Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss picks up where her groundbreaking 1989 book The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Projects left off, expanding upon its insights for a transformed media landscape. This book studies and enacts principles of montage as a means of thinking through how images and ideas work in today’s hyper-visual landscape. If montage as the juxtaposition of images moves thought across conceptual/categorical boundaries, is not its power found in the way that a boundary becomes its opposite—an empty space, a space of freedom, allowing new thoughts and associations to flow in? Architectures of Thought is driven by images not as illustrations, nor as objects of analysis, but images that in their arrangement are the thinking.

Susan Buck-Morss is distinguished professor of political philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where she is a core faculty member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is professor emeritus in the Government Department of Cornell University. Her training is in continental theory, specifically, German Critical Philosophy and the Frankfurt School. Her work crosses disciplines, including art history, architecture, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, philosophy, history, and visual culture. Her books include Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009); Thinking Past Terror (2003); Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000); The Dialectics of Seeing (1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977, republished 2002).

Kevin McCaughey is a designer and founder of Boot Boyz Biz (BBB), established in 2015, a project-based research practice based in New York City. BBB emphasizes access to ideas and the activation of knowledge. T-shirts and everyday materials are tools for contemporary communication and the means for a public sphere—as potential intermediaries promoting marginal forms of discourse with a broad social scope. BBB organizes a wide range of phenomena and material as parts of daily life, building an archive with the aim of organizing collective memory, helping to guide our future. “Bootlegging” is a model for connecting histories and ideas, capturing essences, and processing intertextual relationships.

Adam Michaels (founder, IN-FO.CO; publisher, Inventory Press) is a designer, publisher, and editor. He received the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design at Project Projects, where he was founding principal from 2004–17. His design work has been widely published in books such as Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design and magazines such as Eye, and he has widely lectured at institutions such including the Art Institute of Chicago and Cornell University. His independent projects have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and NYSCA. He has edited and published numerous volumes on design including Blueprint for Counter Education, The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert, A *New* Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt, and the Inventory Books series, within which he coauthored, with Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback.