In 1995, Wark had an affair with novelist Kathy Acker. Their email correspondence was published in the book I'm very into you (2007).[6] In 1997, Wark met artist Cristen Clifford in Williamsburg, New York. They married in 2000 and have two children together.[7]
Wark is a trans woman.[8] In 2017, Wark started her gender transition, and began taking hormones in 2018.[9][10] Anticipating that hormone therapy might affect her ability to write, she took leave from the New School and completed the books Reverse Cowgirl, Philosophy for Spiders, Capital is Dead and Sensoria.[9] Between 2018 and 2022, Wark primarily wrote articles and commissioned pieces, and became involved with queer and trans rave scenes in Brooklyn.[11] In 2023, she published her first book since her leave of absence, Raving, a first-person account of raving.[4][12]
Work
In Virtual Geography, published in 1994, Wark offers a theory of what she calls the 'weird global media event'. Examples given in the book include the stock market crash of 1987, the Tiananmen square demonstrations of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She argues that the emergence of a global media space – a virtual geography – made out of increasingly pervasive lines of communication – vectors – was emerging as a more chaotic space than globalisation theory usually maintains.
Much of Wark's early engagement in public debate occurred in the Australian post-marxist quarterly Arena, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory.
In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Wark turned her attention to the national cultural space of Australia. The first of these works examines the so-called 'culture wars' of the 1990s as symptomatic of struggles over the redefinition of Australian national identity and culture in an age of global media. The second of these 'Australian' books looked at the transformation of a social democratic idea of the 'popular' as a political idea into a more market-based and media-driven popular culture.
Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading national daily. She developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.
Wark describes the process of culture by which "the jolt of new experiences becomes naturalised into habit" or second nature and describes the information society as not being new but something that changes through culture the balance between space binding and time binding media.
She further describes the concept of "third nature" or telesthesia, where devices such as television and the telephone create a platform which we use to communicate to people over large distances and not just a machine that we learn to operate individually. This is described in her book The Virtual Republic:
While it may feel natural for some to inhabit this media-made world, I suspect there is a fundamental change here that has a lot of people just a bit spooked. It's no longer a case of making second nature out of nature, of building things and getting used to living in the world people build. I think it might be interesting to consider telesthesia to be something fundamentally different. What gets woven out of telegraph, telephone, television, telecommunications is not a second nature but what I call third nature.[pageneeded]
Wark emigrated to the United States in 2000. With the Australian poet John Kinsella, Australian novelist Bernard Cohen and Australian memoirist Terri-Ann White, Wark co-wrote Speed Factory, an experimental work about distance and expatriation. The co-authors developed for this the speed factory writing technique, in which an author writes 300 words, emails it to the next author, who then has 24 hours to write the next 300 words.
Dispositions, another experimental work, followed. Wark travelled the world with a GPS device and recorded observations at particular times and coordinates. The media theorist Ned Rossiter has called this approach a 'micro-empiricism', and sees it as derived from the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
In 2004 Wark published her best known work, A Hacker Manifesto. Here Wark argues that the rise of intellectual property creates a new class division, between those who produce it, whom she calls the hacker class, and those who come to own it, the vectoralist class. Wark argues that these vectoralists have imposed the concept of property on all physical fields (thus having scarcity), but now the new vectoralists lay claim to intellectual property, a field that is not bound by scarcity.[13] By the concept of intellectual property these vectoralists attempt to institute an imposed scarcity in an immaterial field. Wark argues that the vectoral class cannot control the intellectual (property) world itself, but only in its commodified form—not its overall application or use.[14]
Gamer Theory combines Wark's interest in experimental writing techniques in networked media with her own developing media theory. Gamer Theory was first published by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a networked book with her own specially designed interface. In Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games are a utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realise the principles of the level playing field and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.
Wark's recent work explores the art, writing, and politics of the Situationist International (SI). In her book 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (the result of a lecture given at Columbia University), Wark examines the influences of Situationist aesthetics on contemporary art and activist movements, from tactical media to the anti-globalism movement. Wark pays particular attention to often-neglected figures and works in the SI, including the utopian architectural projects of Constant, the painting of Giuseppe Pinot, The Situationist Times of Jacqueline de Jong and the novels of Michèle Bernstein.
In 2013, Wark, along with Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, published the book Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. In the opening of the book the authors ask "Does everything that exists, exist to be presented and represented, to be mediated and remediated, to be communicated and translated? There are mediative situations in which heresy, exile, or banishment carry the day, not repetition, communion, or integration. There are certain kinds of messages that state 'there will be no more messages'. Hence for every communication there is a correlative excommunication."[15] This approach has been referred to as the "New York School of Media Theory."[16]
At The New School, Professor Wark teaches seminars on the Situationist International, the Militarized Vision lecture, as well as Introduction to Cultural Studies. Wark was an Eyebeam resident in 2007.[17]
Reverse Cowgirl is an autofictional account of Wark's various experiences of gender and sexuality as she understood them on the cusp of her transition.[18] Her autofictional account of her relationship with Kathy Acker, originally intended to be part of Reverse Cowgirl, became instead the start of Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker. Wark's correspondence with Acker had been published in 2015 as I'm Very into You, which she described in the afterword to the German edition as a work of "accidental autofiction."[19]
Molecular Red (2016) according to its subtitle, is a "theory for the Anthropocene." The first half of the book draws on the relatively neglected Marxism of Alexander Bogdanov, and which reads the work of Andrei Platonov as Marxist theory. Out of these Wark draws a theory and practice of Marxism as the applied knowledge of collaborative labor.[20] The second half of the book applies this Bogdanovite lens to the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
General Intellects (2017) and Sensoria (2020) collect Wark's essay on other theorists who, together, Wark thinks might enable a collaborative knowledge of the present moment, such that it might be transformed.[21]
In 2019, McKenzie Wark's book Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? was published from Verso.[22] Building on her earlier book A Hacker Manifesto, Wark differentiates a vectoralist class from capitalists and landlords as a new ruling class gaining its power through the ownership and control of information.
