all of this
is magic against death
– Frank Stanford
AG2025_1170336a and all
Category: landscape
It is synonymous with struggle, change and overcoming material and metaphorical borders
Marcuse’s utopia: right here, not yet, and over
Margath Walker, Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Louisville, USA
The most striking aspect setting Herbert Marcuse apart from other principal figures identified with the
Frankfurt School is his unwavering commitment to the utopian spirit, to the possibility of a better
future. While there are many lines of connection between Marcuse and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope, most notably in the idea that the process of attaining utopia is a self-generating one rather than a pre-existing ideal state to strive for, Marcuse politicizes the concept by building on Bloch’s formulations. He writes that while the established reality principle has cast utopia as a placeless place beyond reach, the notion and desire for utopia is a necessary component of the human mind. Here, I seek to characterize Marcuse’s vision through a geographic lens and argue that utopia is a realizable place, itself part of his larger project of dialectical thinking. Utopia is commonly understood as both ‘good place’ and ‘no place’ but for Marcuse it is more. Across the breadth of his work, utopia is right here, not yet, and over. In elaborating these three phases, I argue that utopia stretches beyond juridical-territorial conceptualizations reconfiguring temporal borders through an activation of the ‘disallowed’, an articulation of oppositional space rooted in imagination. Spatio-temporal plurality is precisely what imbues utopia with power; at times translating into elusiveness and at others appearing right before us to thwart pessimism and defeatism. Marcuse’s work on utopia is integral to a prefigurative politics where the concept of becoming is integral. It is synonymous with struggle, change and overcoming material and metaphorical borders.
via Utopia at the Border, 2016.
Spatializing Marcuse, Critical Theory for Contemporary Times, Margath A. Walker · 2022
On Marcuse And Liberation Philosophy: Arnold Farr, interviewed by Margath Walker. May 15, 2015.
AG2022_2110297a and its casual insistence
& I’ll admit I like the poem
for its casual insistence
on the weirdness of—for instance—
New Here, Nick Laird
I see only the reflections in your mind
Big L – Put it On. 1994. (Cookin Soul remix).
My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.
The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches, Wallace Stevens
AG2025_DSF6438a or space as a system of relations
Enshittification [is] extraction unchecked. Doctorow (newyorker)
David [Harvey]’s commitment to showing how thinking geographically (spatially, in Explanation) transforms our understanding and explanatory frameworks, which he later brings to Marx’ Capital in his path-breaking third book, Limits to Capital. Already in Explanation,David develops spatial concepts that he never abandons. Deploying philosophers of space like Cassirer, he distinguishes between absolute, relative and relational space. This last—space as a system of relations—becoming central to his framework for spatializing Marxist theory. Almost three decades later in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996; his ‘most geographical book’, personal communication) David makes relational space central to thinking space dialectically, returning to two philosophers he read for and cited in Explanation: Gottried Wilhelm Leibnitz and Alfred North Whitehead. (Verso)
Sarah Trouche (galeriemargueritemilin)
merge dreams and reality
“Does anybody really know you?” might be too narrow, or too rigid, a question, with a passive construction that belies reality. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we may not settle into any particular way of being until someone studies us. Other people help us to know ourselves, working with us to create a shared idea of who we are. So, instead of asking whether we are known, it may be more fruitful to ask whether we’ve arrived, in collaboration with people we care about, at a conception of ourselves that we recognize.
[…]
“Why can he not allow the woman of his dreams to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The answer, he thinks, is that “to walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like “putting together night and day.” It’s scary.
Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 2024.
AG2025_DSF6049a or Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas;
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
The Garden, Andrew Marvell
092625 or making sure
David Hammons, Untitled, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, tarp. 64 x 46 inches (162.6 x 116.8 cm) (canvas size). Gallery.
Executed in 2017, Untitled is a recent example from this series, which began in 2007 and remains ongoing. In these works, painterly canvases are shrouded in mystery behind tarps, blankets, swaths of fabric, or other materials Hammons finds on the street. In Untitled, energetic strokes of blues, pinks, greens, browns, and oranges peer out from the corners of the canvas. Yet, the full composition is blocked from view by the blue-green plastic tarp tied precariously together with a yellow string directly in the center of the viewer’s field of vision.
“Those pieces were all about making sure that the black viewer had a reflection of himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it.”
Coconut Grove Spotlight is published by Miami News Trust, Inc.