Issue 161

So now it’s open US-Israeli interventionism for regime change in Iran. Even if the brutality of the Iranian state is well known and few can defend its violence against its own people (see our issue on the afterlife of the 2022 Jina uprising), we should be clear that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not agents of justice and are most definitely not acting in solidarity with the Iranian people. Any liberation will simply be a different means of violence and control, whether through escalation, fragmentation, or prolonged war.

In this issue, Yuk Hui points out that today’s machine-learning models radicalize the influential postmodern concept of the death of the author. What might have seemed hopeful when it meant the death of the sovereign genius—whether God, father, artist, or king—now extends its reach to subsume our own intellectual efforts and cognitive agency. But for Hui, it is in the impossibility of fully automating university education that we encounter the absolute limit of AI technocracy.

In a delirious essay, Thotti “plays cow” in a kind of personal postcolonial mysticism focused on Brazil’s north. In the humidity and heat of the Amazon region, Thotti’s account finds colonial history bleeding from all pores to take a crystalline form, refracting the cosmos full of stars as a cow stares back at you, flying suspended from a crane. In a similarly drifting essay, Tung-Hui Hu considers the perpetual aspiration to commodify every waking—and non-waking—moment of the day, as exemplified by the phenomenon of sleep streaming. Though the capitalist aspiration to find a way to make money while you sleep (as Warren Buffet put it) has existed since at least the nineteenth century, the latest money-making pastime, Hu writes, is “a paradoxical oscillation between entrepreneurism and passivity.” It is also a lesson in the liberatory potential of being “out of time,” and of choosing to dwell in exhaustion rather than trying to overcome it.

Fantasy and imagination were not always distinguished the way they are today, when the former is coded as passive and feminine and the latter as masculine, rational, and individualist. It was during the Enlightenment that fantasy was demoted to a base diversion while imagination was elevated to a cognitive faculty. As Devin Fore writes, this was an ideologically convenient shift for capitalist alienation. Fore’s piece in this issue, along with Kerstin Stakemeier’s on a similar theme, inaugurate our new Fantasies of the People series, which aims to recover the counter-intellectual tradition of fantasy—its expressions in fables, myths, and rituals. Fore and Stakemeier posit fantasy as a constructive power that can reassemble fragmented experience against imagination’s questionable distinction between the material world and inner freedom. 

Destruction doesn’t always leave a void in its wake. Indeed, as Isadora Neves Marques writes in their contribution about the genre of science fiction, “the debris and shards left behind … have much to teach us.” Elaborating on Judith Merril’s “heterodox (un)definition” of the genre, Neves Marques provocatively asserts: “We might provisionally say that science fiction is the fiction that endeavors to find the meanings and rituals hidden behind science perceived as magic and magic perceived as science.” 

Also in this issue, Joana da Palma Monbaron speaks with Aurélien Catin about art-worker organizing. Unlike recent basic income proposals that do not fundamentally change the relations between workers and the economy, Catin proposes a “wage for artistic work” that challenges capitalist property relations and could create modalities of solidarity between artists and other workers in the art sector. They discuss Catin’s historical research on the emergence of copyright, contemporary movements in France, and also “decolonial materialism,” which unites struggles for communist cultural infrastructure with those for reparations for colonial extraction. 

—Editors

Yuk Hui—The University Within the Limits of Automated Knowledge
Reengineering universities around industrial agendas forgets that contributing to economic growth and social impact are secondary to the fundamental function of the university as a place where knowledge—and more importantly, reason—are contested, and where individuals participate in the life of the spirit through collective learning, debate, and synthesis. Knowledge doesn’t only serve as a means to a practical end, like finding a job. Rather, knowledge allows us to realize a higher end, one that demands both contemplation and action.

Tung-Hui Hu—After Exhaustion, A Door
To see sleep streaming as sex work is to miss something fundamental about how sleep streamers propose other modes of being. The same holds true, reciprocally, for sex itself. We think we know what sex is as a discrete act—did they have sex? did they not?—but historically, sex acts have existed on a spectrum. A sleep stream positions a viewer somewhere in this expanded field—somewhere between sleepiness and sex and stranger-friendship and care.

Devin Fore—Fantasies at Work: An Introduction to Fantasies of the People
Fantasies do not contain symbolic messages, but instead nest in the motor reflexes of our muscles, nerves, and senses. For this reason, they always find their most articulate, most advanced form of expression in the work techniques and forces of production found in a given historical era. According to Adorno, fantasy offers a way to reestablish the connection between art and work that was severed under capitalist regimes of rationalized production.

Kerstin Stakemeier—Epic Fantasies: An Introduction to Fantasies of the People
Fantasy reassembles the living scraps and the deadened remains of disparate lives into a divergent synthesis. Fantasy is vitalized “morphology.” It socializes the replaceable commodities that have been isolated into their economic function, the binary sexes that have been secured into their stately legality, the native labors that have been ruptured by their imperial colonization, or de-actualized into being modernity’s backstory.

Joana da Palma Monbaron—Outline for a Communist Infrastructure in the Arts: Interview with Aurélien Catin
We must rediscover another militant tradition: that of collectively building the institutions that satisfy our needs. It is no longer a question of adopting a supplicatory stance towards a state apparatus, but of taking advantage of historical moments when this apparatus, or the legitimacy of the ruling class, is weak. I believe that we are entering such a moment.

Isadora Neves Marques—Science Fiction: Definitions Serve to be Destroyed
Although it is true that the laws of physics and biology aren’t homogeneously applied, interpreted, and internalized across earth’s many peoples and societies—much less by potential alien civilizations!—these laws are universalized through storytelling. It is only through the many traditions of storytelling that science is, in fact, lived. Science, one could say, is a negotiation between universe and world.

Thotti—Play Cow
This dialogue takes the form of a web of voracities, vertigo, and metabolisms in which the human is the flesh of a body straining with heteroglossia and polyphony, grotesque like Rabelais’s giants and their carnivals, where the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin sees “pregnant death, a death that gives birth.”