McKenzie Wark
Encyclopedia
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer
and scholar. He works mainly on media theory
, critical theory
and new media
. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.
, Australia in 1961 and grew up with his older brother Robert and sister Susan. McKenzie's mother died when he was 6 years old. Brother Robert McKenzie Wark remembers reading to him as a young child and the three children were brought up by their architect father Ross Kenneth Wark. McKenzie studied at Macquarie University
, the University of Technology, Sydney
and at Murdoch University
. He is currently Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School
in New York City
. McKenzie Wark is married to Christen Clifford, they have two children Felix and Vera.
and the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989. He argued that the emergence of a global media space
– a virtual geography – made out of increasingly pervasive lines of communication – vectors – was emerging as a more chaotic space than globalization
theory usually maintains.
Much of Wark's early engagement in public debate occurred in the Australian post-marxist quarterly Arena, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory.
In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Wark turned his attention to the national cultural
space of his homeland, Australia. The first of these works examined the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s as symptomatic of struggles over the redefinition of Australian national identity
and culture in an age of global media. The second of these ‘Australian’ books looked at the transformation of a social democratic idea of the ‘popular’ as a political idea into a more market-based and media-driven popular culture
.
Both these studies grew out of Wark’s experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through his newspaper column in The Australian
, a leading national daily. He developed an approach based on participant observation
, but adapted to the media sphere.
Wark described the process of culture by which "the jolt of new experiences becomes naturalised into habit" or second nature and describes the information society as not being new but something that changes through culture the balance between space binding and time binding media.
He further describes the concept of "third nature" or telesthesia, where devices such as television and the telephone creates a platform which we use to communicate to people over large distances and not just a machine that we learn to operate individually. This is described in his book The Virtual Republic:
Wark emigrated to the United States
in 2000. With the Australian poet
John Kinsella, Australian novelist Bernard Cohen
and Australian memoirist Terri-Ann White, he co-wrote Speed Factory, an experimental work about distance and expatriation. The co-authors developed for this the speed factory writing technique, in which an author writes 300 words, emails it to the next author, who then has 24 hours to write the next 300 words.
Dispositions, another experimental work followed. Wark traveled the world with a GPS
device and recorded observations at particular times and coordinates. The media theorist Ned Rossiter has called this approach a ‘micro-empiricism
’, and sees it as derived from the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
.
In 2004 Wark published his best known work, A Hacker Manifesto. Here Wark argues that the rise of intellectual property
creates a new class division
, between those who produce it, who he calls the hacker class, and those who come to own it, the vectoralist class. Wark argues that these vectoralists have imposed the concept of property on all physical fields (thus having scarcity), but now the new vectoralists lay claim to intellectual property
, a field that is not bound by scarcity. By the concept of intellectual property these vectoralists attempt to institute an imposed scarcity in an immaterial field. Wark argues that the vectoral class cannot control the intellectual (property) world but only it in its commodified form, they only control the information in the objectified form but not its overall application or use.
Gamer Theory combined Wark’s interest in experimental writing techniques in networked media
with his own developing media theory. Gamer Theory was first published by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a networked book
with his own specially designed interface. In Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games
are a utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realize the principles of the level playing field
and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.
Wark's recent work explores the art, writing, and politics of the Situationist International (SI). In his book 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (the result of a lecture given at Columbia University), Wark examines the influences of Situationist aesthetics on contemporary art and activist movements, from tactical media to the anti-globalism movement. Wark pays particular attention to often-neglected figures and works in the SI, including the utopian architectural projects of Constant, the painting of Giuseppe Pinot, and the novels of Michèle Bernstein.
Cultural Studies
, German
Critical Theory and French
Poststructuralism. His earlier works combined British and French influences to extend Australian cultural studies to encompass questions of globalization and new media technology. His later works draw more from Critical Theory and much revised Marxism
. Through his experimentation with new media forms, starting with listservers such as nettime.org and later with web interfaces such as the one developed for Gamer Theory, his works intersect with other new media theorists such as Geert Lovink
and Mark Amerika
.
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and scholar. He works mainly on media theory
Media influence
Media influence or media effects are used in media studies, psychology, communication theory and sociology to refer to the theories about the ways in which mass media affect how their audiences think and behave....
, critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
and new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.
Life
Kenneth McKenzie Wark was born in NewcastleNewcastle, New South Wales
The Newcastle metropolitan area is the second most populated area in the Australian state of New South Wales and includes most of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie Local Government Areas...
, Australia in 1961 and grew up with his older brother Robert and sister Susan. McKenzie's mother died when he was 6 years old. Brother Robert McKenzie Wark remembers reading to him as a young child and the three children were brought up by their architect father Ross Kenneth Wark. McKenzie studied at Macquarie University
Macquarie University
Macquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...
, the University of Technology, Sydney
University of Technology, Sydney
The University of Technology Sydney is a university in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The university was founded in its current form in 1981, although its origins trace back to the 1870s. UTS is notable for its central location as the only university with its main campuses within the Sydney CBD...
and at Murdoch University
Murdoch University
Murdoch University is a public university based in Perth, Australia. It began operations as the state's second university in 1973, and accepted its first students in 1975...
. He is currently Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School
The New School
The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. McKenzie Wark is married to Christen Clifford, they have two children Felix and Vera.
Works
In Virtual Geography, published in 1994, Wark offered a theory of what he called the ‘weird global media event’. Examples given in the book include the stock market crash of 1987, the Tiananmen square demonstrations of 1989Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
and the fall of the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
in 1989. He argued that the emergence of a global media space
Media space
Media spaces are "electronic settings in which groups of people can work together, even when they are not present in the same place and time. In a media space, people can create real-time visual and acoustic environments that span physically separate areas...
