Lewis Levenberg

Poem/CounterPoem: Williams

Poem This installment draws down against William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, specifically, XXI: “The Red Wheelbarrow”. You know this. so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. and so: CounterPoem define this(object) (reference self whole) or (reference not that) define was(subject object) (is past tense) or (used […]

Function, Procedure, Poetics

Conscientious inhabitants of art-spaces – makers, collectors, readers, and so on – respond to an intersection between expressive position and functional affect. This is a fancy way of saying that we care about the other people involved in artistic processes. But since, according to our common senses, it’s not what you say but how you […]

on Background Noise

by lewis levenberg Mornings ride higher when their dull cacophanies remain muffled. At least, the sounds of waking, when they fail to rouse you, seem sweeter: think garbage trucks. Your neighbor’s alarm clock beckons, rude chirp and rattle, unless it finds barrier in wall, door, pillow.  Sleeping late, though no self-sustained reward, requires quiet, but […]

by Marissa Paternoster

On Movement | Between Art and Capital

by lewis levenberg A few words, this week, on the vagaries of hanging out our shingle once more. We’ve encountered setbacks, delays, challenges, and so on. But we’re still dogging this startup—this conglomeration of our assets into publication, incubation, and focused curation—and it’s time to share what we’ve learned so far. Here’s to the phoenix, […]

Contemporary American Subalternity

by lewis levenberg This essay tries to make ‘subalternity’ sensible for what Gramsci called our “special American conditions.” It traces the shifting referents of the concept for theory over the past eighty years. It tries to take the idea seriously, framing subalternity as an abstraction, an outcome of material conditions, and a mode of subjectivity. […]

On Agamben’s Concept of Sovereignty

Giorgio Agamben’s seminal works of political philosophy, Homo Sacer and State of Exception, contain problematic and undefined conceptions of sovereignty. His tergiversation demands, first, an explication of his deployment of the concept. This leads to the articulation of three dissents from his position, along historical, material, and geopolitical grounds. Those dissents recall the work of […]