Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become a creative faculty and aesthetics emerge as a technique of individuation. Fantasies of the People is a new series of texts moving across different provincial histories, calling upon disputes in anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry to interrogate the notion of fantasy as one that radically challenges what is real. Emerging from a conference convened by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier at Princeton University in 2025, the series takes as its starting point radical thinkers of the early twentieth century, such as Marxist feminist Lu Märten and the anarchist art critic Carl Einstein, who deemed fantasy a communal sense against the hermetic cognition of imagination. Calling upon a wide range of contemporary artists, writers, and researchers for discussion, the series proposes fantasy as a collective material practice, rather than treating it as a private or irrational faculty, exploring the media of communal sense, past and present, that have been sidelined by individuation, privatization, and colonial violence.
—Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors
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Fantasy had not always been the disreputable sibling of the imagination. For centuries the two terms were used interchangeably to designate the cognitive faculty that connected concrete sense perceptions to inner mental images. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, philosophers began to elevate the imagination as intentional and assertive, creative and form-giving (gestaltend), while disparaging fantasy as passive and contagious, distracted and de-forming (entstaltend).1 Images became instruments of Enlightenment and phantasms became a means of deception. Proclaiming the imagination as something organic, self-determining, and integral, the minds of the era sought to banish fantasy for being technical, plural, and dangerously unrestrained. One eighteenth-century anthropologist spoke anxiously of “mechanical fantasy,” a faculty that he associated with La Mettrie’s materialist model of the body as an ill-fitted system of parts that was connected internally by hydraulic fluids which always threatened to leak and infect other flesh machines.2 Fantasy seemed to undermine the very autonomy of the ascendant bourgeois subject. At best, it was merely frivolous. Demoted to feminine “fancy,” fantasy was replaced by the masculine imagination, which became a realm of unlimited individual freedom and the facultative basis for a modern self who proclaims independence from social relations and real-life conditions. In his later phenomenological experiment The Imaginary, Sartre noted the strange way that contemplating an image of his acquaintance Pierre actively “irrealized” his friend, leading the existentialist to conclude that imagining means “to hold the real at a distance, to be freed from it, in a word to deny it.”3
Following the lead of Enlightenment philosophy, the nineteenth-century sciences of the mind likewise sought to purge the imagination of fantasy. According to the research of experimental psychologists, the activity of fantasizing transposed mental images upon real objects: the resulting laminations scumbled the boundary between concrete perception and psychic construct, leading to a state resembling psychosis. Toward the end of the century, psychoanalysis came to equate fantasy-hallucinations with daydreams, the distracted but wakeful visions that differ fundamentally from the dreams that come during sleep when eyes are closed, motor functions are suspended, and there is no possibility of reality testing. While night dreams and the imagination enact a “blockade of the outside world” and affirm the autonomy of the bourgeois subject, daydreams and fantasy strive to achieve an “external orbit in which millions are embraced.” This is why Ernst Bloch would insist, against Freud, that a pathological excess of fantasy leads not to psychosis but to paranoia.4 Daydreams embed phantasms everywhere in quotidian contexts of existence. For this reason, Laplanche later associated fantasy with a transitivistic and epistemologically compromised subject who has relinquished the safe distance of the transcendental spectator to join the fray: “In fantasy, the subject does not pursue the object or its sign, but pictures himself involved in a sequence of images. He does not simply represent the desired object, rather, he represents himself as participating in the scene.”5 Fantasy “originates in material entanglements,” writes Kerstin Stakemeier in her co-introduction to this series. It is “both outside and inside.”
