Critical (Auto) Theory

1.

These feet hurt. It’s the weather. An unseasonably warm October. I’m schlepping up Broadway on my way from Village Works bookshop to Rizzoli bookshop, via The Strand bookshop. In each, I will sign copies of my new book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, and take some pictures to put on the socials. It’s a living.

It’s not. I can only afford to write books because I have a day job as a full-time, tenured professor. I don’t rely on money from selling books, although it helps. I have dependents to support and New York rent to pay. I could be writing esoteric things for a tiny readership, but for some very mixed motives, I want this book to sell. I’m doing my best to sell it. A delightfully contradictory experience for a Marxist.

Being bad at business is not a critique of capitalism. Something I learned as a music journo back in the eighties: bands who built their own audience had more contractual leverage and “creative freedom” with their record companies when they “sold out.” Perhaps it’s that, or just my provincial middle-class origins, but I never jibed with that aristocratic aloofness some writers and scholars affect about the book trade. I’ll happily do the work of flogging my own book, even if the legwork makes my feet ache. I learn a lot about the book trade this way.

The full title of this book is Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir. It’s not a memoir. That subtitle was a concession I made to help booksellers sell it, although even without it, classification is going to take place. Markets work through categories; the book market works through BISAC categories—Book Industry Standards and Communications. For Love and Money, Sex and Death, those categories and sub-categories are “Biography and Autobiography / LGBTQ+ / Personal Memoirs” and “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.” In a physical bookstore, that gives a bookseller a few difference places to put it.

BISAC categories help booksellers manage the relation between the product and the potential buyer’s expectations and desires. When you enter a bookstore, you enter a space divided between zones of expectation. If a bookseller shelves my book as “Biography and Autobiography,” the book can be found among those in which the reader might expect that the writer writes of things in her life that actually happened to her. But here’s a question: can “LGBTQ+” lives, specifically this transsexual life, fit within the category of “Biography and Autobiography,” or does that category constraint life-writing to a cis template?

I’ve always had a yen for books that lie askew. That play with genre as form, that tweak a reader’s expectations. Books that, when you open them, open also towards uncategorized desires. Similarly with scholarly books: I like the ones that don’t squat neatly in a field, that evade the keywords assigned to them, that refuse the private property system of owners and their claims to stake out the knowable. In the case of Love and Money, Sex and Death, I wanted it to put some tension through a set of categories like “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.”

And then, needless to say, I also like books that cross the line between the scholarly and books that, in the trade, we call “trade.” This can be hard to do, on a number of levels. We are in what Dan Sinykin, in his very useful study Big Fiction, calls the “conglomerate era” of publishing. It can be harder, and more expensive, for booksellers to get books from smaller publishers. Or from academic presses, which offer less of a discount on the retail price, and don’t offer the bookseller free shipping.

Writing trade books, particularly for the conglomerates, comes with constraints. They want to sell books like the books that have previously sold well. This comes up early in the process. If you propose a trade book, invariably via an agent, you will be asked to name “comps,” which are comparable titles that did well. This can be a curious exercise if your previous experience is with academic publishing. In proposing an academic book, you want to say that your book is not like others; in proposing a trade book, you want to say it is.

I tried pitching Love and Money, Sex and Death as a trade book to conglomerate publishers. I only got one nibble. An assistant editor expressed interest in working with me if I could turn it into a more conventional memoir. He is a white cis gay man with Ivy League credentials. I appreciate his interest, but this is where we are with “diversity” in conglomerate publishing. So I came back to Verso Books. My editor there, Leo Hollis, with whom I’ve worked before, knew what to do with me. He didn’t try to make the book more conventional but did gently nudge me toward solutions to some problems. I like the book we made together.

Verso books are distributed by Penguin Random House, the biggest conglomerate, on more favorable terms for booksellers than academic presses offer. So, I can have independent-publisher freedom with conglomerate-publisher distribution. Sweet. The one thing we don’t have going for us is the kind of publicity machine a conglomerate publisher will throw behind the handful of their own titles they choose to promote each season.

