These feet ache. The unseasonably warm October weather is to blame as I trudge up Broadway, making my way from Village Works bookshop to Rizzoli, and finally, The Strand. At each stop, I’m scheduled to sign copies of my new book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, and capture some photos for social media. This is, supposedly, how one makes a living as an author.
But let’s be honest, it’s not. My ability to write books is propped up by my day job as a tenured professor. Book sales are supplementary income, helpful, but not essential for survival, especially with dependents and New York rent to consider. While I could indulge in writing for a niche audience, a complex mix of motivations drives me to want this book to sell. And so, I engage in the often-contradictory act of self-promotion for a Marxist.
My struggles with the business side of writing aren’t an indictment of capitalism, but rather a practical observation. Drawing on my past as a music journalist in the eighties, I recall how bands who cultivated their own following gained leverage and creative control when dealing with record labels. Perhaps it’s this experience, or my middle-class upbringing, but I’ve never understood the affected aloofness some writers and academics adopt towards the book industry. I’m willing to put in the effort to promote my own book, even if it means foot pain. Through this process, I gain valuable insights into the workings of the book trade.
My book’s full title is Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir. Though marketed as a memoir, it’s not strictly one. This subtitle was a strategic choice to aid booksellers, recognizing the market’s dependence on categorization. Markets function through categories, and the book market utilizes BISAC—Book Industry Standards and Communications—categories. For Love and Money, Sex and Death, the assigned categories are “Biography and Autobiography / LGBTQ+ / Personal Memoirs” and “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.” In a physical bookstore, these categories offer booksellers several placement options.
BISAC categories are tools for booksellers to manage the relationship between a book and a potential reader’s expectations. Entering a bookstore is entering a space organized by zones of anticipation. Shelving my book under “Biography and Autobiography” aligns it with narratives readers expect to be based on the author’s lived experiences. However, this raises a critical question: can “LGBTQ+” lives, and specifically a transsexual life, truly fit within the “Biography and Autobiography” category, or does this category inherently impose a cisgender framework on life writing?
I’ve always been drawn to books that defy easy categorization, that play with genre conventions and challenge reader expectations. Books that, upon opening, unlock uncategorized desires. Similarly, I appreciate scholarly works that resist neat disciplinary boundaries, evade assigned keywords, and reject the proprietary nature of academic fields. With Love and Money, Sex and Death, I aimed to create tension within categories like “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.”
Shelfie #2. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023. Alt text: McKenzie Wark poses with her book in front of a bookshelf at Village Works bookstore, showcasing the book’s placement within a literary context, relevant to discussions on Autozoon and publishing.
Furthermore, I’m interested in books that blur the lines between scholarly and commercially viable works, often termed “trade” books in the industry. This crossover is challenging for various reasons. As Dan Sinykin notes in Big Fiction, we are in a “conglomerate era” of publishing. Smaller publishers, and academic presses, face difficulties in distribution and pricing compared to conglomerates.
Writing for conglomerate publishers, particularly trade books, involves constraints. They prioritize books similar to past successes. Early in the process, especially when proposing through an agent, you’re asked for “comps”—comparable successful titles. This is a shift from academic publishing, where originality is emphasized, to trade publishing, where comparability is key.
I initially pitched Love and Money, Sex and Death as a trade book to conglomerate publishers, receiving only one tentative interest. An assistant editor, a white cis gay man from an Ivy League background, expressed interest in a more conventional memoir. This encounter highlighted the limitations of “diversity” within conglomerate publishing. Ultimately, I returned to Verso Books. My editor, Leo Hollis, familiar with my work, understood my approach. He didn’t try to conventionalize the book but guided me towards effective solutions. I’m pleased with the final product we created together.
Verso books, distributed by Penguin Random House, the largest conglomerate, benefit from more favorable terms for booksellers than academic presses. This provides a sweet spot: independent publisher freedom with conglomerate distribution reach. The main disadvantage is lacking the massive publicity machine that conglomerates reserve for a select few titles each season.
2.
Adding to the sales challenge is Love and Money, Sex and Death’s unconventional nature. In my later writing career, I’ve embraced what I openly call autofiction and/or autotheory. These aren’t always considered respectable forms, but they possess their own allure. I see autofiction as writing where a character sharing the author’s name or attributes appears, but without the intent to present a factual autobiography or memoir. Selfhood itself is treated as a construct, and the writing explores the production of this self-fiction.
