Haraway (Donna) Archives - Page 2 of 3

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Blog-Post for Cyborgs

On Donna Haraway

September 24, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Donna Haraway was born in the forties, trained as a biologist, and radicalized during the Vietnam war years. Lodged at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both cold war techno-science and the struggle ...

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Wendy Chun, on software and the machine

July 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Is the relation between the analog and the digital itself analog or digital? That might be one way of thinking the relation between the work of Alexander Galloway and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. I wrote elsewhere about Galloway’s notion of software as a simulation of ideology. Here I take up Chun’s of software as ...

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From Metaphyiscs to Meatphysics

June 10, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The mark of a major body of work is that it will support more than one interpretation, all of which are coherent and persuasive, and each of which is open-ended enough for further elaboration. So it is with Marx. But at least one possible path of interpretation and elaboration seems ...

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Zizek and me

June 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...

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Animal Spirits

May 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Rather than read books when they come out, I like to lay them down for a while. Sometimes their flavors get richer, just like wine – and sometimes they turn out to be vinegar. I set aside Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (NAi, 2008) because I did not ...

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Laruelle’s Kinky Syntax

April 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the most original and eccentric flavor of Marxism in these times is that of François Laruelle. Introduction to Non-Marxism, (Univocal, 2015) is a translation of a book from fifteen years ago, with a rather striking new last chapter. The world might now finally be ready for him. Here are some ...

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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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#Theory21c (part 2)

March 13, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is quite scandalous how much theory-talk still retails metaphors based on 19^th century worldviews. As if what we can know about the world had not undergone several revolutions since. Hence if one were to look for a #Theory21c it would have to start with people who at least engage with ...

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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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Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...

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The Drone of Minerva

November 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The one kind of speculative thought that might be of service in the Anthropocene is surely some kind of philosophy of history, and yet within the academy itself it seems the one nobody wants to actually attempt. It is as if the debates at the end of the last century ...

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Utopian Realism

October 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

I once asked Jean Baudrillard for his impressions of his tour of the colleges of America. “Boring,” he said, “like any realized utopia.” This was a provocation on several levels. In the cold war, realized utopia mean Soviet terror, not American prosperity. And of course Baudrillard was as aware as Jameson ...