By All Indications

Some of the earliest illuminated manuscripts featured “maniculues” in their margins—cute emoji-like hands with extended index fingers to mark significant passages in a text for subsequent readers. The first book I ever read also pointed outwards. Its title —Look!—was also its dominant word, appended caption-like to illustrations of a young girl pointing her finger at a variety of domestic scenes and objects. Though the lexical monotony of Look! was before long eclipsed by more exhilarating fare, its lesson was instructive for a young person embarking on a reading career: keep your eyes open, stay attentive, look!

Donald J. Trump, by no means a great reader, also relishes the infant’s joy in pointing his finger at things. A recent sociolinguistics study found that in a 2016 rally Trump used the gesture at least once a minute, far more than is customary in the media-trained climate of political communications.1 After all, it’s considered rude to point. Yet for Trump, the pointing figure becomes a deft instrument of his ethnonationalist rhetoric, resembling what Roman Jakobson called a “shifter.” When it points inward (to his chest or his cap), Trump’s finger certifies the Trump brand, signaling the “I=I” of world-historical narcissism, his wounded pride, his successes (real or fraudulent). When it points outward, Trump’s finger directly anoints one of his allies or lackeys in the crowd, or it channels the spirit of Lord Kitchener/Uncle Sam’s direct call to enlist (indicating the broad “you” of his base), or else it moves upward in the middle distance to accusatorily alight on “them”—journalists in attendance at his rallies, his ever-growing list of enemies in the media and the political establishment, and those racialized and marginalized groups against whom he marshals the power the state affords him. In this way the pointer-in-chief assumes the role of the cop who shouts “hey you!” in Althusser’s treatment of “interpellation.”2 His pointing finger conducts his audiences into the order of the law, the friend/enemy distinction, and its manic license to violence.

Yet there remain more empathetic, anti-authoritarian registers of direct indication. These would be works that for the artist Adrian Piper instead engage with the “indexical present.” In her words these: “trade easy classification—and hence xenophobia—for a direct and immediate experience of the complexity of the other,” because “experiencing the other in the indexical present teaches one how to see.”3 Take Vito Acconci’s video Centers (1971), in which he ironizes the determinate pose of Uncle Sam’s pointing finger. As Acconci’s twenty-two-minute silent video wears on, with his arm extended to eclipse his face throughout, the artist’s hand begins to visibly quake and tremble under the physical strain of the circuitry it sets up between the indicated/interpellated viewer (“you”) and his sustained performance of invulnerable authority. A muted call to enlist (in what?), Centers dramatizes the absent referent of many critical artworks troubled by indexicality—the “message without a code” for which the artwork comes to function like a weathervane.4

This indeterminate otherness has only become more troubling in our “indexical present” with the accelerated proliferation of algorithmically-generated imagery (and text). Where is the “trace” in the impoverished images of AI slop? What, or who, do such fabrications indicate? Recent writing has suggested this era of profligate images without clear referents might be best understood as an epistemic turn to “post-indexicality,” with one author defining this as describing “the indexing of multiple temporalities simultaneously, often colliding in non-linear ways.”5

This eighth issue of the e-flux Index explores the fragmentary complexity of the current moment through pointing out eleven emergent themes drawn from texts commissioned by e-flux throughout the spring of 2025. These indications for reading refuse the xenophobic illogic of the us/them, friend/enemy strategies of categorizing, and instead seek to index multiple temporalities and positions simultaneously— in a non-linear way. They bring together exhibition and film reviews, in-depth theoretical and historical essays on contemporary art, architecture, and design, interviews with artists, theorists, and filmmakers, journeys into the archive of film history, and shorter missives on sociopolitics and contemporary culture. They are titled: Dont’s, Othercare, Chance Operations, The World of Interiors, Bone Alphabets, The One Who Waits, The Day Is the Barricade, Sentimental Educations, Marking Territory, [gesticulating], and Sedimentology.