Autotheory, in my view, is closely related to autofiction. Both are concerned with perception. Autofiction leans towards the affective dimensions of perception, while autotheory emphasizes the conceptual. I find it more useful to consider autofiction/autotheory as tactics rather than rigid genres, and as a continuum of writing strategies. Let’s call it “autotextual”: These practices shaped this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances, directed these fortunes and misfortunes.
The author’s name within the text becomes an empty signifier, a node in the perceptual field, around which the narrative of its creation unfolds. Love and Money, Sex and Death isn’t about revealing the hidden depths of McKenzie Wark’s inner life. Instead, it aims to illuminate an era of media and culture, the societal structures of family, class, and sexuality that contributed to the formation of the legal entity known as McKenzie Wark. I am not the divine creator of this life, this text. I am, like any created object, simply curious about my own making. This curiosity, this exploration of self-creation, is central to the autozoon of authorship.
My shift towards this style of writing stemmed from circumstance. Moving from Sydney to New York brought feelings of isolation and disconnection. My job was at Binghamton University, a four-hour drive from Brooklyn. I commuted weekly, leaving Brooklyn on Mondays and returning on Thursdays. Newly married and in love with Christen, I had lost my Sydney community and the sense of purpose derived from engaging with the culture I grew up in. The uncertainty of my visiting professorship added to the unease.
Back in New York, I often wandered the city in a state of dissociation, a mix of culture shock and gender dysphoria. Christen gifted me a handheld GPS device, a novelty before GPS was ubiquitous on phones. I would record GPS coordinates in a notebook and write about the place and time. This practice eventually evolved into my book, Dispositions (2002).
Dispositions largely explores the tension between the abstract nature of GPS coordinates and the concrete details of scene, setting, mood, and atmosphere at those locations. I sensed the world becoming increasingly abstract, shaped by information vectors capable of deploying economic and strategic forces globally. The book concludes in the aftermath of 9/11, with Christen and I wandering through the disaster zone. Its final words are: “This dust, she says, this dust is people.”
Post-9/11, New York state, and I, were financially strained. My Binghamton position was eliminated. The best alternative was teaching composition at SUNY Albany, closer to Brooklyn but in a more expensive city with less pay. I stayed for a year. In 2003, a position opened at Eugene Lang College, The New School, offering $70k annually, $22k more than Albany, with a three-year unranked contract. I accepted. SUNY Albany had implied I’d need to relocate permanently and publish another book for tenure consideration. Having already published three books beyond Dispositions, I declined.
The rest was a matter of fortunate timing. Lang College was expanding. After a few years, tenure was extended beyond the graduate faculty for the first time. By then, I was a strong candidate, having chaired the Media and Culture Department and published two more books with Harvard University Press—A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007)—prestigious academic publications.
A Hacker Manifesto wasn’t conceived as an academic book. It emerged from my engagement with the digital media avant-garde of the 1990s. We aimed to revolutionize media through politics, art, and theory. I sought a language for a nascent class, those creating information as difference, a distinct form of labor from producing commodified sameness. Many publishers rejected it. I sent it to Lindsay Waters at Harvard out of desperation. He called back within days and championed it.
Gamer Theory is its darker counterpart, also adopting a persona: “gamer” instead of “hacker.” It attempts to articulate what I sensed in Dispositions: a planetary enclosure of space and time within a “gamespace” of zero-sum calculation and competition. It reflects insights gained from interacting with independent game designers.
These books are linked to the autotextual. They explore the formation of collective, rather than individual, subjectivities. They aim to refresh language and defamiliarize subjective experience, seeking language for emerging realities. While the hacker’s autopoetic worldview has faced setbacks in the past two decades, the gamer’s enclosed world has become the dominant ethos.
I felt Marxism was becoming anachronistic, a scholastic imitation of itself, largely confined to academia. I tried to revitalize it with fresh language and forms. It worked; both books sold well. A Hacker Manifesto was translated into numerous languages. I found myself connecting with engaged readers, often sharing projects and perspectives aimed at addressing contemporary struggles. However, I was also ostracized from certain orthodox Marxist circles, ironically by those who had mastered canonical Marxist texts in academia, despite my own party-trained Marxist background.
Following Gamer Theory, I wrote books that aimed to circulate materials often marginalized by academic Marxism. The Beach Beneath the Street (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (2013) examine the pre- and post-1968 revolutionary landscape. Molecular Red (2015) explores failed modernity on a grand scale, focusing on the Soviet Union and the United States through dissenting Marxist perspectives.
My intellectual, political, and emotional upbringing was rooted in the labor movement. By the late seventies, the prevailing mood was already one of defeat. Taking praxis seriously means acknowledging these defeats and avoiding rote repetition of outdated theoretical dogmas. One must start anew, drawing on different resources from the past.
I feel there’s one more book in me within this series, focusing on British Marxist scientists and their social circles from the thirties to fifties. They’ve been largely excluded from the Western Marxist canon, a disabling omission. The Anthropocene era necessitates a reevaluation of the relationship between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and between geological and historical time. There are valuable, albeit compromised, resources there for our times.
Not to boast, but I’ve written enough books for two academic careers. As a provincial outsider with an aversion to academic politicking, my academic trajectory was never destined for institutional prestige, despite my belief in my own talent. I teach undergraduates and some master’s students. Ultimately, I prefer being a writer of the city, of my city, New York. I was never tempted to leave for professional advancement. I’ll remain here as the waters rise.
Beyond career missteps, publicly transitioning as transsexual also damaged my media studies credibility. Gender dysphoria became unbearable. I transitioned later in life, becoming one of those “late transitioners” who, arguably, have it both ways, even if slightly past their prime.
From a relatively secure middle-class position, I decided to write what I wanted. This led to the autotextual sequence beginning with Dispositions. The next, I’m Very Into You (2015), was accidental, a publication of email correspondence with Kathy Acker, initiated by her executor. It captures a connection between two individuals who, unknowingly, intuit each other’s transness. This was followed by Reverse Cowgirl (2020) and Raving (2023), and now Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023).
Autotextual writing often faces criticisms of narcissism and self-absorption, dismissed as symptoms of neoliberalism. These critiques are often reductive, collapsing complex phenomena into simplistic condemnations. My experience with compelling autotextual writing is different. The most engaging examples reveal the processes of self-formation and create space for previously marginalized selves to exist.
Shelfie #3. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023. Alt text: McKenzie Wark stands in Rizzoli bookstore, surrounded by shelves, highlighting the author’s engagement with the physical book space as part of the autozoon of writing and self-promotion.
For transsexuals, for example, simply declaring our existence in writing can be an achievement. So many others claim authority over our narratives, speaking about us in the third person as if we are absent. We are often objects of pathologizing “expert” discourse or relegated to minor, quirky roles in fiction. I was enjoying Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger until its trans character appeared, a collection of clichés. Third-person narration often relies on a pretense of mutual ignorance between writer and reader, assuming the subject cannot also read and write.
These thoughts circulate as I walk up Broadway, between bookstores, for signings and selfies. I’m an unconventional, off-brand Marxist engaging in self-promotion to sell books. I have professional photos, manage social media, and participate in readings, signings, podcasts, and interviews. I learn about contemporary media by actively participating in it. Embracing this fully feels less hypocritical than pretending to distance oneself from the commodity form. To foreshadow my point: critical (auto) theory over hypocritical critical theory. This engagement with the media landscape is a crucial aspect of the autozoon of contemporary authorship.
3.
There’s a divide among Marxists: those who see everything as capital and those who see everything as labor. I align with the latter. The commodity form obscures the fact that it’s always a product of socially organized labor.
Consider Love and Money, Sex and Death. It appears as a commodity in a bookstore. Upon purchase, the bookstore retains roughly 40–45 percent, the distributor (Penguin Random House) about 20 percent, and the publisher (Verso) about 25 percent, leaving me with less than 10 percent. Numerous forms of labor are involved: booksellers, shippers, warehouse workers, printers. Even Verso, my left-wing publisher, depends on book sales to pay its staff—editors, copy editors, designers, production managers, publicists (whose workers, notably, are unionized). My relationship to this book-making labor is different. My contract grants Verso certain rights in exchange for an advance and a percentage of sales.
One could critique how the commodity form pervades this entire process. Writing and book production are subordinated to profit extraction from our collective labor. The commodity form transforms writing’s potential for textual difference into the reproduction of sameness—the sameness of categorization that confines difference to repetition.
Commercial publishers prioritize minimizing risk, which can lead to creative stagnation. Occasionally, they take a chance on something different. If successful, similar works quickly follow. Maggie Nelson’s success with The Argonauts undoubtedly prompted agents and editors to seek “another Maggie Nelson,” not through any fault of Nelson’s.
Autotextual writing, though existing under various names for a long time, is often presented as a recent trend in book culture publicity. A Marxist perspective focused on capital might interpret autofiction as the market’s logic dictating the writing process. Autofiction becomes equated with neoliberalism, reality TV, selfies, narcissism, and neoliberal capital.
