Jon McKenzie: Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001–) [EN, CR]
Filed under book | Tags: · labour, management, performance, performance art, technology, theory
“In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to ‘perform… or else’.”
Publisher Routledge, London, 2001
ISBN 0415247691, 9780415247696
x+306 pages
Reviews: Arthur Sabatini (Theatre J, 2002), Henry M. Sayre (Modernism/modernity, 2003), Bez Kershaw (New Theatre Quarterly, 2006).
Interview: Tim Edkins and Stevphen Shukaitis (ephemera, 2014).
Commentary and interview: Anna Street (2014).
Perform or Else (English, 2001, 5 MB)
Izvedi ili snosi posljedice (Croatian, trans. Vlatka Valentić, 2006, 5 MB)
McKenzie Wark: General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty First Century (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropocene, capitalism, communism, culture, labour, marxism, neoliberalism, philosophy, politics, technology, theory, work
“A guide to the thinkers and 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 we no longer have such singular figures, but there are, instead, general intellects whose writing could, if read collectively, 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 nonetheless critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work that endeavors to understand and also 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 Žižek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Hiroki Azuma, Paul B. Préciado, Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway.
Publisher Verso, London, 2017
Public Seminar series
ISBN 9781786631909, 1786631903
viii+325 pages
HTML
See also extra chapters on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Nick Land, Sianne Ngai, Wang Hui, Amitav Ghosh, Yves Citton and Bruno Latour.
Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, capitalism, critique, cyberculture, labour, neoliberalism, politics, technology, theory
“Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.”
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, with Merve, Berlin, 2014
ISBN 9780957529557
536 pages
Reviews: Malcolm Harris (New Inquiry), J.J. Charlesworth (Art Review), Simon O’Sullivan (Mute), Alex Andrews (Review31), Orlando Read (Frieze).
Commentaries: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), David Cunningham (Radical Philosophy).