Propositional Politics

In some quarters, the art world’s infatuation with a fuzzy notion of performativity has given way to a cult of the propositional, which deserves closer inspection. Some ten years ago, Andrea Fraser took artistic-curatorial discourse on performativity to task for largely unmooring the concept from Austinian linguistics or from Butler’s account of gender, and for folding it back into an approach to performance more in line with “classical” performance art and its focus on physical action:

When the term “performative” jumped from linguistics into literary theory, it promised to break down the boundary between doing, on the one hand, and saying, writing, or representing on the other. When it developed in feminist and queer theory to describe the often compulsory and normative character of gender performance, it promised to break down the boundary separating self-conscious and specialized cultural performance from the often unconscious and overdetermined social and psychological aspects of gender performance.5

However, when “performance” came to be used in art to “describe any kind of artistically framed and conceptualized activity,” this served as “a regressive re-inscription of those very boundaries.” According to Fraser, the term became a kind of “camouflage or lure” conveying the fantasy of “artistic and intellectual omnipotence.”6 I would argue that the notion of the propositional has often come to play a similar role, but such a diagnosis should by no means be the last word. Nor should the “lure” be seen as a siren call that is always and everywhere to be resisted: the question is what propositional statements might be able to do, or not do, in the vastly different contexts of the political arena and the aesthetic sphere.

Uses and Abuses

What is the proposition about propositions, about their nature and affordances, that is being proffered? One thing that unites various approaches is that they do not define the proposition in terms of logic and truth-value.7 This is the opposite move from the one made by J. L. Austin. He not only critiqued the traditional privileging of constative statements (evaluated either true or false) by focusing on “performative utterances” (which do something). He also argued that even in the case of constative statements, “we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever that is)”; we also need to

consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech-act—if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances.8

Here, then, the propositional dimension of utterances is relativized, subject to the vagaries of context and speech as situated act. The propositional is eaten by the performative.

By contrast, certain conceptual art practices have foregrounded the performative nature of propositions so as to supercharge rather than downgrade the notion of the propositional. Here, one can think of certain Fluxus-affiliated practices, and of conceptual art’s auto-critique in the output of Art & Language and The Fox in the mid-1970s. In “classic” conceptual art of the late 1960s, artists such as Joseph Kosuth created artworks in the form of tautological analytical propositions, the truth-value of which does not depend on real-world referent. This conceptual closedness came to be questioned and challenged within the Art & Language network. In a 1999 conversation between Mary Kelly and former Art & Language member Terry Smith, they discuss the seventies shift from “from the notion of the analytical proposition to a more synthetic process,” a “synthetic proposition.”9 Smith would later note that “propositionality—its apparently categorical force, but also its materiality and its provisionality—is what language-based conceptualism recurs to: it is its core, from which it opens out again.”10 In a similar vein, Nizan Shaked has analyzed a shift in the 1970s work of artists such as Kelly and Adrian Piper “from the analytic to ‘being in the world,’” or to “synthetic proposition practices.”11 From Kosuth and Mel Ramsden to Kelly and Piper, conceptual work in the seventies was marked by an opening-out of the proposition through an increased focus on the material, provisional, and social aspect of linguistic acts.

Rasha Salti, Elke Uitentuis and Lara Khaldi in the programme Collective Study in Times of Emergency by L’Internationale Online, at De Appel, Amsterdam (May 8, 2024), in the context of the project Every Act of Struggle: Intrusion and Assembly. Visible behind the speakers is Pieter Paul Pothoven’s Notes—fragmented, incomplete—after Jan Wolkers (Boykot Outspan Aktie, 1978), 2025.

