What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave's sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

A breathtaking memoir of transition, history, art, and memory After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all-love and money, sex and death. In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother's early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn's trans and raver communities.

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces. Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

"Invalid Format" is an archive of the widespread activities of Triple Canopy, the New York-based magazine and publisher. The book translates into print work that originally appeared in other forms. The third volume of "Invalid Format" includes artist projects and literary work published online in the third and fourth years of Triple Canopy's existence, as well as documentation of public programs. In form and content, the book explores how works produced for the screen and live settings might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls former contexts while also fully inhabiting the page. It includes contributions by Michael Almereyda, Kurt Beals, Mel Bochner, Daniel Bozhkov, Paul Chan, Joshua Cohen, Jordan Crandall, Simon Critchley, Moyra Davey, Roe Ethridge, Ellie Ga, Daniel Gordon, Vivian Gornick, David Graeber, Group Theory, Joseph McElroy, Tom McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Ken Okiishi, Eve Sussman, Lynne Tillman and McKenzie Wark, among others.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self. Another genre for another gender. What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become. Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyse this new world of information, but the ones to change it, too. Drawing on the writings of the Situationists and a range of contemporary theorists, Wark offers a vast panorama of the contemporary condition and the classes that control it.

Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement--including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michele Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong--Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, "The Beach Beneath the Street" rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...
The book's jacket folds out into a poster, "Totality for Beginners, "a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

The tempestuous email correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, shimmering with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. "Why am I telling you all this? Partly 'cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child's play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be." [M.W.] "It's two in the morning... I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn't for play I'd be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable... " [KA] -from I'm Very into You After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace-by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching. Their corresepondence is a Plato's Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I'm Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time.

Yesterday, the police interrogated me at length about the journal and the Situationist organization. It was only a beginning. This is, I think, one of the principle threats that came up quickly during the discussion: the police want to regard the SI as an association in order to set about its dissolution in France. I protested, emphasizing that the artistic movement was never legally constituted by moral individuals in a declared association. Not being constituted, the SI cannot be officially dissolved, but they tried to intimidate us heavily. It seems they take us for gangsters! --from "Correspondence" This volume traces the dynamic first years of the Situationist International movement--a cultural avant-garde that continues to inspire new generations of artists, theorists, and writers more than half a century later. Debord's letters--published here for the first time in English--provide a fascinating insider's view of just how this seemingly disorganized group drifting around a newly consumerized Paris became one of the most defining cultural movements of the twentieth century. Circumstances, personalities, and ambitions all come into play as the group develops its strategy of anarchic, conceptual, but highly political "intervention." Brilliantly conceived, this collection of letters offers the best available introduction to the Situationist International movement by detailing, through original documents, how the group formed and defined its cultural mission: to bring about, "by any means possible, even artistic," a complete transformation of personal life within the Society of the Spectacle.

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: design, environment, technology and introduces us to the thinking of nineteen major writers. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka. Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. They explore the edges of disciplines to show how we might know the world: through the study of culture, the different notions of how we create such things, and the impact that the machines that we devise have had upon us. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a road map on how we might find our way out of the current crisis.

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyse this new world of information, but the ones to change it, too. A follow-up to their groundbreaking A Hacker Manifesto, Wark takes us on a tour of our information age. Drawing on the writings of the Situationists and a range of contemporary theorists, they offer a vast panorama of the contemporary condition and the classes that control it.

A guide to the thinkers and the ideas that will shape the future What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general intellects whose writing could, if read together, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. McKenzie Wark's distinctive readings are appreciations, but are also critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work to understand and change the world. The thinkers included are Amy Wendling, Kojin Karatani, Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Azumo Hiroki, Paul B. Preciado, Wendy Chun, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway.

Listen to a short interview with McKenzie Wark Host: Chris Gondek ] Producer: Heron & Crane

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

"Gamer Theory" uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, "Gamer Theory" seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general intellects whose writing could, if read together, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. McKenzie Wark's distinctive readings are appreciations, but are also critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work to understand and change the world. The thinkers included are Amy Wendling, Kojin Karatani, Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Slavoj Zizek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Azumo Hiroki, Paul B. Preciado Wendy Chun, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway.

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the scientific pioneers who were trying to transform science during the Russia Revolution, to visionaries contemplating cyborg possibilities and science fiction dreams in late 20th century California, Molecular Red not only looks at the crisis of climate change that we face but also how we might be able to understand it, and how we might salvage some hope out of the wreckage.

Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media]events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world whereunbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light isstartling." -- Choice

..". a wide-ranging, quirky anddextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of theglobal telecommunications network... " -- Times LiterarySupplement

..". this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The NewStatesman

"Wark is one of the most original and interestingcultural critics writing today." -- LawrenceGrossberg

McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everydaylife under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.

What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.