McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark appears in this archive as a later reader of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, not as a member of Ccru or a participant in its 1990s history. Three Wark-authored texts support a bounded reception page: a signed 1995 review of Land's book on Bataille, the 2017 essay “On Nick Land,” and “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces” in the 2012 Cyclonopedia symposium Leper Creativity. They document changes in Wark's reading rather than a complete account of Wark's work.

An early Land reception

The 1995 review considers both Michael Richardson's book on Georges Bataille and Land's The Thirst for Annihilation. Wark describes Bataille as a missing link between late Romantic surrealism and poststructuralism, then contrasts Richardson's conventional introduction with Land's effort to preserve the radical heterogeneity and transgression of Bataille's texts. Wark singles out Land's placement of Bataille among pessimists—especially Freud and Schopenhauer—as the book's inspired move (Nick Land/Secondary Sources/Texts/Reviews/McKenzie Wark - The Thirst for Annihilation; Georges Bataille and Virtulent Nihilism.pdf, pp. 1–2).

This is a short, signed review, not a retrospective theory of Ccru. It establishes that Wark was reading Land's Bataille book as an unusual intervention by 1995; it does not establish Wark's involvement in Land's later collective work.

“On Nick Land”: reading forks, not destiny

“On Nick Land” presents itself as a compressed, functional account of a controversial concept-maker. Wark explicitly refuses to treat Land's later neoreaction as the inevitable truth of the earlier writing: intellectual work moves through branching paths, and a later position is only one realized possibility. Wark therefore concentrates on Fanged Noumena and Land's guide to the 2010 Shanghai Expo (Nick Land/Secondary Sources/Texts/McKenzie Wark - On Nick Land.pdf, pp. 1–3).

Wark gives the early project two keys: Deleuze and Guattari stripped of vitalism, and Bataille's solar economy redirected toward thermodynamic death. He reconstructs Land's attack on Kantian judgment and on capital's unequal exchange with colony and outside, but then identifies a conservative limit. Land calls for an opening to alterity while allowing Western philosophy to remain the sovereign medium that stages it; poets and other figures of the outside remain recognizable stock characters of Western Romanticism (ibid., pp. 3–7). This criticism belongs to Wark, while the many embedded propositions from Fanged Noumena remain quotations from Land.

Wark retains what is diagnostic in the writing without endorsing its direction. Land's base matter, inhuman cognition and positive feedback make capital into an impersonal historical pilot, while labor, politics and collective agency disappear. Wark repeatedly asks what changes if property and work are restored to the analysis (ibid., pp. 9–11).

Acceleration and the hacker-class fork

Wark calls Land's fusion of capital, death drive and positive feedback a version of what would later be named accelerationism, but specifies its consequence: capital is the only agent, and what it accelerates is extinction. Futurity arrives as machinic infection, nonlinear countdown and hyperstition rather than collective political project (ibid., pp. 12–13).

Wark then marks his own fork. Drawing on A Hacker Manifesto, he asks whether capital has already been superseded by a more abstract commodification that extracts an information surplus from a subordinate hacker class. Property forms fetter that class's experimental energies. Land occasionally names the hack, but naturalizes it and does not allow a durable collective agent to form. Wark labels the hacker-class and property question the “left fork” to accelerationism (ibid., p. 14). This is Wark's alternative, not Land's politics and not a definition shared by every accelerationist.

The later sections test Land's trajectory rather than merely dismissing it. Wark reads the Shanghai Expo guide as a condensed Sino-futurism, then argues that it returns to an arrested synthesis of capital and nation. Land's late intuition may be that acceleration requires form, but Wark strongly contests reaction as its partner (ibid., pp. 15–18). The essay finally credits Land's geotraumatic scale and early attention to positive climate feedback, connecting it to Negarestani and the Anthropocene while judging the subsequent neoreactionary turn less promising (ibid., p. 19).

Cyclonopedia: oil as grammatical subject

“An Inhuman Fiction of Forces” begins from a planetary aesthetic problem. Modernity's lasting artwork may be neither image nor monument but a chemical signature: atmospheric carbon, radioactive waste and other molecular remains at planetary scale. Wark seeks an aesthetic able to connect the global and molecular without collapsing into technological optimism, apocalypse spectacle or moral instruction (McKenzie Wark, “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces,” in Leper Creativity, pp. 48–49).

Within that problem, Wark declares that *Cyclonopedia* is “not a novel” but heretical theology and a distributed practice of hidden writing. He makes oil—not a human protagonist—the grammatical subject: historical actors become hosts or minor figures, and capital becomes oil's vector (ibid., pp. 50–51). This is Wark's secondary interpretation, not a neutral bibliographic classification. The archive preserves other readings of the book as a novel, and the disagreement should remain visible.

Wark's contribution to petropolitics is to ask for an elemental narratology in which chemical organization is neither background nor a human-like subject. He also pushes beyond the book's oil-and-dust system toward natural gas, fracking, water and air. “Occult derivatives” become a strategy for disrupting the state's communication through time, while “xenowriting” names a field of possible inhuman fictions rather than one closed genre (ibid., pp. 51–52).

Archive boundary

The local archive supports Wark as a sharp, sometimes sympathetic, often corrective reader. It does not support a general biography, an account of Wark's entire media theory, or any implication of Ccru membership. The strongest through-line is reception: Land's Bataillean heterogeneity is first welcomed; Land's acceleration is later split from Wark's property and class analysis; Negarestani's oil fiction then becomes a route toward planetary chemical media and inhuman narration.