McKenzie Wark
Author of A Hacker Manifesto
About the Author
Works by McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) 181 copies, 6 reviews
The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century (2013) 103 copies, 1 review
50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (FORuM Project Publications) (2008) 36 copies
Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Arts and Politics of the Everyday) (1994) 30 copies
Associated Works
Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International, June 1957-August 1960 (2008) — Introduction, some editions — 32 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wark, McKenzie
- Birthdate
- 1961-09-10
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Macquarie University (BA|1985)
University of Technology, Sydney (MA|1990)
Murdoch University (Ph.D|1998|Communications) - Occupations
- Media and Cultural Studies scholar
professor - Organizations
- The New School
- Relationships
- Christen Clifford (Wife)
Robert McKenzie Wark (Brother) - Nationality
- Australia
- Birthplace
- Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
- Places of residence
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Australia
Members
Reviews
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark
The Situationists were on to something, in their description of the trouble: the commodified experience of time and space, the equation of happiness with acquisitiveness, the spectacle that chokes out awareness, ‘modern cities as miles and miles of organized nowhere’ —but I read Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (twenty years after it was written) as an eccentric prose poem, and Ken Knabb’s compilation as an episode in the history of late-20th c. European ideas. show more Situationism, I thought, was a dead thing from the past. McKenzie Wark wonders if that is true.
The Beach Beneath the Street presents some of the precursors to and the influences on Situationism. Wark largely bypasses the more well-known work of Vaneigem and Guy Debord to credit artists in Romania, Belgium and Denmark with developing concepts deployed by the Situationist International (founded in 1957 with nine members; only 72 people ever belonged). Situationism also took surprising inspiration from Johan Huizinga, Pyotr Kropotkin and Franz Boas, and in the first three years of the International, says Wark, there were many potential versions of it. The architect Ivan Chtcheglov, the painter Asger Jorn and the psychologist Henri Lefebvre were figures against which Situationism sharpened itself in sympathetic opposition.
The Situationists were less interested in offering dogma, writes Wark, than in developing ‘tactical mobility’ combined with ruthless criticism. Their goal was the expansion of the possibilities of social life; they proffered ‘a diagram of forces, trajectories, and possibilities rather than a representation of an object, cut from the world as a frozen moment.’ Alas, the Situationists were better at articulating a negative and critical tactic than in building a positive, constructive model to replace the society of the spectacle. They were never able to surmount the tension between the communal impulse and bohemian creativity. Debord, who successfully jettisoned those thinkers who did not share his (naïve) faith in proletarian consciousness, envisioned not a collaboration between specialists, but the overcoming of specialization in the name of a new kind of collective activity. Jorn, with his insistence that the nucleus of a radical form of action was not the specialists in politics but the connoisseurs of the free use of time, was cut adrift, left to return to the isolation of his studio.
The Beach Beneath the Street is 20th c. cultural history done well, and a bittersweet retrieval of ideas that once suggested the possibility of a different 21st c. than the one we wound up with. Wark believes that there are elements of Situationism that are relevant to the demands of the present, but “the spectacle requires a structural transformation which no mere passing of information between disaffected hipsters could ever achieve.” So, what does optimism look like now? show less
The Beach Beneath the Street presents some of the precursors to and the influences on Situationism. Wark largely bypasses the more well-known work of Vaneigem and Guy Debord to credit artists in Romania, Belgium and Denmark with developing concepts deployed by the Situationist International (founded in 1957 with nine members; only 72 people ever belonged). Situationism also took surprising inspiration from Johan Huizinga, Pyotr Kropotkin and Franz Boas, and in the first three years of the International, says Wark, there were many potential versions of it. The architect Ivan Chtcheglov, the painter Asger Jorn and the psychologist Henri Lefebvre were figures against which Situationism sharpened itself in sympathetic opposition.