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Dont’s
Index# 8 begins by reading the fine print. There you’ll find Evan Calder Williams on the “Deodand,” a baroque instrument of fifteenth-century property law, in the final installment of his essay on paralysis; Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa on Cameron Rowland’s exploration of the contract as an artistic medium; and Tabitha Steinberg on the prohibition of Spanish at a Texan school. Prohibitions, regulations, and arcane forms of jurisprudence elsewhere abound—in Fred Scharmen’s and Rory Rowan’s essays on the treaties regulating extraterrestrial conflict and conquest, in Camille Henrot’s Do’s and Dont’s paintings, in the highly regulated forms of ikebana, and in a review of Reba Maybury and Lucy Mckenzie’s work with the power-differentials of the sub-Dom relationship.

Othercare
Who cares? And how? iLiana Fokianaki argues that we should rethink the relationship between the politics of care and received ideas of motherhood and feminized labor. Samuel Hellmann meanwhile finds an interrogation of the unwaged labor of social reproduction within Chinese postwar architectural discourses of socialist renewal and reconstruction. A more complex picture of caring and parenthood emerges from the pressure-cooker of Mary Bronstein’s recent filmmaking, Ed Atkins’s CGI work with his “surrogates,” and Chong Gu and Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer’s exploration of the chosen families that support migrant Asian massage workers. Rizvana Bradley’s discussion with artist Deborah-Joyce Holman considers the reproductive aspects of artistic practice, as well as Bradley’s theorization of the anteaesthetic “double bind of reproduction.”

Chance Operations
A throw of the dice may never abolish chance, yet the aleatory, the improvisatory, and the spontaneous continue to allure. Rodrigo Nunes’s two-part essay on the physician and philosopher Aleksander Bogdanov’s new science of tektology explores Bogdanov’s ideas on humanity as a “disorganizing force” at both local and global scales. The spontaneous and deliberate disorganization of improvisation erupts in Sandra Skurvida’s piece on the works that bookend John Cage’s career, while Sarah Hennies writes on the surrender of control in her own compositional development, and a conversation with Ericka Beckman reflects on the improvisatory dimension of her practice. François Pain’s films shine a light on the anti-psychiatry movement’s engagement with the disordering work of madness, and Nicholas Risteen writes of the play with the ad-hoc and coincidental informing the unique design ethos of Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa.

The World of Interiors
Oscar Wilde famously pronounced that only the shallow didn’t judge by appearances. This dandyist credo—betokening a fascination with the complexity of ornamentation, surfaces, and decorative practices—shaped the elliptical sensibility of Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s work, as it did Sadao Hasegawa’s efforts to incarnate a non-Occidental “universe of beauty,” and the lessons Claire Ryu draws in her essay on the lavishly decorated hybrid interiors of Boston’s Chinatown. Yet the fascination with mere surfaces can also appall and confound, as when the Soviet Marxist Evald Ilyenkov encountered in Vienna the “most modern form of beauty” (the massified forms of American pop art, part of the Society of the Spectacle) or when the God’s eye view of satellite imagery turns the Earth into a single surface, a veneer (as Bethany Rigby discusses in her essay on “surface imaginaries”).

Bone Alphabets
Crooked signs (mis)direct us through this section on symbolic languages, asemic scribbles, and discourse without words.6 Setting off from Isabelle Bucklow’s review of a book on the arrow as the “generator of architecture,” it also includes two essay-diagrams from an ongoing e-flux Architecture project titled Chronograms of Architecture, departing from Charles Jencks’s speculative diagrammatic practice. Signs are taken for wonders in Chris McCormack’s review of a show responding to the urban rune-making of graffiti. In Pietro Bianchi’s two-part Cannes dispatch he finds the crisis of excessive signification playing itself out across the competition. A conversation between Marianna Ritchey and Greg Stuart broaches the questions of accessibility hidden amidst the dense notational thickets of new music scores, and a republished text by Jean Cocteau affirms the universal language of cinema.

The One Who Waits
Your call is very important to us.7 While you wait, read Thotti’s journey to limbo, Sven Lütticken on the integrality of day-today “habit” for the philosophical discourse of forms of life (Lebensform), David Grubbs on negotiating when to rest while performing Pauline Oliveros’s work Primordial/Lift, and Liam Gillick’s Godot-like “layered musical” Ibuka! in which a London dinner party awaits its delayed host, Erasmus. Please continue to hold. Zeyno Pekünlü’s Perfect Loop dramatizes the migrant’s condition of bureaucratic waiting, while in Jamieson Webster’s essay and Mark Leckey’s recent work, repetitive loops warp time and thought to the rhythm of the hold-call jingle.

