Sensoria
Sensoria
Thinkers for theTwenty-First Century
McKenzie Wark
First published by Verso 2020
© McKenzie Wark 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-506-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-505-6 (HBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-508-7 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-507-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
In memory of Niall Lucy
Contents
Introduction: Toward the Common Task
Sianne Ngai: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Kodwo Eshun: Black Accelerationism
Lisa Nakamura: Digitizing Race
Hito Steyerl: Art Is Beauty That Does not Try to Kill Us
Yves Citton: Ecologies of Attention
Randy Martin: After Capitalism, the Derivative
II. Ethnographics
Jackie Wang: Prisoners of the Algorithm
Wang Hui: China’s Twenty-First Century
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: Friction in the Universal Joint
Achille Mbembe: Africa contra Hegel
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Myth Today
Eyal Weizman: Climate Colonialism
III. Technics
Cory Doctorow: Information Wants to Be Free, But…
Benjamin Bratton: The Stack to Come
Lev Manovich: At the Coalface of the Interface
Tiziana Terranova: The Address of Power
Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft and the Digital City
Jussi Parikka: Geology of Media
Notes
Index
What is the point of scholarship? In any other time, this might have seemed a churlish question to ask. But in the United States and increasingly elsewhere too, the question now calls up three equally prompt and self-evident kinds of answers.
One response is that it has no point at all. This is now an opinion with a lot of powerful backing. Another is that it has no point other than to socialize the high-risk work of invention, so that private interests can do the lower risk work of “innovation” and profit from it. The third answer protests these other two but not in particularly satisfying terms. Scholarship is hard to defend as a means to enlightenment or liberation; these seem rather abstract and now self-undermining goals.1 Ironically, scholarship about the limits to enlightenment and liberation casts doubt on the scholarship as much as the other two lines of questioning.
There is a fourth answer, but it does not get much traction any more: scholarship is an end in itself, a free and self-directed inquiry that takes its own time.2 It describes, at best, what might happen in elite institutions propped up by the venerable seed money of slave owners, robber barons, or an imperial state, but not what the rest of us get to do. It is too remote a utopia from the actually existing university that runs on debt and precarious labor.3
The mission of scholarship appears so hollowed out today that some advocate a more fugitive means of study, one that treats the university as a resource (and not much more) in which to create the under commons, with its own pedagogy and forms of collaboration.4 That has a lot to recommend it, were it not that there seem to be problems at such a scale that such a practice cannot grasp. There may soon not be an institution for the under commons to be under.
Instead let me start by saying something simple: that scholarship is about the common task of knowing the world.5 Each of those little words contains multitudes. Common refers to what is shared but also the ordinary, even the vulgar. Task demarcates a kind of labor, but it is also a kind of play. The action behind the verb knowing connects the shared and ordinary, the laboring but playful activities already telegraphed in this little phrase.
The most difficult but also capacious word here is, of course, world. Perhaps it is best approached indirectly, through the parable of the blind scholars
