Out now from XYZBOOKS is a long-delayed yet still timely publication around Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s series The Prophets:

This book focuses on Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’ seminal work The Prophets (2013–2015), a delicate hand-made collection of 412 small, whimsical sculptures made from everyday materials that renders economic graphs into makeshift models. In this work, the artists explore what it means to move from a material world of entangled, interacting agents to a world of mathematical modelling and graphical abstraction. The Prophets cuts across a wide range of historical and contemporary topics of interest to economists such as labour, consumption, production, taxes, savings, investments, credit and so on, to constitute a diagrammatology of economic thought. With essays by Sven Lütticken, Harro Maas, Marina Roy, and Jakub Zdebik and Foreword by Peggy Gale.

The various texts appear to form a great constellation with the documentation of the project. I have to look further into it, but my first impression is that this is how to do it; how to extend artistic practice and research in publishing, in dialogue with various scholars and theorists. If anything, my own contribution (“Prophetic Realism,” an offshoot of Objections) feels fairly minimal and minor, due to time and energy constraints—but I’m glad to be part of the mix.

Earlier this week, the February issue of e-flux journal went online, including my essay “Improbable Potentialities.” Towards the end of the text, I briefly discuss Netanyahu’s plan for a Dubai-style redevelopment of Gaza, minus its inhabitants; this had been made public in the spring of 2024, complete with spectacular “artist’s impressions.” Pretty much simultaneously with the issue going live, Trump gave a press conference in which he announced that the US would take over Gaza, via its military, expel the Palestinian population, and develop the appropriated land into desirable “property.”

We live through a period in which every attempt to theorize the present, to articulate its contradictions and effect some sort of dialectical critique, will usually already be outdated when published—at least in some of its details. There comes a point when one has to stop updating and hope that some of the analysis and some of the propositions can still be relevant and make a difference, somehow, somewhat, circuitously.

Oh, and as I’m typing: