
McKenzie Wark is so in touch with the present that her work often comes off as futuristic. A public intellectual in her home country of Australia, she was schooled in Marxism by the working class miners she grew up around. Following her immigration to the United States, she wrote some of her most significant works, many of which revolve around communism, media, and cultural theory, along with texts on the Situationists International and her auto-ethnography Reverse Cowgirl (2020), which chronicles her years attempting to be gay, and then straight, before transitioning. Wildly prolific, her reach is long, but Wark has been constructing a body of work around something truly novel for decades now: the death of capitalism unto something else.
As a writer, Wark has expressed frustration with the modifiers that weâve come to see the world through. It is not capitalism we are surviving but neoliberal capitalism, late capitalism, finance capitalism, bio-political capitalism or some other variation. These modifiers signal to Wark that the word âcapitalismâ itself no longer describes our current condition. In 2004, she published her breakout text A Hacker Manifesto which laid out an intimation of a new world order. Class, she argued, is now being organized through relationships with intellectual property, divvying up âhackersâ who produce that intellectual property and the âvectoralistsâ who eventually own it. In 2019 Wark continued this line of thought with Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? further delineating how a new ruling class, without owning the means of production, have come to dominate the world through data harvesting, patents, brands, and copyrights.
Warkâs new book, Sensoria: Thinkers for the 21st Century, is a syllabus of this present, outlining the contours of the new world order through the work of nineteen scholars thinking within aesthetics, ethnography, and design; or to use Warkâs substitutions, media theory, ethnography, and technics. She asks, critically, âWhat is the point of scholarship?â in her introduction to the text, and provides a rousing answer through the work of others. The form of domination is the form of the world. To understand the Anthropocene is to begin untangling the way this new economic mode is shaping our societies and planet, how algorithms and other-than-human processes are co-producing a reality we set into motion but have little control over. And stillâin recognizing this we are no longer limited to the immovable cage of capitalism, there are new grounds on which to consider the fight for liberation.
Iâve never met McKenzie Wark, not in person. Considering the subject of her work, that may be appropriate. There were some emails exchanged, I got a hard copy of her book, plus some PDFs, some Tweets were liked. We got on the phone together, one hundred miles apart, to talk about the more-than-human world we find ourselves living in.
âShanti Escalante-De Mattei
THE BELIEVER: The first thing you ask in Sensoria is: âWhat is the point of scholarship?â Why do you think that question has become so easy to ask?
MCKENZIE WARK: I think thereâs several things going on with that. One is, particularly in the United States, the turning of all higher education into a kind of debt based consumer good, like buying a car or a house, which is then perceived much more in terms of acquiring the car and the house. So it sort of gets nested in this debt-based consumption model which makes scholarship completely secondary to what most people think itâs about. Itâs clear that that modelâs just unsustainable. Fewer and fewer people can really afford it, the cut off point where you really do benefit, even in just straight up monetary terms from having qualification, is shifting. Enrollments have been declining.
The other reason is the attacks from the right. Any knowledge of the world that is reliable at the moment would point to the world being completely unsustainable in the form that itâs in, so therefore we must shut down knowledge, is the response to that.
The third piece would be the way that critical theories about whatâs going on in the world hid out in the university as one of the few available spaces where you could get paid to think about things. But itâs really gotten extremely difficult to do that, to succeed at it became a very sort of formalistic processâdisciplinary criteria and all that. One really has to ask if the best place for critical theory is university or not.
BLVR: You mention in a past interview that you were educated about Marxism outside of school, and there was a kind of âvulgarismâ to the way it was communicated. Once you got to university that was no longer acceptable. And so you ask âDo we really want to be genteel Marxists?â I wonder where one can even go to find these spaces now, where you donât have to be connected to a network of academia to have a critical education.
MW: I tend to read these high theory books sometimes and I think âMy god you need 100,000 dollars worth of graduate school education to read this.â Now look, Iâm in favor of complex and difficult writing but often thereâs a specific kind of schooling that is implied in that. Literature really had other origins, right? Marxâs famous works were all made outside the spaces of university, same for Spinoza, same is true of Nietszche, Simone de Beuvoir. You could keep adding examples. Conceptual writing comes out of organic processes and I think thatâs always been around. That was my experience.
