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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.