Untangling the Mess of the Contemporary

In making sense of the present moment, where systemic thought should prevail, monocausal explanations instead seem everywhere to abound. One language or narrative is enforced where many are required. Against this monoglottism, we can look for guidance to the radical ethos of Officer Ingravallo—the Roman detective with a philosophical bent who is the protagonist of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s classic modernist crime novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulena (1957). Early on in Gadda’s masterpiece, Ingravallo delivers his declaration of procedural intent:

He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. … The opinion that we must “reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of the cause,” as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation … This was how exactly how he defined “his” crimes. “When they call me.. sure. If they call me, you be sure that there’s trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle.” 1

e-flux Index is a bimonthly publishing project that likewise sets itself the task of helping untangle the mess of the contemporary—which wades itself all the way out into Ingravello’s multicausal whirlpool. The Index comprises two months’ worth of contributions from the five separate sections of the e-flux publishing enterprise, from e-flux Architecture, e-flux Criticism, e-flux Education, e-flux journal, and e-flux Notes respectively. Each of these sections has its own independent editorial agenda as well as publishing temporality. e-flux journal publishes monthly for 9 months of the year, meanwhile Architecture works on a longer-term projects basis (f.e. this issue features contributions from three ongoing projects, After Comfort, Accumulation and Interdependence, respectively), and Criticism and Notes pursue a more urgent weekly mode of reflection on art, culture, and politics.

This first issue presents the pieces published by e-flux in December 2023 and January 2024. The metadata gives some indication of its breadth, spanning 48 pieces, 52 authors, and over 150,000 words. Following its wider editorial ambitions to co-articulate multiple discourses, the Index removes the identity cards anchoring these pieces to their original provenance, and instead “meta-edits” them into nine emergent thematic strands. Though these nine strands are presented distinctly, together they should be understood to intertwine and overlap: “Archives of our own global destruction,” Living with Ghosts, Becoming One’s Own Ancestor, the Perpetual Peace of the Graveyard, “Tomorrow we will not work,” the Nurse Log, the Polycrisis, Counter-citational Models, and Benches out of Snow.

Index #1 begins with “Archives of our own global destruction”. 2Here we encounter the long noirish shadows still cast by the Cold War, whether through the legacy of the wall that once split Berlin in two in Peter Sealy’s “Angels in No Man’s Land,” or Manuel Borja-Villel and Vasıf Kortun’s consideration of the Cold War origins of the documenta quinquennial in their rejected joint proposal for Documenta 16. The next section, Living with Ghosts, moves from the Cold World into the domain of the many specters and ghosts (both friendly and malevolent) with whom we are forced to cohabit. We move from Juliana Halpert’s examination of the American artist Paul Pfeiffer, whose spectral video loops imprison pop cultural and sporting figures into a sort of continual present-tense, to Xinyue Liu’s dogged pursuit of the baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin pushed into becoming an extinct “ghost species” by dam construction and industrialization in China.

Becoming One’s Own Ancestor purloins its title from the South African queer performance artist Lukhanyiso Skosana’s characterisation of her multivalent practice. The pieces assembled here yogically stretch and expand the limits of the human body, of embodiment, and of “the human” itself, such as in Nkule Mabaso and Serubiri Moses’s essay on the reproducibility of gesture, or Pietro Bianchi’s review of Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things—a “mechanistic bildungsroman … where the world turns out to be nothing more than a well-oiled machine.”

In her essay “Peace to the World,” Oxana Timofeeva refers to Immanuel Kant’s dark bon mot on The Perpetual Peace of the Graveyard. The strand of Index#1 bearing this title addresses the myriad forms of psychic and physical violence in the contemporary moment, most prominently Israel’s wholesale and ongoing devastation of civilian life and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip since October 7—an onslaught which has at the time of writing killed over 30,000 Palestinians, including upwards of 12,000 children, aided and abetted by the unwavering support of most Western powers. Contributions here include Sami Khatib’s searching exploration of modern barbarism, by way of Benjamin and Brecht, as well as Sandra Neugärtner’s examination of the “epistemic violence involved in the transfer of concepts and artistic knowledge,” and Novuyo Moyo’s review of the “frank, inquisitive approach” to portraiture taken by the painter Henry Taylor.