The conception of art as reflexive praxis put forward in Ramsden’s 1975 essay “On Practice” is far removed from some of the more triumphant propositionalisms of today.12 Some of the latter embrace what Alfred North Whitehead termed the “propositional lure,” an interpretation that has a much more positive valence than Fraser’s.13 One case in point is basis for actuele kunst (BAK) in Utrecht. In 2017, its then-director, Maria Hlavajova, developed a research trajectory titled Propositions for Non-Fascist Living. Under this label, BAK’s website archives a dizzying array of exhibitions, assemblies, courses, screenings, publications, and more. One such publication is the edited volume Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, which postulates a “tension between the oppositional and the generative,” and states that the publication seeks to “disrupt the modern operation of critique as little more than an assessment and diagnosis of conditions, and to propel that critique into a propositional modality.”14 While BAK explicitly based its conception of non-fascist life on Foucault, defining it as a “form of life” that counters “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” the notion of the proposition was not unpacked beyond being linked to the prefigurative.15

For Montreal’s SenseLab, on the other hand, the notion has an explicitly Whiteheadian inflection. Founded in 2004 by Erin Manning as a transversal “working and thinking environment for the creation of new modes of encounter” that was to be “radically open,” SenseLab (which later morphed into the 3Ecologies Project) hosted reading groups as well as events (performances, etc.) in a nontraditional pedagogical space.16 In addition to Deleuze and Guattari, a key reference was Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, leading SenseLab to co-organize a Whitehead conference reimagined as a Whiteheadian laboratory:

What would a conference look like were it to take Whitehead’s propositions about propositions seriously? It would look more like a laboratory of speculative thought, we proposed, than a “marketplace” of ideas. A matter of fact in potential, directly experienced, is enacted, not exchanged. Our questions were: what would it mean to make the conference form “propositional” in the way that process philosophy understands it? How would that reorient what Isabelle Stengers calls ecologies of practice, within the academy, as well as in the academy’s relation to the world’s awaiting collectivities-to-come?17

Here, the proposition is framed much more precisely than in the case of BAK—though when it comes to practice, what one might call dogmatic looseness appears to set in, as the propositional lure spawns a certain generic aesthetic of Deleuzian-Whiteheadian micropolitical pottering. If BAK’s Propositions for Non-Fascist Living was light on defining one of its key terms, it arguably took the notion of the proposition seriously in at least one key respect: the urgency of any proposition for non-fascist living counteracted a certain cult of propositionalist magic, in which questions of the “felicity” of propositions (to invoke Austin on felicitous and infelicitous speech acts) hardly features. In disavowing their own situatedness, contradictions, and compromises, certain endeavors suggest an all-too-abstract negation of academic disciplinary frameworks and established methods. This tendency can certainly be seen in SenseLab’s influence on artistic research (AR) discourse in Europe, where the propositional lure functions as a kind of Kool-Aid. In a publication documenting work done in the context of the DAS THIRD graduate program in the performing arts, Sher Doruff suggests that

a processual mode of thinking/feeling/making is vibrantly immanent to the material-discursive-somatic practices that excite our conversations. Feminist, queer, care, ecological/extractivist, Black and decolonial studies, institutional and capitalist critique and bodies in all their in-/nonhuman manifestations augment artistic and research … Transversal artistic techniques and practices situate these knowledge domains with discourse that values natureculture, fiction and fabulation, death and grief, social injustice and precarity, spectatorship and agency, intimacy and alienation, movement and muscle, and more.18

DAS provides precarious practitioners in dance, theater, and performance with some much-needed research infrastructure, but Doruff’s text amounts to little more than an aesthetico-epistemological glamorization of this environment, and of AR in general. Referencing Whitehead as “a source of the origination of feeling which is not tied to a mere datum,” as well as Manning and Brian Massumi on the proposition as “nothing less than a worlding,” Doruff glosses the propositional lure as “an amodal sensation of potential” that “may well become a conscious provocateur of gedankenexperiments.”19 This kind of contemporary AR language of “labs” and “experiments” can be seen as folding the language of the sciences back into that of twentieth-century experimental art. What is the nature of these experiments, and is there any way to assess their outcomes?