There used to be political parties, there used to be a kind of para-art space, there were social movements that had their own publications and things. I think that really revived in the last few years. It revived through organizations like DSA and Black Lives Matter. There seem to be reading groups all over town at the moment and a kind of proliferation of para-journals, the little magazine culture has really come back and is really quite strong. It seems to me that all the innovative work is coming out there first.
It also strikes me as important that you donât get to the interesting stuff until youâre almost through four years [of university]. I donât know that thatâs all that helpful either.
BLVR: Do you teach in an interdisciplinary fashion? How do you make that work for your students?
MW: This is going to contradict everything I just said but, Sensoria partly came out of teaching at a liberal studies program at the New School and itâs sort of been set up as a great books sort of project, to do that sort of linear thing, âPlato to Natoâ as it used to be called.
I wanted to do it a different way, which was to go sort of sideways and track the different debates going on in different fields in the present. Itâs always that tradeoff: to know one thing is to not know another thing. If you were to spend the time reading the Marx that is the background of the thing youâve just read, then you would need to read the Hegel that is the background of Marx, then you would need to read the Kant thatâs the background of Hegel, then you would need to read the Spinoza thatâs the background of Kant, and so on until the Greeks. And then youâd look up and say, Now wait a minuteâthatâs a provincial tradition in a very big world where India has a whole other set of traditions and so does China, and so forth, and then know nothing of any of that.
Iâm trying to do a synoptic view in Sensoria of these different interesting contributions to aesthetics and ethnography and design/technics so you can sort of reach in and grab a handful of concepts. [The aesthetics category] draws concepts from different traditions that would enable you to perceive how youâre viewing the world, secondly, shaped and situated by where you are [through ethnography], and how thatâs all kind of embedded in technics whose mission in life is to try to make itself invisible to you. The entirety of the Earth is technic-ly mediated into a kind of spectacular consumer nightmare that will probably kill us all! [Laughter]
BLVR: You also ask, âDoes more knowledge lead to higher resolution? Does that lead to knowing the world more?â I was really interested in this idea of being able to zoom out and still having this larger picture that is useful. But it does feel, at times, almost like a personal risk, to say âThatâs enough detail. Let me go broader, let me go to a different place.â Did you feel any insecurity around making these big moves, conceptually?
MW: Oh, all the time. Itâs the thing that youâre not supposed to do, particularly as a scholar. Thereâs the old figure of the fox and the hedgehogâthe hedgehog digs his hole deeper and the fox likes to jump around between different places. Iâm very much at the extreme end of the fox mentality, I kind of get bored and want to go dig something else. Youâre not really supposed to do that. Thereâs been greater and greater emphasis on specialization in academic workâand to some extent you need people to know things in depthâbut I think we then got less good at drawing the thread out between those things. How does this particular piece of specialized work inâwhatever it isâhistory, or sociology, how does that fit in with any sort of bigger picture?
We need to be able to interpret the world in order to change it, right? As Marx famously said. But then we gave up on interpreting the world but interpreting specific things, so you lose the sense of the synoptic that for any kind of action in the world is what you really need. You do need specialized knowledge but you do need to quickly apply some concepts to a situation and see what your options are and how to act in relation to it.
BLVR: You mention that technics are built to be invisibleâhow do we address that?
MW: To me thatâs the job of media studies, to make the form apparent so that youâre not just soaking up the content. Iâm old enough to be from the broadcast era where television, recorded music, and radio and mass print was the way everything came at you.
I donât think itâs even capitalism anymore because if what capitalism did was a way to extract a surplus out of labor, whatever this is is extracting a surplus out of, quite literally, our communism. Our desire to feel and be with others is the very thing that they extract.
I think that maybe itâs helpful to start in the present than start with what Marx wrote in the 1850s, a quite different worldâMarx was writing in the era of the steam engine where electric light is new and itâs like, I donât think this quite works that way anymore, thereâs been a whole technical revolution. Marx is writing in a wave of technical revolution (which turns out to just be thermodynamics) and now weâre in a technical revolution past that, which is information theory and its implications. Thatâs shifted the whole horizon for how a political economy works. If you can quantify/manage everything as information and control the whole value chain through thatâ to directly address that strikes me as the project of the time.
