I know where I’m going!

The e-flux Index carries on its cover a labyrinth, composed from many winding textual paths, nooks, and crannies. Magazines and labyrinths share a certain nonlinearity. This publication’s ambition is in part to help orient readers through the breadth of two months of e-flux’s broad commissioning across arts, architecture, criticism, philosophy, film, and a whole cosmos of other topics, and to thereby give structure and coherence to the multi-tabbed browsers of an often-cluttered digital publishing landscape. But like any good labyrinth it also remains attuned to the project of radical disorientation. The resultant Index is situated somewhere between a travel guide to the contemporary moment and the Situationist “counter-maps” produced by Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Jacqueline de long, and Asger Jorn for their experimental dérives through the city and the archive.

Earlier this year Australian media reported on two young German tourists who found themselves stranded for a week in the wilderness of Cape York, having diligently followed Google Maps (mis)directions.1 Such GPS “fails” have become familiar clickbait since we all became dependent on our smartphones for navigation: a Japanese couple driving their 4x4 into the Pacific Ocean; an Indian tourist in Yorkshire following his GPS onto the railroad tracks; Swedish tourists sent 400 miles off course from their intended destination of Capri to… Carpi. Contemporary folk tales, somewhere between Looney Tunes and Hansel and Gretel, these stories share a similar moral structure: at some point, the hapless travelers come to invest total confidence into their GPS—to the point that its directions overwhelm all the other environmental signals, which might indicate they were heading off course.

Shaking our handsets for reorientation across multiple and intersecting scales (geopolitical, economic, ethical), we find ourselves now living in societies ever more confused and conflicted about their fundamental orientation, and ever more disoriented by an advanced semiocapitalism where signals and noise intermesh.2 Radical artists, architects, writers, and filmmakers have been purposefully disorientating and misdirecting themselves, if not aimlessly drifting, for years. Both as a strategy inclined toward the “mimetic exacerbation” of broader social conditions,3 and simply as a means for exploring the complex rewards and revelations of getting lost.

We can think here of one of the twentieth centuries’ most enigmatic conceptualists—Stanley Brouwn. Recently arrived in Amsterdam from Holland’s former colonial periphery of Suriname in the early 1960s, Brouwn embarked on his this way brouwn work. This involved him approaching random members of the Dutch public and asking them to draw him directions to a particular point in the city, resulting in a sequence of wobbly biro pen abstractions that he would subsequently stamp with either THIS WAY BROUWN or NO WAY BROUWN (if they didn’t know the way), like a dealer certifying the authenticity of a print for sale. In one of his very few artist’s statements on the work, contributed to the influential anthology Happenings. Fluxus. Pop Art. Nouveau Realisme, the artist wrote: “Every day, Brouwn makes people discover the streets they use. A farewell to the city, to the world, before taking the big jump into space, before discovering space. It is not the past but the future which has the greatest influence on our ideas and actions.”4

The cartography of Index #4 gathers everything published by e-flux.com from June–July 2024 into nine thematic districts, across and through which we hope you can plot your own exploratory dérive. These districts are titled: Things We Don’t Understand, Fluid Subjects, Not Asking for a Trip to the Moon, Forty Good Evenings, Doomscrolling, The Age of the Amateur, Elephants Without Tusks, Levels of Control, and How to Measure Everything.

*

Index#4 begins—somewhere between puzzlement and horror— with Things We Don’t Understand. This district opens with Mimi Ọnụọha’s arresting essay on what changes when we learn of something atrocious having occurred somewhere we thought we knew well. Pieces from two representatives of the Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis, Alenka Zupančič and Slavoj Žižek respectively, proceed to probe the structure of the disavowals and indifference that undergird modern subjectivity. Meanwhile Janus Rose’s interview with Chelsea Manning examines, among other topics, the obstacles that corporate media ownership presents to collective knowledge sharing.

The issue then drifts, eddies, and leaks, into a selection of Fluid Subjects. We learn how the ocean as a smooth space provided a “horizon of possibility” for the seascapes Lala Rukh produced living in landlocked Lahore, while Sean O’Toole writes of how Rossella Biscotti’s aquatic installations foreground the darker flipside of the ocean as a striated space of transnational trade, military economies, and hazardous migratory journeys. The porous boundary between inside and out is straddled along the lines of Marianna Janowicz’s essay on the politics of air-drying laundry, while Isabel Ling brings our attention back to the enormous quantities of water that enable the computational heft of crypto mining.

