Art has always had a strange relation to power, whether in the service of royals and merchants or as a form for revolutionary vanguards’ imagination. Today the relationship has become even more complex, especially as the structures that have underwritten contemporary art shift beneath our feet—open markets close, soft power hardens into war, and populist sentiment becomes public life. One can say that, on a very high level, power itself has become highly unstable. In this special issue of e-flux journal, guest editor Mi You proposes that this instability is accompanied by a malleability, but also by a problem of representation that demands the immediacy of realism: a transfer of hopes and expectations to a calculus of means and ends. What would it mean to tactically revisit sites of oppression like capital and the state, but as fluid bodies that might be repurposed as levers? If art still corresponds to social progress, do notions like freedom and equality need new vision or should we rather prepare for what follows their ruin?
—e-flux journal editors
This issue is born out of recognizing a slow-burning yet unmistakable process that leaves in tatters what some perceive as a golden era of globalization. In the face of geopolitical fallout, the foreclosure of a liberal progressive social contract, and rising claims to value pluralism, the survival of art’s exceptionalism depends on realism. Questions immediately arise, such as: What concessions can be made without pulling the rug out from under one’s feet? How to make space for subtlety, while keeping the scale of politics and economics closely in sight? How to encourage cultural practices that differentiate political means and ends while celebrating debates that are not zero-sum games—or are purely representational? Can cultural practices even share space with the means and ends of science and technology?
This issue plays with the concept of experimentation in relation to public life. An experiment rearranges existing structures without necessarily adding something ontologically new. But what is a public today? Today’s publics are composed of people who make up an overwhelming majority of a society, but who shy away from asserting their political existence as such. Rather, their positions are hollowed out by current political debates. Is it possible for the backbone of society to experiment with the forces that it is subject to? In time, we hope, the limit of rational deliberations in politics and science will be clear to a society that doesn’t want to dissolve into ever smaller domains of relativism, but still maintains a general affinity for liberty without being doctrinal and self-righteous about what progressive politics or civil society should look like.
In the issue, Max Grünberg explores the politics of games and considers what happens when designers and artists make games modeling the stakes of collective organization and social antagonisms. Dingxin Zhao’s essay highlights that nationalist movements have to be examined from the perspective of geopolitics among major empires, and discerns typologies of nationalism that help us clarify forces at play in today’s global politics.
Aslak Aamot Helm’s essay tackles the questions of underdetermination and of the wall of complexities that overwhelm scientists as sophisticated technologies open new frontiers. In a time when scientific objectivity is undermined in public debates, can its rationality be subtly delivered through art? Jacob Dreyer’s essay dives into China’s results-driven approach to science and technology, which resembles and diverges from both the US and the Soviet paths in important ways. Across disparate political orders, the question remains: If science is the answer, what was the question? Aiwen Yin and Yiren Zhao draw on extensive experience in community-building to transmit and transform learning through role-playing games. Their work in art and design intersects with social work, urban development, and policymaking.
My essay opens the issue with an analysis of the precepts of art amidst the sea change in liberalism, progressive politics, and geopolitics. Danilo Scholz’s essay traces how the philosopher-turned-diplomatic-maverick Alexandre Kojève engaged in trade diplomacy and regional integration, revealing the deep histories of the design of global trade, which calls for our renewed attention amidst current crises. Kojève’s great success is perhaps also his limit: it is nearly impossible to serve as a “civil servant of humanity” in a multipolar world.
Kojève once said, “Good diplomats play multiple games at the same time.” Even in a world where multiple simultaneous games are mutually unintelligible to each other, we must still at least try to remain at the table to play them.