The Day Is the Barricade
Exploitation is ordinary. What Marx termed capital’s “sucking of living labor” extends from the 16-plus-hour days the astronauts in Ana María Gómez López’s essay clock up in orbit, down to the repetitive emotional labor of the checkout cashiers in the opera Have a Good Day! by Vaiva Grainytė and co. The dream of ending such ubiquitous exploitation animated actually existing socialism, from the Soviet experiment (whose developmentalist relations with its “peripheries” are discussed in Olexii Kuchanskyi’s essay on Sergei Parajanov) to the Grand Projects of François Mitterrand (the architectural legacy of which appears in Valentin Noujäim’s films). In our historically quiescent moment for anti-capitalist utopias, Nate Wooley explores the musical score as a site of militancy, while Jasper Bernes interrogates earlier presumptions of communism’s inevitability, and Charles Mudede finishes by asking: Will Marxism go mad after the end of the world?

Sentimental Educations
How to get started? Sometimes it can take the mentorship of a friend for new ideas to blossom—as appears in Anton Vidokle’s portrait here of Boris Groys and in his discussion with artist Hiwa K, as well as in Pietro Bianchi’s portrait of Antonio Negri. Or, an artistic career can begin with a series of false starts, moments of defeat, and frustration—as in the case of two candid biographical texts from the filmmakers Nagisa Ōshima and Satyajit Ray. For many others, the process of formation comes about with the long march through (or out the nearest exit of) the institutions. Shayari de Silva plots out the “elective affinities” between the life stories of three pioneering Sri Lankan female architects who each in their own way defied the patriarchal disciplinary context of their profession, while Rob Goyanes and Hallie Ayres take us into two very different schooling environments to document the processes of formation there at work.

Marking Territory
How to go on living in hostile environments? Contributions by Jamieson Webster, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, and Emerson Goo survey the torrid landscapes of environmental degradation, ecocide, and “toxicity” that differentially characterize the dead zones and red tides of the Anthropocene, moving from recent wildfires in Hawai’i to the psychic structure of everyday climate denialism. Megan Eardley and Thandi Loewensen illuminate the extension of the colonial-frontierist necropolitics of enclosure and extractivism to the final frontier of the solar system. Meanwhile John Tresch and Ou Ning raise a spirit level to prospect non-extractivist horizons for human inhabitation—in Tresch’s proposal to unleash the emergent “living thought” of cities and Ning’s critical history of Saneatsu Mushakoji’s utopian “New Village” community in Japan.

[gesticulating]
For the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, gestures were the site at which human technics came into being. In a digital environment of ubiquitous haptic interfaces—swiping to enlarge images, tapping to enter our account details—our relationship to technology is becoming ever softer and more tactile, occasioning new theorizations of a “soft future” of wetware, as explored by Laura Capaldi, and in Yuk Hui’s Tractatus Politico Technologicus. In their reviews of recent moving image and theoretical work by Nam Hwayeon and Zeynep Bulut, Adeena Mey and Xenia Benivolski each explore expanded conceptions of tactility, plasticity, and the kinetics of artistic research. When words escape us, a raised middle finger is still a potent gesture—as Sezgin Boynik reminds us in his essay examining the politics of UK post-punk, while a text from the late Dara Birnbaum on her legendary work with manipulating the “ready-mades” of mass images finds joy in the punk gesture of appropriation.

Sedimentology
Sedimentology is the science of accretion, weathering, and erosion of the soils, the sands, the earth. This issue of e-flux Index ends with pictures that fade, monuments that rust, the violent images we encounter one day that are overwritten the next, as infrastructural technologies of erasure efface Indigenous histories, and forgetting takes its course. Countering such processes, Mary Walling Blackburn writes here on the counter-memorial genre of “trench art,” Eloise Fornieles visits Dario Galetti Magnani and Maury Fonte’s monumental home-shrine to Italian queer life and history, while reviews from Novuyo Moyo and Xuanlin Tham respectively investigate the work of memory and memorialization in the practices of Noah Davis and Steve McQueen.

Together this issue presents an invitation to dodge and misdirect the accusatory fingers of the authoritarian present and instead enter into Piper’s indexical present. Look!