What are theory’s conditions of possibility? How, where, and by whom is it deployed in the art world? The late Marina Vishmidt, whose essay begins this section, helped reorient the focus of critique in art theory from the narrow attachment to the “institution” toward the terrain of “infrastructure.” Her ideas percolate into Anthony Discenza’s dispatch from the 2025 Bard CCS graduate-curated exhibitions. Though the professionalized infrastructures of theory pro...
Index #9
Did the Theory Wars take place?
As quaint as they may now seem at thirty years distance (under febrile geopolitical conditions that for an increasing share of the world are those of actual wars that did take place, or their looming inevitability), the Theory Wars, and the fissures they opened in the modern academy and wider cultural sphere, supplied many of the (anti)intellectual coordinates for the "moving right show" under which so many of us have now been living since the mid-2010s. Indeed, the outright refusal of the patient mediation of theory seems in retrospect to have defined culture in the 2010s and 2020s: Move fast and break things. First thought, best thought. No filter. Immediacy culture. Bomb first, talk later. The late fascist assault on so-called "gender ideology" and "post-modern neo-Marxism." The online injunction to "let people enjoy things." Judith Butler, certainly no friend of Sokal and his comrades, anticipated this in the late 1990s when they wrote that the marginalization of "merely cultural" lines of inquiry under the auspices of restoring Left unity, could in fact only portend the Left's further weakening and fragmentation.
This ninth issue of e-flux Index interweaves a selection of pieces published by e-flux throughout the Summer of 2025, and is divided into two parts. In six chapters that index the state of Art and Theory Today, the first part revisits the primal scene of the Theory Wars—the tenor of which has changed, from an urgent ideological contest between humanist objectivity and postmodern relativism, to a more even-handed, pragmatic, and pluralist one, in the decades since. It brings together material that the various independent publishing arms of e-flux published around the theme of the often-fraught relations between theory and (artistic, architectural, pedagogic, political) practice.
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11 ChaptersMay 2026
Infrastructural Utopianism
With: Marina Vishmidt, Gabrielle Schwarz, Anthony Discenza, Hindley Wang, Jörg Heiser and Juan José Santos
Monet’s Cataracts
With: Germaine Dulac, Agnès Varda, Re’al Christian, Maddie Hampton, Thomas Waller, Keller Easterling, Patrick Langley, Orit Gat and Köken Ergun
Try squinting. In his later years Claude Monet’s cataracts significantly impaired his perception of color, contributing in part to the abstraction of his later work, which in turn enriched our own sense of color. In this section other such perceptual warpings and anamorphisms multiply, commencing with theoretical reflections on the nature of the image from two visionary female filmmakers (Germaine Dulac and Agnés Varda). In Keller Easterling’s essay, the viewfinder is adjusted...
Recitation. Evocation. Offering. Provocation.
With: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Raqs Media Collective, Jennifer Teets, Liam Gillick, Theadora Walsh, Ben Davis, Viktor Timofeev, Ericka Beckman, Francisco Godoy Vega and Kate Lacey
“Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words.” These words—from the stuttering, tongue-tied prologue to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poem Dictée—begin this section on asemic languages, art speak, and the linguistic nuts and bolts of theory. The recitation ends with the tongue ceasing to move in Kate Lacey’s call for “listening-out” as an active state of encountering otherness in space. In between, Raqs Media Collective take us on a journey from the ...
The World Fair
With: Annemarie Bucher, KJ Abudu, CCCP ’26, Océane Ragoucy, James Taylor-Foster, Luis Camnitzer and Team Kinoki
Large-scale exhibitions are a medium in transit and a medium of transit. A place of encounter somewhere between the classical agora and an airport lobby. Annemarie Bucher attends to the palimpsestic history of large-scale exhibition formats such as the Venice Biennale, and their emergence from the Grand Exhibitions of the nineteenth century. KJ Abudu’s essay draws on Okwui Enwezor’s pioneering curatorial work and commitment to postcolonial realism as an object lesson for resisting th...
