Issue 148

Wars are never the result of just one man. And yet, today’s strongman leaders are emblematic of the ideological and existential rot that hides within state systems, behind the promise of an ultimate showdown of all against all. It is well known, perhaps within Israel more than anywhere, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on multiple criminal charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. These charges were not handed down by the Palestinians, by Hamas in Gaza, by Hezbollah in Lebanon, or by the Houthis in Yemen. He will not stand trial for corruption by the Islamic Republic of Iran or the United Nations, nor by the International Criminal Court (which has issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity), nor by South Africa (which has formally accused Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice). 

No, he has already been indicted by the police and courts of the State of Israel, a country now hostage not to Hamas, but to their own leader—a man known as “the magician” for his talent for self-preservation. Supported by Empire’s coffers, the magician now holds the entire world captive, unable to stop the butchery of a massive ethno-nationalist war machine. For the magician’s next trick, as the fire spreads into Lebanon and on to Iran, how many more countries and people will become hostages to a spreading war? How many other world powers, with their own grievances and nationalist agendas craving the fullness of expression only possible in war, will gladly aid Israel in sharing its own purifying self-extinction with the world? 

In this issue, Boris Groys considers the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s dialectics of self-destruction whereby humanity’s Godlike mastery over nature through technology will bring about an apocalyptic collective suicide and annihilation of nature itself, evidenced by the development of the nuclear bomb—a realization of human power as supreme and self-consuming. But what power can possibly be found in death? For this question, Groys turns to the sociologist Marcel Mauss, who built his theory around the Native American economy of the gift, and the potlatch, a competition among tribes consisting of the destruction of their own property. To receive gifts is to be dependent on the giver, while to renounce and destroy one’s own property, to not profit from nature, repays the debt to nature by allowing it to rejuvenate itself, to restart a new dialectical cycle. 

Irmgard Emmelhainz’s essay looks at necropower: the global apparatus that administers life through the measurement and distribution of death. Entire populations are rife with disease and addiction, whether to drugs, hormones, antibiotics, or industrial additives—a consequence of the technosphere fully inhabiting and overtaking the ecosphere. This technosphere pollutes and corrupts our bodies, causing immune functions to misrecognize self and enemy and turn against their host body. How might we begin to restore our bodies’ diminished microbiomes in order to rebuild the relationship between our inner and outer environments, especially following the scorched-earth campaigns of the twentieth century against our bodies?

Trevor Paglen examines the subtle and nearly undetectable tricks that endow machines with the illusion of sentience and create the appearance of supernatural phenomena. In the second part of his series on early experiments in psychological warfare, Paglen peers into how the CIA researched and operationalized stage magic for its power of illusion—and deception. If it’s possible to conjure supernatural or unexplainable events through sleight of hand, how else might perception, sentiment, and the very fabric of reality be malleable? What other cognitive blind spots could be exploited to hide engines of illusion?

In the second part of an excerpt from Yuk Hui’s new book Post-Europe, Hui considers the politics of nostalgia and exclusion that accompanies the pervasive sense of a lost homeland. Especially today, the cosmopolitan perspective surpasses the limits of the planet itself and faces the challenge of the planet in its totality, even from a position beyond it. No single nation can be much farther ahead or behind any other, even according to the teleological metric of world history and its development. On the contrary, the reactionary mirage of return can only produce state thinking and state thinkers—a tragic missed opportunity and, as history has shown, not even a path leading home.

Minh Nguyen looks beyond the triumphalism of the end of Cold War ideologies to find a wild domain of unresolved positions for Vietnamese contemporary art and its diaspora. Bearing in mind that contemporary art itself is a global post-socialist ideological product in the most sweeping sense, Nguyen measures a relationship to a particular place and a particular time—and a means of remaking place and time collectively—against contemporary forms of artistic representation that seek resolution and obfuscation simultaneously.

In the first part of a series of essays on the late writer, curator, and theoretician Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), Serubiri Moses questions an apparent absence of exhibitions of African art in New York, the city where Enwezor lived for most of his career. Filling this absence with a selection of exhibitions that did in fact take place, Moses discusses the problematics of the African continent, from the simplistic expectations of Western institutions to influential political critiques within Africa, all of which Enwezor addressed with skill and tact.

