In making sense of the present moment, where systemic thought should prevail, monocausal explanations instead seem everywhere to abound. One language or narrative is enforced where many are required. Against this monoglottism, we can look for guidance to the radical ethos of Officer Ingravallo—the Roman detective with a philosophical bent who is the protagonist of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s classic modernist crime novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulena (1957). Early on in Gadda’s masterpiece, Ingravallo delivers his declaration of procedural intent: "He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. … The opinion that we must “reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of the cause,” as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation … This was how exactly how he defined 'his' crimes. 'When they call me.. sure. If they call me, you be sure that there’s trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle.'"

e-flux Index is a bimonthly publishing project that likewise sets itself the task of helping untangle the mess of the contemporary—which wades itself all the way out into Ingravello’s multicausal whirlpool.