with contributions by The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind; Keti Chukhrov; Hito Steyerl; Alan Gilbert; and Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, Cristina Freire, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Vít Havránek, Piotr Piotrowski, and Branka Stipančić
www.e-flux.com/issues/41-january-2013
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You don’t have to be a new age spiritualist to believe that the end of the world could have improved your circumstances. If you thought you were nearing a fiscal cliff, or if you really were entering hell itself with an Islamist soft coup, a well-placed apocalypse carries the promise of voiding all debts, so to speak: Rip up all the contracts and let’s start over! This is why the Mayan prediction was welcomed by so many who thought the apocalypse would actually redeem the world by giving some concrete form or recognition to an already existing state of collapse. While you might think you have a lot to lose when the world ends, you might have even more to gain.
But in the days after December 21, with the world still there and looking exactly the same, we saw the apocalypse shrink into a proverb: apparently the Mayan calendar only predicted the end of the world as we know it—a new beginning. But this makes some sense: the apocalypse is not always synonymous with death and annihilation, as Hollywood likes to have it. The term apocalypse actually means “revelation” and “clarity”—literally “un-covering” (ἀπό, apo, or “away from,” and καλύπτω, kalupto, or “to cover”). And this suggests that, rather than the end of time as such, the apocalypse actually reveals a new time, a new world.
As Hito Steyerl wrote in the April 2011 issue of e-flux journal, while you are in free fall, whole societies around you may be falling just as you are, and it may feel like perfect stasis—as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward. And the sense that everything is collapsing under you may in fact come from the laws of gravity in the new world the Mayans predicted. And all of these disparate nosedives into oblivion will be revealed as having a totality, a clarity, and a face—even if there is no ground. I’ve already fallen off the fiscal cliff and I’ve never felt better—I’m finally free!
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
In this issue:
The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind—The End of Neonationalism: On The Comparative Certainty of Extraterrestrial Life and its Significance for Humankind (Earth and the Solar System Section)
Nearly 4.6 billion years ago, within a vast cloud of interstellar space, a small pocket of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity and our solar system was born. As part of this system, our Earth is always in flux and is constantly remolded by powerful forces. These forces can often appear as sudden and unexpected phenomena.
Keti Chukhrov—Epistemological Gaps between the Former Soviet East and the “Democratic” West
But all those restrictions that we condemn in historical socialism have deeper roots; they do not stem simply from authoritarian limitations against freedom, but from different historical paradigms of emancipation that the socialist East, on the one hand, and the liberal capitalist West, on the other, adhered to.
Hito Steyerl—Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries
While today’s lance-for-hire takes on many different forms—from stone crushers, shovels, baby bottles, and machine guns to any form of digital hardware—the conditions of employment do not appear to have changed as dramatically as the lance itself. Today, that lance—at least in the case of writers—has most likely been designed by Steve Jobs.
Alan Gilbert—Allegories of Art, Politics, and Poetry
While some might argue that political indoctrination occurs via the state and its affiliate apparatuses, and others might claim that it happens through the corporate media, it’s clear that what’s been hijacked aren’t our thoughts per se but our desires. The service industry is predicated on capturing desire in a way that a manufacturing economy, with its checklist of items to buy, never was.
Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, Cristina Freire, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Vít Havránek, Piotr Piotrowski, and Branka Stipančić—Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe, Part II
One of the things that happened in 1967—I feel its almost that specific—is that once the central status of that modernist account of the history of aesthetics is put into question, a whole lot of practices, previously part of history albeit slightly invisible, become very visible again. Duchamp, Manzoni, Yves Klein become visible, as does early Morris. Then, people in the West start looking outside the mainstream, they start looking at Latin America, to the East, and everything opens up very fast. As if what history signifies becomes much messier and wider again, and the mainstream, basically controlled from New York, disappears. When you lose the mainstream you lose all your regulations, the sense of standards, paradigms—and you lose the concept of art.
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