The poetics of planetary-thinking is at the front of my mind as I complete my book on a river, its riverworld and the world (of) rivers and eye where the next three years or so take me plunging deeper into related areas to run myself and thinking into the concreteness of forested urban futures to construct that vision from ‘here/now’. Which is exactly what I understand by the formulaic panto produced by what Wark calls ‘genteel Marxists’. It’s not a matter of my having any juice here she is razor sharp of course! But, I enjoyed (again) her respect for the work of others, and this is the character of the kinds of repair we need to engage with, versus the old world of correction and delineation and various forms of declamatory possession of territory. MW impressed me by how comradely and/or clear certain distinctions were in their thinking. I agree (because, or anyway, it is productively complex in actuality).
It’s not solidarity, not even a substantive politics, without that urgent scope anymore. Timothy Morton had published Humankind not long before, with its updated insistence that solidarity is literally meaningless without understanding it to include all living and companion species. You’ll see some other cusps regarding Haraway and Latour, which you can probably guess. She has affecting loyalties to what she calls ‘my people’, and is naturally suspicious of non-Marxist thinkers like Michel Serres. I’m always interested in where lines of thought and allegiance spill over or expire…Īmongst other qualities, Wark is rigorous in her concretising of situation. I was seeking dissolution -if not end- points of certain intellectual trails (some of which Wark set out on in her General Intellects series, which emerged from her teaching practice), towards the muddying world of rivers and related planetary concerns and work of my own through this period. TANK is a wonder for having the capacity for a piece like this and the process produced some interesting digressions, which distracted from the main conversatonal thrusts and so we nipped them out. I had not been the interviewer rather than interviewee for a decade and it happened to take place during Wark’s transitioning she later remarked upon the strangeness and no doubt unwelcome intrusiveness of this first interview…
Wark’s work has a promiscuousness which I wanted to engage across its liberating range, and more clearly establish what that is. It was a privilege to do and peculiarly intimate as well as inherently exploratory if not aleatory. Late summer 2019 -a plague and a bit ago- I conducted a written exchange with McKenzie Wark around Capital is Dead which was published in TANK magazine’s Autumn Issue.
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