McKenzie Wark: A response to Kim Charnley’s Critique of High and Low Theory

Does it not seem strange that Kim Charnley would claim that my argument conceals its own “social position” while he makes no mention of his own? It is crystal clear to any readers of my books that I work in a university. Its on the back cover!

It would be crystal clear to any mildly attentive reader that my practice is a critique from within of the university as a site of knowledge production, in which the critical distance is achieved by writing about non-academic knowledge practices. I can hardly be accused of trying to pass myself off as anything else but an academic when the title of one of my books is 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International.

In the interview he wants to question when I said that low theory “borrows” from philosophy. As any reader of The Beach Beneath the Street will recognize, this is a way of restating the concept of “détournement” in plain English. Détournement is the strategy of treating the whole of past culture as a commons, as always belonging to all of us, rather than being the private property of the culture industries or the academic division of labor.

Charnley’s article is mostly a series of rhetorical effects around this word ‘borrow’, the motivation for which is never really stated. Even if one knows nothing of détournement, or my book, a moment’s critical reflection on the word ‘borrow’ show it to have something of the quality of détournement. In the context I use it, it clearly means something like to borrow a book from a library, or borrow a camera from a friend. It implies some other kind of economy for thought and culture outside of the commodity and monetized debt. It implies, indeed, the commons.

Charnley’s rhetorical move is to belittle ‘borrowing’ with modifiers, rather than explore it critically. To borrow is to ‘simply’ borrow, or ‘only’ borrow, or ‘mere appropriation’; ‘confining’ and ‘immobilizing.’ Well perhaps – if you shut down any move to think it through as a concept!

Charnley then brings two more uncritical assumptions into his reading. Where do I say that the everyday, and its low theory is the domain only of the tactical? The Beach Beneath the Street argues quite the opposite! It is Charnley who is here just unconsciously reproducing the divide that High Theory institutes, where the big picture belongs to it, and the everyday is the domain of mere tactics.

The second assumption is that anything really critical can’t be just the low theory of the everyday. If one wanted examples of how low theory does indeed “borrow” from institutionalized high theory, make it accountable to the experience of everyday life, and does propose both strategies and tactics, why Charnley produces the examples in this very text! It seems one does have to remind people that neither Marx nor Gramsci were philosophers. They held no chair, gave no lecture courses, received no stipend from state. They are low theory in its finest form, even if the university appropriates them into its canon and denies the critique of the form of knowledge which is so intrinsic to their practice.

And while we are on the subject of strategy and tactics, why does Charnley reproduce the hierarchical relation between them as if this was a given, not also something worthy of critique? Why think of a concern with tactics is ‘confining’? Why is ‘direct action’ the only thing that counts as a ‘tactic’? The Beach Beneath the Street only begins an inquiry on this point. I’ll have more to say about it on the sequel, The Spectacle of Disintegration. There I revisit a proposition I have made before, namely that the other archetypal low theorist Guy Debord’s Game of War is in itself a critique of hierarchical relations between strategy and tactics.

What someone once called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” begins at home. In the case of professional intellectuals, it begins with the critique of the practices of that profession, which is exactly what I do in The Beach Beneath the Street. For philosophers, surely it begins with not taking on faith that philosophy is inherently critical of anything when it has nothing to say about its own conditions of production.

So while I welcome discussion of these things, one has to wonder what opening this sort of point-scoring exercise is really supposed to achieve. Our attention might more usefully be turned to the low theory of Occupy itself. This I think Charnley does in drawing attention to the Global Manifesto. So there I think is an area of agreement, and a more worthwhile project.

By McKenzie Wark