Ready-Made Theory
With: Geert Lovink, Zairong Xiang, Eunsong Kim, Michael Kurtz, Stevphen Shukaitis, Leonid Slonimskiy , Artem Kitaev , Gili Merin, Natasha Marie Llorens and Jaleh Mansoor
No ideas but in things. The ready-made art object, from Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal) and Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg’s God (a twisted bend of plumbing) via Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes” to Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (a banana tacked to the wall), is generally read as surpassing or refusing mere objecthood. In a pair of essays considering this decisive nominalist gesture, Zairong Xiang provocatively takes Duchamp’s Fountain back to its...
The Forever War
With: Alenka Zupančič, Alaa Alqaisi, Stephanie Bailey, Sonya Vseliubska, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Mathilde Villeneuve, Sam Thorne and Isa Jacobs
In early September 2025 Donald Trump signed an executive order rebranding the US “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War,” with the president declaring, in a rare moment of geopolitical perspicacity, that: “I think it’s a much more appropriate name, in light of where the world is right now.” In the essay that opens this section on the forever wars of the 2020s, Alaa Alqaisi writes with devastating lucidity on the “choreography of absence&...
Endurance
With: Achille Mbembe, Vincent van Velsen, Frank Ruda, Frank Ruda, Adam Przywara, Brian Karl and Caitlin DeSilvey with Vanessa Ruhlig
“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” The vacillations of Samuel Beckett’s famous closing lines from The Unnamable can be transferred onto what Achille Mbembe calls the “shelter-rubble-dust continuum” in the essay that begins this section on resilience in (what can feel like) the end times. Here Mbembe describes our era as an “age of brutalism” in which “unhoming is the new means of social and political selection.” In an ex...
And the Dogs Were Silent
With: Jesi Khadivi, Aaron Schuster, Lukas Brasiskis, Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, Owen Hopkins, Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Emma McCormick Goodhart
Why Look at Animals? John Berger asked. It is a question answered in this section by an exhibition which tries to tear down the Enlightenment’s strictly patrolled fence between Nature and Culture. Aaron Schuster then shows us “how to research like a dog,” following his nose to pursue a prismatic reading of Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog.” The 13th Berlin Biennale meanwhile takes up the itinerant, resilient figure of the fox as an allegory for urban res...
Diasporism
With: Boris Groys, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Benjamin Seroussi, Jacinda S. Tran, Pramodha Weerasekera, Max Crosbie-Jones, Hannah le Roux, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Ariana Kalliga, Joyce Joumaa and Danae Io
As Boris Groys notes in the essay that begins this section, “Migration is the one truly universal, international phenomenon of our time.” Benjamin Seroussi turns to the non-possessive, incomplete nature of the diasporism that displacement produces in his “Lexicon for an Art Institution.” In a profile of Isaac Julien’s work, Jonathan T. D. Neil discusses the British video artist’s abiding concern with individuals who work within and against the limitations of r...
Warped and Fashioned
With: Brian Dillon, Dominique Routhier, Patrick Langley, Andreas Petrossiants, Giulia Sbaffi, Minh Nguyen, McKenzie Wark and Konstantin Akinsha
Memory is a capricious seamstress. For the social theorist Svetlana Boym, nostalgia does not confront the past as it actually was, but instead sends sideways glances to an idealized zone, one that is both “dream and everyday life.” In a similar vein, Brian Dillon scrutinizes the recent curatorial vogue for nostalgist returns to the 1980s in the UK, while Dominique Routhier likewise finds rosy spectacles applied to the recent past in a critique of how contemporary art lost its way. Vi...
Zhuangzi and the Butterfly
With: Joanne Morra, Pietro Bianchi, Malek Al-Sarnamy, Raúl Ruiz, Jean-Louis Schefer, Novuyo Moyo, Isadora Neves Marques, Ben Rivers and Mark von Schlegell
This issue of e-flux Index ends by closing its eyes and allowing itself to dream. In the Daoist parable, Zhuangzi awoke from his dream uncertain whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. This switchboard between our dreaming and waking lives forms the historic terrain of psychoanalysis. In her essay Joanne Morra investigates what the role of psychoanalysis might be for art education, while Pietro Bianchi takes up the points of convergence and diverge...