Issue 158

Congratulations to Zohran Kwame Mamdani for being elected the next mayor of New York City! 

To confront today’s ugly theaters of cruelty, torture, and mass dehumanization, let’s experiment with the stadium stands around the field of popular spectatorship to foster alternate modes of political formation. In this issue of e-flux journal, Stevphen Shukaitis looks at the insurgent, aesthetic, and revolutionary experiment in self-organization and social imagination that is football (aka soccer), pointing out that Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri was among the early organizers of AC Milan’s ultras, helping to shape a culture of the game inseparable from collective action and horizontal politics. The issue also features Antonio Negri’s only work of narrative fiction, written while in prison in 1980 and translated into English here for the first time by Timothy S. Murphy. The piece combines a tentatively hopeful collective vision of the future with a plot focused on the inevitability of subjective antagonisms.

Also in this issue, Jonas Staal peers into the shadow art world where artists, fiction writers, and game designers build immersive models with which to rehearse the genocidal imaginaries of today and tomorrow. It is within these speculative war zones that empires caricature the composite enemies they need, but also where the racist and genocidal imaginary folds back on itself as pure and deliberate hallucination.

Keti Chukhrov looks at a fundamental contradiction of contemporary art, which both inherits the modernist legacy of radical negativity and yet aspires to be socially useful. Today’s contemporary art institutions often obscure this negativist background in order to perform the values of a democratic civil society, despite being “detached from broader sociality.” This traps art in an impasse between conflicting demands for autonomous critique and popular utility.

John Bohn takes the revival of interest in James Baldwin in recent years as an occasion to return to the work of Richard Wright (1908–60), author of Native Son, which Baldwin famously eviscerated. Wright’s resistance to a saintly portrayal of both Black liberation and revolutionary class struggle may have made his work unpalatable to some, but Bohn argues that the novel can also spur social movements to engage in much-needed self-investigation and negative critique, strengthening them in their fight against white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

Sophie Lewis’s essay examines Monique Wittig’s lesbian feminist philosophy, which regarded lesbianism as not only a sexual orientation but as a political position that challenges the heterosexual political-economic system. Though Wittig’s theories were radical, Lewis writes that it is this uncompromising position that limited her influence within feminist movements at the time, which were more motivated to build coalitions around different forms of oppression.

As part of After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses—Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie commends Okwui Enwezor for bringing African contemporary art into European and American institutional centers of power and for brokering an exceptional space of exchange that few had the skill to concretely realize. But what were the hidden costs of this act of inclusion? And in what ways did it follow the headwinds of a neoliberal ideology hungry to open new markets and devour new artworks, but with little regard for the social or political concerns that artists bring forward in their works? 

—Editors

Antonio Negri—The Broken Pipe
When the committee of the Commune met—it was a heterogeneous committee, composed of old people, people who should have had a higher and more complex experience but who, like all old people, had only a different experience—when the committee met, attention naturally fell on the pipe. The clue. But what the devil, who knew anything about it! And then a clue is a clue and that’s it! An element of particular knowledge, not a foretaste of an exhaustive knowledge of the event.

Keti Chukhrov—Art and Emancipation in the Gaze of Political Eschatology
The art of modernism, the avant-garde, and conceptual practice inherently demonstrate an awareness that art sublates itself for the sake of counter-aesthetic reconsideration. Such self-destruction is viewed as an inevitable turning point in social history. However, post-conceptual contemporary practice forgets about that turn and often makes no effort to specify why its nonartistic practices should reconfirm themselves on the territory of art.

Jonas Staal—The Shadow Art World: Rehearsing Genocide
Some may be surprised that cultural workers are willing to operate in the shadow art world, contributing to the entrenchment or expansion of empire. But there is another more critical question: Are game developers and science-fiction artists merely predicting the wars of the future, or are they actually writing those wars into existence?

Sophie Lewis—Beautiful Soup: On the Afterlives of Monique Wittig’s Unique Utopias
“Sexual pleasure and sexual modes are not the question,” Wittig noted in 1989. For the French philosopher, who lived from 1935 to 2003 and wrote both fiction and nonfiction, heterosexuality is not a name for a kind of human desire at all. For her, pleasureful things are, by definition, not heterosexual—and heterosex may or may not entail having sex. Instead, “heterosex” is the name of a phallocentric social contract that humanity must violently overcome if it ever wants to be free.

John Bohn—Narrating Self-Abolition: On Richard Wright
Rather than depicting dramatic moments of struggle like the riot or the strike, Native Son investigates the nearly imperceptible shifts that occur in everyday battles that precede and inform those moments, the basic building blocks of a revolution, and the individual subjectivities that compose and carry it out.

Stevphen Shukaitis—The Trequartistas of Culture
In moments of constraint, uncertainty, or political crisis, the relationship between the histories of football and art become visible. Artistic modalities have refunctioned the game, smuggling new forms of politics and aesthetics into its spaces, transforming matches, terraces, and stadiums. Tactical innovations, supporter culture, grassroots organizing, and artistic experimentation have regularly converged to make football not merely a spectacle, but a medium through which new forms of life, solidarity, and resistance might be rehearsed.

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie—In the Kingdoms of Ruin: Okwui Enwezor, Contemporary Art, and the Global South
If we think of modern African artists as agents of cultural translation who enunciated modernist positions through appeals to Indigenous identities, contemporary African artists are transnational and agentic actors who engage with the global art world through various modalities. We should be interested in how their art reflects an expanded awareness of their location in Africa, if they live and work there, or in the Euro-American contexts that they often relocate to in an effort to gain greater visibility for their work.