McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019), 123.
By “transsexuality” I do not mean an identity. I mean the cultural paradigm of gender transition as involving body modification such as hormone treatments and surgeries. Consequently, by “transsexual” I do not mean a person who identifies in this or that way. Instead, I use “transsexual” as an adjective that refers to the overall paradigm. Something is “transsexual” in this sense if it exists in the vortex of the idea of gender transition as involving body modification. This does not say anything about identity, representation, or individual identification. It speaks strictly about the relation to a social paradigm. The term “transsexuality” has often been criticized for many reasons, and rightfully so. Yet the reason I prefer this term in this context is that identity discourse tends to blur questions of institutional change and an analysis of political economy. For an extensive critique of an identity interpretation of transness, see Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 17. See also Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (South End Press, 2011). I take it that to the present day, transsexuality is paradigmatic of Western gender diversity and the hinge of anti-trans discourse, so called “gender ideology,” and the like. We can see this in the ongoing political conflicts over body modification (see Mikey Elster, “Insidious Concern: Trans Panic and the Limits of Care,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3, 2022; and Eric Plemons and Chris Straayer, “Introduction: Reframing the Surgical,” TSQ 5, no. 2, 2018: 165), but also in that “nonbinary,” “gender fluid,” “trans,” “transgender,” and many other terms are understood in deliberate distinction from “transsexuality” as kinds of transition without or independently of body modification and medical intervention (such as hormone treatments and surgeries). Consequentially, due to its high affective impact and its political currency, I think we should appropriate the term, rather than avoiding it. Yet that appropriation doesn’t have to describe individual identities. “Transsexuality” is a social paradigm. It does not (necessarily) describe individual people. For more on this, see Luce deLire, “Nature Is a Transsexual Woman: Lucretian Metaphysics Reconsidered,” Classical Philology 119, no. 2 (April 2024): 208; and deLire, “Transsexuality at the Origin of Desire, Or: Schreber’s Satanic Handjob,” in The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Contemporary Times, ed. Vanessa Sinclair, Elisabeth Punzi, and Myriam Sauer (Routledge, forthcoming 2024).
McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press 2004), thesis 15.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 15.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 74, my emphasis.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 74.
McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso 2015), 18, my emphasis.
ComInSitu, “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China (Chuang, 2020),” Communists In Situ, February 28, 2020 →.
Wark, Molecular Red, 180. See also Wark, Capital Is Dead, 138.
McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke University Press, 2021), 166.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18, my emphasis.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18.
Wark, Molecular Red, 23.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18.
One might protest and say that the point of Molecular Red was never to overcome dogmatism, but to change the location of the dogmatism from “nature” to “labor.” Rather than dogmatically assuming that “naturally,” women* want BABIES, the world is composed of ultimately solid elements, and dogs like sticks, we would then dogmatically assume that instead of merely understanding the status quo, we ought to change the world (through labor)—and only the results matter. In this view, Marxism would be the philosophy of the working class dogmatically attached to labor as a point of view (based on the worker’s social position in the cycle of production). But I don’t see that in Molecular Red. For one, Wark explicitly states that Marxism was oftentimes “misconstrued as a dogma” (Molecular Red, 216). Consequentially, she uses “dogma” exclusively as a negative adjective, opposing “dogmatic” views (even of Marxist philosophers) to “scientific” or “tactic” views in which “knowledge of matter is to be produced by experiment” (Molecular Red, 24; see also Molecular Red, 20, 23, 125, 126, 127,129, 130, 165, 216). Secondly and more importantly, Molecular Red seems to aspire to more than just replacing one dogmatism with another dogmatism: “Labor is a prism through which to construct a version of Marx that does not disappear into the cultural, political, or theological problem of the subject. It is not so much that it is objective, however. It is not about making a claim to have the true”—i.e., dogmatic?—“method. Rather, it is about the struggle of and within the realm of things, of how things organize themselves and how they might—through labor—become otherwise. The turn toward the object, as some-thing that exceeds subjectivity in scale, can undo the damage done by the fascination with the great molar dramas”—or dogmas?—“which appear as the clash of superhuman subjects, but subjects nonetheless” (217). The category “labor” decenters the subject exactly without tumbling into the fold of dogmatic knowledge. Wark, it seems, picked “labor” exactly for its flexibility both in the production of knowledge and in the production of things, for its transformative quality in relation to an ever evolving subject. Labor can be many things and it stands in many relations between things. Yet it centers resistance and transformation. In fact, if “the being of nature is … whatever appears as resistance in labor” (Molecular Red, 18, my emphasis), then this “whatever” seems to mirror the positive malleability that characterizes Warkian labor in the first place. Labor is nature as it manifests in human experience. It’s not just one strategic dogmatism replacing an other. It is, supposedly, the exit from dogmatism, the entry into nature. Yet by virtue of such an exit, a dogmatic approach to nature reinscribes itself exactly through the perfect indeterminate “whatever,” declared by authoritarian decree in Wark’s definition of “nature” as “whatever appears as resistance in labor” (Molecular Red, 18, my emphasis).
Wark, Molecular Red, 18.
Wark, Molecular Red, 35.
Wark, Molecular Red, xviii, 11, 12, 17 et passim.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 74.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18.
See deLire, “Nature Is a Transsexual Woman.”
Another feminized nature as the object of patriarchal control occurs in Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: “Or maybe he only controls, and considers really natural in the sense of penetrable and controllable, a nature that is female. And so on, not unlike a bad myth” (167).
Wark, Molecular Red, 18, my emphasis.
Wark, Capital Is Dead, 139.
Wark, Capital Is Dead, 63.
McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso 2023), e-book, n.p.
In “Nature Is a Transsexual Woman,” I discuss the various racialized and gendered aspects of the Galli in some detail.
Wark, Molecular Red, 46.
Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death, chap. 3.3.
Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death, chap. 3.3.
Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death, chap. 3.3.
Wark, Molecular Red, 18, my emphasis.
I quote Spinoza from The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton University Press, 2016). “Ep.” stands for “letter” (epistola).
Ep. 58, IV/268/1–5. Also Spinoza: “A horse is excusable for being a horse and not a man, but he must still be a horse and not a man. Someone who is crazy because of a dog’s bite is indeed to be excused; nevertheless, he is rightly suffocated. And finally, one who cannot govern his desires and restrain them by fear of the laws, although he too is to be excused because of his weakness, nevertheless, cannot enjoy peace of mind” (Ep. 78, IV/327a).
Ep. 78, IV/327a.
Meister Propper, Bremen, 2006: “Eltern abtreiben, sich selbst gebären, frei sein.”
Many thanks to McKenzie Wark and Milena Glimbovski.