BLVR: And thereâs such a difficulty in evaluating this world because itâs so dissociated from material, from labor, it feels like you can just put the price of your liking to it.
MW: Right, itâs an exploitation not just of labor anymore, which still happens, but of non-labor. Just walking around with your cellphone is generating data for whoever your phone is communicating with. All of the things that you do because you want to, motivated by desire, value can be extracted from them. Itâs very different from the old culture industry where you didnât really do that at all. In the old culture industry you had to make things and make you pay for them. Now we sort of just entertain each other for free. The culture industry [becomes] the vulture industry for extracting a surplus out of us entertaining each other for free because we like to.
BLVR: The finance broâs motto of passive income.
MW: Right, I mean I donât know how many two dollar, five dollar subscriptions I have to things anymore⌠theyâre just collecting the rent. You have to pay to access your own information now and thatâs pretty novel. Novel in the sense that itâs developed over the past ten years, and itâs something for which we need a new language. Particularly in Capital is Dead I wanted to ask the question of how have we innovated languageâgod, I hate that word, innovate. All these words have been poisoned, right? Whatâs the art, if I can say that, whatâs the literary dimension of writing theory? Itâs a genre of literature, Marx is a literary genius. We sort of lose track of that, creating language to describe new situations but in ways that donât lose track of their genesis and genealogy. To write theory as a literary genre, to tackle that, rather than recycle these terms we picked up from the great famous names.
BLVR: You mentioned in a previous interview that words just arenât doing the work anymore and if theyâre not doing the work we need to be creating new ones.
MW: I think to call it âbio-political-capitalismâ or âneoliberal capitalâ or âpost-fordist capitalâ or using a modifier that has a modifier on the front of itâit just strikes me as bad poetry. Itâs the kind of thing an editor would strike. Hereâs three wordsâwhatâs the one word that would do that job? If you keep using this old language you see how itâs connected to the past. Thereâs kind of an aesthetic dimension to theory as a genre of literature, and I want to make it fresh, make it new. A language of surprise. What I wanted to do in Capital is Dead is reinvigorate that sense of to write theory is a form of literature.
SED: And then of course naming what comes next âSomething Worseâ retains itâs agility and nascent quality in this really interesting way.
MW: Well thereâs also a little bit of strategy. Iâve been making this argument for twenty years and Iâve met every counter argument over that time, Iâve got a bingo card of all the things that people have told me, that âthereâs nothing new itâs just finance capitalââactually itâs not, what Google does is something different. There were a set of arguments, particularly during the cold war that was like âThis is not capitalismâitâs something better!â And itâs like no itâs not better. We didnât make the class struggle go away, maybe thereâs a new kind of ruling class, maybe thereâs new forms of subordinate class. So to say âItâs something worseâ is to get out of that [association].
SED: We have whole aspirational worlds built off of data-harvesting-Silicon-Valley-accumulation and itâs hard to counter these aspirations and talk about them using a language and theory, that as you said, is referring to a different technological era.
MW: The economics of information is quite weird. There seems to be this problem within the information economy which is like âOh people arenât paying for itâŚ?â and so you had this whole era of the ramping up of intellectual property regimes trying to recapture [lost value]. But the other strategy is like âGood, wow right, free informationâletâs just go parasite off that and extract value out of it âcause people are gonna wanna know stuff.â So theyâll give you a bit of information but âitâ gets all of it, it gets all of the pattern recognition and all that data and not just to figure out how to advertise to you but how to plan itâs future in the world. Itâs kind of this massive privatization of knowledge, culture, feeling, and itâs not just Google. Everything you interact with now is extracting that in one way or another.
To me this is faithful to Marx in the sense that Marx was looking at this thing [and said] âWow, this thing is just so different to what Iâve been raised to think is the order of the worldâ and it just needed a new language, but then also locating the points of intervention. Where are the points you can change that and he thought âAh, industrial labor, it’s this whole new thing because of factories, letâs address that as a constituency and create a theory of what they could possibly do.â
SED: And where do you think a point of intervention is for this new world?