Moving from the perpetration of violence to strategies of refusal and resistance, the next section, “Tomorrow we will not work” is titled after the announcement suddenly made by workers in the rural Italian petrochemical factory where a young Antonio Negri organized in the early 1960s. Here we shuttle between radical forms of go-slow, quiet quitting, and social refusal, as detailed in the first part of e-flux journal contributing editor Evan Calder Williams’s magisterial essay “On Paralysis” and Jason E. Smith’s situation of the Situationist International within a broader “crisis of work” in the 1960s. We also find other liberatory horizons relating to the refusal of work and the quotidian, such as in R. H. Lossin’s review of Andrea Bowers’s practice (and the affront that queerness represents to a form of “capitalism that needs straight people”) and Christoph Menke’s recasting of Walter White (from Breaking Bad) as freedom fighter.

The period covered by Index #1 saw a spate of news stories reminding us, in an end-of-year tradition now as grimly familiar as marking up one’s resolutions, that 2023 had been “the hottest year on record, by far.” The Nurse Log features pieces responding to this situation in a number of different vernaculars. The title comes from silviculture forestry terminology, referring to a “a large piece of coarse wood on the forest floor that is referred to as fallen, debris, or dead” but which provides a wider ecological benefit, as detailed in Laila Seewang’s fine-grained genealogy of sustainable forestry and the timber trade. In the excerpts published from Aziba Ekio’s poem The Color, Green, meanwhile, we read of how “we scuttled along village roads / we pretended / were runways / back then / Green was a color / and not a manifesto.”

The climate crisis is just one prominent feature of the The Polycrisis, a term popularized by the economist Adam Tooze but first coined by the French sociologists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern in the late 1990s to describe the “interwoven and overlapping crises” humanity was seen to face on the brink of the new millennium. While, in a manner of speaking, this could have been a title assigned to many of the sections in Index #1, the pieces grouped here under this rubric largely deal with questions of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and neocolonial territorialization. We “follow the grain” through Dorota Jagoda Michalska’s essay on the politics of grain and “folkwark modernity” in Ukraine, and reckon with the Bonapartism of contemporary neocolonial illiberalism in Artemy Magun’s review of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Judith Wilkinson’s piece on a show devoted to self-determination and Third Worldist struggles.

In a turn from the larger abstraction of the nation-state to the little nations of the museum, Counter-citational Models engages questions of exhibition-making and curatorial strategy. In the second part of his essay on the Artists for Democracy movement, David Morris examines how their later exhibitions (for instance of Indigenous American art), “developed an understanding of exhibition-making as a didactic and pedagogical tool,” an understanding that is carried through in Octavian Esanu and Angela Harutyunyan’s interrogation of the challenges encountered by the MA in curating they co-convene at the American University of Beirut. Elsewhere, Gracie Hadland and Valentin Diaconov each review recent exhibitions that “turn the museum inside out.”

Index #1 draws to a close with a strand titled Benches Out of Snow. The metaphor here comes from Brecht but was later repurposed by the institutional psychotherapist Franco Rotelli: how to build institutions that behave like benches made from snow, such that they can support people in the winter of their lives, but melt away once they are no longer needed? How to overcome institutional inertia and sclerosis? In different ways, each of these contributions set out to address the problems of the commons, of living together, and what remains of the public sphere: from the (ultimately successful) petition against incorporating the draconian IHRA definition of anti-Semitism into Berlin cultural funding applications, through to Jose Rosales analysis of the 2017–18 Iranian popular struggles as an “exemplary laboratory of … militant sensibility.”