Issue 167

History happens slowly, then quickly, then slowly again, in waves of contracting and expanding potential. At the moment, political changes are tearing through the streets and election systems of multiple cities and countries, forcing open new possibilities for the future that just days or weeks ago seemed sealed off. The odd thing, however, about convulsive fits of rage on streets and in voting booths is not that they instantaneously change anything, but that they have immense representational power to foretell what is to come by narrowing a field of possibilities: They telescope our vision forward to presage a structure of life that seems suddenly real enough to look backward at us from the future. In this issue of e-flux journal, Giuliana Bruno continues with the second part of her essay elaborating on how projection is more than just an image of light flashing forward onto a screen or a psychoanalytic displacement. It is also an alchemical force seeking the conversion and transmutation of matter, a magnetic field that draws together organic and nonorganic elements into a mixed environment of material and sensory exchange. 

Also in this issue, Giulia Colletti speaks with Metahaven’s Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden about their latest book, The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures, and how it deals with the politics of perception and the AI modeling of cognition. What is the particular form of cognition that art invites? Can it be said to project another kind of model that is navigable through empathy—itself a “feeling into” that projects into another person’s inner world and motivations? 

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev invites us to consider the presence of angels, and how their role as divine intermediaries carries a very different kind of address and agency than the agentic AI systems that anticipate and predict with prophetic effects, but really only mold the future based on the known coordinates of what they have amassed. Such an overaccumulation of data causes a deadening and overwhelming saturation that moves counter to the very bodily experience of absence and emptiness that is also a readiness for actually new and unforeseen knowledge, thought, and art to enter and bring about transformation—what used to be called “grace,” which is unattainable by machines. 

Dante Philp asks in this issue: “If theories are valid only to the degree that they relate to definite ‘praxis’ in given situations, then what prospects are there for learning lessons from past struggles?” His essay dives deep into the historical reverberations and consequences of a presentation by two members of the radical Italian group Lotta Continua in Buffalo in 1971, which we also publish in this issue—the first time it has seen the light of day since it circulated as a pamphlet in London and beyond over fifty years ago. Reporting from Italy’s exploding “long ’68,” the Lotta Continua militants (Gianni Safri and Franco Caprotti) speak of their attempts to translate revolutionary experiences from elsewhere into their own context. Philps reads the reception of the text at the conference alongside the reception of “laboratory Italy” in England, where groups like Big Flame studied the tactics of Lotta Continua and similar organizations. Returning to the original text today, then, is not purely an exercise in historicizing what might be unperiodizable, but rather a bid to reignite flames, and to change our time for a different one—a projection in its own right. 

After probing three major works by Lucy Raven in our last issue, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa returns with part two of his essay “Parallel Acts,” this time focused on the epic photographic series Al río / To the River (2016–22) by Zoe Leonard. The series consists of over five hundred photographs taken along a 1200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande, which runs along the US-Mexico border. In his meticulous reflection on Al río / To the River, Wolukau-Wanambwa shows how Leonard’s interest in iteration undermines certain staid modernist conventions about the authority of the photographic gaze. “In Al río,” he writes, “iteration presses back against solipsistic illusions … just as Leonard’s work responds to multiple entangled histories of imaging, and to the political implications of our hereditary or chosen points of view.” 

A conversation between Anselm Franke and Fumi Okiji in this issue continues our ongoing series Fantasies of the People, commissioned by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier to ask 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 “Reoriginating Our Unreality,” Franke and Okiji discuss the role of fantasy in the backwards-projecting construction of origin stories and myths. Perhaps it is where historical power becomes the most openly yet seductively performative that the existential imagination runs wild, dreaming up essences of our selves coming from the cosmos, from our own ingenuity, from elements, or from our stories of becoming.

And what of the dead—including those who animate the histories unfolding in our present and who have been written out of the conversation? Beny Wagner probes how the enclosure of land also saw the expulsion of ghosts and spirits from our worlds. Indeed, it turns out that decades before the publication of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, the word “communism” first appeared in a text fragment by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin titled “Communism of Spirits” (Communismus der Geister). For Wagner, the enclosure of the dead continues today with AI services termed variously “GriefTech” or “DeathTech,” which welcome the dead back into the fold, remade and reanimated by LLMs. He asks: “What is lost in our relational framework to the past and future when the dead are captured and reappear in the commodity form? Where will we find a communism of spirits?”

This month, e-flux journal slightly shifts its publishing rhythm to a bimonthly format spanning all months of the year, including summer and winter holidays. Issue 167 is the first in this new format, with the following issue in January—our first January issue in some time. Thank you as always for reading!