Abandoning contemplation for participation, fantasies find concrete form in the material labor practices by which people transform their life conditions. To adapt Marx: imagination may interpret the world but only fantasy can change it. In this respect, fantasy marks the limit of the mind sciences. In “Dreaming, Fantasying and Living,” D. W. Winnicott thus associated fantasy with embodied manual work and concrete scenarios of production. Recalling the case of an analysand who had a recurrent daydream in which she saw herself “busily carrying out [the] task” of making a dress, the English analyst concluded that this vision had no meaning outside of itself. Unlike a nocturnal dream about making a dress, which would be a worthy subject of interpretation, Winnicott discovered that he had nothing to say about her fantasy––“no sign to pursue,” as Laplanche would put it. He cut the analysis short: the patient’s daydream about making a dress was “simply about making a dress,” wrote Winnicott, who concluded that the daydream is “dead end,” hermeneutically speaking.6 Fantasies do not contain symbolic messages, but instead nest in the motor reflexes of our muscles, nerves, and senses. For this reason, they always find their most articulate, most advanced form of expression in the work techniques and forces of production found in a given historical era. Adorno speculated in the 1960s about fantasy’s lost connection to the industrial mode of production and the modern division of labor:
It would be worthwhile to write an intellectual history of fantasy, since the latter is the actual goal of positivist prohibitions. In the eighteenth century, both in Saint-Simon’s work and in d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire, fantasy along with art is included in productive labor and participates in the notion of the unleashing of the forces of production …The defamation of fantasy or its relegation to a special domain, marked off by the division of labour, is a primordial phenomenon [ein Urphänomen] of the regression of the bourgeois spirit.7
According to Adorno, fantasy offers a way to reestablish the connection between art and work that was severed under capitalist regimes of rationalized production. Stakemeier puts it more axiomatically: Fantasy “has to be inherently technological.”
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While fantasy was being driven to the margins of culture in the nineteenth century, the imagination took root and blossomed within industrial capitalism. To this day leftist poets and artists herald the liberatory powers of imagining, but the imagination turns out to be entirely compatible with, if not complicit in, the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, the modern imagination would seem to intensify the general experience of alienation and processes of psychic dissociation that are fundamental to factory labor organization and to the abstractions of the capitalist value form as such. Fordist methods convert the worker’s existence to a purely biological magnitude, but paradoxically, this creaturely reduction also establishes perfect conditions for the flourishing of the imagination. In his pathbreaking historical study La nuit des prolétaires (1981), Jacques Rancière recalled the manual workers who debated philosophy, composed essays, and wrote poetry in the precious hours they spent away from the workplace. And while Rancière holds up these feats of creativity as moments of resistance to a system of industrial production that degrades the working body into pure labor power––Marx’s Arbeit sans phrase––his account nonetheless fails to consider how these proletarian nights might actually have sustained the logic of capitalist labor dialectically. For the modern workplace does not inhibit the worker’s imagination but, quite the opposite, conditions and indeed demands it.
This is why the dizzying intensification of Taylorist rationalization in the 1920s gave birth to a legendary generation of assembly-line poets. Consider Heinrich Hauser, who celebrated work at the conveyer belt for allowing him to mentally step away (geistig wegzutreten) to compose poetry, or Hyacinthe Dubreuil, who boasted that “the connection between movement and the mind’s activity is severed” in the factory and that this “purely physical work disposes me to write.”8 Philosophers of the era likewise described the modern workplace as a metaphysical centrifuge that separated spirit from body. Lukács explained: “As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised [the worker’s] activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative [wird zu einer kontemplativen Haltung].”9 Along similar lines, Gramsci, who was famously ambivalent about the pseudo-liberation of Fordism, wrote that mechanization
is not the spiritual death of man. What really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom … Reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, [the labor process] “nestles” in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations … One walks automatically, and at the same time thinks about whatever one chooses.10
In other words: art, literature, and speculative philosophy thrived under rationalization, although the works that emerged from the capitalist factory were violently severed from everyday life contexts and concrete scenarios of making. Based on interviews that he conducted with factory workers in the 1970s, the French psychiatrist Bernard Doray later confirmed that the physiological movements that were executed on the industrial assembly line lacked the quality of the trace––that enduring graphism which, according to Derrida, is constitutive of every signifying process. The symbolic dispossession of the laboring body becomes a “precondition for the liberation of the technological imagination,” concluded Doray.11 Capitalist Arbeit sans phrase is both “labor pure and simple” as well as, quite literally, “phraseless labor.”
