McKenzie Wark famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Language is always ambivalent. Its forms mutate and connect in unexpected ways. It's hard to instrumentalize language. But I think it's better to explore linguistic potentials than to keep on using language that's past its expiration date.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Past #Thinking #Unexpected
We no longer have roots, we have aerials.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Internet #Free Speech
I would describe myself as a writer and a student of media. If there's a central idea in media theory, it's to take media as form. It might grow out of philosophical aesthetics or the study of literature and visual art, but the various strands of media theory converge in treating all of those as subsets of the study of media as form.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Art #Philosophical #Literature
What makes globalization even possible in the first place? One answer would be that it requires the regularization of some kind of media and communication infrastructure. When you have that, you might get globalized economic trade within some political or imperial framework, but it is likely you'll get transnational cultural flows as well. Globalizing trade can lead to a cosmopolitan culture, but also to all sorts of nationalistic or racist or patriarchal reactions to those as breaches of imaginary communities.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Communication #Community #Political
In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Boredom #Desire #Trying
Trump appears to some as too simulated, too much a spectacle. But all authorized politics is spectacle. He just does it in a different style. It's not conservative, its post-liberal. Rather than make hypocritical gestures towards the just, the good and the true, it's about making hyperbolic gestures about their absence.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Style #Different #Conservative
You can trace a through-line from the eighties to the present, and in retrospect Trump was always one of the minor avatars of a certain business model, all through that time. One based on branding, celebrity, and exploiting certain quirks of media form for fun and profit. In some ways he is not all that exceptional.
-- McKenzie Wark

#Fun #Branding #Exceptional

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute
Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where we are going?'. Answer: 'If you didn't know any geography, people would think you were an American, and you wouldn't be able to put them right because you wouldn't know where they live.'
Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.
Sometimes, unexpected things can happen.
In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.
All gardeners need to know when to accept something wonderful and unexpected, taking no credit except for letting it be.
A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

McKenzie Wark famous quotes

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