The notion of the experiment played a particularly important role in the context of the postwar Dutch Experimental Group, the international CoBrA group into which it merged, and the Situationist International. Constant’s 1948 manifesto for the Experimental Group decreed the dawn of “an experimental period,” insisting that “experience gained in this state of unfettered freedom will flow the rules by which the new creativity will abide. From what emerges, as yet more or less unconsciously, according to the dialectic method, a new consciousness will be shaped.”20 The group’s interest in such concerns developed into the 1950s and ’60s: Jorn founded an “experimental laboratory for free artistic research” in Alba in 1955, and the Situationist International would go on to define the dérive as “an experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society,” with Debord becoming involved in internecine debates on the nature of the experimental.21 Constant, meanwhile, would continue to develop his dialectical conception of the experiment in the context of New Babylon.22 His 1966 exhibition “Experiment Studio Rotterdam” consisted of several environments in which visitors were subjected to various stimuli, and were invited to give feedback: data collection with an eye to building New Babylon. 

In today’s AR networks (with their PhD programs, fellowships, residencies), Jorn’s comportement experimental is often reconceptualized in terms of a precarious queer and decolonial Lebenskunst, an experimental non-fascist life. While this is valid and valuable, there are indeed moments when Fraser’s diagnosis of a fantasy of “artistic and intellectual omnipotence” rings all too true. In many respects, aesthetic propositionalism remains anchored in, even while chafing against, the project-based culture that emerged in the 1990s. In the “project-based polis,” neoliberalism is not some Bad Other, but part of the fabric of cultural practice. Curatorial, artistic, and theoretical “projectarians” are forever looking for the next concept or buzzword that can galvanize attention and generate funding—from non-alignment to quantum entanglement, and indeed to the propositional itself.

BAK’s propositionalism likewise emerged out of his dynamic, as the institution tried to counter the short-term trends of Dutch neoliberalized public funding even while surfing them. I should acknowledge that I contributed to Propositions for Non-Fascist Living in a number of ways, including an essay in the eponymous volume. My project Deserting from the Culture Wars also took place within this general framework. Taking Jeanne van Heeswijk’s notion of “training for the not-yet” as a point of departure, Deserting from the Culture Wars revolved around training sessions and lectures that sought to open lines of flight—forms of positive desertion from the dynamics of right-wing cultural warfare, which is a very strong lure indeed.23 No doubt the project and the publication were highly inadequate attempts at sketching a critique of the culture wars while proposing active and immanent desertions—yet I remain convinced that their driving questions are crucial, and that critique must come with a propositional pull. In retrospect, it seems to me that I asked Manning/Massumi-type questions in a different register: How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? How can culture be a propositional lab? Can it?

In today’s cultural sphere, we are constantly being propositioned. All too often, it appears that propositionalism has rendered us dumb, as we stew in a para-academic soup of events—or their e-flux announcements—on decolonial cosmologies, queer quantum futurity, and demodernization, on artists as “carriers of profound healing,” on “the role of art amid the rise of planetary intelligence,” all the while being flooded with Versoified theory pamphlets on communism and socialist planning. At its worst, propositionalism runs all too smoothly, spouting slogans with ease. At its best on the other hand, it becomes a practice, complicating buzzwordification. It is not for nothing that one of the key texts from the context of mid-seventies Art & Language, by Mel Ramsden, was titled “On Practice.”

Practice makes imperfect. It generates provisional and problematic propositions—problems to be worked with. It engages with contradictions rather than pretending they don’t exist. Practices of this kind can be “aesthetic” insofar as that are forms of sense-making, and “poetic” in that they develop ways of crafting and developing propositions—making, unmaking, and remaking them; testing, developing, modulating, socializing, and deconstructing them.24 The potential political relevance of contemporary aesthetic practice does not lie primarily in immediate or broad political effects, but precisely in its poetic aspects, taking the form of semi-controlled experiments under compromised conditions.

