In
Virtual Geography, published in 1994, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory. In two subsequent books,
The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, By the concept of intellectual property these vectoralists attempt to institute an imposed scarcity in an immaterial field. Wark argues that the vectoral class cannot control the intellectual (property) world itself, but only in its commodified form—not its overall application or use.
Gamer Theory combines Wark's interest in experimental writing techniques in
networked media with her own developing media theory.
Gamer Theory was first published by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a
networked book with her own specially designed interface. In
Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like,
computer games are a
utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realise the principles of the
level playing field and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered. Wark's recent work explores the art, writing, and politics of the
Situationist International (SI). In her book
50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (the result of a lecture given at
Columbia University), Wark examines the influences of Situationist aesthetics on contemporary art and activist movements, from tactical media to the anti-globalism movement. Wark pays particular attention to often-neglected figures and works in the SI, including the utopian architectural projects of
Constant, the painting of
Giuseppe Pinot, The Situationist Times of
Jacqueline de Jong and the novels of
Michèle Bernstein. In 2013, Wark, along with
Alexander Galloway and
Eugene Thacker, published the book
Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. In the opening of the book the authors ask "Does everything that exists, exist to be presented and represented, to be mediated and remediated, to be communicated and translated? There are mediative situations in which heresy, exile, or banishment carry the day, not repetition, communion, or integration. There are certain kinds of messages that state 'there will be no more messages'. Hence for every communication there is a correlative excommunication." This approach has been referred to as the "New York School of Media Theory." At
The New School, Professor Wark teaches seminars on the Situationist International, the Militarized Vision lecture, as well as Introduction to Cultural Studies. Wark was an
Eyebeam resident in 2007.
Reverse Cowgirl is an
autofictional account of Wark's various experiences of gender and sexuality as she understood them on the cusp of her transition. Her autofictional account of her relationship with Kathy Acker, originally intended to be part of
Reverse Cowgirl, became instead the start of
Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker. Wark's correspondence with Acker had been published in 2015 as ''I'm Very into You'', which she described in the afterword to the German edition as a work of "accidental autofiction."
Molecular Red (2016) according to its subtitle, is a "theory for the
Anthropocene." The first half of the book draws on the relatively neglected
Marxism of
Alexander Bogdanov, and which reads the work of
Andrei Platonov as Marxist theory. Out of these Wark draws a theory and practice of Marxism as the applied knowledge of collaborative labor. The second half of the book applies this Bogdanovite lens to the work of
Donna Haraway,
Karen Barad, and
Kim Stanley Robinson.
General Intellects (2017) and
Sensoria (2020) collect Wark's essay on other theorists who, together, Wark thinks might enable a collaborative knowledge of the present moment, such that it might be transformed. In 2019, McKenzie Wark's book
Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? was published from Verso. Building on her earlier book
A Hacker Manifesto, Wark differentiates a vectoralist class from
capitalists and
landlords as a new ruling class gaining its power through the ownership and control of information. In the epistolary
Love and Money, Sex and Death, Wark writes to her deceased mother, her sister, and various lovers. This book, along with ''I'm Very into You
and part of Raving'', was intentionally written in the second person, which Wark considers to be enabling for
trans literature. She writes that: "Addressing the text in the second person to and from specific people, real or imagined, gets us away from the omniscient narrator and allows us to explore how particular experiences and emotions fall outside both literary and social norms." In her 2022
Document Journal essay “Mapping a modern trans bohemia in the borough of the flesh,” Wark chronicles her late-life transition and immersion into Brooklyn’s trans cultural scene, spotlighting artists, writers, and nightlife figures like
Torrey Peters,
Kay Gabriel,
Macy Rodman,
Hannah Baer, and
Goth Jafar." ==Reception==