A journal of ten thousand things
Dear readers, we came across a peculiar joke the other day:
“A Confucian, a Legalist, and a Daoist are arguing about how to govern the Ten Thousand Things.
The Confucian says, ‘Educate them!’
The Legalist says, ‘Punish them!’
The Daoist says nothing.”
And so begins the sixth issue of e-flux Index, a journal of ten thousand things. Featuring 82 contributors, the 580 pages of this summer issue combine long-form essays on art, architecture, and contemporary culture; exhibition and film reviews; interviews; theory; and opinion pieces into eleven thematic digressions.
Thirty years into life online, our attention spans are increasingly taxed by algorithmic and data-driven time-sinks. Against the self-optimization regime of mindfulness apps, smart drugs, and tunnel vision, Index #6 instead embraces the generative pleasures of discovery. This publication is an invitation to drift, to detour into associative thinking and sudden moments of reverie.
Index #6 begins in the wasteland, with a section titled How We Take Things Apart. Things here fall apart, but they are also thrown from car windows, broken down, and repurposed. From waste to waistlines, the next section, The Abracadabra of Flesh, asks: how do our bodies give us away? Bulwarks Against Forgetting meanwhile examines the use and abuse of historical memory. In a time when official “memory cultures” mandate one reading of atrocities past and present, this digression queries how contemporary artistic practices of counter-memorialization can fight against the forces of forgetting. Leaving the all-too-terrestrial domain of historical memory and drifting up into the clouds of the imagination, Pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry gathers together this issue’s tricksters, jokers, storytellers, magicians, and daydreamers.
Strangers in the Village explores diasporic identities and the vagaries of displacement. The pieces here ask what happens when we shift our perspective of dwelling, of being-in-the-world, from the sturdy terrain of home to the conditions of Heimatlosigkeit, in-betweenness, diaspora, and glocality? And Then Came the Environment meanwhile maps the terrain of ecological collapse, from a “phenomenology of climate devastation” to the black sands of the Caribbean. Seeking shelter from the unpredictabilities of the great outdoors inside the sterilized “closed world” of the museum, we then arrive at A World of Statues, a digression on museology and radical curatorial research.
Infrastructures of Dependency approaches the ambivalent social world that comes after autonomy, after independence is obtained. Contributions range from a thoroughgoing exploration of the hobbyhorse of “autonomous art” to essays on the postcolonial melancholia surrounding the false promises of industrial modernization. Off-Script traverses media spectacles and staged realities, from reality TV presidents and hyperreal CGI marionettes to the thorny relationship between theater and film. Barbed Wire Rusts gathers contributions that seek to imagine communal life otherwise: from the Paris Commune to the disability critique of property. Index #6 ends in a crescendo of resonance and rupture with The Sound of Your World Collapsing, bringing together essays and reviews on voicing, operatic curation, the cacophony of war, and the resonant silence of meditation.
From monuments to marionettes, climate devastation to acts of sonic resistance, Index #6 wanders through the margins where new ways of thinking—and living—take shape.
The printed edition of the Index is available to purchase from select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The publication is distributed by Antenne Books (Europe and the UK), Les presses du réel (Europe), Asterism Books (USA), Art Metropole (Canada), The Book Society (East Asia), and Buchhandlung Walther König (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Annual subscriptions, covering four issues, are available at both institutional and individual rates here.
e-flux Index #6 features contributions from: Katherine C.M. Adams, Mal Ahern, Jamie Allen, Mónica Amor, Stephanie Bailey, Oliver Basciano, Sarah Bell, Lucy Benjamin, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Pietro Bianchi, Ewa Borysiewicz, Molly Crabapple, Jhordan Channer, Adeline Chia, After Comfort Collective, Guy Debord, Brian Dillon, Cathryn Drake, Marguerite Duras, Ben Eastham, Caroline Elbaor, Jean Epstein, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Almudena Escobar López, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Andrea Fraser, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Alan Gilbert, David Gissen, Anna Gorskaya, Rob Goyanes, Simon Hajdini, Jörg Heiser, Yuk Hui, Dylan Huw, Nadia Huggins, Isabel Jacobs, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Jennifer Johung, George Kafka, Michael Kurtz, Enzo Lara-Hamilton, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Jen Liu, Sven Lütticken, Mae-ling Lokko, Natasha Marie Llorens, Elsa Mäki, Ives Maes, Babette Mangolte, Michael Marder, Jeremy Millar, John Douglas Millar, Luise Mörke, Serubiri Moses, Novuyo Moyo, Chris Murtha, Minh Nguyen, Marakianí Olivieri, Trevor Paglen, Andreas Petrossiants, Armina Pilav, André Pitol, Valery Podoroga Post-Novis, Océane Ragoucy, Rachel Rakes, Oleksiy Radynski, Shellyne Rodriguez, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Sophie Rose, Kristin Ross, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Frans Saraste, Aaron Schuster, Marina Vishmidt, Lua Vollaard, Jason Waite, Zofia Trafas White, Toby Üpson, Slavoj Žižek, and Amy Zhang.
