paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory

 …a with this much Walter Benjamin, a dead cert the contrary (digital) flâneuse (irony noted) would pick it. What else can I say? Shift happens. Omnivore is always a treat.

....From critical theory to psychological warfare — how Franwithkfurt School intellectuals fought the Nazi enemy: Ulrich Plass reviews Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort by Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer (ed. Raffaele Laudani).

Craig Shrimpton (Goldsmiths): Fascism in Benjamin's Historical Materialism: Crisis and the Aestheticisation of Politics. Joel White reviews Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy by Andrew Benjamin. Fallen angel: Ian Penman on the tragic life and enduring influence of critic Walter Benjamin. From TNR’s series “Book that changed my mind”, Stephanie LaCava: “Walter Benjamin was my first crush”.

Barbarism: Anna-Verena Nosthoff on notes on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno.

read the rest at paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory - bookforum.com / omnivore

Make the most of limited city living space: House in a Box

Two hundred square feet. Appallingly small, even by NYC standards. But a new project from MIT Media Lab’s Changing Places group, promises to transform that into one that is like an apartment three times the size to live in

CityHome is essentially a hideaway bed taken to the umpteenth level. It’s a mechanical box about the size of a closet that sits inside an apartment, where it stows a bed, dining room table, kitchen surface, a cooking range, a closet, and multipurpose storage, too.

MIT's CityHome Is A House In A Box You Control By Waving Your Hand | Co.Design | business design: 

Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle

…or the creative #precariat & the #city, by extension #citymooc. Academic knowledge workers, particularly in the arts and humanities, are explicitly noted as those who, "began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live." Sounds like a Balzac novel, doesn't it? Illusions perdues, in particular, comes to mind. 

NEW YORK -- Is it still possible to be a bohemian in today's New York City, where average rents now surpass $3,000 a month? Or are the rents just too damn high? And -- if they are -- what does this mean for the future of artists and intellectuals of the sort who have long been as much a part of the natural order of the city as pigeons and locust trees?
These are some of the questions provoked by an article in the Spring issue of N+1 magazine on "Cultural Revolution" signed by "The Editors." 

...fast forward to the closing paragraphs...

[Bohmeian] complaints [in n+1 article ]are far larger than one about the New York housing market, or the academy, as well -- they are about the relation of the intellectual and the artist to society, about the lack of recognition except by "the Happy Few." But the art and literary worlds have always been a total crap shoot, and far too many artists and writers reach old age as impoverished and unknown as when they began. There is nothing new in the failure of that dare. Even those who have one wonderful glorious moment of fame and fortune are rarely set, because a moment is not a life, and life is longer than most forms of renown these days. 

T.S. Eliot worked as a banker. Wallace Stevens was an insurance company vice president. There are others who have carved memorable careers out of evenings and weekends. But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live. 

I'm not saying any of this is good, only that it is hardly new.

Read the complete article at Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle - Garance Franke-Ruta - The Atlantic

virtual flânerie chez MOOC

…late in the day or game of my life ~ figuratively speaking, but this flâneuse persona is off on another city jaunt...virtual flânerie in the form of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses about cities.

The first, nearly over, is Technicity, and the other, in development and yet to start, is City MOOC.

Borges, Paradox & Perception

…+ Heisenberg = irresistible. This was sitting in drafts, earmarked for #introphil, the philosophy course, now over, and the others left abandoned by the wayside. It's time for flâneuse to leave philosophy classes behind and move on. Topically speaking, we're city bound, heading home to the streets. MOOCs have discovered their cousin, the city, no stranger to paradox or uncertainty. More later. For now, let's transition with Cities, MOOCs, Global Networks by Kris Olds, Inside HigherEd.

In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle’s position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated. Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that this condition was actually impossible: