McKenzie Wark
Workings of the World, Untie!
In a rapidly disintegrating world, where the tears in the old machinery of exploitation and oppression have been sewn shut by the spectral threads of information, data and algorithms, McKenzie Wark proposes — quite literally — to crack the code: ‘If one is to philosophize with a hammer, then this is best done, not with professional philosophers, but with professional hammerers’, she writes. Throughout her extensive body of work, Wark, one of the most prominent critical theorists of our time and a key figure in the fields of cultural and media studies, tries to capture the present, not to come to terms with it, but to finally break loose from it.
In works like A Hacker Manifesto (2004), Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019), Raving (2023) and Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023), Wark’s approach is inspired as much by Marxist literature and history as by everyday life and personal experiences. Her method does not involve ‘thinking about thinking’, but generates tools for creating concepts and language anew in an ongoing effort to reorganise our knowing and producing of the world in all its divergent forms. ‘*Di (…)
