Seeing <―> Making: Room for Thought

by Susan Buck-Morss, Kevin McCaughey, Adam Michaels

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with conceptual apparel label Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and Benjamin Showing how the montage principle allows thought to occupy the space between two seemingly unrelated things, Seeing | Making ―> Room for Thought both studies and embodies how an arrangement of images can be a form of thinking―in other words, images not as illustrations or objects of analysis but as a montage. In a close collaboration with designers Kevin McCaughey (founder of the popular conceptual clothing line Boot Boys Biz) and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press, renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss expands on her unique conception of montage, combining images and text―also integrating excerpts from Buck-Morss’ previous work―in an innovative way that provides insight into images and how they work together.
In both design and content, Seeing | Making ―> Room for Thought is directly in conversation with Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage , as well as the works of Walter Benjamin. This innovative volume brings Buck-Morss’ more experimental, visually engaged work to the fore in a way that has not been available in the usual contexts within which her writing has appeared.
Susan Buck-Morss (born 1942) is the author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and Year 1 (2021). She is Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
Kevin McCaughey (born 1991) is a designer and founder of Boot Boyz Biz (established in 2015), a project-based research practice based in New York.
Adam Michaels (born 1978) is a designer, publisher and editor, the cofounder of design studio Project Projects, and the founder of Inventory Press and design studios Project Projects and IN-FO.CO. He received the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design.

Genres: Art, Design, Philosophy, Nonfiction

397 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Susan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

[Tanza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary dense and captivating — when I picked it up in the book store, I accidentally read 100 pages before realizing that I should probably stop just standing there and buy it. The collision of image and text does an amazing job translating a complex philosophical topic — the nature of knowledge, power, and memory in relation to perception, images, and history — into something comprehensible. While each page is dense with information, the actual amount of main text per page is low, meaning that your initial read can be relatively quick, allowing for multiple readings where the content can soak in through multiple modes of learning. I personally am fond of reading a difficult philosophical text, but often get caught up trying to parse sentences and lose sight of the full picture. This book provides a necessary antidote to that. I cannot recommend it enough if this is your sort of thing!

[Hannah Gadbois · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What if you cannot read what is written by the image?
Whom will you trust to tell you what it says?"

[Caleb Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

super super cool document... loving the "syncretic" (sort of) and "synthetic" (more so) nature of this, although it did make it fairly hard to follow the actual writing of it. anyways, SBM is a great scholar and reader of Benjamin, and the images and connections make it a fun, quick read, although I found myself focusing more on the writing than on the images (maybe just my proclivity, my taste, my way of absorbing information). I think it might be a bit "shocking", aesthetically, like a frenetic tik tok montage, which we know SBM doesn't like. I wonder if the book makers can defend this position - that montage in book-form is actually dialectical, a politicized (as they want it to be) aesthetic rather than an aestheticized politics... will need to return to this to really think more about it, but the book is cool and really well done for sure.

[olivier]

someone make this Benjamin fan book as mandatory text for art theory 101 class please

[Sky]

Came across this at the used bookstore and bought it because the design looked awesome to me but I’m glad I did bc it was a good way to dip my toes into Walter Benjamin :3 got me thinking and pondering

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and fun illustrations, with conceptual focus on several writers' ideas. I enjoyed the idea of placing images next to one another to evoke different thoughts.