But a “undialectical” Marxism that only perceives from capital’s viewpoint, like capital itself, sees sameness everywhere. I find this approach lazy and, ironically, “neoliberal.” It mistakes market appearances as allegories of capital, exclusively. Everything becomes capital, echoing neoliberalism’s core tenet: we are all “human capital.” This leads to a “Neoliberal Marxism” where everything is capital, and that’s inherently negative.
What does this look like from a Marxism centered on labor? Writing is a form of work. Like workers, writers employ tactics within and against commodity production. Most capitalist labor produces sameness, structured by capital to maximize measurement, efficiency, and value extraction through repetition.
Writing, however, is work that produces difference. A piece of writing becomes a commodity only if it offers a measurable degree of difference from existing works. The paradox of writing for trade presses is that a book must be sufficiently different to be saleable “intellectual property” yet similar enough to successful predecessors. An industry exists to train writers in this: how-to books, workshops, MFAs, and agents who “detail” writers for the market like used cars.
What options do writers have? Refusal is one tactic: remaining on the industry’s periphery, working with small presses, and engaging in writing and reading circuits that minimize commodification. Political publishing collectives are valuable but often short-lived and struggle with distribution. Nonprofit publishers also exist, often supported by foundation grants, which come with their own agendas, often favoring diversity but within controlled parameters.
Another tactic involves writing in-and-against dominant market forms, through the contradictory experiences of pursuing a creative life within contemporary “gamespace” conditions. For me, compelling autotextual writing does this. It integrates the process of its creation into both the form and content of the book. It’s not the only tactic, but a potentially engaging one. This self-reflexivity, this awareness of the conditions of production, is a key element of the autozoon of writing.
You can view writing as labor, but defining what constitutes “work” is complex. While laptop hours in cafes contribute, writing also happens while dancing, having sex, or showering. What portion is labor? How does life shape writing? Autotextual writing, among other things, can be a tactic for creative workers—the hacker class—to communicate about the intertwined practices of life and art, exploring the autozoon of creative existence.
4.
Autotextual tactics are accessible to any writer, including those with problematic histories (e.g., William Burroughs, Norman Mailer). I’m particularly interested in its use by those historically excluded from the category of “creative human,” whose very right to be human is contested. My introduction to autotextual writing was Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Prison writing, homosexual writing, perhaps even trans writing, it uses fabulation to call the writer into existence within the context of writing itself.
Stripped of its stylistic flourishes, this tactic reappears in later French gay writing, in Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan. Dustan’s minimalist prose also draws from Marguerite Duras’ later autotextual books, like Writing, which explicitly addresses the act of writing. Annie Ernaux’s now-celebrated work, The Years, encapsulates postwar French experience through a provincial woman’s perspective.
Privileged writers, particularly women in the literary inner circle whose talent is often undervalued, also utilize autotextual tactics. Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction introduced me to Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. Both were conglomerate publishing insiders, and while their relationship to feminism was complex, these books center the practice of writing as a woman, for whom the separation of writing and life, common among male contemporaries, was not feasible.
These books, published by conglomerates, garnered attention. Sinykin offers a different narrative with Percival Everett’s Erasure. Everett’s previous book, Frenzy, was miscategorized as “Black writing,” despite transcending that label. Erasure followed, telling the story of a Black writer pressured into self-marginalization by an industry that restricts certain subjects’ access to universal perspectives.
Frank Wilderson III’s Incognegro is remarkable, intertwining his parents’ middle-class Black lives with his own experiences in South Africa and involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle. It’s often overlooked that this foundational figure of Afropessimism arrived at the bleak concept of ontological anti-Blackness as modernity’s original sin through firsthand experience of the labor movement’s failures in South Africa.
The autotextual as a method to weave together personal and political realms forms a distinct category, exemplified by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands / La Frontera, Audre Lorde’s Zami, and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. These works explore the negotiations involved in building solidarity across differences—navigating queer identity and political commitment. All emerged from small presses, relatively free from conglomerate publishing’s categorical constraints.
Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s anthology, The Writers Who Love Too Much, offers a valuable entry point into New Narrative writers, emphasizing the collective creation of both a gay milieu and a related writing scene. Theory and gossip intertwine on the autotextual page.
Several trans writers have adopted 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. For trans writers, the autotextual serves as a means of writing to each other, sharing the labor and play involved in writing both books and bodies into existence, a profound act of autozoon.
The scandal of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick wasn’t solely its exploration of sex, but also its focus on money. Kraus, with Hedi El Kholti, shifted the legendary theory publisher Semiotext(e) towards autotextual works. Hedi introduced French queer authors like Guibert and Dustan, while Chris brought in Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, a meta-autotext on the complex writing/living situations of modernist women. I’m Very Into You and Reverse Cowgirl were published through these connections.
