Williams (Raymond) 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!

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…

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Imaginal Politics

November 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

To any follower of the news, it may seem these days harder than ever to figure out what is real and what is delusional, and whether the delusional is an individual psychopathology or perhaps something more general. As Chiara Bottici puts it: “We live in a society of spectacles that ...

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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Inventing the Future

October 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

“The ambition here is to take the future back from capitalism.” (127) Which would be all well and good if there still was a future. The encounter that never arrives in Srnicek and Williams (hereafter S+W) is with, say, the work of John Bellamy Foster or Jason Moore, which would ...

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Benjamedia

August 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...

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 ...

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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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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Compose Yourself!

December 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

After yet another review in the New York Times Book Review about some book about Scott Fitzgerald, I felt it was time to write something about Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines. I taught some of it this semester past and made at least a couple of Zambreno converts. Zambreno’s Heroines (Semiotexte 2012) ...

Theory & Practice

The Long Counter-Revolution

October 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I like to peek at what other people in coffee-shops are doing on their laptops. Sometimes it is spreadsheets. Very, vary rarely it is code. Practically everyone else is doing the sort of stuff that might get them labeled in today culture as 'creatives'. A 'creative' seems to mean anyone ...

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English Psycho

June 23, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The third, and perhaps dominant mode was to stick to writing from the male point of view, but to make the male character a nebbish. As if to say: ‘see? How could we possibly be implicated in patriarchy? Men are so hopeless! Jerks, sure, but incapable of dominating their own ...