Propositional Poetics

Part of the intoxicating proposition of fascism, then as now, is that power and epistemic or physical violence creates alternative “facts”: Haitians eat cats and dogs, Israeli football hooligans in Amsterdam were helpless Jews subjected to a pogrom, and Hitler was of course not a fascist but a socialist (because influencers, bots, and politicians keep saying it). While the propositional lure of the far right is steeped in claims that do not withstand a fact check, such fact-checking has shown itself to be fairly powerless as long as it remains within the framework of an eroding liberal consensus.25 The central proposition of the far right is essentially about restoring (or rather protecting) a “greatness” of racial and gender privilege. One of fascism’s key successes has always been convincing enough people that they can be on the good side, on the side of the winners, of sovereign subjects—not on the side of the subalterns or surplus populations. They won’t deport me because I belong here.

This proposition involves a historical narrative that usually has conspiratorial elements, as the fall from greatness must be explained through the covert actions of Jews, “Cultural Marxists,” feminists, trans activists, or corrupt climate scientists. Conspiracism involves a particularly insidious kind of lure, one that shares substantial DNA with the fascist proposition: against powerful enemies without and especially within, terror becomes legitimate self-defense. Here, an excursion to Whitehead is indeed useful. If conspiracy theories would seem to give the very term “theory” a bad reputation, they corroborate Whitehead’s account of theories qua propositions:

It is evident, however, that the primary function of theories is as a lure for feeling, thereby providing immediacy of enjoyment and purpose. Unfortunately theories, under their name of “propositions,” have been handed over to logicians, who have countenanced the doctrine that their one function is to be judged as to their truth or falsehood.26

As Alberto Toscano suggested years ago, certain efforts to derive news “tools” from Whitehead as read via Deleuze can be critiqued even while acknowledging the relevance of his process philosophy, which often seems to articulate proto-materialist insights.27 Crucially, Whitehead is a thinker of potentiality, theorizing “the principle that everything is somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere.”28 It is in propositions that potentiality manifests itself, suggesting that things could be different. Invoking the specter of a universe “interpreted in terms of static actuality,” where succession and movement are “mere appearance, rising from the limitation of perception,” Whitehead insists that the notion of potentiality is “fundamental for the understanding of existence, as soon as the notion of process is admitted,” which means that “the actualities of the present are deriving their characters from the process, and are bestowing their characters upon the future.”29 With actualization being “a selection among possibilities,” the actualities of the present also represent a reduction: the past is full of dormant potential haunting the contemporary condition.30

Dora García, The Bug Timeline (2021), detail of installation in the exhibition Dora García—She Has Many Names, M HKA, Antwerp, 2023.

Whitehead argued this in a famous passage on the Battle of Waterloo—a counterpoint, albeit an unintentional one, to Kojève’s fixation on Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Jena as the End of History.31 The point is not so much that Whitehead privileged Waterloo over Jena but that he insisted that the brute factuality of the world that followed was itself not absolute. Here, almost by accident, without staking a grand claim in the matter, Whitehead emerges as the more incisive and generative historical thinker:

This Battle resulted in the defeat of Napoleon, and in a constitution of our actual world grounded upon that defeat. But the abstract notions, expressing the possibilities of another course of history which would have followed upon his victory, are relevant to the facts which actually happened. We may not think it of practical importance that imaginative historians should dwell upon such hypothetical alternatives. But we confess their relevance in thinking about them at all, even to the extent of dismissing them. But some imaginative writers do not dismiss such ideas. Thus, in our actual world of today, there is a penumbra of eternal objects, constituted by relevance to the Battle of Waterloo. Some people do admit elements from this penumbral complex into effective feeling, and others wholly exclude them … The elements of this penumbra are propositional prehensions, and not pure conceptual prehensions; for their implication of the particular nexus which is the Battle of Waterloo is an essential factor. Thus an element in this penumbral complex is what is termed a “proposition.” A proposition is a new kind of entity. It is a hybrid between pure potentialities and actualities. A “singular” proposition is the potentiality of an actual world including a definite set of actual entities in a nexus of reactions involving the hypothetical ingression of a definite set of eternal objects.32

