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.

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.

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.

If post-socialist critique is reductive, individual artists and curators are not the sole culprits—nor are MoMA, Guggenheim, or liberal 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.

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.

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?

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.