2.

It doesn’t help with the sales effort that Love and Money, Sex and Death is a bit weird. Late in my writing life, I started writing what I’m not ashamed to call autofiction and/or autotheory. They’re not exactly respectable ways of writing, although they have their charms. I think of autofiction as writing in which a character with the same name or attributes as the author appears, but where that character is not attempting to write the truth of the self, in the manner of memoir or autobiography. Selfhood itself is a fiction, and the writing is an account of how the fiction of a self is produced.

I think of autotheory as not too different from autofiction. Both are interested in the perceptual. Autofiction is more interested in the affective dimensions of what’s perceived; autotheory more the conceptual. It’s more interesting to think of autofiction/autotheory as tactics rather than genres, and as a continuity of tactics. I’ll call it the “autotextual”: These practices made this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances. It chanced these slings and arrows.

The name of the author in the text is an empty sign that forms a node in the perceptual field, around which unfolds the situation of its making. Love and Money, Sex and Death won’t tell you much about the true and secret inner life of McKenzie Wark. It might tell you instead about an era of media and culture, about the forms of family, class, and sexuality that went into the production of a legally recognized entity known as McKenzie Wark. I’m not the creator-god of this life, this text. I’m just a made thing, like any other made thing—just one that is curious about its making.

That I started writing like this is a matter of circumstance. Emigration from Sydney to New York left me feeling lonely and disconnected. My job was at Binghamton University, a four-hour drive from Brooklyn. I drove up Monday, back every Thursday. I was freshly married to Christen, and in love, but I’d lost my Sydney friends and community. I’d lost the sense of purpose that came with struggling in and against the culture in which I was raised. And it felt like after my visiting professorship ran out, I might be unemployed.

When back in New York, I wandered around the city in a dissociated fugue state—partly culture shock, mostly gender dysphoria. Christen had given me a personal, handheld GPS device as a gift. This was years before there was GPS tracking in everyone’s phone. I’d record my GPS coordinates in a notebook and write about that place and time. Eventually it became a book, Dispositions (2002).

It’s mostly a book about the tension between the abstraction of GPS and the particulars of scene, setting, mood, and ambience at the coordinates recorded. I felt this world being rendered ever more abstract by vectors of information that could command economic and strategic forces to be deployed around the globe. The book ends in the days after 9/11, with me and Christen drifting around the scene of the disaster. Its last words are: “This dust, she says, this dust is people.”

After 9/11, New York state was broke, and so was I. My Binghamton job, abolished. Best I could find was teaching composition at SUNY Albany. A little closer to Brooklyn, but a more expensive town, and less money. I was there for a year. Then in 2003, a job opened up at Eugene Lang College, The New School, at $70k per year, $22k more than at Albany. A three-year contract, unranked. I took it. I’d been told at SUNY Albany that I’d have to move there full time and publish another book to be considered for tenure. I already had three books, not counting Dispositions, so fuck that.

The rest was dumb luck. I’d landed at Lang College when it was expanding. After a few years, tenure was extended beyond the graduate faculty for the first time. By then I was a good candidate, as I’d chaired the Media and Culture Department a couple of times, and published two more books, both with Harvard University Press, which more than a few academics think of as the gold standard in academic publishing. The books were A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007).

I hadn’t written A Hacker Manifesto as an academic book at all. It came out of my engagement with the digital media avant-garde of the 1990s. We were trying to make the revolution in the media of our times, through politics, art, and theory. I was trying to find a language for an emerging class, those who made information as difference. A different kind of labor to making commodified sameness. Many publishers turned it down. I sent it to Lindsay Waters at Harvard out of desperation. He called my three days later. He made it happen.

Gamer Theory is that book’s bleak double. It also voices a persona: “gamer” rather than “hacker.” It tries to find a language for what I’d sensed in Dispositions was a planet-wide enclosure of all of space and time in a “gamespace” of zero-sum calculation and competition. It articulates what I learned hanging around a different creative subculture, that of independent game designers.