– a virtual geography – made out of increasingly pervasive lines of communication – vectors – was emerging as a more chaotic space than globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
theory usually maintains.
Much of Wark's early engagement in public debate occurred in the Australian post-marxist quarterly Arena, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory.
In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Wark turned his attention to the national cultural
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
space of his homeland, Australia. The first of these works examined the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s as symptomatic of struggles over the redefinition of Australian national identity
National identity
National identity is the person's identity and sense of belonging to one state or to one nation, a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status....
and culture in an age of global media. The second of these ‘Australian’ books looked at the transformation of a social democratic idea of the ‘popular’ as a political idea into a more market-based and media-driven popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
.
Both these studies grew out of Wark’s experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through his newspaper column in The Australian
The Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
, a leading national daily. He developed an approach based on participant observation
Participant observation
Participant observation is a type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology...
, but adapted to the media sphere.
Wark described the process of culture by which "the jolt of new experiences becomes naturalised into habit" or second nature and describes the information society as not being new but something that changes through culture the balance between space binding and time binding media.
He further describes the concept of "third nature" or telesthesia, where devices such as television and the telephone creates a platform which we use to communicate to people over large distances and not just a machine that we learn to operate individually. This is described in his book The Virtual Republic:
"While it may feel natural for some to inhabit this media-made world, I suspect there is a fundamental change here that has a lot of people just a bit spooked. It's no longer a case of making second nature out of nature, of building things and getting used to living in the world people build. I think it might be interesting to consider telesthesia to be something fundamentally different. What gets woven out of telegraph, telephone, television, telecommunications is not a second nature but what I call third nature."
Wark emigrated to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 2000. With the Australian poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
John Kinsella, Australian novelist Bernard Cohen
Bernard Cohen
Bernard Leonard Cohen born June 14, 1924 in Pittsburgh, is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Cohen has been a staunch opponent to the so called Linear no-threshold model which postulates there exists no safe threshold for radiation exposure...
and Australian memoirist Terri-Ann White, he co-wrote Speed Factory, an experimental work about distance and expatriation. The co-authors developed for this the speed factory writing technique, in which an author writes 300 words, emails it to the next author, who then has 24 hours to write the next 300 words.
Dispositions, another experimental work followed. Wark traveled the world with a GPS
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...
device and recorded observations at particular times and coordinates. The media theorist Ned Rossiter has called this approach a ‘micro-empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
’, and sees it as derived from the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
.
In 2004 Wark published his best known work, A Hacker Manifesto. Here Wark argues that the rise of intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
creates a new class division
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
, between those who produce it, who he calls the hacker class, and those who come to own it, the vectoralist class. Wark argues that these vectoralists have imposed the concept of property on all physical fields (thus having scarcity), but now the new vectoralists lay claim to intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
, a field that is not bound by scarcity. By the concept of intellectual property these vectoralists attempt to institute an imposed scarcity in an immaterial field. Wark argues that the vectoral class cannot control the intellectual (property) world but only it in its commodified form, they only control the information in the objectified form but not its overall application or use.
Gamer Theory combined Wark’s interest in experimental writing techniques in networked media
Network media
Network media refers to media mainly used in computer networks such as the Internet.Network media is essentially driven by technological development, emerging from the internet as a non-centralized medium in the late nineties, the term has more recently begun to be applied to both the arts and...
with his own developing media theory. Gamer Theory was first published by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a networked book
Networked book
A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited, and read in a networked environment. It is also a platform for social exchange, and is potentially linked to other books and other discussions...
with his own specially designed interface. In Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games
Computer Games
"Computer Games" is a single by New Zealand group, Mi-Sex released in 1979 in Australia and New Zealand and in 1981 throughout Europe. It was the single that launched the band, and was hugely popular, particularly in Australia and New Zealand...
are a utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realize the principles of the level playing field
Level playing field
A level playing field is a concept about fairness, not that each player has an equal chance to succeed, but that they all play by the same set of rules. A metaphorical playing field is said to be level if no external interference affects the ability of the players to compete fairly...
and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.
Wark's recent work explores the art, writing, and politics of the Situationist International (SI). In his book 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (the result of a lecture given at Columbia University), Wark examines the influences of Situationist aesthetics on contemporary art and activist movements, from tactical media to the anti-globalism movement. Wark pays particular attention to often-neglected figures and works in the SI, including the utopian architectural projects of Constant, the painting of Giuseppe Pinot, and the novels of Michèle Bernstein.
Context
At the theoretical level, Wark’s writing can be seen in the context of three currents: BritishUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Cultural Studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
, German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
Critical Theory and French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Poststructuralism. His earlier works combined British and French influences to extend Australian cultural studies to encompass questions of globalization and new media technology. His later works draw more from Critical Theory and much revised Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. Through his experimentation with new media forms, starting with listservers such as nettime.org and later with web interfaces such as the one developed for Gamer Theory, his works intersect with other new media theorists such as Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam , a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School, and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam...
and Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika is an American artist and author.- Career :Amerika received his MFA from Brown University. After publishing two cult-novels, and , he turned his energy towards net art. His goal is to expand the concept of writing so that it includes writing in and with new media technologies. He...
.
Classes
Professor Wark teaches the Militarized Vision lecture at The New School as well as Introduction to Cultural Studies.External links
- Wark’s homepage
- The New School: Ken Wark
- An Inhuman Fiction of Forces, lecture at Leper Creativity symposium, The New School, 11 March 2011
- Interview with First Monday
- Review of A Hacker Manifesto by Terry Eagleton
- Chronicle of Higher Education article Gamer Theory and the networked book
Texts by McKenzie Wark
- The Aims of Education (The New School convocation, 2 September 2010)
- Hacker Manifesto, version 4
- GAMER THE0RY, version 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book)
- Post Human? All Too Human