While touring the Parisian Citroën plant in the 1920s––the first French factory organized according to Fordist methods––the Russian writer Il’ia Ehrenburg arrived at the same conclusion as Doray: assembly-line workers might compose lofty poetry, but in everyday situations they had “forg[otten] human words [and] unlearned how to speak.”12 The silencing of work in the modern factory became a paramount concern of Soviet production artists and theorists. Researchers in Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor struggled to adapt the methods of factory rationalization from the West without turning the Soviet workplace into a Taylorist machine of derealization and poetic imagination. At first the way forward was not evident. Initially at least, the Institute’s founding director, Aleksei Gastev––a legendary Proletkult poet and former Citroën line-worker––had focused their labor analytics on striking (ударять) and other force-gestures that exemplified muscular exertion and brute strength. But Gastev quickly came to discover something that Marx had noticed long before: that punctual and percussive movements such as these interrupted the worker’s physical contact with the object, amputating the fingertips as organs for shaping and modeling the world.13 The gesture of striking presumed the laborer’s distance from the object being worked and established what Gastev called an “optical interface” (зрительная установка), a phenomenological hiatus in which mental imagery came to flourish. In the capitalist factory, the transcendental I/eye substitutes a virtual representation of the activity of making for the real process. Searching for an alternative to this Taylorist metaphysics, the researchers at the Central Institute of Labor shifted their focus to a second species of labor movement that was fundamentally distinct from striking: the proximal and sensuous control-gesture of pressing (нажимать). As Gastev explained, “Striking is a swift and sharp work motion that is primarily executed at a remove from the object being processed. Pressing is a smooth motion that is always executed in contact with the object being processed.” A gesture like chiseling, which combined the percussive kinetics of the strike with the haptic guidance of feeling, suggested a transitional form between force and control that linked embodied movement to “higher intellectual labor,” Gastev wrote.14 Turning to “the gendered characteristics of movements,” Gastev correlated the proliferation of touch in the modern factory with the feminization of the workforce. Women may not naturally excel at striking, but they quickly “master the movement of pressing,” he explained. “Metalworking experiments with women show that women achieve a level of artistry in precision work that is in no way inferior to that of men, and, quite to the contrary, show a stunning attention to ‘detail.’”15 Feminine fancy was returning to the workplace. This development presaged the future of Soviet labor: as Gastev announced at the beginning of his programmatic 1923 booklet The Uprising of Culture, “We learned how to strike forcefully (on the front). Now we must learn to press methodically.”16 Gastev developed this new phenomenology of labor in tandem with the work of Nikolai Bernstein, the leading physiologist at the Central Institute of Labor. Bernstein had produced the famous chronocyclographic studies of the hammer strike that circulated widely in Bolshevik propaganda, but, like Gastev, in the mid-1920s his laboratory began to shift the focus of its research away from the industrial ballistics of the strike to consider more refined proximal gestures: not just filing at a workbench, which required continuous contact and a delicate sense of pressure, but the tactile gestures used by the female operators of perforating machines, the actuarial gestures of applying postal stamps, the expressive gestures of the pianist at the keyboard, and, eventually, the highly coordinated motor gestures of handwriting itself. Analysis of these delicate movements eventually led Bernstein to write a full-length study of dexterity (ловкость), а unique physiological capacity of humans that, he wrote, originated evolutionarily in the differentiation of pressing from striking. Following Engels’s legendary essay “The Role of Labor in the Hominization of the Ape,” which situated the seat of human intelligence not in mental imagery but in the movements of the hand, Bernstein argued that consciousness and higher thought arose from the increasing haptic refinement of our species. The gestural repertoire of our ancestors
included accurate, precise, and strong targeted movements, such as aiming, touching, grasping, accurate and strong striking [удар], far and precise throwing, accurate and carefully planned pressing [нажим]. These simple movements … gradually developed into numerous semantic chain-actions [смысловые цепные действия], such as the handling of objects, the using of tools, and, eventually, the labor of reason.17
By reconstructing the “semantic chain-actions” that linked motor movement to tools and tools to reason, scientists like Bernstein proposed to reverse the symbolic dispossession of labor in the capitalist workplace.