Those books aren’t too removed from the autotextual. They’re about the making of collective rather than individual subjectivities. They attempt to defamiliarize subjective experience by freshening language. They look for language for what’s coming. The autopoetic worldview of the hacker has suffered a series of defeats in the twenty years since it came out; the enclosed world of the gamer has became the prevailing mood.

I felt that Marxism was living in the past—and the wrong one. It became a scholastic simulacrum of itself. Not surprising, given that it was now mostly produced in academia. I tried to give it fresh language, fresh forms. It worked—both books sold well. A Hacker Manifesto was translated into a dozen languages. I found myself among interesting readers, often with commitments, projects, and perspectives that were also trying to engage the struggles of the present. I was excommunicated from “Marxism” by certain defenders of its orthodoxies. There’s an irony in being a party-trained Marxist denied membership in a “party” that no longer exists by those who acquired mastery of its revered classics in graduate school.

After Gamer Theory I wrote some books that try to put into circulation some of the materials that the genteel world of academic Marxism holds at arm’s length. The Beach Beneath the Street (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (2013) are before-and-after books about the failed revolution of 1968. Molecular Red (2015) is also a book about failed modernity, on a grand scale: that of the Soviet Union and the United States, from the point of view of dissenting Marxist currents.

I was raised intellectually, politically, and even emotionally in the labor movement. The mood, back in the late seventies, was already that we were a defeated people. If one takes praxis seriously, then the defeats in practice of our movement—and those defeats have been horrible in scale—mean that one cannot keep repeating the same old theoretical truisms. One starts over, drawing other resources from the past.

It feels like I have one more book in me in that series. It would be on the British Marxist scientists and their social milieu from the thirties to the fifties. They’ve been largely erased from the canonic succession of “Western Marxism,” and I think that’s disabling. The Anthropocene changes the relationship between scientific and humanistic knowledge, as it changes the relationship between geologic and historical time. There’s resources there, for our times—compromised ones, to be sure.

Not to be that bitch, but I wrote enough books for two academic careers. As a provincial outsider with a constitutional inability to kiss the ring, my academic career was never going to be a sterling ascent crowned in institutional prestige. (I’m vain enough to think I had enough talent.) I teach undergrad liberal arts and a few master’s students. In any case, I’d rather be a writer of the city, of my city, New York. I was never really tempted to leave it just for professional reasons. I’ll be here as the waters rise to meet me.

Besides being careless with career management, I tanked whatever credibility I had in media studies by coming out as a transsexual. The dysphoria got to me. I couldn’t take it anymore. I became one of those “late transitioners.” We who have our cake and eat it too, even if it’s gone a little stale.

From the relative comfort and security of a middle-class life, I decided to just write whatever the fuck I wanted. Hence the sequence of autotextual books, picking up from Dispositions. The next one was accidental. Kathy Acker’s executor wanted to publish our email correspondence, which came out as I’m Very Into You (2015). One in which two people who don’t know that they are in some sense trans intuit that in each other but don’t know what to do with it. After that, Reverse Cowgirl (2020) and Raving (2023). And now Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023).

There are a lot of hot takes about the autotextual as narcissistic, self-absorbed, a symptom of the neoliberal blah blah blah. It’s a rhetorical device of the haters to collapse everything into one giant symptom from which they declare themselves magically exempt. That’s not my reading experience with the autotextual at all. The most interesting autotextual writing does one of two things, or even better, both: shows how selves are made, and makes room for a kind of self that otherwise barely gets to exist.

Transsexuals, for instance. Sometimes it’s an achievement just to declare, on the page, that we exist. So many others claim authority over us, narrate us in the third person, as if we’re not in the room. We are the object of pathologizing “expert” discourse. Or we’re quirky minor characters in third-person fiction. I was getting into Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger until his trans character showed up, a bundle of clichés. The condition of possibility of third-person narration is the mutual ignorance of writer and reader, and the conceit that the other written about is not also able to read and write.

