Issue 166

Today’s fascisms are rife with false claims and outright lies. But confronting such lies takes more than simply telling the truth. False claims, invented threats, and delusions of grandeur exert a hold on the imagination, and furthermore produce alternate realities that are no longer reducible to fact and falsehood. The damage has already been done. And yet, perhaps other ways of imagining and acting in the world still remain open and available. In this issue, Luce deLire asks whether the hallucinatory and excessive character of contemporary political tyranny might be redirected. Looking to André Breton and the early surrealists, deLire considers how their experiments with psychoanalysis drawing on practices like the “exquisite corpse” sought contact with reality through embracing the unknown rather than compulsively denying it.

Also in this issue are two new installments of our ongoing series Fantasies of the People, commissioned by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier. The series asks how fantasy can be embraced not as an escapist or private irrational faculty, but as a collective material practice capable of surpassing the hermeticism of imagination. In “Chain of Fools FKA Fantasy,” Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos reflect on how the sensory world kindles everyday fantasies, proposing that we listen in “as things sing with things.” Then in “Ontogenetic Fantasies: Objects and Images as Crystallized Capacities,” Ludovic Coupaye invokes Bernard Stiegler and Gilbert Simondon to question the traditional dichotomy between fantasy and reality. Coupaye ultimately concludes that fantasies, far from being “unreal projections opposed to reality,” exert real material force in the world. 

Lucy Steeds’s contribution to this issue begins with a question about historical repetition, asking, amongst other things, how exhibition histories are mobilized by curators to either reinforce canonization or unsettle the exhibition’s role in the reproduction of colonial culture. Indeed, can those two operations be separated? Zooming in on the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, particularly its exhibition of archival and artistic materials related to the participation of Indigenous artists in numerous historic European exhibitions, Steeds looks for how histories, and their relics, can chart other relationships with the present. 

In the first of a two-part essay, Giuliana Bruno asks whether it’s time to call for a new humanism—based not in the exclusive omnipotence of the human, but rather in the mixed agency of the human with mechanical, emotional, and organic processes of becoming. Looking at artists who encounter technological and mediatic realities as ecologically determined, Bruno asks how we might derive a renewed understanding of the human from their work. How do screen-based media arise from the dynamic structures of matter and the photosynthetic life of plants?

The first part of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s two-part essay “Parallel Acts” moves through three works by Lucy Raven that enlarge the distance between land and landscape, material fact and ideological instrument. In Raven’s stagings of land subject to industrial extraction, Wolukau-Wanambwa finds wild entropic exchanges of energy, and sedimentary flows that refuse containment of any kind. Next month, part two of “Parallel Acts” looks at the photographic surfaces of landscape in a work by Zoe Leonard.

Juliana Streva interviews Denise Ferreira da Silva about how her experiences in 1980s and ’90s Brazil influenced some of Ferreira da Silva’s most powerful approaches to and against philosophy. From a youth group in Vila Aliança to a neighborhood association linked to the Communist Party, Ferreira da Silva’s participation in everyday forms of collective education was foundational to her critique of the state, cultural politics, Marxism, and radical analyses of “law that did not take the state into account.” Streva and Ferreira da Silva discuss the possibility/impossibility of reparations, decolonization, and repair. 

—Editors

Luce deLire—Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model: Political Surrealisms and Tyrannical Excesses
It’s time for us to reappropriate “surrealism” both as a descriptive category and as a political strategy. In this essay, I first show how the category allows us to understand the recent rise of tyranny as maliciously surreal. I then propose a political surrealism that mobilizes euphoria against the current depletion of reason and imagination through AI and brainrot, national protectionism and psychological repression. The tech bros’ artificial “superintelligence beyond human capacity” pales beside the infinite force of imagination-powered human minds.

Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos—Chain of Fools FKA Fantasy
We still love imagination—if only for the automatic, autonomic query latent in its colloquial use—but we refuse the singularity of subjection asserted by imāginātiō because that’s precisely where it fails us, and any we. Clearly some kinda telescoping is needed to truly touch these times, something that hits a little more real for the necessarily collective construction of reality and fantasy.  

Ludovic Coupaye—Ontogenetic Fantasies: Objects and Images as Crystallized Capacities
Images and artefacts are not merely representations or indexes of worlds, nor simply mediators between them. I suggest approaching them as transductive operators through which capacities propagate across human, material, and environmental milieus, what I call, playfully, an “ontogenetic flux.” The waves and forms of relations generated when humans encounter objects and images actualize norms, values, relations, and possibilities that had remained latent.  

Lucy Steeds—The Goldfish Remembers: On the Curatorial Flex of Exhibition Histories
Art biennials and other perennial exhibitions seek to engage a public on the basis of their past achievements while simultaneously dedicating themselves to a new present. They may include some revisionary art history or even incorporate elements that restage previous shows. However, they rarely make a point of challenging the institutionalized pasts that promise to help secure more of the same types of exhibitions into the future. 

Giuliana Bruno—Manifesto for a New Humanism, Part 1: Cellular Thinking
At first glance, an inquiry into vegetable and cellular life may seem to diverge, both in terms of method and object, from an analysis of the arts, or of technological models of media. But if a plant’s cellular structure is subjected to a mediatic analysis, we can see that it in fact shares aspects of the materiality of visual technology, and in particular that of the film medium. And if we think further in cellular terms about forms of projection, as I later propose, we may be able to shift our perspective about the negative effects of media toward an outlook on environmental coexistence that does not exclude a new form of humanism.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa—Parallel Acts, Part 1: Lucy Raven
Dam Breach unfurls, in essence, as a continuous interplay between rigidity and fluidity, understood as two interanimating dynamics that burrow through Raven’s work. This same dynamic is active in the temporality of the work, as the videos’ iterative accumulations inflect the stolid, processional rhythms of the abstract grid with the successive effects of fluid, dynamic, and recursive change. Raven’s flattened frames evoke the austerity of evidentiary practice, yet their contents evoke other tendencies: the sedimentary activity of earthwork, the liquid textures of pigment, the irregular shape(s) of landscape, and the improvisational skeins of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressions.

Denise Ferreira da Silva in conversation with Juliana Streva—Movements, Reparation, and the Constitution of Everything
From this critique of the state, I developed a critique of both cultural politics and Marxism, as well as of theoretical critiques of law that did not take the state into account. I believe that one of my contributions in life is this: There can be no critique of law without a critique of the state, because the law does not operate in a vacuum, and the limits of law are also found within the state. So, all the pieces, all the threads come not only from the place where I grew up, Vila Aliança, but also from the political and theoretical transformations and circumstances of that moment.