McKenzie Wark Finds a Better Fiction
The scholar, writer, and raver on playing with form in writing and in herself
Hi friends,
This morning we’re dropping our first episode of a new season. In November, I sat down with the inimitable McKenzie Wark in the Media Lab of PioneerWorks here in Brooklyn for a conversation about the two books she released last year: Raving, an autofiction essay about her experience as a trans woman in her sixties in the queer rave scene in New York; and Love and Money, Sex and Death, which is a memoir in letters addressed to, as she put it to me, “mothers, lovers, and others.”
Wark’s books tend to be hard to categorize. In my first draft of this note, I described Raving as an autofiction-essay-cultural theory-performance notebook, for example. Her most recent work on Kathy Acker, with whom she had an affair when they first met, is something like speculative criticism? This is the attraction of her work and her thinking: Wark is always pushing, “tickling” and playing with form— a practice she’s had in writing for years but began anew for herself when she came out as trans in her fifties.
“You don’t have to break a form. You can play with it instead. Play with the forms as given until they expand our possibilities and meet our needs.”
READ MCKENZIE’S BOOKS
There are many things to love about this conversation —Wark is so quick, so charming— but a favorite of mine is the expansiveness with which she thinks about writing and dancing as technologies for survival. If you believe, as she does, that there’s no such thing as a fixed self, then that opens up the possibility of authorship and play.
“We are always fictions that we create for ourselves and others. So that gives you a different way of thinking: Like, what’s a better fiction?”
Also mentioned in the ep:
Not mentioned in the episode, but a fun read: Wark’s Year In Reading for The Millions.
To learn more about Wark and to hear the interview, listen along:
PioneerWorks’ publication BROADCAST has published an edited version of this conversation on their website, which you can read here.
That’s all for now! Wishing “better fictions” for us all.
-Jordan