These thoughts are all rattling around in my head as I schlep up Broadway, between bookstores, for signings and selfies. I’m a weird, off-brand Marxist selling herself to sell books. I had professional photographs done. I maintain social media accounts. I do readings, signings, podcasts, and interviews. I learn how contemporary media works, as I always did, by being in it. I feel like going all-in with that is far less hypocritical than pretending to hold the commodity at arm’s length. To foreshadow where I’m going with this: rather a critical (auto) theory than hypocritical critical theory.

3.

There are two kinds of Marxists: those who think everything is capital and those who think everything is labor. I’m the second kind. What the commodity form hides from perception is that it is always the product of socially organized labor.

Take Love and Money, Sex and Death. It appears as a commodity in the bookshop. If you buy it, the bookstore gets about 40–45 percent, the rest split between the distributor (Penguin Random House), which gets about 20 percent, and the publisher (Verso), which gets about 25 percent, leaving less than 10 percent for me. So many kinds of labor are involved. The booksellers, the shippers, the warehousers, printers. Even Verso Books, my left-wing publisher, needs my book to sell, to pay for the labor that made it. There’s the editor, the copy editor, the designer, the production manager, the publicist. (It’s a press where, incidentally, the workers are now unionized.) My relation to the labor of bookmaking is a little different. I have a contract which assigns certain rights to Verso in exchange for an advance and percentage of the sales.

You could look at this and critique the way in which the commodity form has saturated the whole process. Writing and bookmaking are subordinated to the extraction of a profit from our collaborative labor. The commodity form turns writing’s promise of the possibility of textual difference into the reproduction of sameness. The sameness of categorization, which disciplines difference into repetition.

Commercial publishers are in the business of minimizing risk, but that in turn risks boredom. Every now and then they take a chance on something a little different. If that works, then you see a bunch of things come out a year or two later that used it for comps. After Maggie Nelson had a minor hit with The Argonauts, you can be sure a lot of agents and editors were looking for another Maggie Nelson. Which is not the fault of Maggie Nelson.

The autotextual is a writing tactic that’s actually been around for a long time, under various names, but if you only get your information about book culture from publicity handouts, it seems that autofiction is a recent trend. A Marxist reading from the point of view of capital might then go: Aha! Autofiction is the logic of the market overdetermining the writing process. Autofiction equals neoliberalism! Autofiction equals reality TV equals selfies equals narcissism equals neoliberal capital!

If your (rather “undialectical”) Marxism only perceives from the point of view of capital, then like capital, it finds sameness everywhere. I find this a bit lazy, and ironically, “neoliberal” in its own way. It takes the appearance of things on the market as allegories of capital at work, and capital only. Everything is capital! Which is, of course, neoliberalism’s key theory—that we’re all just “human capital.” Hence: Neoliberal Marxism, in which everything is capital, but that’s bad.

How does all this look from the point of view of that Marxism in which everything is labor? Writing is work, of a sort. The writer, like the worker, only has tactics in and against the production of commodities. Sometimes the same tactics, sometimes different ones. Most work under capitalism is the production of sameness. The organization of labor by capital reduces it to repetition, in the name of measurement, efficiency, value extraction.

Writing is work, but work that does something else: it produces difference. A work of writing can only become a commodity if it has a measurable amount of difference from existing works. The contradiction in writing for the trade press is that the book has to be different enough to be a work of saleable “intellectual property,” and yet the same enough to be like other works that have been successful. There’s a whole industry out there which schools writers in how to do that: how-to books, workshops, MFAs. And agents, whose job is to detail writers for market like you would a used car.

What’s a writer to do? One tactic is refusal. Stick to the periphery of the industry, to the small presses, to circuits of writing and reading that do their best to de-commodify that relation. I’m all for publishing collectives with political agendas, but they tend not to endure long, and struggle to get distribution. There are also nonprofit publishers. Much of that world is supported by grant money from foundations, who have their own agendas. They like to support diversity, but they like to keep the “diverse” in their place.

