Congratulations to Zohran Kwame Mamdani for being elected the next mayor of New York City!
To confront today’s ugly theaters of cruelty, torture, and mass dehumanization, let’s experiment with the stadium stands around the field of popular spectatorship to foster alternate modes of political formation. In this issue of e-flux journal, Stevphen Shukaitis looks at the insurgent, aesthetic, and revolutionary experiment in self-organization and social imagination that is football (aka soccer), pointing out that Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri was among the early organizers of AC Milan’s ultras, helping to shape a culture of the game inseparable from collective action and horizontal politics. The issue also features Negri’s only work of narrative fiction, written while in prison in 1980 and translated into English here for the first time by Timothy S. Murphy. The piece combines a tentatively hopeful collective vision of the future with a plot focused on the inevitability of subjective antagonisms.
Also in this issue, Jonas Staal peers into the shadow art world where artists, fiction writers, and game designers build immersive models with which to rehearse the genocidal imaginaries of today and tomorrow. It is within these speculative war zones that empires caricature the composite enemies they need, but also where the racist and genocidal imaginary folds back on itself as pure and deliberate hallucination.
Keti Chukhrov looks at a fundamental contradiction of contemporary art, which both inherits the modernist legacy of radical negativity and yet aspires to be socially useful. Today’s contemporary art institutions often obscure this negativist background in order to perform the values of a democratic civil society, despite being “detached from broader sociality.” This traps art in an impasse between conflicting demands for autonomous critique and popular utility.
John Bohn takes the revival of interest in James Baldwin in recent years as an occasion to return to the work of Richard Wright (1908–60), author of Native Son, which Baldwin famously eviscerated. Wright’s resistance to a saintly portrayal of both Black liberation and revolutionary class struggle may have made his work unpalatable to some, but Bohn argues that the novel can also spur social movements to engage in much-needed self-investigation and negative critique, strengthening them in their fight against white supremacy and anti-Blackness.
Sophie Lewis’s essay examines Monique Wittig’s lesbian feminist philosophy, which regarded lesbianism as not only a sexual orientation but as a political position that challenges the heterosexual political-economic system. Though Wittig’s theories were radical, Lewis writes that it is this uncompromising position that limited her influence within feminist movements at the time, which were more motivated to build coalitions around different forms of oppression.
As part of After Okwui—a series commissioned by contributing editor Serubiri Moses—Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie commends Okwui Enwezor for bringing African contemporary art into European and American institutional centers of power and for brokering an exceptional space of exchange that few had the skill to concretely realize. But what were the hidden costs of this act of inclusion? And in what ways did it follow the headwinds of a neoliberal ideology hungry to open new markets and devour new artworks, but with little regard for the social or political concerns that artists bring forward in their works?