The shift from striking to pressing restored fantasy to the production process. In this respect, the systems developed at the Central Institute of Labor promised an alternative to those of the industrial West, where the emerging practices of a sensory neurocapitalism only further amplified and accelerated the dissociations of the imagination. The same year that Gastev declared pressing to be the work gesture of the future, Gastev began to champion fantasy (фантазия) as a faculty distinct from the Romantic imagination (воображение). He proclaimed the Soviet worker “a fantasist, although not one who is soft and idealizing, not one who dreams of lands of milk and honey; rather, he must be a tough and nimble fantasist who thinks by means of constructions and who can swiftly connect one phenomenon to another.”18 Gastev was in fact but one of many figures who heralded the return of fantasy in the 1920s. His secretary Viktor Pertsov, who became a core member avant-garde group LEF, situated this materialist, technical faculty at the center of production art’s new program. In his 1925 resumé of recent developments in LEF, he proposed “constructive fantasy” as the solution to the impasse facing first-generation production artists, whose rallying cry “Into Production!” had led the group to mistakenly embrace a factory metaphysics that sundered gesture from symbol, body from mind. According to Pertsov, constructive fantasy was the combinatorial faculty that broke through the barriers erected by the division of labor, that regressive Urphänomen of the bourgeois spirit. He argued that factory rationalization alone would never liberate the forces of production: the connective tissue of art and fantasy would always be needed as well. As he put it, A[rt] ≥ E[ngineering].19
Thus, when fantasy returned in the 1920s after a century and a half of exile, its edges had grown sharper, its features more constructivist, its disposition more materialist. Artists, writers, and philosophers of the interwar years proclaimed an era of “technical fantasy,” “logical fantasy,” and “factual fantasy.”20 Adorno’s 1931 lecture outlining the program for a coming philosophy advanced the faculty of “exact fantasy,” a mode of thought that eschews flights of speculation and instead “abides strictly within the material which the sciences present to it.”21 The imagination is allusive, but fantasy is explicit. In contrast to the imagination, which media theorists since Benjamin have considered hostile to the industrial lifeworld, fantasy turns out to be fully compatible with empirical sciences and media technologies such as film and photography. Such “technologies of psychocultural reconcretization … keep alive society’s ‘vital chains of action’ by supplying the element of fantasy that is necessary for their operation.”22 In his 1927 book on cinema, Materialization of the Fantastic, Ehrenburg observed that fantasy “demands not only a different technology but also a different psychology,” a post-Romantic psyche that was at home in these industrial laminations of image and reality. The fantastic opens a space where “object and image seem to collide.”23 But unlike the daydreams of the past, the technological hallucinations of the twentieth century were shared, collective, and socialized. “Humanity has started to dream ‘in broad daylight,’” announced Ehrenburg.
Just because open-eyed fantasy takes root in empirical phenomena does not make its positivities symbolically meaningful or even necessarily intelligible. As Winnicott discovered, hermeneutic methods have little purchase here. Fantasy dominates in those scenarios that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge later called proletarian counter-public spheres: practical sites of experience and encounter that are shared and collective but that are nonetheless unrepresentable because they fall outside the hegemonic horizon of knowledge and understanding. Fantasies might appear irrational but they are not irreal. The artist Aleksandr Rodchenko had something like this in mind when he partially solarized the famous face of the avant-garde poster girl Lili Brik for the cover of Ehrenburg’s Materialization of the Fantastic. Oscillating between transparency and opacity, Rodchenko’s cover visualizes something that is familiar yet obscure and unrecognizable, manifest yet elusive and unknowable, tangible yet discontinuous and incoherent. According to Negt and Kluge, proletarian counter-public spheres are perplexing ideologically not so much because they are abstract or hidden from view but because these “tactile” fragments of experience lack a Lebenszusammenhang, an integrated context of living to hold them together. They write that “fantasy relates to a concrete situation,” although not as a “particular substance” but as “the organizer of mediation”: fantasy is “the specific work process whereby libidinal structure, consciousness, and the outside world are connected with one another.” Fantasies are never class specific and for this reason do not belong to the realm of explicit political messaging, although the chains of association generated by fantasy are nonetheless “entirely dependent upon one’s position within the production process.” Fantasy “spins a web around reality” (das Einspinnen der Realität) that threads sensuous particles of experience together into a causal sequence of action.24
Emerging from their study of mass cultural formations in Weimar Germany, Negt and Kluge’s concept of Lebenszusammenhang owes an obvious debt to the work of Proletkult theorist Lu Märten, who situated fantasy at the center of the program that she called Lebensarbeit, or life-work. As a practice of life-work, fantasizing reassembles and quickens the pieces of fragmented subjectivity, both psychic and gestural, that are strewn across an empirical and objective––but still derealized and abstract––collective of networked bodies. Märten thus insisted that fantasy was not an atavistic reaction against technical modernity. To the contrary, her signal 1924 book Essence and Transformation of Forms and Arts emphasized fantasizing as a strategy for reintegrating disjunctive, developmentally “uneven” moments of production that spanned the artisanal and the industrial, the folkic and the futuristic. Negt and Kluge later echoed: “Empirically, [fantasy] is expressed in the flow of associations that accompanies the lifelong labor process, but also in the historical sedimentations of this flow of consciousness in the form of cultural products and ways of life [der Kulturprodukte und der Lebensweise].”25
Like the Soviet production theorists who conjured fantasy’s “constructive,” or combinatorial, powers, Märten insisted that fantasy generates nothing new, but instead only assembles and concatenates existing empirical facts. In this respect, it is distinct from an ex-nihilo creative faculty like the Romantic imagination. “The forces of fantasy are not inventive, but combinatory forces,” Märten explained. “Fantasy has the task of combining, increasingly on the basis of facts and of general knowledge. Thus, [fantasy works like] an indicator or a chemical reagent––albeit a reagent that has nothing to do with naïve intuiting or belief even though the masses of people might be uneducated.” Märten rejected the notion that fantasy belongs to a primitive stage of cultural development or that it has been superseded by modern scientific consciousness.26 She argued the opposite case: increasing industrial rationalization, the intensification of labor divisions, and the loss of artisanal practices in which workers were able to oversee work processes from beginning to end had only strengthened the forces of fantasy as compensation for the loss of the totality of a life-form [Lebensform]. In her art criticism, Märten thus positioned fantasy against the overspecialization of aesthetic labor and its apotheosis in the silos of high-modernist artwork.