To be sure, this can be taken in very problematic directions—which only makes it more imperative to think with and beyond Whitehead. Nationalist, irredentist, and fascist movements have glorified lost historical battles and wars, and transmuted them into powerful myths, from the Battle of the Golden Spurs for Flemish nationalism, the Battle on Kosovo Field for Serbian nationalism, the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy in US white supremacism, or the Battle in the Teutoburger Forest in Germany; one could also think of the role played by the Dolchstoßlegende about the End of WWI in the rise of the Nazi movement. A question, of course, is what kind of potentiality is being discerned in history, and for whom. In many of these cases, the logic is one of a war on potentiality—a potentialicide that employs bio- and necropolitical means to curb and extirpate popular agency, and entire populations, to maximize potential gains for an extractivist über-elite.

Kojève’s faux-Hegelian metanarrative and bureaucratic backroom scheming (the latter being legitimated, however tenuously, by the former) currently seem to hold a fascination for the curator civil servants of the multipolar new world order, ready to work for whichever autocracy. The end of History no longer takes the form of a single universal and homogeneous state but of a continuum of illiberal sovereign states, none of which can claim to represent enlightened or universal values. This is where Whitehead’s insistence on historical potential and on the propositional “penumbra” needs to be reintroduced. In keeping with this, much crucial scholarly, curatorial, and artistic work today seeks to restore potentiality to erased histories, involving critical reconstructions of marginalized practices, lost exhibitions, destroyed archives, or activist “museums in exile.”33 But potentialicide is ongoing, and intensifying. At the level of party politics, a new propositional poetics is desperately needed—and part of this is precisely the reinvention of party politics as grounded in social movements and collective imaginaries. To some extent, this is what the Nouveau Front Populaire exemplifies, as did the Sanders campaign in the US; in Germany, the party Die Linke has been revived by the so-called Bewegungslinke movement, which has reconnected the party with the extra-parliamentary work of various social movements and activist groups.

And here, perhaps, certain forms of artistic practice—certain subfields and contexts—could indeed function as laboratory spaces for the elaboration of experimental propositions.

Now that the defunding and criminalization of dissent is well underway, questions of infrastructure and funding are paramount.34 Spaces have shrunk, literally and metaphorically. They provide crucial havens for Parallelgesellschaften, counterpublics and countercommunities.35 But experiments can fail—and sometimes the triggering of institutional failure can be illuminating about the conditions against which one labors.

On May 28, 2024, the Not Surprised Collective asked the Stedelijk Museum to loan them Ahmet Öğüt’s installation Bakunin’s Barricade to help protect students protesting the Gaza genocide, who were facing police brutality.36 The piece consists of artworks from the museum’s collection attached to a barricade, recalling a proposal allegedly made by Bakunin during the 1848 revolution in Dresden. According to a myth launched in the second half of the nineteenth century by Alexander Herzen, the Russian anarchist wanted to place paintings by Raphael and Murillo on the city walls in order to discourage bourgeois generals from firing (since artistic masterpieces meant more to them than human lives).37 Later, in 1963, the story was adapted and supercharged by Guy Debord.38 As an avant-garde provocation, Öğüt turned the Bakunin’s barricade myth into an artistic proposition. The work was acquired by the Stedelijk on the condition that the museum

loan the Barricade to third parties in the Netherlands in order to be used as a barricade if they request this loan in the context of extreme economic, social, political, transformative moments and movements which engender high levels of public concern relating to fundamental human rights, including those defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.39

