Ken Wark on Chantal Mouffe

Posted on Feb 2, 2018

For my transcription exercise I wanted to pick something that was

a) short enough so that I could transcribe the whole thing

b) interesting enough that I wouldn’t mind listening to it over and over again

c) spoken slowly enough that I would only have to pause and rewind ten seconds 500 times and not 1000.

I’d recently watched to MacKenzie Wark’s edutainment video on Chantal Mouffe for DIS magazine (now just DIS?) and decided that it met the required criteria, as well as having some arbitrary time limit for existing on the web (just 11 days left on the web) that gave my transcription a greater sense of archival weight. Ken Wark has always seemed a little unctious to me but I didn’t mind having to listen to his disembodied head talk for an hour or so as much as I thought I might.

You can see the original video here and see the transcript here. I mistyped “Mouffe” as “Moufee” the first time I wrote it and since I was typing in atom it autosuggested the wrong spelling every subsequent time. I decided to leave it in as an interesting artifact of the process.