#mckenzie wark

[endlessandrea]

Huw Lemmey on the Gay City, Gentrification, Class, Mystical Queer Ancestors and Chemsex - Extra Extra Magazine

With wit, style and formal invention, Huw Lemmey writes about some of the bad and weird sides of gay life in the city. Starting with Chubz:

"The protagonists of both Chubz and Red Tory take advantage of the peculiar types of (not always equitable) inter-class contact that exist within gay life. There are always people slipping between classes based on sexual desirability, based on a sort of class subterfuge. The ruling class is always, and has always been, full of camouflaged gays dressing up their accents and adopting graces, while every gay party has some middle-class gay in a tracksuit and playing up his northern accent or trade unionist grandfather in order to suggest he’s ‘prolier than thou.’ London has a whole genre of club nights, sex parties and porn dedicated to the image of ‘the scally,’ the stereotypical hetero-ish working class council estate lad, and they’re populated 90% by roleplaying college grads. This is part of the sexual tension of a nation tongue tied about sex and class."

Researching the relationship between desire and the city!

[sublecturas]

"Raving", de McKenzie Wark en la #LíneaD

[swallowedintheircoats]

nighttime things and making banana bread

[proustiansleep]

"Louis Aragon has a “love poem” that involves two empty suits of armor talking to each other."

—McKenzie Wark, in interview

[stoozy]

[moe-hyperstition]

"Every relation of a body to another body is mediated. Being any kind of body at all, of any sex, cis or trans, involves the third sex of the machinic. But, perhaps, there are better technics via which to relate to other bodies and, via other bodies, to perceive one’s body schema and, having perceived it, to make it pretty. It’s why I prefer the rave to the internet. At least for a while, it gets us off our phones and puts our bodies in relation, pulsed by the sub-bass. Becoming cannot avoid the risk of death. The arrested development of the perpetual egg reproduces the sameness of that which is only ever a possibility. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. The pretty things emerge into the world to challenge it: to be forms without norms and not without a struggle."

The Politics of Cuteness

McKenzie Wark on trans-feminine aesthetics and the revolutionary potential of prettiness

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

McKenzie Wark

[lepertamar]

When I wrote Capital is Dead [2019], one of the questions there is: Why do we love capitalism? Even Marxists love it, perversely! The negative theology of Marxism is believing at all costs that this must be capitalism. Why? What if there’s something that’s not captured by that concept – and what if it’s worse? How would you think that? How to do what Marx actually did, which was come up with concepts adequate to the time rather than simply repeat the end product of the thinking that Marx gave us? I think there are a lot of consumers of Marx’s product and fewer people actually doing what Marx did as praxis, which is trying to think the historical tendency of advanced forms of exploitation that are emerging. To do theory in the present is my main objective. I’m an unrepentant modernist in that respect. Trying to be the antenna that’s detecting, that’s picking up signals of imminent futures, but where you’re very likely to be wrong.

– McKenzie Wark, "A Rave Just For Friends"