The Situationists were less interested in offering dogma, writes Wark, than in developing ‘tactical mobility’ combined with ruthless criticism. Their goal was the expansion of the possibilities of social life; they proffered ‘a diagram of forces, trajectories, and possibilities rather than a representation of an object, cut from the world as a frozen moment.’ Alas, the Situationists were better at articulating a negative and critical tactic than in building a positive, constructive model to replace the society of the spectacle. They were never able to surmount the tension between the communal impulse and bohemian creativity. Debord, who successfully jettisoned those thinkers who did not share his (naïve) faith in proletarian consciousness, envisioned not a collaboration between specialists, but the overcoming of specialization in the name of a new kind of collective activity. Jorn, with his insistence that the nucleus of a radical form of action was not the specialists in politics but the connoisseurs of the free use of time, was cut adrift, left to return to the isolation of his studio.
The Beach Beneath the Street is 20th c. cultural history done well, and a bittersweet retrieval of ideas that once suggested the possibility of a different 21st c. than the one we wound up with. Wark believes that there are elements of Situationism that are relevant to the demands of the present, but “the spectacle requires a structural transformation which no mere passing of information between disaffected hipsters could ever achieve.” So, what does optimism look like now? show less
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark
A flawed but interesting, if somewhat indirect, account of the Situationist International which grew out of the Parisian Left Bank, as a generational reaction to surrealism, existentialism, structuralism and mainstream Marxism, and played an important role in the 'evenements' of 1968.
The problem with the book is that it is low level polemic as much as it is history. Published by Verso, it falls into the classic Verso trap of editorially permitting, indeed encouraging, both posturing rhetoric show more and obscurity. Verso intellectuals do like to strut and show off like peacocks.
Nevertheless, it is enlightening if only for retrieving key personalities from the movement as highly creative and in giving us at least some idea of why their anarcho-radical ideas were important then and may be even more important now.
I write 'anarcho-radical' cautiously because that is how Situationism might reasonably be interpreted as functionally useful today but, of course (and the book makes this clear), the Situationists spoke within the same standard Marxist discourse as everyone else in post-war Paris.
It is hard to believe today that Marxism held the bulk of the European artistic and intellectual establishment in thrall for much of the immediate post-war period. Its weird tight language infected culture and politics far into the 1980s but acts as a barrier to the modern reader.
To discuss issues of culture and politics required that it be done within a framework of Marxist texts that are now only of interest to specialists - an analogy might be with the necessity of discussing reality or the human condition within a strictly Christian context in earlier periods.
Nevertheless, once we adapt to this strange and ancient language of class struggle and labour value, beneath the cant these artists and intellectuals were genuinely trying to deal with an issue that Christian apologists, Marx himself and the existentialists had all struggled with – alienation.
This is where Situationism and the book become interesting. How do we as subjects of a system that is palpably out of our control regain control. The Situationist response is to emphasise playfulness and an expansive expenditure of what private resources are available to us.
Situationism is fundamentally a romantic reaction to the bureaucratic impulse in both ‘really existing socialism’ (the communism of Stalin and Trotsky) and in the post-war liberal capitalist state that would evolve later into the Hegelian lunacy of the European Federal State.
It also presents an accidental advance critique of what would later become not just a theory of commodity fetishism but an actuality in the form of the debt-fuelled, leisure-based, peasant-worker exploiting capitalism that is now going rather spectacularly through one of its periodic crises.
McKenzie Wark is polemically attempting to recover not Situationism as such but the attitude of Situationists in this context. It has to be said that his few sharp comments on rioting as a response to alienation in the last chapter really are rather good.
There is something as romantic about this book as the movement. It evidences the latter's elan and its imagination, perhaps its paradoxical role in creating the current crisis through its contribution to the post-modern impulse, but not its effectiveness on its own terms.
It is certainly worth reading for its brief accounts of the work of key figures – the novels of Bernstein (whose dissection of post-bourgeois heterosexual sexuality is magnificent), the self-destructive genius of Trocchi, the utopianism of Constant and the central artistic role of Jorn.
I am sure the account of Lefebvre would be fascinating if I cared enough about the Marxist theory of labour value (barely stifles yawn!) – but anyone who reads this book will understand the centrality of Situationist critique to our current predicament and may want to find out more.
And, flitting in and out as Master of Ceremonies, is Guy Debord himself who understands, as Stalin did, that power in any society lies with the man who is given command of the Minutes and the Membership Register. An uneven, occasionally frustrating, book, but well worth reading. show less
The problem with the book is that it is low level polemic as much as it is history. Published by Verso, it falls into the classic Verso trap of editorially permitting, indeed encouraging, both posturing rhetoric show more and obscurity. Verso intellectuals do like to strut and show off like peacocks.