In an excerpt from her new book The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life, historian Kristin Ross looks at how different groups recompose themselves as part of land-based struggles. From the Paris Commune to Standing Rock, from the zone à défendre (ZAD) in France to the Stop Cop City movement in the US, a movement’s power to contest accumulative activities and enclosure comes in part from the participants’ divergent and varied subject positions. Thus, the “space-time of the commune form is anchored in the art and organization of everyday life and in a collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence.”

—Editors
 

Kristin Ross—Composition
The transmutability of the form has everything to do with the particular people who make each commune, and who, in so doing, outline a way of life, a subsistence in accordance with the commune’s site, its location, and its location’s history. Equally importantly, they devise a way of life in accordance with what the people making the commune decide their own political emancipation will look like. Each commune is built in a way particular to its specific space—to its subjects, its geography, to the history of its conflicts and achievements, its attributes and its challenges, as well as the challenges to come.

Trevor Paglen—Society of the Psyop, Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic
We can think of magic as a type of media. One that operates in the world of preconscious perception, playing with associations, expectations, symbols, and other forms of media to alter perception, to influence behavior, to affect the physical world, and to produce any number of other effects. To study magic is to study the quirks, foibles, and everyday hallucinations that characterize human perception, and to use those gaps between reality-as-it-is and reality-as-it-is-perceived as a vehicle for making supernatural-seeming interventions into perceived reality.

Boris Groys—The Lord of the Rings
According to Evald Ilyenkov, the dialectic process must have no beginning and no end; it must be infinitely circular. Such an infinite circulation presupposes that at the end of every cosmic period, every humanity takes the decision to explode itself and thus let the universe start a new cosmic period. Here dialectical materialism is inscribed not merely into historical materialism but into the symbolic exchange between universe and humanity, between nature and spirit.

Minh Nguyen—The Post-socialist Condition: Nostalgia and Anti-communism in Vietnamese Art
If post-socialist critique is reductive, individual artists and curators are not the sole culprits—nor are MoMA, Guggenheim, or liberal US cultural institutions. The Communist Party of Vietnam has itself perpetuated a corrupt version of its own history, erasing vibrant internal debates and silencing opposition to state communism, whether from within a Marxist framework or against it. Post-socialist art vividly reflects the strange mutations undergone by the current Party, which has drastically departed from, yet still rides on, its communist identity. It remains important to inquire, at each instance, whether the appropriation of state-socialist aesthetics illuminates the present’s relationship with the past or obfuscates it further.

Serubiri Moses—Reason, Cliché, Object: A Few Notes on African Art Exhibitions
It seems unlikely that the racism (the unfair judgment of the work and experience of African curators) will go away. The trenchant pessimistic attitude that Africa will never develop its own museums is evidence of that. Prior to his death, Okwui Enwezor himself was foggy on the issue of whether to shift focus to exhibitions on the African continent, preferring to curate and write for institutions in Euro-America. Perhaps even he had difficulty avoiding how the evolutionary logic of racist pseudoscience has passed down a belief that some art is more developed than others—a legacy we still have to actively confront.

Irmgard Emmelhainz—Gut Brain: Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess
The notion of nature as distinct from humanity, and as malleable, has radically changed the planet, bringing all its living systems to the brink of collapse. This continues to be driven by consumerism as the primary human relationship to one’s subjecthood. The result is individualist hedonism, the fantasy that death can be negated, and the mandate to pursue individual happiness while considering suffering as a personal failure. Clearly the food system we rely on and the chemical products we consume damage us and the planet. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Yuk Hui—Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 2
In past centuries, almost every philosopher was addressed according to nationality, and a new school of thought was often prefixed with a nationality. A thinker can only go beyond the nation-state by becoming heimatlos, that is to say, by looking at the world from the standpoint of not being at home. This doesn’t mean that one must refrain from talking or thinking about a particular place or a culture; on the contrary, one must confront it and access it from the perspective of a planetary future.