Low Theory, Review of Telesthesia: Communication, Culture Class by McKenzie Wark

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ccupy Wall Street (OWS) is the new and enduring object of political and intellectual inquiry for the Left in the United States. Indeed, like the 1999 Seattle WTO protests before it, OWS is perhaps more momentous, more impactful, or even more ‘revolutionary’ in its after-eff ects and in its memorialization than it was in the time and space of its production. For some of us in academia that participated in local demonstrations or travelled to Zuccotti Park, OWS has become a thought experiment and a provocation as its physical manifestations have all but disappeared. Written in its wake, McKenzie Wark’s Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, and Class (2012) is an artifact of the occupation. It is simultaneously an attempt to rewrite the method through which radical thought is articulated in academic contexts and an attempt to surpass academic constraints on intellectual production given the event of OWS—in Wark’s words, Telesthesia is “a book about method […] but one that explains the method by performing it” (9). As a kind of action-oriented text, then, Telesthesia situates Occupy as both its launch pad and its medium, its provocation and its means of articulation.