Each year, we invite an internationally distinguished critical theorist to visit the campus to deliver a series of three lectures in which they develop their critical position and relate it to the contemporary theoretical scene. Since 1981, the School of Humanities and UCI Critical Theory have sponsored an annual lecture series, named in honor of René Wellek (Yale University), whose library of works in critical theory is housed in Langson Library Special Collections at the University of California, Irvine.
Past Wellek Lectures are listed on this webpage. Each set of lectures is generally published in the Columbia University Press Wellek Library Lectures series.
Critical Theory and the School of Humanities present
The 2024-2025 Wellek Lectures
McKenzie Wark
Professor, Culture and media, The New School
Monday, May 19, Reception Following | Location TBA
All talks start at 4:00 pm
McKenzie Wark, Professor, Culture and Media, The New School
From Writing to Text: autotext | metatext | transtext
It appears that there is still writing, but what if it has becoming something else? The devices upon which we read and write are skeuomorphic, meaning they mimic the surfaces of familiar media forms when underneath they’ve become something else. Writing became texting. The writing and reading interface became an algorithmically controlled feedback loop that produces subjectivity in a different way. What was once the ideological state apparatus became the algorithmic state apparatus. What happens to the practices and pedagogy of reading and writing in such a media environment?
I propose a three-part approach to finding critical leverage from inside the algorithmic textual apparatus: autotext, metatext and transtext. The aim of which is firstly to attend to the experiences of texting interfaces as they shape our own bodies (autotext). Then to begin an analysis of the information economy of which the surface of the text is the everyday effect (metatext). And lastly, to propose some practices of collaborative knowledge and cultural work and play in and against the textual regime (transtext).
Autotext: Here are two kinds of resources I can draw upon to make the seamless surface of texting reveal itself a little. The first is that I’m old enough to remember a previous mode of inscription and perception, the world of mechanical reproducibility. By recalling my own formation by the ideological apparatus of that time, the break under the surface of text into a different mode begins to appear. The second is through an appraisal of what is living and what is dead in the critical theories of that era. By bringing some Marx, some Althusser, some Stuart Hall and some Pasolini up against the present situation, it might begin to reveal itself.
Tuesday, May 20 | Humanities Gateway 1030
Metatext: An autotextual approach might show something of how the particulars of everyday life as I experience them are saturated by a now fully-formed algorithmic state apparatus of text. By attending in a nuanced and open way to these immediate particulars one gains a particular point of access to the current historical form of the totality. But what of that totality? Let’s attempt a conceptual mapping —a metatext—of the information economy as it appears to those who labor away at its texting surfaces. Here I introduce the concepts of sense value and sign value, where sign value is what the apparatus behind texting seeks to extract from all our engagements with textual surfaces. The transformation of the entire textual sphere into one dedicated to the extraction of sign value falsifies the whole information sphere, to the point of imminent disaster.
Wednesday, May 21 | Humanities Gateway 1030
Transtext: What becomes of the traditional arts of reading and writing within the textual regime? My interest here is in reading and writing as techniques of the self, which enable modes of becoming for the human. These subsisted as subsidiary means of self-making in the broadcast era, but are themselves now transformed by the textual regime and its extraction of sign value from any act of sense making. There is nothing outside the text-regime. But perhaps there are practices of knowledge and culture which work and play in and against it. (Form of detournement as techno-social practice, perhaps). Those who already do this best are often those who have always had to turn a margin of the ideological apparatus which excludes them against itself to survive. Hence our example of transtextual practice from which to learn is that of transsexuals, my people.
The Wellek Library Lectures at UCI
Since 1981, the UCI School of Humanities / Critical Theory has sponsored an annual lecture series, named in honor of René Wellek (Yale University), whose library of works in critical theory is housed in the Langson Library Special Collections at the University of California, Irvine. Each year, we invite an internationally distinguished critical theorist to visit campus and deliver a series of three lectures that develops their critical position and relates it to the contemporary theoretical scene. Learn more about the Wellek Library Lectures.
Photo credit: Z Walsh
Location TBA