Gregory Allen Schrempp, Magical Arrows: The Maori, the Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” in A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas de Giovanni (Penguin Books, 1975).
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist. (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures 1925 (New American Library, 1925).
John Tresch, Cosmograms: How To Do Things with Worlds (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); John Tresch, “Cosmic Terrains (Of the Sun King, Son of Heaven, and Sovereign of the Seas),” e-flux journal #114 (December 2020).
Jacob Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011); Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988).
A debate exists over whether cities in Mesoamerica were cosmograms, or whether this reading was just a projection by conquistadors, inspired by Dante and imaginaries of Rome, to find a concentric and hierarchical cosmos. Michael E. Smith, "Did the Maya build architectural cosmograms?," Latin American Antiquity 16, no. 2 (2005): 217-224.
See Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, eds. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. (Taylor & Francis, 1996.)
David N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place: Geographies of scientific knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Thomas Gieryn, "City as truth-spot: Laboratories and field-sites in urban studies," Social Studies of Science 36, no. 1 (2006): 5-38.
Marisol De la Cadena, and Mario Blaser, eds. A World of Many Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018).
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013). Kohn’s title riffs on Marshall Sahlins’s How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Instance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which in turn plays on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s disparaged theories of “mystical participation” in How Natives Think (New York: Knopf, 1925) and the translation by Lilian Clare, “La mentalité primitive.” In a new French edition Frederic Keck reframes Lévy-Bruhl’s emphasis on “participation” as a reflection how people “act under the impact of forces that are imperceptible to the senses but nevertheless real”; Frederic Keck, introduction to La Mentalité Primitive by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).
Kohn, How Forests Think, 82.
Kohn, How Forests Think, 92
Kohn, How Forests Think, 90
Kohn, How Forests Think, 186.
Kohn, How Forests Think, 186.
Gregory Bateson “Pathologies of Epistemology” (1969), in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 490. Kohn’s frequent reference to Bateson highlights the compatibility and continuity between Peirce’s semiotic and Bateson’s cybernetic metaphysics. See also Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2022).
Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris, Ville Invisible (Paris: Les empecheurs de penser en rond, 1998).
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
Cristóbal Amunátegui, "Order for Profit: On the Architecture of a Nineteenth-Century French Agency," Grey Room 95 (2024): 6-41; Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Joseph Vogl and Christopher Reid, “Taming Time: Media of Financialization,” Grey Room 46 (2012): 72-83.
Lukas Rieppel, Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters,Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Quoted in Robert Bud, "Infected by the Bacillus of Science: The explosion of South Kensington" in Science for the Nation: Perspectives on the History of the Science Museum, ed. Peter Morris (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 12.
Thanks to Simon Schaffer and Caitlin Doherty for their conversation about Carbonopolis in Somers Town, 2022, and to Charlie and Catherina Gere for cosmic readings of the Albert Memorial.
John Tresch, “La ‘technesthétique’: répétition, habitude et dispositif technique dans les arts romantiques,” Romantisme 150, no. 4 (2010): 63-73.
Éloi Rousseau and Johann Protais, Les plus belles oeuvres de Vallotton (Paris: Éditions Larousse, 2013), 44. On the dynamic fusion of sense and calculable line, see Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); and Irene Small, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2024).
Timothy J. Clark, The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers (Princeton University Press, 2015); Susan Buck-Morss, The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991).
Charles Duveyrier, “La Ville Nouvelle,” in John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 192-194, 218-219; Antoine Picon, Les Saint-simoniens: Raison, imaginaire et utopie (Paris: Editions Belin, 2002).
Mark Wigley, "Network Fever," Grey Room 4 (2001): 82-122; Brain, The Pulse of Modernism.
Kohn, How Forests Think, 178.
Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).