In the epistolary Love and Money, Sex and Death, Wark writes to her deceased mother, her sister, and various lovers. This book, along with I'm Very into You and part of Raving, was intentionally written in the second person, which Wark considers to be enabling for trans literature. She writes that: "Addressing the text in the second person to and from specific people, real or imagined, gets us away from the omniscient narrator and allows us to explore how particular experiences and emotions fall outside both literary and social norms."[23]
Reception
At the theoretical level, Wark's writing can be seen in the context of three currents: British Cultural Studies, German Critical Theory and French Poststructuralism. Her earlier works combined British and French influences to extend Australian cultural studies to encompass questions of globalization and new media technology. Her later works draw more from Critical Theory and a much revised Marxism. Through her experimentation with new media forms, starting with listservers such as nettime.org and later with web interfaces such as the one developed for Gamer Theory, her works intersect with other new media theorists such as Geert Lovink and Mark Amerika.
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Media imperialism is an area in the international political economy of communications research tradition that focuses on how "all Empires, in territorial or nonterritorial forms, rely upon communications technologies and mass media industries to expand and shore up their economic, geopolitical, and cultural influence." In the main, most media imperialism research examines how the unequal relations of economic, military and cultural power between an imperialist country and those on the receiving end of its influence tend to be expressed and perpetuated by mass media and cultural industries.
André Frankin was a Belgian Lettrist and Situationist.
The dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants stop focusing on their everyday relations to their social environment. Developed by members of the Letterist International, it was first publicly theorized in Guy Debord's "Theory of the Dérive" (1956). Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances."
Samuel Rutherford Crockett, who published under the name "S. R. Crockett", was a Scottish novelist.
Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.
The philosophy of technology is a sub-field of philosophy that studies the nature of technology and its social effects.
G. H. Hovagimyan is an American experimental cross-media, new media art and performance artist who lives and works in New York City.
Michèle Bernstein is a French novelist and critic, most often remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the first wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.
Katharina Hacker is a German author best known for her award-winning novel Die Habenichtse. Hacker studied philosophy, history and Jewish studies at the University of Freiburg and the University of Jerusalem. Her studies in Israel have been seen as an attempt to compensate for the strong anti-Semitic feelings of her Silesian grandmother. She did not finish her studies with an academic degree. Since 1996, she has been living as a freelance writer in Berlin. In 2006, she was the second writer to be awarded the German Book Prize for Die Habenichtse. In this and other works, Hacker examines the consequences of globalization and neoliberalism on the working life, social relations, and family interactions of her German protagonists.
Ursula Hirschmann was a German anti-fascist activist and an advocate of European federalism.
Frances Watts is the pen-name of Ali Lavau, a Swiss born Australian author, who moved to Sydney, Australia when she was three years old. She has studied English literature at Macquarie University, going on to teach Australian Literature and children's literature. After graduating with a PhD, she obtained her first job in publishing.
Eugene Thacker is an American author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Previously he was a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His writing is associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation. Many of his media contributions are developments of Science and Technology Studies. He has produced theory around how media informs and augments biological processes across several publications.
Caroline O'Donnell is an architect, writer, and educator. She is the founder and sole-proprietor of the firm CODA, based in Ithaca, NY, USA. CODA won the PS1 MoMA Young Architects Program in 2013 and built "Party Wall" at PS1 in Long Island City, New York. O’Donnell is the Edgar A. Tafel Professor of Architecture, and Chair of Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She has previously taught at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, and at Harvard GSD.
A Hacker Manifesto is a critical manifesto written by McKenzie Wark, which criticizes the commodification of information in the age of digital culture and globalization. It was published in the United States in 2004.
Dark media are a type of media outlined by American philosopher Eugene Thacker to describe technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural, most commonly found in the horror genre.
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her assistants. Since 2018 Claire Fontaine lives and works in Palermo and has a studio in the historical centre of the Kalsa near Piazza Magione.
Walking art refers to a variety of artistic practices that position walking as the central process, experience or outcome. Walking artists have diverse interests and it 'has gathered practitioners from nearly every field'.:43 Despite emerging from a variety of artistic and literary traditions, a 'common feature [of walking art] is the engagement of the body in a process of walking through a landscape based on a specific artistic design.':161 Some artists consider walking an artistic end in itself, while others use walking as a means of mark-making, storytelling, social practice, or to create work in other artistic media.
Jodi McAlister is an Australian author and academic. She has published numerous books, including contemporary romance and young adult fiction and academic works regarding romance and literature.
↑ Alexander R. Galloway; Eugene Thacker; McKenzie Wark (2013). Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. University of Chicago Press. p.10. ISBN978-0-226-92523-3.
↑ Wark, Mckenzie (9 February 2021). Verso. Verso Books. ISBN9781788735339. Archived from the original on 17 February 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2020.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
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