Nevertheless, it is enlightening if only for retrieving key personalities from the movement as highly creative and in giving us at least some idea of why their anarcho-radical ideas were important then and may be even more important now.
I write 'anarcho-radical' cautiously because that is how Situationism might reasonably be interpreted as functionally useful today but, of course (and the book makes this clear), the Situationists spoke within the same standard Marxist discourse as everyone else in post-war Paris.
It is hard to believe today that Marxism held the bulk of the European artistic and intellectual establishment in thrall for much of the immediate post-war period. Its weird tight language infected culture and politics far into the 1980s but acts as a barrier to the modern reader.
To discuss issues of culture and politics required that it be done within a framework of Marxist texts that are now only of interest to specialists - an analogy might be with the necessity of discussing reality or the human condition within a strictly Christian context in earlier periods.
Nevertheless, once we adapt to this strange and ancient language of class struggle and labour value, beneath the cant these artists and intellectuals were genuinely trying to deal with an issue that Christian apologists, Marx himself and the existentialists had all struggled with – alienation.
This is where Situationism and the book become interesting. How do we as subjects of a system that is palpably out of our control regain control. The Situationist response is to emphasise playfulness and an expansive expenditure of what private resources are available to us.
Situationism is fundamentally a romantic reaction to the bureaucratic impulse in both ‘really existing socialism’ (the communism of Stalin and Trotsky) and in the post-war liberal capitalist state that would evolve later into the Hegelian lunacy of the European Federal State.
It also presents an accidental advance critique of what would later become not just a theory of commodity fetishism but an actuality in the form of the debt-fuelled, leisure-based, peasant-worker exploiting capitalism that is now going rather spectacularly through one of its periodic crises.
McKenzie Wark is polemically attempting to recover not Situationism as such but the attitude of Situationists in this context. It has to be said that his few sharp comments on rioting as a response to alienation in the last chapter really are rather good.
There is something as romantic about this book as the movement. It evidences the latter's elan and its imagination, perhaps its paradoxical role in creating the current crisis through its contribution to the post-modern impulse, but not its effectiveness on its own terms.
It is certainly worth reading for its brief accounts of the work of key figures – the novels of Bernstein (whose dissection of post-bourgeois heterosexual sexuality is magnificent), the self-destructive genius of Trocchi, the utopianism of Constant and the central artistic role of Jorn.
I am sure the account of Lefebvre would be fascinating if I cared enough about the Marxist theory of labour value (barely stifles yawn!) – but anyone who reads this book will understand the centrality of Situationist critique to our current predicament and may want to find out more.
And, flitting in and out as Master of Ceremonies, is Guy Debord himself who understands, as Stalin did, that power in any society lies with the man who is given command of the Minutes and the Membership Register. An uneven, occasionally frustrating, book, but well worth reading. show less
Raving is about as close as you can come into the vibrant vibes of the queer subscene without leaving your armchair. Even if you are not really into that scene, and might never go to a party, Raving is an exhilirating read.
In the foreword, McKenzie Wark says that the series editor approached them by the end of July 2021 to submit the book for the series by end of September '21, so the book was compiled in a frenzy, putting together pre-written and existing materials. New materials were show more written during the pandemic, so the book is all up-to-date about covid lockdowns that affected the scene.
Raving is a very honest and totally authentic book. Read it, even it is not your scene. The enthusiasm and authenticity should infect you, you will learn a lot, and Raving is a roller-coaster read.
Exhilirating ! show less
In the foreword, McKenzie Wark says that the series editor approached them by the end of July 2021 to submit the book for the series by end of September '21, so the book was compiled in a frenzy, putting together pre-written and existing materials. New materials were show more written during the pandemic, so the book is all up-to-date about covid lockdowns that affected the scene.
Raving is a very honest and totally authentic book. Read it, even it is not your scene. The enthusiasm and authenticity should infect you, you will learn a lot, and Raving is a roller-coaster read.