Semiotext(e) also published my favorite Kathy Acker book, Hannibal Lector, My Father, featuring early autotextual experiments alongside a Sylvère Lotringer interview where Acker articulates her autotextual theory and practice. In Philosophy for Spiders (2021), I analyze how Acker pushed writing beyond conventional public discourse, simultaneously towards the intensely personal and the profoundly abstract, capable of discussing masturbation and post-capitalism in the same breath.
Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie becomes clearer in light of these works. It moves from self-administering testosterone to a theory of postwar capitalism centered on the pharmaceutical and pornographic production of sex. It’s also explicitly Marxist, critiquing Italian and French “cognitive capitalism” theorists by foregrounding the experiences of genderfuck radicals whose commodified lives can’t be reduced to “cognitive” labor.
Shelfie #4. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023. Alt text: McKenzie Wark at The Strand bookstore, surrounded by towering bookshelves, illustrating the vast landscape of literary work that forms the backdrop for the autozoon of individual authorship.
Testo Junkie is a key influence on my book Raving. Both connect specific practices to the forms of real abstraction dominating the contemporary world. Starting from practices allows appreciation of diverse lived experiences and labor. Solidarity requires mutual appreciation of difference. One can discern the historical contours of the totality we inhabit and labor within, which appears to be undergoing mutations. Or, as I posed in another book: Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019). This exploration of totality through individual practice is central to understanding the autozoon.
Finally, one can recognize how this totality appears differently from diverse perspectives and through varied working methods. I value autotextual writing most when it transcends the purely personal, reaching for a particular-universal, the totality as seen from a specific viewpoint. This differs from the universal-universal of third-person narration, that unknowable totality of totalities. Writers are not gods; the autotextual is the creator made secular.
The practice of writing autotexts is mirrored by a practice of reading—tracing connections between particular-universals perceived through different working methods, fostering a comradely production of knowledge. This is what I’ve aimed for in General Intellects (2017) and Sensoria (2020), both dedicated to the work of others I see as producing compelling particular-universals from diverse situations and methods, contributing to a collective autozoon of intellectual and creative endeavor.
5.
Third-person writing risks a detached, flyover perspective that erases or suppresses particulars it cannot fully encompass. First-person writing risks confinement to the purely personal, obscuring any sense of totality. What about the second person?
The epistolary form has always intrigued me, another tactic used by writers from Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo to Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. It’s surprisingly prevalent 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 directs the writerly self away from introspection towards the other, modeling modes of interpretation for the book’s external reader by addressing an internal “other.”
This is particularly useful for trans writing when engaging with readers, even trans readers, accustomed to viewing transness through a cisgender lens that categorizes us as objects to be dismissed, distrusted, or spoken for. Thus, Love and Money, Sex and Death is structured as a series of letters to mothers, lovers, and others, exploring practices of self-making and self-becoming within specific historical, political, and cultural constraints—a deeply personal yet broadly resonant autozoon.
Not critical theory, but critical (auto) theory. I’ve become disillusioned with academic Marxism that has solidified into dogma. For Roland Barthes—himself a master of critical (auto) theory—doxa is the transformation of history into nature, leading to resignation: “It’s always been this way. It’s just how things are.” Marxist doxa is the belief that not only is everything capital, but that capital’s essence is eternal and unchanging, with only superficial appearances shifting. The world of appearances, of senses, of labor and play and diverse practices, becomes secondary, a mere derivation of an essence observable only by the detached critical theorist.
I don’t claim critical (auto) theory is a morally superior alternative. On the contrary, my bookstore tour promoting my book is an embrace of the inherent contradictions of operating within and against the commodity form. My motivations are mixed: I believe in the praxis, but I also enjoy attention—and royalty checks. This complex interplay of motivations is part of the autozoon of authorship in the modern world.
If Marxism is to remain relevant, it needs to become more accessible, more grounded, more embodied, and less refined. It needs to find refuge outside the academy, which has shaped Marxism in its own image more than academic Marxists often acknowledge. The struggle for liberation is continuous, marked by defeats and renewals. When theory fails in practice, practice must inform its revitalization. “Mature” Marxism itself emerged from the defeats of 1848.
These are different times, and we face the rising threat of fascism globally. Against this, what is our vision of a good life? Perhaps it lies in fragments of everyday life lived without wasted time—while making love, dancing, wandering without purpose, glimpsing another city, another life. Let’s write that. This act of writing, this capturing of lived experience, is the ultimate expression of the autozoon, the self-living, self-creating being in the world.
