Issue 152

A curious series of handmade signs started replacing commercial advertisements in some bus shelters near e-flux in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn over the last few weeks. Amidst the new US government’s breakneck pace of undoing itself, the signs’ cheerful colors, reminiscent of children’s crafts, and their calls to protect democracy and resist seem to inhabit a level of power surreal in its mismatch with that of Trump, Musk, and their cabal armed with AI engineers and turbocharged by historically unprecedented wealth. Amidst the near-absence of effective opposition from the stunned onlookers of more organized and powerful bodies in the Democratic Party, labor unions, and civil society, perhaps this does not bode well for the outcome. Then again, maybe this is how a new form of opposition begins.

In this issue, Sven Lütticken analyzes contemporary repressive processes, specifically those that attack “forms of life” not suitable for neoliberal/neofascist governance. After a thorough intellectual history of Lebensformen (forms of life), beginning with Friedrich Schiller, Lütticken traces reappearances of the concept across aesthetics, the life sciences, and political theory over the last century. Arriving at the present, Lütticken suggests that the student movement against genocide exemplifies a “non-fascist life-form” that confronts the present necropolitical functions of civic institutions. In his four-part essay “On Paralysis,” Evan Calder Williams has traced backwards from high-functioning bodies and well-organized systems worshipped today, uncovering a history of merciless bodily control. In the final installment in this issue, Williams looks at how circuits connecting bodies and their environment are conjoined by movement, severed by stoppage, activated by damage, and always made possible by labor rendered invisible.

What if the path to liberation lies not in self-possession but rather in dispossession, or the acknowledgement that one’s body is not “one’s own”? In “There Is No Death: A Sketch Towards Entrancement,” Thotti challenges Western notions of sovereignty through trance. Weaving together Yoruba initiations, Ernst Jünger’s time wall, and Heidegger’s concept of “mineness,” the essay playfully explores the ways entrancement dissolves the distinctions between human and nonhuman, self and other. This issue also features a new translation of a 1999 essay by artist, curator, and researcher Marion von Osten (1963–2020) that reflects on the rise of discourse- and collaboration-driven art spaces and social contexts in the 1990s, and how their independent “cultural production” contrasted with the weaponization of criticism as a magical cudgel for bludgeoning opponents with universal knowledge.

Adding a historical appraisal to After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses—KJ Abudu discusses Okwui Enwezor’s important 2002 essay “The Black Box” to ask what conjunctions of ethics and aesthetics, poetics and politics, we are tasked to figure during this “heightened moment of accumulating imperial debris and accelerated mass mobilization.” How can Enwezor’s curatorial and theoretical approaches offer pathways towards—or reveal the fundamental limitations of—Western institutions’ abilities to disinherit colonial modalities? In the first of a two-part essay, Rodrigo Nunes offers a trenchant analysis of the formation of the physician, writer, and Bolshevik revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov’s “tektology”: a radical attempt to construct a universal science that bridges social, physical, and biological systems of knowledge. Nunes underlines how Bogdanov was thinking against Hegelian dialectics, which he deemed insufficiently universal, and instead developed theories of resistance and organization from divergent disciplines. 

Ou Ning’s “The Ideal World,” an excerpt from his book The Agritopianists: Thinking and Practice in Rural Japan, looks at Mushakoji Saneatsu’s audacious New Village experiment, which lasted from the 1910s to the 1930s. The intellectuals and outcasts that formed this horseshoe-shaped community along the Omaru River in Japan created sophisticated models for collective land ownership without class hierarchy, incorporating art production into labor, and integrating with refugees in an imperial era, all as a radical third position, flourishing between capitalist individualism and revolutionary overhaul.

—Editors 

Marion von Osten—Cudgel, Out of the Bag
No longer content with their traditional role, artists in the nineties became actively involved as critics, mediators, and organizers, exploding the (art) system’s rigid division of labor. Instead of pursuing individual creative achievements, they devised various strategies of collective and collaborative work, in record labels, groups, bands, temporary project-based coalitions, or creative contexts established for the longer term.

Sven Lütticken—Forms of Strife
The neoliberal attack on the humanities in countries such as the UK and the Netherlands makes universities increasingly inhospitable to heterodox forms of life, of intellectual praxis and critical inquiry. Under the circumstances, it is vital that existing institutional forms and habits are supplemented and challenged by forms of self-organization whose autonomy often comes at the cost of extreme precarity.

Thotti—There is No Death: A Sketch Towards Entrancement
The guinea fowl opens across all times, traveling through infinite spaces, emptying and filling itself with many nows of tomorrow and yesterday. It is a vessel and a chart in the unfathomable darkness of the present. On its wings are the stars of galaxies, the lights of UFOs, pores of a shared body stripped of death. Its wings hold what was lost and shattered, resisting the line or the closure in a curve. In this curve, time doesn’t arrive solely as doom; it can take the form of a spiraled prayer, a music-mosaic, a dispersed fragment reaching for the wind, the waves, the prompt ears that still don’t exist to hear—trance, trance, trance.

Ou Ning—The Ideal World
In order to reconcile social contradictions and avoid violent revolution, Mushakoji Saneatsu walked a third road beyond capitalism and socialism. He supported collective ownership of property, but opposed class struggle; believed in freedom, but did not accept competition; he advocated for necessary labor, but paid attention to people’s leisure; he pursued anarchist egalitarianism, mutual aid, and cooperation, but abandoned any associated violence. He emphasized personal will and opposed oppression; with the ideal of humans across the world following their destinies, he resisted nationalism and ethnocentrism.

KJ Abudu—Disinheriting the Violence of Colonial Modernity: Art, Exhibition-Making, and Infra/Intra-structural Critique
For Okwui Enwezor, the void of Ground Zero indexes the full manifestation of a Fanonian “tabula rasa” in which the entropic unleashing of excessive violence weakens and dissolves the “dead certainties” of the formerly stable Western liberal/imperial global order. Such systemic crises present an unforeseen possibility for the global majority, a “founding moment,” wherein subsequent structural reconfigurations allow for their demands to be more fully articulated. These articulated demands necessarily include artistic and cultural responses, which, Enwezor observes, “posit a radical departure from the system of hegemony that fuels the present struggle.”

Evan Calder Williams—On Paralysis, Part 4
Instead, de-paralysis points towards a dynamic already active in paralysis: the establishment of novel conduits and links in excess of those already in place. If paralysis is generated by the temporary severing or decoupling of linkages, it also paradoxically keeps producing a proliferation of unexpected ones, especially through those contagious chains that shift scale and leap across vectors, moving from the failure of a single wire to the blackout of a network to the person who stands in the new dark, frozen with indecision.

Rodrigo Nunes—From the Organizational Point of View: Bogdanov and the Augustinian Left, Part 1
What is, then, organization? Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Essays in Tektology offers two distinct and complementary definitions, one indirect, the other explicit. If human labor discovers that “any product is a system organized from material elements by means of joining them with the elements of energy of human labor,” then it is possible to generalize from this that organization consists of the joining of elements through the expenditure of energy. “No conjunction whatsoever—not only this, biological, but none whatsoever, in the most general tektological sense of the word—can occur without an expenditure of activities,” hence also energy.