Another tactic is to write in-and-against the dominant forms in the marketplace by writing through the contradictory experiences of trying to live any kind of creative life in the gamespace of present conditions. When the autotextual is interesting to me, that’s what it’s doing. It’s writing in which the process of its own making is present in both the form and content of the book itself. It’s not the only writerly tactic that can do that, but it can be a fun one.

You can conceive of writing as labor, but the problem is that I never really know what part is the work. Sure, my book would never have made it into the front window at Rizzoli bookshop if I had not been sitting at my laptop in cafes for hours. And then sometimes the writing happens while I’m dancing, or fucking, or in the shower. What part of this is labor? How does the form of life shape the form of writing? The autotextual might, among other things, be a tactic for writing in which people who do creative work—the hacker class—communicate to each other about the shared problem of the connections between the practice of life and the practice of art.

4.

Any writer can deploy autotextual tactics, including wife-shooters and wife-knifers (William Burroughs, Norman Mailer). I’m interested in it when it comes from those excluded from the set of those whose right to be a human at all, let alone a creative human, is contested and embattled. My reading of the autotextual started with Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. It’s prison writing, homosexual writing, and maybe even trans writing, which calls the writer into existence through the capacity to fabulate the situation in which the writer writes.

Shorn of its stylistic curlicues, this tactic shows up later in French gay writing: in Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan. The latter’s direct, minimal prose also comes, in part, from the later autotextual books of Marguerite Duras, like the text Writing. Which is about exactly that. Or the now famous work of Annie Erneux. The Years contains the entire postwar experience of France as experienced by a provincial woman.

Otherwise, privileged writers of the literary inner circle might resort to autotextual tactics when, being women, their talent is discounted. Two that I learned about from Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction are Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. Both were conglomerate publishing insiders, and while both writers had complicated relations to feminism, these books center the practice of writing as a woman, for whom the separation of writing from life affected by their male contemporaries was not an option.

Those books came out with conglomerate publishers and got their share of attention. Sinykin offers a different story with Percival Everett’s Erasure. Everett’s previous book, Frenzy, got pigeonholed as “Black writing” when it’s anything but that. He followed up with Erasure, the story of a Black writer pressured into self-marginalization by an industry in which the power to overfly the totality of experience like Icarus is not one granted to certain kinds of subjects.

Frank Wilderson III’s Incognegro is an astonishing book, weaving together his parent’s middle-class Black lives with his story of going to South Africa and joining the struggle there. It’s sometimes overlooked that this founding writer of Afropessimism came by the bleak idea of an ontological anti-Blackness as modernity’s original sin through direct experience of the failure of the labor movement in South Africa.

The autotextual as a way of weaving together the personal and the political is a whole subset of tactics—for instance: Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands / La Frontera, Audre Lorde’s Zami, and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. Those are books that deal with the negotiations involved in producing solidarity out of difference. How can one negotiate being both queer and a comrade? All three came out of the small-press world, relatively free from the category constraints of conglomerate publishing.

Perhaps the best way to access the New Narrative writers is via the anthology edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, The Writers Who Love Too Much. That book puts the emphasis on the collective production, at one and the same time, of a gay milieu and an overlapping writing milieu. Theory and gossip nestle into each other on the same autotextual page.

Several trans writers have turned to the autotextual, from Juliana Huxtable’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland to Aurora Mattia’s The Fifth Wound to T. Fleishmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. The autotextual is a tactic for trans writers to write to each other, to share the work and play through which we write both our books and our bodies into existence.

The scandal of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick was not so much that she wrote about sex but that she wrote about money. Together with Hedi El Kholti, Kraus turned legendary theory publisher Semiotext(e) toward the autotextual. Hedi brought in the French queer authors: Guibert, Dustan, and several others. Chris brought in Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, a meta-autotext on the fraught living/writing situation of modernist women. I’m Very Into You and Reverse Cowgirl saw print through these same connections.

Semiotext(e) also published my favorite Kathy Acker book, Hannibal Lector, My Father. It includes early texts that play with autotextual tactics, together with one of Sylvère Lotringer’s brilliant interviews, in which Kathy unfurls an autotext theory and practice. In Philosophy for Spiders (2021), I try to show how Kathy worked writing out of its middle zone of respectable public utterances in two directions at once: toward the most intimate and toward the most abstract. She could write about masturbation and post-capitalism in the same sentence.

Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie makes a lot of sense if you’ve read some of the above. It pivots from auto-administering testosterone to a theory of postwar capitalism that centers the production of sex via pharmaceutical and pornographic technics. It’s also an explicitly Marxist book, one that takes issue with the Italian and French theorists of “cognitive capitalism” by centering the situation of genderfuck radicals whose experience of commodified life is hardly reducible to “cognitive” labor.

Testo Junkie is the secret source/sauce of my own book Raving. Both try to connect particular practices to the forms of real abstraction that dominate the contemporary world. If you start from practices, you can appreciate the differences in how people live and labor. There’s no solidarity without mutual appreciation of difference. You can discern how the totality within which we live and labor has particular historical contours, which appear to have mutated. Or, as I put it in another book: Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019).

Lastly, you can appreciate how that totality appears differently when perceived from different situations, through different working methods. I like the autotextual best when it extends beyond the particulars. When it reaches for a particular-universal, for the totality as perceived from a point of view. This is not the universal-universal of third-person narration, that unknowable totality of totalities. Writers are not gods. The autotextual is the creator become secular.

For the practice of writing autotexts there’s a corresponding practice of reading, which traces connections between the particular universal as perceived via different working methods, in the name of a comradely production of knowledge. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my books General Intellects (2017) and Sensoria (2020), both devoted to the work of others who I read as having produced interesting particular-universals from different situations via different methods.

5.

The danger of writing in the third person is the flyover view which erases or suppresses the particulars it can’t totalize. The danger of writing in the first person is being confined, by voluntary or involuntary means, to the particular only, foreclosing a sense of totality at all. What of the second person?

The epistolary has always intrigued me. It, too, has been a tactic for certain modern and contemporary writers, from Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo to Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. It’s a surprisingly common tactic in recent trans writing, such as Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Buck’s County, Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran. The second person turns the writerly self away from the self towards the other, and in addressing the other within the text, models modes of interpretation for the book’s other other—the reader external to it.

That has its uses for trans writing when confronting readers, including even trans readers, used to perceiving trans-ness through the cis gaze which categorizes us as objects to be discounted, distrusted, spoken of or for. And so: Love and Money, Sex and Death is a series of letters to mothers, lovers, and others about practices of self-making and self-becoming, within given historical, political, and cultural constraints.

Not critical theory, critical (auto) theory. I’ve grown disenchanted with those strains of academic Marxism that have turned it into doxa. For Roland Barthes—himself a great exponent of critical (auto) theory—doxa is the overturning of history into nature. Such that we shrug and say: “It’s always been so. It just is what it is.” Marxist doxa is the belief that not only is everything capital, but that the essence of capital is eternal and never changes. Only its appearances change. The world of appearances, the world of the senses, incidentally also the world of labor and play and practices of all kinds, appears only in the negative, as derivations of an essence that only the sage critical theorist can observe from a stately distance.

I’m not claiming that a critical (auto) theory would be some noble, ethical alternative. On the contrary, I’m touring bookstores to promote my book as an embrace of the contradictions of being in and against the commodity form. My motives are mixed. I think it’s good praxis, but I also like attention—and royalty checks.

If there’s to be any ongoingness to Marxism I think it needs to get more vulgar, more common, fleshy, and “ill-bred.” It needs shelter outside the academy, which shaped Marxism after its own image more than we academic Marxists care to admit. The struggle for liberation is a continual one of defeat and renewal. When theory fails the test of practice, then practice should inform its renewal. As it ever was: what came to be thought of as “mature” Marxism came after the defeats of 1848.

These are different times, and we’re on the defensive against creeping fascism everywhere. Against which—what is even our image now of the good life? Perhaps it’s to be found in fragments of the everyday when we live without dead time. While fucking, while dancing, while wandering without appointment. When we glimpse another city for another life. Let’s write that.