Arriving back on solid land and taking inspiration from the title of Maricarmen de Lara’s 1986 documentary No les pedimos un viaje a la luna,5 Not Asking for a Trip to the Moon enters the field of post-Fordist organizing and its many demands. Erin McElroy writes here of the ingenious strategies pursued by housing activists against shady landlords in California, while Liara Roux and Irmgard Emmelhainz examine contemporary feminist struggles from two different vantage points—the hyper-mediated entrepreneurs of OnlyFans on the one hand and precariatized domestic laborers and el tendederos fight against femicide in South America on the other. Francisco Nunes and Matteo Pasquinelli each explore the adequacy of prevailing theories of labor and value to current patterns of dispossession, exploitation, and collective action.

The linguist Roman Jakobson once reportedly instructed a group of actors to repeat “Good Evening” forty times in forty different ways. Forty Good Evenings departs from this radical exercise in transforming a phrase’s meaning through sheer repetition to assemble pieces that explore the relationship between language and ideology. The languages here range from a film script by Anton Vidokle, in which the nomenclature of Ceaușescu-era communism produces bafflement, to the mantras of contemporary populist governance in South America. Ilya Budraitskis anatomizes the “absolutist relativism” of Putin’s linguistic inversions, Stephanie Bailey identifies the obfuscatory language of patriarchal law in Jordan Strafer’s video work, and Alexi Kukuljevic confronts the wordplay practiced by the very devil himself.

Dissatisfied as many often claim to be with the ongoing “enshittification” of the Internet,6 still we cannot stop Doomscrolling. Under this title we’ve collaged together pieces that explore the maladies and the promises of our hyperconnectivity. Lai Yi Ohlsen details the quixotic task of trying to measure the Internet as it expands in real time while Franco “Bifo” Beradi peers into the dark sensitivities of the “connective generation” who grew up online. Two exhibition reviews from Jörg Heiser and Daisy Hildyard intimate the trend toward hyperlinked curation for perennial shows, and we learn from Isabel Jacobs of the proto-networking underway in Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical collages.

Twenty years before the Internet went public, and before punk proudly raised its middle figure to all forms of professionalism, Roland Barthes began theorizing “amateurism.”7.Since then, the appeal and risks of doing-it-yourself have only intensified. The Age of the Amateur moves from Boris Groys writing on the iconoclastic logic of Pussy Riot’s notorious “punk prayer” to Panu Savolainen on the self-built vernacular log houses found in one of the northernmost regions of the planet. Between these pieces we encounter teenage zinesters, a survey of the autopoietic countercultures of the formerly Eastern Bloc, Yifan Wang and Changwen Chen’s theorization of Huaqiangbei’s second-hand phone markets, and Hugh Davies on the “alchemical work” of hackers.8

From DIY, the Index then moves to the great outdoors—albeit one transformed by human activity into a nature beyond the fantasy of an untouched “nature.” This is the world of Elephants Without Tusks.9 This can be liberatory, as seen in Luce deLire’s theorization of a transitional and transexual understanding of nature, picking up from McKenzie Wark’s call to bring back the “problem of what nature might be … from exile among the hippies,” or in Lukas Brasiskis writing of how Jonas Mekas’s final film, Requiem, summons up a “a prophetic vision of a world poised for renewal.” But as Filipa Ramos, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne remind us, this next nature is also the world of species who contemplate their own extinction and sophisticated carbon capture offsetting markets designed to permit the perpetuation of extractivist economies.

The penultimate section, Levels of Control, returns indoors to assemble pieces troubled by the interrelated problems of containment, storage, and domesticity. In the first part of a major essay for e-flux Architecture’s After Comfort project, Mal Ahern provides a startling examination of the obsessive architectural desire to “keep the world out” of museums. The entropic ruins of Tolia Astakhishvili’s installations, reviewed here by Chris Murtha, connect with Bami Oke’s personal reflections on the decay of the data we hoard on our devices. Orit Gat’s review of Zurich Art Weekend finds a collection of looted art haunted by its history, and we end with Chantal Akerman’s video loop of a no-less haunted Jeanne Dielmann sat alone in her apartment.

Index# 4 draws to a close by taking a step back, to get some distance on it all. How to Measure Everything begins with McKenzie Wark returning to reconsider her Hacker Manifesto twenty-five years after its publication. In an essay on the cosmos as proto-cinema, republished on e-flux’s new Film Notes section (launched in June 2024), Alexander Kluge reflects on the light brought to us from distant galaxies. In London the painter Caragh Thuring depicts the hulking silhouette of Mount Tamalpais some 5000 miles away (having never seen it in person), while in Beijing the street photographer Mo Yi displaces himself from the crowd flowing all around him. Finally, Pier Paolo Pasolini considers the interval between the thunderclap and the lightning, and Michelangelo Antonioni the distance between the event and the image.

— Berlin, October 2024