Interest in the infrastructure of fantasy led Märten to explore the fables and myths that “emerge systemless from the [people’s] material awarenesses of their vital interests in work and life.”27 As Stakemeier points out, fantasy finds a vehicle in the originless and clichéd epic forms of literature that circulate, authorless, among an anonymous population. Much like Freud, whose 1908 essay “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”) had questioned the relevance of high art for understanding the workings of fantasy and which turned instead to serials, dime novels, and other sites of mass-cultural expression that derive “from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales,” Märten focused on the amateur forms of art and literature where fantasy took root.28 But unlike the psychoanalyst, Märten dismissed efforts to extract symbolic content or meaning from fables, since, for her, the purpose of these daydreams was not to represent reality but to provide it with a preliminary grammar, a tentative blueprint of action that she called “the field of fantasy” (das Feld der Phantasie). Fables are maps of the world, not its pictures.
The production theorist Pertsov, too, had foregrounded the fable (басня) as an important noetic resource for industrial modernity and, also like Märten, pointed out that these operational schemes were per se contentless. Soviet fables about frugality, self-actuation, and duty––some of the topics Pertsov proposes––were neither didactic nor moralistic. They did not contain clear ideological messages and could mean many different things. Likewise, Märten could find no hermeneutics of fantasy, only a “morphology.” “All poetry is powerful and fantastic only when it is real, when it has a determinate content [einen bestimmten Inhalt] rather than a symbolic content.”29 For materialists like Märten, fables and myths were not narratives in need of critical interpretation but patterns of movement and affectivity whose concrete functions had to be reconstructed choreographically. “The way to explain a myth is to discover the ritual to which it corresponds,” explained Jean-Pierre Vernant some years later.30 As one example of popular fantasy, Märten thus cited the rituals of ancient mystery cults that directed their initiates to mime and reenact the contents of myth in order to weave together sensuous perceptions, motor movements, and abstract doctrinal precepts. “The earliest form of the mysteries show the gnosis [spiritual knowledge] just as clearly as the simplest fairy tale,” Märten wrote. “They have the most tangible and material plastic expression; only later do they become abstracted.”31
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At the same time that communists like Gastev and Märten were pursuing a materialist account of fantasy, a second, complementary approach was emerging in the 1920s from the sciences of ethnography, anthropology, and paleontology. It was the art critic and lay ethnographer Carl Einstein who synthesized the research of these fields, connected these insights to contemporary aesthetic practices, and, in so doing, made the case for the primacy of fantasy over imagining. To be sure, Einstein’s early studies of African art from the 1910s had repeated the violence of colonial deracination by reducing the looted statuary to a system of purely formal differences: concave eyes or convex eyes, penis or vagina, open mouth or closed mouth, and so forth. From this perspective, the structuralist logic of African art was no different from that of abstract art as such. But as Einstein came to see modernism’s play of formal equivalences and its programmed logic of procedural variation as a dead end, he sought to re-embed these artifacts in lived rituals and their corresponding myths.32 He began collecting and publishing African fables and legends.33 Much like the Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp, who abandoned the structuralist premise of his early Morphology of the Folktale to explore the initiation rites and acts of communion that anchored these tales in social facts, Einstein sought to conjoin legend and ritual object directly, without the mediation of the imagination.34 For Einstein, the ethnographic object did not “illustrate” a myth; nor, conversely, could myth “explain” the object. The two phenomena were instead connected through a causal, material chain of action and effectivity. And the force holding this chain together was nothing other than fantasy, a faculty that Einstein situated in the image-poor customs, behaviors, comportments, and performed regionalisms that bound members of an ethnographic community together. Ritual was, as he put it, “proof of fantasy” (Beweis der Phantasie).