Exhilirating ! show less
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark
I can’t believe it has taken me an entire month to read such a short book. I expected ‘The Beach Beneath the Street’ to be something along the lines of the very readable [b:Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|22716641|Communal Luxury The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|Kristin Ross|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1406511042s/22716641.jpg|42243876]. While that discussed the ‘everyday life and glorious times’ of the Communards, this claims to do show more the same with the Situationists. I hoped to gain insight into the philosophies and practises of the somewhat mysterious Situationists and their role in the upheavals of 1968. Having finally finished the book, I do not feel hugely enlightened on this front. This is undoubtedly in part because the Situationists do not seem to have had a coherent ideology (I don’t think the word is even mentioned in the book) and frequently splintered into grouplets. Although the word praxis is quite often mentioned, the actual activities of the Situationists appear to have largely involved publishing newsletters, quarrelling, and occasionally playing practical jokes. Perhaps I underestimate them, or perhaps I simply didn’t get along with Wark’s prose style. I found the second half easier going than the first, although I was never really carried along by it. The density of references proved gruelling when I hadn’t heard of them but rewarding when I had, not surprisingly.
Nevertheless, ‘The Beach beneath the Street’ does make interesting links between the Situationists and their antecedents (the Letterists) and their heirs (psychogeographers and purveyors of internet memes?). I liked the grounding of Situationism, if there was such a cohesive concept, in the urban spatial environment. The comparison between Marx and Jorn’s concepts of value was thought-provoking, especially Jorn’s subtle idea of ‘container form’. This carries an implicit critique of progress in terms of rising quantities of goods produced, at the expense of diversity in forms. As I’ve long intended to read [b:Critique of Everyday Life|1443432|Critique of Everyday Life|Henri Lefebvre|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374000454s/1443432.jpg|1434077], I also found the discussion of Lefebvre’s work appealing. In particular, his take on Debord’s spectacle, which feels extremely relevant today:
Doesn’t that sound exactly like social media? On the other hand, I remain confused about the nature of détournement and increasingly convinced that such concepts may not be amenable to translation. Surely a definition in French would make more sense than this sort of thing:
Wark does end on a well-chosen note, though: ‘There may be no dignified exits left to the twenty-first century, the century of the flying inflatable turd, but there might be at least some paths to adventure. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about’. Although it took quite a lot of effort and I remain largely befuddled by the Situationists, I found enough insight and novelty here to make this book worth persisting with. [b:Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|22716641|Communal Luxury The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|Kristin Ross|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1406511042s/22716641.jpg|42243876] is much friendlier to the reader, however. show less
Nevertheless, ‘The Beach beneath the Street’ does make interesting links between the Situationists and their antecedents (the Letterists) and their heirs (psychogeographers and purveyors of internet memes?). I liked the grounding of Situationism, if there was such a cohesive concept, in the urban spatial environment. The comparison between Marx and Jorn’s concepts of value was thought-provoking, especially Jorn’s subtle idea of ‘container form’. This carries an implicit critique of progress in terms of rising quantities of goods produced, at the expense of diversity in forms. As I’ve long intended to read [b:Critique of Everyday Life|1443432|Critique of Everyday Life|Henri Lefebvre|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374000454s/1443432.jpg|1434077], I also found the discussion of Lefebvre’s work appealing. In particular, his take on Debord’s spectacle, which feels extremely relevant today:
Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of totalising tendency, ‘it would be be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect hell in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.’ What is real is known; what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: ‘the faked orgasms of art and life’.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like social media? On the other hand, I remain confused about the nature of détournement and increasingly convinced that such concepts may not be amenable to translation. Surely a definition in French would make more sense than this sort of thing:
Détournement dissolves the rituals of knowledge into in an active remembering that calls collective being into existence. If all property is theft, then all intellectual property is détournement.
Wark does end on a well-chosen note, though: ‘There may be no dignified exits left to the twenty-first century, the century of the flying inflatable turd, but there might be at least some paths to adventure. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about’. Although it took quite a lot of effort and I remain largely befuddled by the Situationists, I found enough insight and novelty here to make this book worth persisting with. [b:Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|22716641|Communal Luxury The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune|Kristin Ross|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1406511042s/22716641.jpg|42243876] is much friendlier to the reader, however. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 34
- Also by
- 4
- Members
- 1,464
- Popularity
- #17,550
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 18
- ISBNs
- 85
- Languages
- 11
- Favorited
- 1
