iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 27/04/2026

Really pleased to see this poem out in the English Journal—grateful for friends and colleagues continuing to do the work to resist the narrative of AI inevitability in education. publicationsncte.org/content/jour...

Teaching in the Age of Artifice
All the banks I love are fog and all the work worth doing doesn't pay.
I'm here another year.
But now the creature
in the corner of the classroom—not feathered, not soul-perched-begs me show it to these young ones, let its shining body blind them, its claws mangle and rend, quick before it rusts away (surely it must).
I call out for the otherwise.
Give me mist
to hide us all from the seeking cyc of enterprise. The here and now need not be only hell.
-COLEMAN ALLUMS

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 21/04/2026

Barragán on so-called traditional architecture and social totality

Photo of a book titled “A Conversation with Luis Barragán”

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Let's see if I can manage to explain the mistake of using the words traditionalist architects.
This is generally understood as an architect who does architecture in the style of the place where he is, but of a different time. In philosophical terms, that should not be considered traditional, because the architecture he is copying from that age, when it was made, was contemporary. Which means that true tradition consists of continuing to make contemporary architecture. For example, in the colonial period, if they had made Mayan architecture, they would not have been traditionalists either, because then the Maya would have made architecture of a previous age, and so on indefinitely. I don't know if I have explained this clearly. Tradition is to do architecture of its age, in accordance with the life and culture of the age.
In the history of our architecture, we have always made architecture of our age. The Americans are not traditionalists; the tradition of the American people is not like ours. The Americans have a tradition directly imported from Europe and they have alwaysat least until 1940, with slight exceptions done architecture of other ages, and thus they are called traditionalists.
I have gone into this whole thing about traDitionaliem in order to assess at its true val to speak, the architecture of Mexico with r

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 29/03/2026

monoskop.org/images/5/57/...

Excerpt from Marcuse’s “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 23/03/2026

Really looking forward to teaching this next year

Let the Poets Govern

By Camonghne Felix

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 09/03/2026

I've been working out the ideas that would eventually become this paper since 2020 or so. Really pleased to see it out in the world. "Make Buckhead great again: Phantasmagoria and the geographies of authoritarian urbanism" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Concluding note
This question—how to make great again that which never was?—has haunted me as I finalize my work revising this paper. In recent weeks, two non-violent observers were murdered by the US Department of Homeland Security in Minneapolis as they attempted to provide witness and aid to their community amidst a now weeks-long campaign of state-sponsored white supremacist terror. In many ways, I think, we can read the entirety of the second Trump term to date as precisely the sort of possessive, authoritarian exercise that I have just spent the preceding pages working through. The white supremacist version of the United States put forward by Project 2025 and operationalized by Stephen Miller and other reactionaries in the administration is precisely an image “in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being” (Benjamin, 2002: 669). Perhaps no better illustration can be desired than the removal this month from George Washington’s historic home all public acknowledgements of his well-documented slaveholding.
What Buckhead City and all other white authoritarian projects desire is no less than the accumulated totality of the ill-gotten wealth and privileges of the white possessive project and the abject subjection of the rest of us to their violent excesses. To make great again is only ever to make and remake, in every desperate moment, the image that simultaneously represses and exalts in such power, else Benjamin’s utopian promise—the vital activity of care and emancipation and redemption embodied by Renee Good and Alex Pretti and Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Brown and so many others across this vast wreckage of history—might just begin, again, to leak out.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 25/01/2026

Wrote this last night: colemanallums.net/blog/2026/1/... Poetry is so we don’t forget.

Twin Cities

My blood is kerosene
alight, incandescent
eyes like razor blades.
Tonight, our soul slouches
Bedlam way, crawling over
shattered bodies through
snow, lies, lies, lies.

Surely some revelation is at hand.
Surely some
revelation is at hand.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 06/11/2025

Reminds me of one of my all time favorite books:

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 24/08/2025

Marcuse, in one of my all time favorite bits of writing: monoskop.org/images/5/57/...

Struggle A gainst Liberalism in Totalitarianism

The turn from the liberalist to the total-authoritarian state occurs within the framework of a single social order. With regard to the unity of this economic base, we can say it is liberalism that 'produces' the total-authoritarian state out of itself, as its own consummation at a more advanced stage of development. The total-authoritarian state brings with it the organization and theory of society that correspond to the monopolistic stage of capitalism.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 15/07/2025

Assigning bits of this @ajdouglas.bsky.social book in every class I’m teaching this coming term, these kids are gonna be so du Bois pilled.

