For his notebook, Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has compiled excerpts and notations from his personal sketchbook, as well as associative photographs. Cruzvillegas playfully picks up notions of sense, sensibility, reason, and fantasy—the four basic terms of the “human mind and soul” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe built his chromatic circle of 1809—and combines them with handwritten thoughts about the structural and creative aspects of artistic production. This notebook is a colorful collage of ideas opposing the appropriation of art by capitalism, against which Cruzvillegas reacts with collective, living, and “definitely unfinished” social sculptures—involving people, animals, and things—that come to ...

Even in my dotage, I have never failed to mark the day that I felt compelled to distance myself from my first mentor, Francis Galton. In his day, he was a hero to his public, an intellectual giant amongst his peers, and the person I then credited with whatever learnedness I had achieved. During my youth, I was completely enamored of the conviction that Europe was unrelentingly progressing toward ever-greater prosperity and perpetual peace. This irresistible amelioration was fueled by science, engineering, and enterprise. The entirety of the earth, from the soil, to the animals, to humanity itself, could be ...

“Poetry puts language into a dream state, thereby reassuring itself of the impinging realities,” Durs Grünbein wrote in his seminal 2009 Frankfurt Poetry Lecture. When I first stumbled upon this somewhat cryptic statement, I took it to be more of a metaphor than something to be understood literally. Why the dream state was presumably key to reassuring ourselves of the “impinging realities” of our world, and why and in what sense poetry presumably translated language into an oneiric state, I didn’t even try fully to fathom (let alone grasp and articulate to myself), happily suffused with the line’s wafting aroma ...

An organic notebook is as good a way as any to commit events and objects to memory. Fallen leaves, bark, twigs, and decaying branches are records of the past. Glistening water moves through grass-lined channels, emerging in bubbling rivulets that slow and subside over terraces, briefly creating a mirror of the sky that soon tarnishes as the earth drinks. The flow, measured by the shadows, is directed by the gardeners’ long-handled shovels. Imagine it as ink, while fallen leaves and twigs form words, and the earth provides pages around which enclosing mud walls form a robust binding. Like the worn cover ...

—What should I do? We anticipated atrocities, mayhem, chaos. All there was, was a strange stillness lingering over violence from the night before. It doesn’t matter where or when this was. There were, there are, many nights. The calmness was sincere, not eerie as one might imagine. Blood shed in peace, startles. It felt welcoming, enough to want to be there, amid anyone. We walked among people, tents, clusters of conversations, we gave out newspapers, shared news and oranges we had bought. Nine floors up, in a balcony, overlooking freedom, journalists propped their cameras for an uninterrupted airing of a live ...

In the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald ...

As in one of those sentences that starts with a new subject and is followed by composing two parts that are familiar (“Kiwi: strawberry meets gooseberry,” for example), we may be in search of some new character here. Not necessarily entirely composed of existing parts, though. Roosevelt calls. “President Roosevelt?!?” Carolyn jumps up. “Of course, President Roosevelt if you’re Sally Rand!” Dixie pipes up. The phone is blue. The same one that Dixie fell on a floor with in 1962 when Marilyn died. “I fell with a blue phone. When I woke up, people were applauding me.” This is a scene ...

I want to begin, not with a curse, but with a very beautiful convergence—one widely held to be real, but shrouded in mystery for millions of people. I am talking about the “movement of the squares” unfolding on both sides of the North/South divide. What is the hidden link be – tween the middle-class and precarious movements against the dictates of finance capital—Occupy Wall Street and the European Indignados— and the far more perilous struggles to end dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East? What relationship could possibly be sustained be – tween the regions that concentrate global wealth ...

There were irregularly distributed and mostly small dark patches that stood out, small flat shadows, bits of shadows, that drew together as one approached and then shrank or broke up into discrete black splinters and vanished in the matte gray light that had spread out over the surface of the street. Larger areas sometimes appeared, black, hand size, recessed or angular at the edges, jagged and sharp, troughs and holes that fell away as one looked and that were followed by new, differently shaped patches. Farther ahead they flowed into one another, blurring into one dull black area resembling a ...

This is a preliminary report on a seminar that I taught with my colleague Françoise Meltzer in the winter term of 2011. We explored a series of films that comprise a kind of short history of a strange genre that occupies the uncanny realm between horror and film noir, between the spectacle of violent, raging lunacy and the quieter scenes of detective work into the etiology of madness, or its confinement and isolation in clinical and disciplinary settings. We wanted to ask a double question about movies and madness. First, what does cinema reveal about insanity that was not available prior ...

Art would be like a dream, one of those “harmless psychoses” that Freud talks about in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: The harmless dream-psychosis is the result of a withdrawal from the external world which is consciously willed and only temporary, and it disappears when relations to the external world are resumed. During the isolation of the sleeping individual an alteration in the distribution of his psychical energy also sets in; a part of the expenditure on repression, which is normally required in order to hold the unconscious down, can be saved, for if the unconscious makes use of its ...

In recent years I have been linked with a philosophical movement called speculative realism. But my own variant of speculative realism, known as object-oriented philosophy, actually dates to the late 1990s. The principles of object-oriented philosophy can be summarized in a few sentences. First, philosophy must deal with every type of object rather than reducing all objects to one privileged type: zebras, leprechauns, and armies are just as worthy of philosophical discussion as atoms and brains. Second, objects are deeper than their appearance to the human mind but also deeper than their relations to one another, so that all contact ...