New knowledge for a new planet: critical pedagogy for the Anthropocene

Abstract

In and against the hypocritical theory Petar Jandrić (PJ): Ken, thank you a lot for this interviewand for your valuable advice regarding other interviews in this series. Upon completing my research on your rich bibliography, I could not help but wonder how it arrived into being. You are an academic researcherbut your book I'm very into you: Correspondence 1995-1996 (Acker & Wark, 2015) is a collection of emails. A hacker manifesto (Wark, 2004) speaks of the present and future caused by digital technologiesbut The beach beneath the street: The everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International (2011a) is firmly dedicated to the past. Your writing style is dense and ambiguous, yet your multimedia works such as Totality for kids (Loyer, Pyle, & Wark, 2009) speak loud and clear, and you often engage in experimental writings such as Speed factory (Cohen, Kinsella, White, & Wark, 2002). Certainly, these diverse ways of probing reality are focused to similar questionsfor instance, Gamer theory website (2006) served as a base for the book with the same title (2007), while Totality for kids (Loyer et al., 2009) talks about the Situationist International (Wark, 2008, 2011a). What is your inspiration for asking similar questions using different approaches? What do you expect to achieve with such approach? McKenzie Wark (MW): Well, first and last I am a writer, and writers have to find readers and find ways of engaging and keeping the interest of readers. This takes a particular form if you are a twenty-first-century writer, where the old print-based forms we have known for the whole of the modern period have been displaced-I will not quite say replacedby other means. Hence I am interested in experimenting with ways of writing and also ways of finding and engaging readers. So Speed factory (Cohen et al., 2002) was an experiment in ways of writing. It is a game played over email, where a writer sends exactly 300 words to another, and the other writes the next 300. It is fun to stop in the middle of a sentence and have someone complete your thought! It is also a sort of diaspora game, as the other players were all over the world, in other time zones, so interesting rhythms emerge.

Rebooting the systems approach by applying the thinking of Bogdanov and the pragmatists

“…Mason (2016) draws upon the work of Bogdanov to buttress his critique of contemporary capitalism and also notes his prescience in insisting that post-capitalist society has to be sustainable for the planet. Wark (2016) argues that the threat of climate change represents a 'world-historical moment' that should make us, as 'collective labourers', reimagine what we can make of the world. Bogdanov's thinking is crucial because He took the core of Marxism to be the labor point of view.…”

Alexander Bogdanov, Stafford Beer and intimations of a post‐capitalist future

“…Mason also notes Bogdanov's prescience in insisting that post-capitalist society has to be sustainable for the planet. Wark (2016) argues that the threat of climate change represents a 'worldhistorical moment' that should make us, as 'collective labourers', reimagine what we can make of the world. Bogdanov's thinking is crucial because: He took the core of Marxism to be the labor point of view.…”

Embrace the Antagonism, Build the Party! The New Communist Horizon in and Against Communicative Capitalism

“…These days we understand that the endless frontier is a hoax aimed at promoting what Barbrook and Cameron call the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron 1996). In the age of the Anthropocene, we also understand there is no such thing as an endless frontier (Jandrić 2017; see also Wark and Jandrić 2016). Obviously, the struggle against communicative capitalism is not about mere change of social system; more importantly, it is also about internalizing the fact that colonization simply cannot go forever (or, more precisely, cannot go very far from this point in history).…”