On the 8th of May from 18.00 McKenzie Wark will be our guest in the bookstore, all the way from New York (via the internet)

There’s space for about 25 guests, we’ll talk about her work and all things ranging from being a hacker (to hack is to differ!), capitalism and whatever the heck it is that we’re experiencing now, writing autofiction/autotheory, coming out as trans, dancing!

McKenzie Wark lives in New York and is the author of several books, ranging from cultural criticism (The Beach Beneath the Street, Verso, 2011) and political theory (A Hacker Manifesto, HUP, 2004) to lyrical texts that hit you in the feelies and gently poke you to review your humanity (Reverse Cowgirl, semiotext(e), 2020). 

I stumbled on these words from Foucault which, to me, they fit the spirit of her work: “a discourse that combines the fervour of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.”

“Late in my writing life, I started writing what I’m not ashamed to call autofiction and/or autotheory. They’re not exactly respectable ways of writing, although they have their charms. I think of autofiction as writing in which a character with the same name or attributes as the author appears, but where that character is not attempting to write the truth of the self, in the manner of memoir or autobiography. Selfhood itself is a fiction, and the writing is an account of how the fiction of a self is produced.

I think of autotheory as not too different from autofiction. Both are interested in the perceptual. Autofiction is more interested in the affective dimensions of what’s perceived; autotheory more the conceptual. It’s more interesting to think of autofiction/autotheory as tactics rather than genres, and as a continuity of tactics. I’ll call it the “autotextual”: These practices made this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances. It chanced these slings and arrows.” M.W.