The museum, which is beholden to a number of high-profile donors and to a liberal conception of diversity, and which will not pass up any opportunity for consequence-free virtue signaling, has not responded to the Gaza genocide in its programming in any way. A search for “Gaza” on the museum’s website only throws up some 1990s photographs by Ad van Denderen from the museum’s collection, in addition to the institution’s response to the loan request. The Stedelijk offered to loan the barricade for installation at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, but with the tacit substitution of copies for the additional artworks from the collection—which the Not Surprised Collective refused, calling it a form of fraud.40 Öğüt, meanwhile, criticized the museum for failing its obligation to loan “the standalone work of art,” insisting that “the negotiation over the other original works is a separate and additional contractual obligation”—even though nobody would consider the barricade itself, without the additional artworks, “a standalone work of art.”41 In any case, the failure of the museum to loan the work clarified matters, shedding a harsh light on what happens when wonderful artistic propositions attempt to intervene in institutional protocols and political struggles.

This is where a dialectic of the propositional and the organizational is crucial.42 Asserting or suggesting that things could be different, propositions reinject potentiality into the actual world. However, if one does not wish to fetishize “inoperativity,” the crucial question is how some of those propositions (for non-fascist, non-extractive, non-patriarchal, non-capitalist living) can be actualized, at least tentatively. If much propositionalism operates in the realm of announcements and blurbs, other propositions serve as calls or exhortations. They are more than superstructural, having infrastructural and prefigurative dimensions. Movements such as BDS and Strike Germany—which to some extent reenact the cultural boycott of South Africa—interpellate the cultural worker with a call to act: to refuse work and invitations, to refuse complicity. Not that this will prevent the next Documenta (or Scabumenta) from being a smashing success, but the very terms of such a success must be challenged, and other criteria developed.

Drama and Dramaturgy

In art, simulation and corruption are the old and the new normal. Kitschified propositionalism only makes it more necessary to investigate the potential, and the limitation, of propositions in the context of art—specifically propositions that aim to have implications or repercussions beyond the art sector. There is, of course, the predictable chorus of those who warn against politicizing or instrumentalizing art. After all, the politics of art is an aesthetic metapolitics that will never “fulfil its political promise.”43 In the face of naive activism, what is needed is calm and undisturbed reflection on the foundations of art and/or politics.

Arguments against politicizing art are based on the kind of unexamined and undialectical opposition that the authors in question usually abhor: a bogeyman of thoughtless activism is used to discredit any action as “alarmist.” At the same time these authors refuse to reflect on the political implications of sharing relaxed drinks in an ivory tower. It is true enough that political skirmishes in the art field can be displacements and pacifications of political conflicts, and that the “efficacy” of political art is often doubtful. This, however, is less a conclusion than a point of departure for serious inquiry and practice. If we accept that politics always has a propositional element, then the question is if, when, and how certain artistic milieus can contribute to the elaboration, enactment, and embodiment of emancipatory propositions. Here, I can merely sketch some outlines of such an inquiry, using a limited set of examples.

Savva Dudin and Anja Groten, Juggling Participation: Power-over, Power-to and Power-with, workshop in the PhDArts colloquium, The Hague, November 22, 2024.

In confronting these questions we are concerned with the activist and academic subfields outlined in Fraser’s recent diagram of the art field.44 We are talking not about art saving the world or negating itself in favor of politics, but about (im)patient practice on issues that are too political to be reduced to “politics.” One approach to this is via performance studies, with a focus on performance in the expanded field—not in the sense of fantasies of omnipotence rightly critiqued by Fraser, but in the sense of careful work on the dialectic of performance in different registers. The work of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner on the feedback loop between aesthetic drama and social drama can be one point of reference here.45 Schechner developed his account of performance in close conjunction with theater practices of the 1960s and ’70s, such as Augusto Boal’s, as well as sociological (Goffman) and anthropological (Turner) inquiries into the performance of social roles:

The difference between performing myself—acting out a dream, reexperiencing a childhood trauma, showing you what I did yesterday—and more formal “presentations of self”…—is a difference of degree, not kind. There is also a continuum linking the ways of presenting the self to the ways of presenting others: acting in dramas, dances, and rituals. The same can be said for “social actions” and “cultural performances.”46

