Psychogeography and Speculative Design

Another City for Another Life: I’m starting work on a course, possibly a collaborative one, that would have three components. 1. Psychogeography, as a way of moving through the city, gathering a knowledge of its ambiences, but concentrating on its special moments. 2. Unitary Urbanism, or the practice of imagining another ...
Read More
Psychogeography and Speculative Design

Africa contra Hegel

There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny. This idea belongs to what one might ...
Read More
Africa contra Hegel

Issues in 21c Critical Theory

Below is the course I'll be offering in the Liberal Studies Masters program at the New School for Social Research this semester. There's links below to (most of) the blog posts that will serve as lecture notes. GLIB 5555 | LCST 4458 | Issues in 21 Century Critical Theory | How ...
Read More
Issues in 21c Critical Theory

Virno on Human Nature

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were.  The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...
Read More
Virno on Human Nature

Make Kith Not Kin!

On Donna Haraway

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little New Yorker, to teach her to watch where she steps. ...
Read More
Make Kith Not Kin!

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...
Read More
What the Performative Can’t Perform