More central to me is somebody like Stuart Hall who said, “Theory is a detour on the way to somewhere more important.” It's not up to me to say what's more important, I just write books, but it’s about how these things are enabling. I never had the pedigree or the training to do that, and it seems to have ended up as a sort of set of formal exercises that could never escape the university. “Low theory” is a back formation from what used to be called “high theory,” which is particularly the reception of Derrida through the Yale school of deconstruction, which is a fine and wonderful thing, but it's just not me.
"Something that didn't flourish in the 1920s or 1960s might be the place to start now.especially if you're being gaslit by exactly the same people over and over again.” To think about the past as a maze, as McKenzie suggests, is to see the future as contestable.
“I'm more interested in what happens if you go off the linear path and start thinking about the past as a maze, with all these little byways,” McKenzie tells me.
Chris Kraus writes to McKenzie in her “auto-ethnography,’’ Reverse Cowgirl, out with Semiotext(e) in February: “how uncanny and unpredictable it is, how things turn out.” I tell McKenzie that one of the most profound things in her work, to me, is her ability to forge a new kind of criticism-one that is less about negation and more about possibility-that leans into this uncanniness and contrariety. McKenzie was fired for mixing the rubber and leather displays, an anecdote I recall for its quotidian rejection of category, which seems fundamental to McKenzie’s character. McKenzie wrote her masters thesis from behind the counter of Numbers, a sex shop on Oxford Street, Sydney. To move forward, allow me to go backward. New class relations entail new forms of exploitation novel threats to our autonomy and social order. Expanding upon the terms “Hacker” and “Vectorialist class,” first coined in her 1994’s The Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie questions our reluctance to re-define our reality-suggesting that this reluctance also circumvents our ability to reckon with it. In Capital is Dead, Wark argues that we are living under a new form of class relations. I’m calling McKenzie to discuss the class relations in this fraught landscape, most recently interrogated in her book, Capital is Dead, published by Verso Books last year. Writer, theorist and educator McKenzie Wark writes in 2019’s Capital is Dead: “reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us.collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.” Can we see technology as a social and psychic apparatus-that the two are dependent on one another? An ambient dread is palpable.
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