Recently, these and related sources have been reexamined by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić in their account of social dramaturgy, specifically of modes of performing the transindividual self under conditions of twenty-first century ever-later capitalism. Taking on board Simondon and Stiegler as well as Balibar and a variety of post-operaists, and discussing a number of performance practices, Vujanović and Cvejić strive to counter “the still predominant individualist modes of (per)forming the self in European and global neoliberal, capitalist, and democratic societies” with a focus on transindividuation both as a “condition of the formation of self and an active process, a practice,” in the hope of showing that “there is no real and unavoidable clash between the individual and the collective in the onto-historical sense.”47

This project is made all the more urgent, and more daunting, by the retrenchment of the neoliberal individual subject, its armoring and weaponization in the form of reified “traditional” gender roles, white supremacism, normalized racism, transphobia, and the rejection of any responsibility for the climate catastrophe. In the face (or in the midst) of all of this, aesthetic drama will appear laughably inadequate if it is expected to “fix” things. Taking a non-messianic approach may reveal potentials for propositional practices on a relatively small scale, under in vitro conditions, with all the uncertainties about the (im)possibility of scaling up and of translating performance from the artistic to other registers. Here, as a jumping-off point, is a preliminary and all-too-condensed mapping of some actual and potential practices.

Firstly, there are artists who develop performances within the frameworks of art, theater, and dance, but whose work insists that aesthetic performance can be an intervention in the performance of self in everyday life—that it can challenge the reproduction of individual selves and roles. Here one can think of Johannes Paul Raether’s AlterIdentities and aLifveForms such as Protektorama and Transformella. If Raether’s Alteridentities are striking presences that create queer countercommunities through visits to Ikea, Apple stores, and German coal mines, Dora García frequently inserts performers into art spaces in a surreptitious manner, with her piece The Romeos involving men who, inspired by GDR spy master Markus Wolff’s “Romeo program,” strike up conversations with unsuspecting visitors. In García’s The Prophets, it is clearer that these good-looking young men are performers in an aesthetic sense, as they discuss potential future events with audience members. One should be careful about the claims made for such practices; they make use of certain artistic infrastructures for a micropolitical propagation—or reproduction, or survival—of forms of life and structures of feeling, without claiming to leap from the molecular to the molar. When García participates in the (re)activiation of emancipatory propositions through her in-depth engagement with histories of communism and feminist/queer activism and her participation in collectives such as Army of Love and Rose Hammer, the artistic collaboration and collectivity stands in, synechdochally, for larger emancipatory projects.48

Secondly, we have artists using their skills and methods to work with movements and parties, in different organizational structures, ranging from the horizontally networked to the more hierarchical, and everything between and beyond. Examples include the Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, working in the autonomous zone of the ZAD in France; Jonas Staal working with Diem25 and Progressive International, or indeed with the Kurdish autonomous regions of Rojava; Matthijs de Bruijne with the cleaners’ movement in the Netherlands; or many, in Mexico and elsewhere, allying themselves in one way or another with the Zapatistas. Sometimes, anticolonial struggle and decolonial practice provide pointers for organizational work within Western cultural infrastructures. The lumbung network is a case in point. Essentially a proposition for funding and organizing art otherwise, lumbung was not just launched as a buzzword but enacted as a form of prefigurative practice. One problem is that such a community’s critical (self-)assessment of its practice tends to take place behind closed doors—under external flak from Antideutsche wingnuts and other fascists. Closure creeps in, and comradeship generates a peculiar omertà.