A subsequent reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo likely deepened Einstein’s insight that myths must be understood not as mental images but as concrete scripts for the mimetic reenactment of social conflict.35 But even this account was not sufficiently materialist for him. As the 1920s went on, Einstein lost interest in the phylogenetic fantasies of Freud, and, turning to contemporary French anthropology, came to explore the specific ethnotechnical practices and instruments that embedded fantasy in physical movement, gesture, and manual operations. As one of his final projects, Einstein announced a “biology of art” that extrapolated basic sensorimotor action-schemas from the analysis of paleolithic technologies like hand axes, knives, needles, textiles, ceramics, and knots. He saw confirmation of this approach in the ornaments that endowed such objects with symbolic value, whether in the embellishments that gendered an instrument (he noted the Sexus der Geräte) or the stylistic variations that reflected specific social configurations (clan, tribe, matriarchy, etc.). The insight that cultural and semantic meaning did not exist independently of manual activity led the art critic to abandon the sociohistorical, structuralist, and iconological methods of his time in favor of a Handbuch der Kunst, literally “a manual of art.” This late work proclaimed “the primary force of the fantastic that alone can form and master reality. Which is to say, fantasy [is] tightly bound to form. When collective fantasizing is at hand [one finds] a convergence of fantasy with its styles.” As Einstein noted about the origins of art in the paleolithic period, “the style of the fantastic is social form.” Only in the neolithic period that followed do archaeologists begin to observe “the differentiation of the pictorial vision of the imagination” (die Differenzierung des bildhaft imaginativen Sehens) and the emergence of writing and image-making as autonomous practices distinct from the concrete functioning of these instruments. And even after the neolithic, the two were never entirely separated. For Einstein, contemporary art objects, much like the sexed and socialized tools from which they descend, continue to preserve a “record of determinate actions [through] the archaic bindings [Bindungen] of fantasy. [In fantasy] psychic phenomena are completely exteriorized, objectified.”36
Einstein’s turn to fantasy took up theoretical impulses coming from French anthropology. Following André Leroi-Gourhan, who sought to analyze the “operational sequences” of making that formed the basis for higher symbolic reasoning, and Marcel Mauss, who argued that ideological abstractions such as community identity were rooted in “physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions,” Einstein situated fantasy at the intersection of the operational and the symbolic, the biological and the social.37 Such practical sequences enact “the intercalation of the fantastic in the real” (die Einschaltung des Phantastischen in das Wirkliche), he wrote. Fantasy thus inhabits the same hybrid ontology that media theorists today identify with “cultural techniques”: a
mode of existence engendered by the operations of opening, closing, sewing, coupling, and folding. Signs and things are thus always already entangled by means of linking operations and are part of a continuum of operations that connects assemblages––and that also plugs in the subject attached to these structures.38
Building on Mauss’s work, Bernhard Siegert explains that these sequences establish “an interface between the real and the symbolic” that functions entirely independently of ideological messages, semantic contents, and mental reflections.39 Such practical strata of meaning have no need for the mediations or sublimations of the image, or even for the imagination as such.
