Issue 147

In this issue of e-flux journal, Trevor Paglen begins his three-part essay on how US military psychological warfare techniques were a historical predecessor to today’s AI-driven social media trained to identify emotions and exploit affects. Telling the story of Richard Doty, a counterintelligence officer who deliberately spread disinformation about extraterrestrials as cover for military operations, Paglen identifies a key tenet of the US Army Field Manual: it is easier to deceive someone by reinforcing their preexisting beliefs than to change those beliefs. Behind the outlandish but well-documented example of UFO sightings lies a chilling warning that the creation of an entirely new reality is accomplished not through coercion but through the tactical use of affirmative encouragement.

Also in this issue, Jonas Staal looks at Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean, some sixteen hundred kilometers off the west coast of Africa. Uninhabited when it was “discovered” by European seafarers, the island was considered a cursed land for exiling deviants of Empire. (It neighbors St. Helena, where Napoleon was finally exiled after his escape from Elba.) As Staal recounts, declaring Ascension Island terra nullius invited agents of colonization to civilize it through technologies of geoengineering, warfare, surveillance, and eventually space colonization. But it also provides an opportunity to measure the pathologies of Empire in reverse, by asking: Who is the island? 

If science and technology are offered as a promise of creating new worlds, today this same promise of expansion mixes with the limited and closed nature of any world. Indeed, science and technology not only inspire the imagination to study physical laws and limits in order to fly, sail, and build hospitals; they also weaponize those very same powers for air strikes, conquest, and bombing those same hospitals. María Iñigo Clavo’s essay analyzes the forms of ecocide necessary for colonial and postcolonial state-building. Considering the many threads of Indigenous dispossession through several textile-based artworks, Iñigo Clavo highlights a judicial case in which survivors of sexual violence shielded themselves from state-backed violence using an Indigenous textile known as the perraje. By unraveling the often separated discourses of anti-coloniality and ecology, she puts forward a feminist and Indigenous approach for thinking through state violence in Guatemala and beyond. 

In the first of a two-part excerpt from Yuk Hui’s forthcoming book Post-Europe, Hui connects a longing for a sense of being at home to waves of displacement experienced due to modernization and colonialism. After European and then American planetarization, we are well aware of how the longing for lost wholeness and belonging can lead to reactionary and fascistic movements—most notably within Europe and the US themselves. Today, however, when wars and technological acceleration become increasingly threatening, we must draw finer distinctions between the existential need for home and the jingoist sense of belonging readily captured by nations or nationalist movements promising to restore lost homeworlds.

Hunter Bolin offers an extensive appraisal of the work of Günther Anders, a German thinker, antinuclear activist, and significant critic of the autonomization of technical forms, whose texts remain largely untranslated into English. Part of Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams’s “Negative Anthropology” series—which draws its name in part from Anders himself—this essay develops an account of Anders’s self-described negative anthropology and its refusal of any idea of a stable essence or historical constant for human behavior. Bolin offers extensive previously untranslated materials that show the depth of Anders’s thinking, focusing on the notion of “unworldliness” and placing Anders in dialogue with psychoanalysis.

In the third part of his ongoing series, Evan Calder Williams enters further into how the trope of paralysis establishes a frame that opens beyond “normal” cycles of production and circulation. What would it mean to understand accelerated production through its inclusion of stoppage, sabotage, inefficiency, loss, delay, and waste rather than their exclusion at the expense of human bodies? If debilitation and the intentional lowering of the quality of factory output are consequences of exploitative labor, but also techniques of resistance against that very same work, Williams argues that we need new tools to understand an intimate relation between limited movement and expressive power. 

Finally, Luis Camnitzer looks at the overemphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education as signaling a crisis in moral and ethical development—precisely the kind of development cultivated in the humanities. Do attempts to feed workers into industrial fields such as AI erode our understanding of how creativity may enhance otherwise totalizing technological worlds defined by stability and control? Camnitzer turns to AI itself to find out.

—Editors

Trevor Paglen—Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media
If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. A mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified. That assumes no distinction between perception and reality even as it attempts to intervene as directly as possible into the brains and emotional makeups of its experiencers.

Yuk Hui—Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 1
In the twenty-first century, we can easily sense that this process of destruction and recreation is only accelerating rather than slowing down. The longing for Heimat will only be intensified instead of being diminished; the dilemma of homecoming can only become more pathological. In fact, two opposed movements are taking place at the same time: planetarization and homecoming. Capital and techno-science, with their assumed universality, have a tendency toward escalation and self-propagation, while the specificity of territory and customs have a tendency to resist what is foreign.

María Iñigo Clavo—Agrarian Economies and Indigenous Textiles: The Feminization of Land Struggles
Textiles express ancestral knowledge of geometry and mathematics connected to the Mayan worldview, incorporating elements of politics, nature, history, and memory. Each community has different colors, embroideries, and figures that have been passed down from generation to generation. As the slogan of the National Movement of Women Weavers says: “The weavings are the books that colonialism could not burn.”

Jonas Staal—Empire’s Island, or, Who is the Island?
Though Hasenbosch was a victim of heteropatriarchy, he was also undoubtedly an agent of Empire. He showed no signs of resistance against the murderous unworlding campaigns of the Dutch East India Company. His only divergence from the terms of order was his sexual desire for men, which had no place in the white Christian doctrine central to the Dutch empire’s command structure. As such, Hasenbosch was exiled from the very world he had helped to propagate.

Evan Calder Williams—On Paralysis, Part 3
The challenge for sabotage will be to erode the gap between unavoidable delay and avoidable delay, to make avoidable delays appear unavoidable, both as a threat to employers who pay poor wages and to enable the kind of unprovability that sabotage hinges on and weaponizes. (Did the power just happen to go out, causing everything to go quiet? Or did someone knock it out?) The tactic will try, again and again, to pass resistance and fatigue out from an individual body expected to work faster, more repetitively, or for less money, back into the system of production and circulation itself.

Hunter Bolin—Unworldliness: A Pathology of Humankind (On Günther Anders’s Negative Anthropology)
It can be difficult to see what is lost when loss is experienced. Freud described melancholia as a condition in which what is lost, beyond any particular object, is ultimately the subject’s relation to the world, which he then describes as a topographical withdrawal back into the self and narcissism, a state he called melancholia. In the process, the relation to the external world is severely compromised. But, Anders asked, could it be possible to start from the opposite premise—that the relationship to the world is never guaranteed a priori?

Luis Camnitzer—Stemming the Tide of STEM
When the US Constitution was drafted, the definition of the word “art” didn’t exactly coincide with today’s Art Basel version. On the positive side, Clause 8 recognized intellectual work as a form of actual labor. The founding fathers would have supported my demand for a dollar. On the negative side, Clause 8 set down guidelines that, by promoting applied knowledge in a world defined by the hope for certainty, have today culminated in the push for STEM curricula.