Thirdly, I would mention the development of training sessions, role-playing games, and related exercises. In such forms there is often a leader or designer (individual or collective) who has set things up and determined the rules, to some extent, though this initiator may be challenged. Training sessions by artists such as Staal and Jeanne van Heeswijk seek to actualize blocked potentials and preenact a “not-yet” by working with various kinds of organizers, with experience in social or aesthetic dramaturgy. LARPs and other role-playing games, meanwhile, provide a more rule-based exploration of options.49 In a recent workshop, artist Savva Dudin and designer Anja Groten asked participants to mentally project Fraser’s diagram of the art field onto the floor of an auditorium, to identify their position in one of the subfields (for instance academic or activist), and to choose a subfield on the opposite side (for instance market-based), and to ask themselves what could be taken or learned from this other art world—a question that is particularly resonant at a moment of legal, financial, and ideological clampdowns on already precarious spaces for criticality in art and academia.50 For artist like Dudin, a key contention is that role-playing games can indeed be spaces of transindividuation, and propositional spaces.

On the more informal end of the spectrum, any number of gatherings (workshops, reading groups, dinners) bring together affinity groups; such exercises in making oddkin foster countercommunities under increasingly adverse conditions. These are less about training for a desirable future and more about resilience and survival in the now and the near future. Their propositional pull is more concrete yet more limited. As positive desertions and tentative parallel societies, they run less risk of remaining unrealized models, failed experiments, or unactualized potentialities.

Lastly, tactical media and media activism need to be reevaluated and developed. As a set of practices, they have yet to fully recover from the shock of the alt-right in 2016, and the cooptation of transgressive tactics in the service of fascist trolling and “meme magic.”51 Nonetheless, there is obviously more need than ever for tactical interventions—whether on dominant platforms or through desertion and exodus—and not all relevant activities may have a direct link to historical tactical media networks.

Some of the most compelling propositions are anything but straightforward. The basis for Jonas Staal’s book Climate Propagandas and his video study 94 Million Years of Collectivism, as well as the Climate Propagandas Congregation at BAK in December 2024, is a deep-time fantasy.52 Having already organized a Training for the Future under the slogan “We demand a million more years” (2019), Staal homed in on the Ediacaran, a geological age before the Cambrian, the source of animals and plants as we know them; with his collaborator Vincent van Gerven Oei, the artist presented such “heterotrophs” as ancestors of today’s predatory corporations, whereas the peaceful “autotrophs: of the Ediacaran were non-predatory life-forms.” In his video study, and in the installation that formed the set for the “congregation” at BAK, Staal grafted the faces of revolutionary leaders, from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh and from Marx to Kollontai and Sankara, onto Ediacaran life-forms.

All these leaders were presented as Ediacaran autotrophs, while the Ediacaran life-forms themselves were presented, in cosmist fashion, as models for potential autotrophic humans—humans capable of photosynthesis, thus putting an end to human predation. One problem with this is that the Darwinian reading of the post-Cambrian world in terms of the survival of the fittest and the struggle of life remains intact; the Cambrian terrain is ceded, as oneiric new ancestors are found in deep time. As a logical proposition, all of this makes little to no sense. At the BAK event, as a montage of speakers and performers (from T. J. Demos and Jodi Dean to the Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination and Natural History Museum and various Holland-based refugee and queer groups) provided usually more concrete reports from struggles and resistant forms of life, Staal’s Ediacaran iconography hovered over the proceedings in a penumbral dream-time, informing yet staying distinct from the actual groups and movements.

The proof of the proposition is in the eating. In one of the classic texts of formalist criticism, J. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley state that “judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.”53 The question is how, and according to which standards, something may be said to “work.” Counterfactuality is needed; while inoperativity should not be fetishized, a suspension of actualization can itself be liberating and can create room to imagine, think, and maneuver. There is no single checklist of criteria, but experiments can fail, and they can fail in more or less illuminating and generative ways. I would always defend the queer art of failure against instrumentalist diktats, yet it is also clear from present catastrophic conditions that we must learn to fail better. Many workshops and assemblies seem more convincing on paper (or in the announcement) than they are in reality, where they are either too unstructured or organized in an overly controlling way. We must learn to assess propositional experiments with generous severity, and be attentive to the worlds that are contained in many a Waterloo.