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The technological intensification of social and economic life in the postwar period has only hastened fantasy’s return to the center of cultural inquiry. Rejecting the transcendental reflectionism of the Idealist spectator-subject, philosophers and artists have pursued any number of monistic, materialist alternatives to the imagination. All of these roads lead back to fantasy. The media theorist Vilém Flusser, for example, argued that the “technical images” that are generated through computational methods transmit “models for behavior” rather than ideas or representations, leading him to proclaim a “new faculty of the imagination” (eine neue Einbildungskraft) that was genealogically unrelated to its Romantic precedent.40 In an explicit polemic against the Sartrean imagination, Gilbert Simondon likewise sought to redefine images as operative patterns, or “action schemas,” that affected consciousness without being transparent to it. Reviving ancient theories of φαντασία that presumed the “primordial exteriority of images in relation to the subject,” the French philosopher of technology proposed a genetic, or transductive, method that follows the activity of the image along a kinetic chain of cause and effect.41 Much like Märten, Simondon emphasized the role that myth and legend play in potentiating and amplifying––or “aggrandizing,” as he put it––certain biological reflexes and features of matter while diminishing or deactivating others. On the one hand, Simondon’s reflexology of phantasms looked forward to recent attempts to theorize memes, those contentless but highly contagious concatenations of images and bodies that circulate swiftly without semantic ballast or psychological residue. On the other hand, Simondon’s behaviorist image-monism also looked back to Einstein, who observed that “we live between and with images, statues, and words: we create these [forms] just as they, in turn, influence us.”42
According to Simondon, humans inhabit a three-phase image-cycle that includes primitive motor movements, determinate perceptions, and forms of symbolic communication. At the latter, highest level of consciousness, images may circulate as mental pictures, but these representations, no matter how abstract, always remain rooted in physical attitudes and affective dispositions. Here Simondon was inspired by Henri Bergson, who had argued that all life-forms, even nonhuman ones, participate in the image-infrastructure of reality, even if only on the primary, motoric register of existence. This infrastructure established the field of action that philosophers like Bergson associated with moral life and social obligation. (Importantly, Bergson derived the intuition of moral action not from any abstract ethical tenets but from embodied scripts of movement, like those found in ancient mystery rituals.) Not just moral behavior but political systems, too, were extrapolations from these affective networks: think of Georges Sorel’s scandalous definition of socialism not as an ideology or an economic system but as a “body of [motor] images capable of evoking … sentiments instinctively.”43 If the imagining subject declares his or her independence from others and from the contingencies of collective existence, fantasizing returns us to our moral commitments and political communities.
As one manifestation of collective fantasy, Simondon cited the Ideal Palace that the country postman (facteur) Ferdinand Cheval built between 1879 and 1912. Made famous in the photo shoots of the surrealists in 1920s, the construction was assembled from stones that Cheval collected while walking his daily route in southeast France over thirty-three years. Like the stones themselves, the morphology of the Palace also derived from the postman’s work: the façades of the Ideal Palace were inspired by photographs found in the magazines and encyclopedias that Cheval delivered to his neighbors, which depicted architectural monuments ranging from Cambodian temples to the White House in Washington, DC and the Maison-Carrée in Algiers. Its sources in illustrated print media notwithstanding, Cheval’s own building refused to be represented in pictures. Years later, art critic John Berger wrote that photographs cannot capture the achievement of the Palace, whose “visceral … tissue” echoes “the actual rhythm of [Cheval’s] movements as he moulded the cement or placed his stones.”44 About this “fantastical” structure, Simondon likewise wrote: “The non-figurative assemblages of stones, truly express [the] amplificatory and proliferating power of the gesture of construction that is diversified by going forward, directed only by the primordial intuition of a line or a motor theme.” The embodied reflex-scheme of the facteur––a word meaning “postman” but also, on a more technical register, a “coefficient”––potentiates and aggrandizes the image.45
For Simondon, the project recalled the DIY practices of amateurs who strive, in however flawed and improvised a manner, to overcome the modern workplace’s division of labor on their own time: A ≥ E, to recall Pertsov’s formula. Despite its strikingly idiosyncratic appearance, the Ideal Palace was not the creative expression of an isolated and eccentric folk genius, as so many have claimed. This is why Berger insisted that the surrealists were wrong to compare the Palace to a nocturnal dream or to celebrate its ramparts as an uprising against the exigencies of material reality. For the structure’s concatenation of image and gesture did not negate shared reality but augmented and extended it. And Cheval himself hardly considered his project quixotic or imaginative. For him, the Ideal Palace was anything but ideal: it was just a formal systematization and resocialization of the isolated gestures, perceptions, and cadences that comprised his daily work routine. Thus the dedication that the facteur placed on the north façade upon completing the building: “1879–1912. 10,000 days, 93,000 hours, 33 years of trials: Those who think they can do better can get to work.” The nocturnal imagination had played no role in Cheval’s endeavor. The fantasies of the people flourish not in la nuit des prolétaires but in the daytime of the laboring body.
Walter Benjamin, “Phantasie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Suhrkamp, 1991), 4:114.
Discussed in Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Phantasie,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. (Metzler, 2002), 4:784.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary, trans. Jonathan Webber (Routledge, 2004), 183–84.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (MIT Press, 1986), 79, 92. Bloch distinguishes categorically between the nocturnal dream (Nachttraum) and the daydream (Tagphantasie). In contrast to the former, the latter “does not exclude acuteness and even responsibility precisely of ‘thinking’” (86).
Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, “Primal Fantasy, Fantasies of Origins, Origins of Fantasy,” trans. Jonathan House, in Dominique Scarfone, Laplanche: An Introduction (Unconscious in Translation, 2015), 114.