W.E.B.
DU BOIS
AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE
COMPETITIVE
SOCIETY
ANDREW J. DOUGLAS

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 25/06/2025

Nothing hits like a short book of theory. I get to exercise my silly little brain and it only takes me like an hour to get the thing done. Writing over 100 pages should be illegal, tiny books only.

The cover of J. Camatte’s _The Wandering of Humanity_

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 12/06/2025

Tyler played this live for the first time ever in LA yesterday. When it was originally released, I saw it as a genuine act of anti-racist class solidarity and I find it difficult not to feel the same once again. Contrast message with that of most D politicos…

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Byung-Chul Han reconsiders power in the present age of media, tech, and Big Data, paying particular attention to how the human psyche is implicated in the struggle for freedom.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

What would cooperation look like across politics, economics, and broader society? And how would this differ from the status quo of liberal democracy? These are the questions at play in Bernard Harcourt’s _Cooperation_

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

More Frankfurt and Frankfurt-adjacent stuff: Bertolt Brecht’s collected poems and Löwy’s helpful gloss on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Both incredibly evocative reckonings with history, politics, mourning, and redemption.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

While much of the Frankfurt School canon is, once again, distressingly relevant, I particularly like this collection of Herbert Marcuse’s essays for their concision and polemical perspectives on culture, democracy, and capitalism.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

While we generally consider forgetting to be an individual annoyance (currently missing my car keys), Henry Giroux’s _The Violence of Organized Forgetting_ reminds us that remembering and forgetting are social acts that can’t be separated from the exercise and reproduction of power.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

In _The Abuse of Property_ @danielloick.bsky.social asks how we might interact with things and other people outside of the alienating logics of property that so commonly structure our connections.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

_Mistaken Identity_ is Asad Haider’s pithy reflection on the various ways that race and class can be leveraged in service of both authoritarian and emancipatory political projects.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Barthe’s _Mythologies_ is a primer on how to read through and against the myths that structure our and others’ experiences of the world. For French theory, it’s quite lucid.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

@jedpurdy.bsky.social’s _For Common Things_ is simple and sincere in its pursuit of its titular commitment.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Taking up the thread of abolition from du Bois and others, the late Joel Olson’s _Abolition of White Democracy_ theorizes race as a form of citizenship that mediates access to democratic self-determination

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

WEB du Bois’s magisterial work of historical sociology, _Black Reconstruction_ offers an account of the betrayal of reconstruction and the lingering project of abolition.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

_Being Numerous_ is a short but punchy collection of essays by @natashalennard.bsky.social that has really helped me understand what it means to struggle—it also introduced me to the fabulous work of Paul Virilio. And it’s got some beautiful prose.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Geoff Mann’s _Disassembly Required_ tackles capitalism as it exists in everyday society. I’ve taught out of this book many times and find it really accessible.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Another by Brown, _Undoing the Demos_ Both this book and Ruins explore how recent configurations of capitalist society have made the task of real democracy quite difficult (read: impossible)

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Alright, I’ve got the flu and I’m tired of doomscrolling. Here’s some books for the present moment, pulled from my shelves. Should largely be accessible for lay readers. I’ll probably add more to this thread later! Starting us off is Wendy Brown’s _In the Ruins of Neoliberalism_

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

In _The Abuse of Property_ @danielloick.bsky.social asks how we might interact with things and other people outside of the alienating logics of property that so commonly structure our connections.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

_Mistaken Identity_ is Asad Haider’s pithy reflection on the various ways that race and class can be leveraged in service of both authoritarian and emancipatory political projects.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Barthe’s _Mythologies_ is a primer on how to read through and against the myths that structure our and others’ experiences of the world. For French theory, it’s quite lucid.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

@jedpurdy.bsky.social’s _For Common Things_ is simple and sincere in its pursuit of its titular commitment.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

WEB du Bois’s magisterial work of historical sociology, _Black Reconstruction_ offers an account of the betrayal of reconstruction and the lingering project of abolition.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Geoff Mann’s _Disassembly Required_ tackles capitalism as it exists in everyday society. I’ve taught out of this book many times and find it really accessible.

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Coleman Allums @colemanallums.net · 02/02/2025

Another by Brown, _Undoing the Demos_ Both this book and Ruins explore how recent configurations of capitalist society have made the task of real democracy quite difficult (read: impossible)

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