A curious series of handmade signs started replacing commercial advertisements in some bus shelters near e-flux in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn over the last few weeks. Amidst the new US government’s breakneck pace of undoing itself, the signs’ cheerful colors, reminiscent of children’s crafts, and their calls to protect democracy and resist seem to inhabit a level of power surreal in its mismatch with that of Trump, Musk, and their cabal armed with AI engineers and turbocharged by historically unprecedented wealth. Amidst the near-absence of effective opposition from the stunned onlookers of more organized and powerful bodies in the Democratic Party, labor unions, and civil society, perhaps this does not bode well for the outcome. Then again, maybe this is how a new form of opposition begins.
In this issue, Sven Lütticken analyzes contemporary repressive processes, specifically those that attack “forms of life” not suitable for neoliberal/neofascist governance. After a thorough intellectual history of Lebensformen (forms of life), beginning with Friedrich Schiller, Lütticken traces reappearances of the concept across aesthetics, the life sciences, and political theory over the last century. Arriving at the present, Lütticken suggests that the student movement against genocide exemplifies a “non-fascist life-form” that confronts the present necropolitical functions of civic institutions. In his four-part essay “On Paralysis,” Evan Calder Williams has traced backwards from high-functioning bodies and well-organized systems worshipped today, uncovering a history of merciless bodily control. In the final installment in this issue, Williams looks at how circuits connecting bodies and their environment are conjoined by movement, severed by stoppage, activated by damage, and always made possible by labor rendered invisible.
What if the path to liberation lies not in self-possession but rather in dispossession, or the acknowledgement that one’s body is not “one’s own”? In “There Is No Death: A Sketch Towards Entrancement,” Thotti challenges Western notions of sovereignty through trance. Weaving together Yoruba initiations, Ernst Jünger’s time wall, and Heidegger’s concept of “mineness,” the essay playfully explores the ways entrancement dissolves the distinctions between human and nonhuman, self and other. This issue also features a new translation of a 1999 essay by artist, curator, and researcher Marion von Osten (1963–2020) that reflects on the rise of discourse- and collaboration-driven art spaces and social contexts in the 1990s, and how their independent “cultural production” contrasted with the weaponization of criticism as a magical cudgel for bludgeoning opponents with universal knowledge.
Adding a historical appraisal to After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses—KJ Abudu discusses Okwui Enwezor’s important 2002 essay “The Black Box” to ask what conjunctions of ethics and aesthetics, poetics and politics, we are tasked to figure during this “heightened moment of accumulating imperial debris and accelerated mass mobilization.” How can Enwezor’s curatorial and theoretical approaches offer pathways towards––or reveal the fundamental limitations of––Western institutions’ abilities to disinherit colonial modalities? In the first of a two-part essay, Rodrigo Nunes offers a trenchant analysis of the formation of the physician, writer, and Bolshevik revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov’s “tektology”: a radical attempt to construct a universal science that bridges social, physical, and biological systems of knowledge. Nunes underlines how Bogdanov was thinking against Hegelian dialectics, which he deemed insufficiently universal, and instead developed theories of resistance and organization from divergent disciplines.
Ou Ning’s “The Ideal World,” an excerpt from his book The Agritopianists: Thinking and Practice in Rural Japan, looks at Mushakoji Saneatsu’s audacious New Village experiment, which lasted from the 1910s to the 1930s. The intellectuals and outcasts that formed this horseshoe-shaped community along the Omaru River in Japan created sophisticated models for collective land ownership without class hierarchy, incorporating art production into labor, and integrating with refugees in an imperial era, all as a radical third position, flourishing between capitalist individualism and revolutionary overhaul.