MW: The thing about Marxism is that you quickly realize that Marx was wrong, the working class doesnât become an absolute majority, and the first thing you need is a theory in relationship to the peasantry. Like thereâre two subordinate classes in Marxâs day. All the way through until the 20th century the worker-peasant relationship is a kind of external alliance of two different kinds of class who were antagonistic to the ruling order for different reasons, so itâs a mutli-class alliance youâre trying to figure out. What is the relationship between digital workers now and analog workers would be one way to frame it.
Most people still feel like exploited labor means you work with things but there are some of us whose relationship to exploitation is different because our relationship to the work is different. Our interests can be aligned but theyâre not the same. But how do you have the conversation that puts those things together? And thereâre ways to do it, like Iâm in the 14th congressional district which is central northern queens, which is now represented by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the basis of that alliance between a mostly non-english speaking service working class community and a sort of educated anglophone workers who have more money but who have massive debt. We have these common interests around education and housing and that was the agenda and it worked.
BLVR: I also wanted to bring up the chapter on Deborah Danowsky and Viveries de Castro. I know that within environmentalist circles our disconnect from other-than-human kinship is at the center of understanding the taken for granted cruelty that we unleash upon the world. Something that struck me was how almost out of place this chapter seemed, it seemed to clash with the vision of the vectoral class and the almost futuristic world thatâs being set up in the chapters on aesthetics and technics. Where does an other-than-human vision fit into this other world? How, where, do these worlds meet?
MW: Thatâs a really good question. The rub is that they donât meet. A possible meeting point [would be] between a kind of technics based on information and the resource based relation to the material world that that tends to generate. Thatâs the question thatâs kind of unanswerable at the moment. Thatâs why I wanted to sort of include voices that at least filtered through the scholarly world that are pointing that out.
[Anna] Tsing writes about these elaborate, philosophically rich, technically rich means of constructing life worlds in relation to other species in particular, I wanted that to be in that middle section to point out that there are other parts of modernity [coming] out of indigenous and non-metropolitan cultures. Itâs difficult for me to know what to do with those, like my ancestors have been city dwellers for 200 years as far as I can tell so Iâm not in a good position to know what the other is. Iâm really wary of speaking in its place but I just wanted to touch the scholarship of people who have. Because thatâs the thing, we donât have a way of reconnecting the technical infrastructures the world runs on to a world that perceives nature as more [than from] which to extract. But there could be other forms of organization than this one we ended up in.
BLVR: Itâs my sense that within capitalism there is at least recognition of the world because there is a struggle with the world, a struggle to extract from it. But when it comes to the âsomething worseâ and the vectoral class thereâs this refusal to acknowledge its reality. It âfloats aboveâ material in the most Bourdian sense, it does not need to be concerned with the world because there is beneath it a mode of capitalism that is dealing with the extraction, right? It seems that there are more degrees of separation.
MW: And there is some media theory perspectiveâhow did that become invisible? I mean Iâm from mining country, so I sort of have some sense of whenever I look at a city skyline, when youâre coming in on the train you see the line of the city I imagine a mine thatâs an open cut pit somewhere that goes down as far as the city goes up. âCause to build that you dug a hole the size of it, probably bigger, and that hole is still out there somewhere. But the vectors connecting you to it have so many links and itâs so remote that you donât always see thatâs where this comes from.
BLVR: Would you describe your work as futuristic?
MW: Itâs probably embedded in a kind of modernism that is always all about a difference between past and future time, so often itâs about futures that happened in the past. My book Molecular Red is about an alternative version of what the Soviet Union could have been, but itâs a future that never happened in the past, yeah?
Itâs weird that trying to talk about the present in a language adequate to it gets treated as futuristic, Capital is Dead is not about the future, itâs about the present, about a thirty to fifty year old presentâI just donât want to talk about it in the language of the 1850s. Thatâs futuristic? The present is here but there are a lot of writers who are trying to live in the past.
BLVR: That connects to what you said, in the book, about people who are still trying to live in the Holoceneâweâre not all occupying the same timeline. Weâre so firmly embedded in ways of understanding the world that arenât really made in the present.
MW: And thatâll be the death of us, yeah?