D. W. Winnicott, “Dreaming, Fantasying and Living,” in Playing and Reality (Routledge, 2005), 45.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (Heinemann, 1976), 51. Translation modified.
Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Robots or Men?, trans. F. and M. Merrill (Harper, 1930), 121–22.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (MIT Press, 1971), 89.
Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in The Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (International Publishers, 1971), 309–10.
Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism, trans. David Macey (Free Association Books, 1988), 33.
Il’ia Erenburg, 10 l.s. (Petropolis, 1929), 30, 26.
Karl Marx, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in Capital, vol. 1, ed. Paul North and Paul Reitter, trans. Paul Reitter (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Aleksei Gastev, “Biometodika, predopredeliaiushchaia orgametodika,” in Trudovye ustanovki, ed. Iu. A. Gastev and E. A. Petrov (Ekonomika, 1973), 163.
Gastev, “Analitika priemov,” in Trudovye ustanovki, 119.
Aleksei Gastev, “Vosstanie kul’tury,” in Kak nado rabotat’, ed. N. M. Bakhrakh et al. (Ekonomika, 1972), 51, 34. On striking versus pressing in Gastev, see Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October, no. 118 (2006).
N. A. Bernshtein, O lovkosti i ee razvitii (Fizkul’tura i sport, 1991), 112.
Aleksei Gastev, “Kak izobretat’,” in Poeziia rabochego udara (Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1971), 276.
Viktor Pertsov, Reviziia levogo fronta v sovremennom russkom isskustve (Vserossiskii proletkul’t, 1925), 74–75.
Herbert Ihering, “‘Hoppla, wir leben!’ Piscator-Bühne,” in Theater in Aktion (Argon, 1987), 284; Egon Erwin Kisch, Der rasende Reporter (E. Reiss, 1925); and Alfred Döblin, Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur (Fischer, 2013), 123.
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, Telos, no. 31 (1977): 131.
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, “Dimensionen der ‘Literatur,’” in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Suhrkamp, 1988), 732.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy (Methuen, 1981), 19.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, trans Peter Labanyi et al. (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 32–38.
Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 34.
Lu Märten, Wesen und Veränderung der Formen und Künste (Werden und Wirken, 1949), 285.
Lu Märten, “Historisch-Materialistisches über Wesen und Veränderung der Künste: Eine pragmatische Einleitung,” in Formen für den Alltag: Schriften, Aufsätze, Vorträge, ed. Rainhard May (Verlag der Kunst, 1982), 64.
Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1953) 9:152. Importantly, Freud did not regard fantasies as anthropologically universal, but daydreams that were rooted in specific communities, peoples, and nations: “The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity” (152).
Märten, Wesen und Veränderung, 348.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Reason of Myth,” in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Zone Books, 1990), 229.
Märten, Formen für den Alltag, 63.
Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915).
Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Legenden (Rowohlt, 1925).
Consider Propp’s transition from Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (University of Texas Press, 1968) to Historical Roots of the Wondertale, trans. Miriam Schrager et al. (Indiana University Press, 2025).
While likely, there is no concrete evidence that Einstein read Totem and Taboo. Andreas Michel, “Formalism to Psychoanalysis: On the Politics of Primitivism in Carl Einstein,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer et al. (University of Michigan Press, 1998).
Carl Einstein, Werke, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Fannei & Walz, 1992), 4:307–8. On the connections of Einstein’s manual of art to contemporary French anthropology, see Maria Stavrinaki, “Carl Einstein’s History Without Names: From Geology to the Masses,” trans. Zoe Stillpass, Grey Room, no. 62 (2016).
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (MIT Press, 1993); Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. and trans. Nathan Schlanger (Durkheim Press, 2006), 92.
Bernhard Siegert, “Attached: The Object and the Collective,” trans. Michael Thomas Taylor, in Cultural Techniques: Assembling Spaces, Texts & Collectives, ed. Jörg Dünne et al. (De Gruyter, 2020), 140.
Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Fordham University Press, 2015), 15.
Vilém Flusser, “Eine neue Einbildungskraft,” in Bildlichkeit, ed. Volker Bohn (Suhrkamp, 1900).
Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention, trans. Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 31, 43, 7.
Einstein, Werke, 4:338.
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge University Press), 118.
John Berger, “The Ideal Palace,” in Keeping a Rendezvous (Pantheon, 1991), 87.
Simondon, Imagination and Invention, 55.