I’m deeply saddened to hear that the brilliant and wonderful Kobe Matthys has lost his long battle with cancer (though trite and contested, the metaphor does not feel inappropriate here). In 1992, Kobe founded Agency, a practice revolving around an ever-expanding archive of “things” that had been subject to intellectual property disputes; such things were presented and discussed by Agency in various types of assemblies. I have discussed of few of these pieces in some of my writings, including Objections, and there’s more to come in Personafications. Given Kobe’s condition, Agency became a not-for-profit association in 2019, so the archive in Saint-Gilles (Brussels) has a legal status that will hopefully protect it, enabling Kobe’s associates to keep the legacy of Agency alive. If anything, I would say that Kobe’s Lebenswerk has not yet received the sustained attention it deserves. To be continued…

Like Kobe, I like filing things in boxes (though my shelves are less tidy). My archival box for Agency contains, aside from various publications and correspondence, some photos that bring back memories… However, although I’m sure I took a picture at the time, my most vivid recollection of any Agency assembly is not represented here: Sanne Oorthuizen dressed as a penguin. It seems that some memories are unarchivable.

The new issue of Grey Room contains my article “Plan and Council: Genealogies of Calculation, Organization, and Transvalation.” Responding to the renewed discourse on socialist calculation and economic planning in the context of Big Data, this text revisits debates on plans and on workers’ councils, with particular focus on the role of aesthetics and visualization—from Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath in the 1920s and 1930s to recent projects by artists such as Jonas Staal and Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. If the texts appears to resonate somewhat with my recent October essay on organizational aesthetics, this is not entirely coincidental: the plan is that they become the basis for consecutive chapters in the second volume of Forms of Abstraction—at some point, if there is enough interest to warrant the effort.

Images: Gerd Arntz in Die proletarische Revolution (1927); Make Amazon Pay campaign designed by Jonas Staal.