On General Intellects

The selection of thinkers is good, though — contrary to the Goodreads title — there are twenty-one of them. There are autonomists like Berardi and Virno, speculative realists like Timothy Morton and Quentin Meillassoux, Jodi Dean with her communicative capitalism, Yann Moulier-Boutang with his cognitive capitalism, and, of course, the book closes on Donna Haraway, the queen of critical theory. Plenty of others fill it out, ranging across political economy, ecology and nature, gender, media, and labor. The one crowd left out is the accelerationists — though Wark did write a Verso blog post on Nick Land, so perhaps that counts.

The real difficulty is the writing. Since each chapter is an attempt to summarize a major twenty-first-century critical theorist, I’d hoped for something more approachable. Some chapters are far clearer than others, and a handful left me scratching my head about what Wark, or the thinker she was summarizing, even meant — a shame, because the book is a chance to make critical theory exciting. For someone already grounded in theory it’s solid; for someone unfamiliar with it, it isn’t a good place to start. The one thing that genuinely bugged me was how often Wark plugs her own books — A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, and Molecular Red all come up repeatedly. There’s nothing wrong with her arguing against the thinkers she covers, but the marketing of her own work struck me as ham-fisted. Worth the time if you’re well read in theory and want a sense of recent developments; if not, less so.