REVISED 4/14/2014 PRESS RELEASE Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Cloth (w/ dust jacket), 191 pages, ISBN 9781-4438-5603-4. Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production with, in Part One (The Gray and the Black), an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines. Initially surveying the shift from Cultural Ecology to Cultural Studies to Cognitive Capitalism, the essays of Part Two (What is "Franciscan" Ontology?) return to certain lost causes in the historical development of modernity and postmodernity, foremost the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and renascent) avant-garde agitation. It is somewhere in-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things that Art and Architecture as speculative intellectual capital emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency, defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both. Developed historically, while defying assimilation to narratives that are in service to positivism, Art and Architecture as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validate and valorize the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end (here connoted as immemorial agency/paradox), or in relation to the empty universal figure of ethical and moral power that trans-historically undermines and/or threatens this-worldly power per se. The essays (all written in 2013) map the emergence and submersion of various moments in the so-called History of Art (and History of Architecture), with Architecture positioned within Art as a unique form of constructing alternative visions of worlds no longer held in thrall to reactionary ideology or rote economic determinism. Traces of theological and metaphysical speculation in the Arts and Sciences are (pace Giorgio Agamben) utilized against the grain to secure the ethical foundations of world-making and world-shattering practices that defy, resist, and combat the conversion of the same to empty exercises of privilege and power. In this sense, the persistence of preAristotelian thought (in the form of Tertullian, Augustine, and Bonaventure) suggests that pre-modern, nonideological insurrections, while nonetheless often converted to religious and/or political dogma, represent age-old and, effectively, ageless evocations of the true universalism of the abstract, moral, and ethical substrate of artistic, political, and cultural production. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Gavin Keeney is an editor, writer, and critic. His most recent publications include: Art as "Night": An ArtTheological Treatise (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), a survey of meta-painting from Velázquez to Gerhard Richter; "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); and Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). He has taught in architecture schools in the US and Australia and is the Creative Director of Agence 'X', an editorial and artists' and architects' re-representation bureau. His current research concerns theories of visual agency in Art and Architecture.