It's popular in literary circles to consider "autofiction" some sort of narcissistic, neoliberal fad. Done right, it’s the opposite. Autofiction, or what McKenzie Wark reframes as the 'autotextual', is a long tradition of writing in which the writer attempts to account, from within, for the historical circumstances that made them. Its experiments in accounting for subjectivity as a thing made by forces outside itself. 

"I think that's an important writerly method in an historical moment when the media that make us have become pervasive, distributed, and double as means of surveillance. Moreover, when almost everyone's textual product is being strip-mined by so-called AI to mimic the language of the human, it seems timely to look critically and intimately in what made us imagine we are humans in the first place." - McKenzie

Originally from Newcastle NSW, McKenzie Wark is a New York based writer and scholar specializing in media theory. Her books include A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory and Raving. Her current project is provisionally titled From Writing to Texting. She teaches at The New School for Social Research.

McKenzie Wark - Critical (Auto) Theory | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

Gadigal / Sydney based arts organisation, est. 2017. Ecstatic encounters with art, sound and new media.

McKenzie Wark - Critical (Auto) Theory | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

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