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

       versobooks.com

      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

I. Aesthetics

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

Introduction

       Toward the Common Task

      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 and their elephant: Each touches, senses, and knows a part of the elephant and declares the elephant to be like what they touch: tusklike, trunklike, or taillike. Each hears the other saying something incompatible with the thing that they themselves touch.

      The first limit to the parable is that maybe there’s no whole elephant to be seen, either.⁶ A scholar who could see the elephant would not know any better than the blind ones, because while the account by the scholar who sees might include the grey color of its skin, they may know nothing of its texture or smell. Nobody gets to know the totality.

      The second limit to this parable is that it may not even be possible to combine all of these partial accounts of the elephant into a true and whole picture of the elephant as a totality, as a world. The parts don’t quite add up to a whole. Each way of knowing shapes in part the thing it comes to know, producing parts that are parts of different wholes. Knowing is never quite going to come together again, and there may be nothing at all helpful any more in the fiction that it might.

      This