First, the title of this post obviously is a steal from Trevor Paglen’s book, subtitled The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. I’ve been meaning to write up one or two thoughts after seeing his exhibition Geographies of Seeing at Brighton Photo Biennial, but that’s on hold until next week.

Rather this is a quick reaction to Michael J. Shapiro’s new book, Studies in Transdisciplinary Method. As Shapiro writes, it’s a “methods book” (p.32) that explores a wide range of artistic texts and the aesthetic figures that inhabit them, as a way of opening up alternative political imaginations. Surveying a huge range of authors, including Kant, Benjamin, Arendt, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari and Mbembe, Shapiro draws especially on the work of Jacques Rancière and his arguments concerning the ability of critical art to enact moments of dissensus and reframe the ‘distribution of the sensible’.

First, a couple of…