General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

by McKenzie Wark

A guide to the thinkers and ideas that will shape the future

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues we no longer have such singular figures, but there are, instead, general intellects whose writing could, if read collectively, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others. McKenzie Wark’s distinctive readings are appreciations, but are nonetheless critical of how neoliberal universities militate against cooperative intellectual work that endeavors to understand and also change the world.

The thinkers included are Amy Wendling, Kojin Karatani, Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Hiroki Azuma, Paul B. Préciado, Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Timothy Morton, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Cultural Studies, Contemporary

336 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2017

About the author

McKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Reviews

[javisitu · Rating 4 out of 5]

el trabajo es titánico ojalá tener tiempo para estudiar este libro con calma

[Gabriel Moragues Corbí · Rating 4 out of 5]

He disfrutado mucho de sus capítulos, cumple con el título y la tesis, son pensamientos encarnados en el ahora y sus circunstancias. A partir de la reflexión que hace McKenzie sobre diversxs autorxs he podido rascar la superficie sobre muchos grandes temas de gran importancia: naturales, políticos, económicos, identitarios, etc... ¡Me lo he pasado pipa! Y me gusta también haberlo leído lento a lo largo de medio año, las ideas crecen y se meditan con el día a día y eso ha estado muy guayy

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this collection of essays an excellent and accessible survey of contemporary social thought. I read this as a point of departure into more thorough research.

[Efe Re · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you find yourself lost at the start of a project, like a dissertation or something, this is the book to go. Packed with ideas from diverse contemporary theorists it will surely inspire you to develop your own path.

It not only provides the reader with succinct summaries of complex theoretical work, it also engages with them, glimpsing at the directions such ideas could be taken. To answer the question Wark asks at the very beginning of her book, what could be the role of public intellectual today? It is this, to clear up pathways around all the bulk of what is constantly said and written and posted and shared. To make the reader able to find a flag post whence they could take off.

[Post1000Tension · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth mentioning at the start is the cultural make-up of this book. On Twitter, General Intellects was criticized for its Euro-centric bias, citing only three people of color in its chapters. McKenzie Wark, for her part, rather avoided the critique, deferring the task of highlighting the Global South to others.

That said, if one can accept the inherent limitations, there's plenty to like in General Intellects. Wark presents compelling cases for her chosen thinkers, providing gentle but exacting commentary on their bodies of work. I'll admit that the harder science orientations of, i.e., Wendling, Galloway, and Chun tend to go over my head. But I find Wark's writing style clear and welcoming, even if I don't always grasp the technicalities of its focus. Reading her, I always get the sense that I could understand her positions if I read her sources as rigorously as she has. I think there's something to be said for allowing that possibility, the exploration of critical thought that doesn't repel the newcomers.

More encouragingly, most of the book deals in thinkers and subjects I know better. From roughly the chapter on Virno to the one on Preciado, Wark presents a bounty of intriguing concepts and her own opinions on them. Even the later chapters on Morton, Meillassoux, and Stengers beguile with their original perspectives on climate. Most exciting for me was the Wendy Brown chapter, which helped me further my own thinking on the callousness of neoliberal logic. Namely: by foregoing the social consciousness of previous eras, a neoliberal populace can better direct its attention to the cultivation of the self. Marginalized communities are then left to "bankrupt" their human capital like misbehaving startups. No longer encumbered by obligation toward the needy, encouraged by the prejudices of the bourgeoisie, the state can deprive marginalized communities of their basic rights (food, shelter, education) with impunity. I thank Wark and Brown for their insights into this "necro-liberalism" that tacitly allows the culling of surplus populations through capitalist 'competition.'

Previously, Wark's writing also led me to Hiroki Azuma's book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. I've read that book once already and I'm finding it even richer upon rereading it. Wark's accompanying chapter is a great summary of Azuma's insights, best experienced after reading Azuma's book as a primary source. In summary, I hope my experience speaks for the breadth of Wark's project. Reading just one of the thinkers she's highlighted created a lot of scaffolding for my own further investigations. And I look forward to reading many other of the books discussed, knowing I can triangulate my own interpretation of them through Wark's sharp dissections. Omissions aside, there's an ever-deepening world of critical theory laid out here for any interested general intellect.

[Rohit · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult, dense, weird, and interesting book. While reading it my thoughts oscillated wildly between "what the fuck is he talking about, none of this makes any sense and I haven't understood the last 15 pages" and "oh wow cool that's super interesting definitely gonna put this author on my reading list what a neat framework", with a decent amount of "hmm I guess, dunno if that's a correct or useful way of looking at things though". The most interesting chapters were the ones on historicizing changes in capitalist political economy near the beginning of the book, and the ones on philosophizing about nature and ecology toward the end of the book.

In general this book is probably best suited for people in academia who are already familiar with critical left-wing philosophy and have had some engagement with the discussed authors. For the average chump like myself who was reading somewhat quickly it was far too much work to try to sift through the dense mess of academic jargon, references to various theories/frameworks, and quirky poetics. Still, there are definitely at least a few chapters in here that I would like to revisit and read with more effort.

[Ky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggle with the new philosophical schools, mainly because I have to come up with some sort of memorization system that can support this mental ecology of intellectual monikers (Hegelian-Marxism? Lacanian-Stalinism? Where am I?), but ultimately throwing yourself in head first without a care in the world as to whether or not you can recall a single thing about tektology or the spectacle of the absolute is the right way to do things (I do not wish to be challenged on this). Actually maybe I’m joking. You’ll never know.

Putting these figures in conversation with one another was a brilliant exercise on the part of Wark. If you found your head spinning slightly from Virno’s developments on Post-Fordism, you may find yourself grounded by an examination of the same concept offered by Boutang in a subsequent chapter. You may have a breeze with the psychoanalysts and be KO’d by the speculative realists. As a singular reader you may or may not be a generalist across the theoretical frameworks offered to you in this book, so the work of threading a needle through the fabric of 21 minds appears to be the ultimate intellectual exercise. With that said, this book was difficult be had my head spinning like a dreidel this holiday season.

[Alice Nilsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good short intros on theorists of the 21st century that allow you to be gripped by their ideas and want to engage with them further

[Lukasz Dygon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is packed with interesting ideas across a section of modern thinking. Rather than presenting philosophies of 'general intellects' of recent, it tries engaging with them, making pieces sound more like meditative essays. I found it a bit hard sometimes to follow the arguments and descriptions as the focus kept changing between the presented idea and Wark's response or commentary of it. There is a fair bit of trying to draw referencial relationship between author's and subject's ideas which I found awkward.

I am not a scholar of social sciences, Marxism or modern philosophy. I picked this book up from an art gallery shop, thinking it's a good way to engage with those areas. Unfortunately the style, syntactic structure, and vocabulary required rereading of section and even then half the time, especially in early chapters, I didn't understand what I'm reading about. I am lead to believe I was not the target audience.

All things considered, the book's content was interesting and I'm interested in understanding what I failed to while reading. The style didn't lend itself to layman's reading of it. Maybe I will reread some of it when my understanding of the terminology and argument improves with engaging with other works. It made me want to read more of something else.

[Diego Noriega · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si bien es un libro extenso es accesible por el formato de cada capítulo en cuanto a la forma, porque el contenido como tal sí que es muy denso y en ocasiones se torna tediosamente enrevesado, no estoy seguro si por mi incapacidad intelectual o porque Wark no sabe explicarse sin dar muchas vueltas. En lineas generales es un libro estimulante y que puede reavivar el interés por el estudio, sin embargo hay capitulos que resultan innecesariamente pesados de leer y pueden cortar un poco el ritmo que se toma previamente, al menos eso me pasó a mí puesto que algunos capitulos sobre autores como Preciado, Lazzarato, Chun,... me resultaron muchísimo mas enriquecedores que otros como el de Zizek, Morton y Meillassoux. Sin duda es para repasarlo y echarme a la cabeza el resto de libros de Mckenzie Wark, que tiene grandísimos aportes.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I found the most useful here was the thesis on general intellects, the idea of the "Marx-field", and an orientation towards ecology and technology that emphasizes theorizing around the most recent developments in these fields. The summaries of each author were usually exactly that, and therefore less novel.

[Wendy Liu]

a legend