—Editors

Metahaven in conversation with Giulia Colletti—After the Next Token
Physics aspires to describe nature through the language of math, while poetry does not have—and cannot have—a commensurably precise form of notation. The language of poetry is always, necessarily, contaminated with a spillover of meaning from elsewhere, and it benefits from that. But one thing poetry might have in common with physical laws is the way poetry abstracts, certainly more than prose does. Physical laws—like those of statistical mechanics—allow you to abstract from having to describe every possible configuration of stuff. Where some poetry may come close here is in its freedom to abstract from exhaustive description.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa—Parallel Acts, Part 2: Zoe Leonard
In Leonard’s work, iteration reanimates photography’s contingency and incompleteness, its incapacity to see and know all from a fixed point in space. It resurfaces the copresence of a wider variety of discernible “subjects” than can tend to articulate themselves in a visual economy driven by autonomy’s logic of exception. The recursive nature of iteration materializes the multiplicity of varying connections that exist between places in time, and it materializes the manifold connections that exist between images in space. Iteration in this way makes multivalence available, perceptually, by infusing the vertiginous force of instantaneity into the horizontal plasticity of time.

Gianni Safri and Franco Caprotti—Organizing for Revolution
This does not mean that in our opinion there is nothing more to be learned from Lenin or Luxemburg. On the contrary, it simply means that we intend to present here a contribution of our own experience. This seems to be the correct way for us to participate in this discussion; first of all, because we consider that the praxis in a specific situation constitutes the only possible measure of the validity of any theory; and secondly, because we think that the problem of organization cannot be reduced to a simple theoretical problem or even a technical-administrative one, but rather must always be seen in strict relationship to a determinate class situation and to a certain political program. In other words, the question of “how to organize” depends strictly on another question, “Why organize, and under what conditions?”

Dante Philp—Somewhere Between Buffalo and Big Flame: A Forgotten Conference
If theories are valid only to the degree that they relate to definite “praxis” in given situations, then what prospects are there for learning lessons from past struggles? This difficulty would have doubtless agonized some of the American audience members, listening excitedly about the unrest in Italy and watching their own revolutionary movements fragment—much as we today look longingly at insurrections in other countries and ask why “we” fail to take such initiative. Reports from an accelerating succession of upheavals—from the renters’ and student revolts in Spain and France, to the shock electoral mobilizations in Serbia and Brazil—have prompted a similar wave of studied envy by those of us in relatively subdued atmospheres elsewhere.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev—The Angelic-Agentic Dimension: Prolegomena to a Twenty-First-Century Theory of Subjectivity
The consequences of algorithms are entirely material—energy consumption, heat, labor, spatial infrastructures, and, increasingly, decisions affecting human and nonhuman lives—yet the operation itself remains procedurally enclosed. It produces results but cannot itself ground the conditions through which those results acquire meaning. The angel and the agent are thus not two names for the same intermediary function. They indicate different epistemological regimes: what is received and what is made; what addresses and what executes; what may transform the receiver through encounter and what transforms inputs according to operations.

Anselm Franke and Fumi Okiji—Reoriginating Our Unreality
Seeking a grounding in this horror is the quest of those Lord of the Rings fantasies that dominate and terrorize white politics. I like to call these fantasies a symptom of a crisis of origination. It begins with the disavowal and denial of an originary violence. The pathos of those symptoms is truly pathetic. But what passes as fantasy in that industry is not what you propose, and I wonder what it means for you to take the fantastic seriously and differently, as you propose in Billie’s Bent Elbow, which reads the orisha Èṣù’s aporetic bearing and Yoruba aesthetics as something closer to technique than to origin.

Giuliana Bruno—Manifesto for a New Humanism, Part 2: The Culture of Projection
It is well known that the idea of projection became central to psychoanalysis and the arts of technological modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. But it is not well known that its history is also deeply rooted in environmental processes, and that its meaning goes much further back in time. The term “projection” actually originated in alchemy, where it was already in use in the late fifteenth century. This is a fundamental genealogy to unearth, because it speaks of projection as the act of transforming organic and inorganic matter. This genealogy is consequential not only for rethinking what the term “projective” means but also for understanding what a projective model of knowledge can do.

Beny Wagner—The Dead and the Commons
The dead form the connective tissue between the body and place, between signs and signification, between the built environment and the nonhuman world. Their absent presence in the material and immaterial relations that structure life means that when those relations are reconfigured, the dead take on new forms. Perhaps different historical regimes of enclosure continuously displace the dead, and in the process, reconfigure the scope of possibilities for their appearance or disappearance among the living.