincing portrait of what it called the Fordist regime of regulation. In this version capitalism has stages, each of which are qualitatively different. But it tends to be troubled by the current stage, ...

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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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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: ...