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 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.
For this month’s installments in the series, the editors invited Ludovic Coupaye, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos to reflect on fantasy as a technical system that establishes a new relationship between imagery and collective experience. Zavitsanos’s work presumes the facts of division and dependency as preconditions not for social alienation but for the formulation of a common sense. McArthur has focused on the way that accessibility and environments multiply subjects and distribute them across a community of care. Both explore the (dis)identification of abilities, and sensory experiences, across populations. Finally, Coupaye’s curatorial practice and academic scholarship challenges us to approach language and culture as a syntax of operational gestures that stitches together body, object, and image.
All three of these projects presume the image to be something other than a neutral reflection or a depiction of an objective, external world. Thus, the editors’ writing prompt for Coupaye, McArthur, and Zavitsanos: How do you think about the interactions between signs and objects, between images and bodies, on a material level? And how does this stance inform your thinking about technology? Are there aspects of instruments—whether practical, scientific, or epistemic—that exceed the criterion of pure functionality and set in motion processes of collective fantasy? Finally, is there a specific class of objects that should be privileged over others as catalysts of collective fantasy?
—Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors
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CAMERA ONE
Iamb you say as I just ramble on;
Across the bars in song unformed and free;
Preamble jambled gambles gone on too long;
So what, if ev’rything’s anomaly?
If páme, vólta loops much more than turn;
And we must meet conspiracy anew;
To break our legs for this again and learn;
How excess sicks its hold on truth accrued.
But O to bite satirical afield;
Two bees in bonnets, outta pocket, sting;
To breathe symphonically and not to yield;1
For polyphonic sonnet’s whispers sing.
’Tis form that gives a body live or dead.
And mom’s spaghetti’s readymade unread.
Neighbors, Strangers, and Nonsensuous Strands
The gods visit us disguised as strangers.
—Homer, The Odyssey2
There used to be a store across from my apartment—I think it was a sign store because its sign was just a dove icon with a script that said “Signs” (and I doubt it was a dove store). The store was closed for all the time I lived across from it, and then one day about a month ago, the “Signs” sign was replaced by a big wraparound sign that says “boost mobile”; the double lowercase o’s in “boost” are elongated and connected like an infinity symbol which I think is meant to convey that their cell phones last long.
Last week a bunch of orange balloons were tied out front and some kind of AI remix of Keith Sweat’s “Twisted” echoed down the alley. I’d never seen this store open before and with the exception of the fanfare that one day last week, I’m not sure it’s actually ever really open. During the day, the sign is there but everyone just walks by in corridoral flow.
At night something more fantastical happens and the mobile store becomes more mobile and simultaneously static.
[ Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?3 ]
At night, when the store is closed, the sign lights up the whole corner, its reflection flashes in the puddles and floats across the curls of smoke from people’s cigarettes below. I swear the acoustics of the alley get more punctuated too. There’s a kind of synesthetic cacophony that highlights the displacement of the sign itself and whoever’s under it lingering (or malingering) in this strange loop that cycles day for night bathed lemniscate.
Last night I dreamt you under the sign singing “I heard it in a dream” but I don’t know what it means. Do you?
[ I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.4 ]
On the highway today every sign was out of time. So far beyond late and outdated. The fact that I can read them makes me cry. That I conceive of myself as moving in a direction of my choosing makes me cry. Population 3,894. Settled. Founded. Limits. Established. Home of the Bobcats. Does a sign know when a baby is born?
When asked about signs and objects and how they differ, we aren’t fully sure how they do. That they do differ, when they do differ, seems obvious enough but so often signs and objects still seem to render suffused.5 Sometimes it seems like every object is a sign and it pretty much always feels to us that every sign is an object. We don’t object to a world of things and we count ourselves among the myriad material and shifting situations: just another choratic occasion in a very long chain of interactions that continually construct scenes.
Recently we’ve noticed a cut though—some kinda bifurcation in our basic being. (Maybe it’s some bildung showing a bit; maybe it’s Maybelline.) That maybe line though, that hybridization of what is and what may be, is the line we wanna draw out and reel back. Ever since the real came back in style there’s been some contestation in the concatenation of dreams and waking life.6
We still love imagination—if only for the automatic, autonomic query latent in its colloquial use—but we refuse the singularity of subjection asserted by imāginātiō because that’s precisely where it fails us, and any we. Clearly some kinda telescoping is needed to truly touch these times, something that hits a little more real for the necessarily collective construction of reality and fantasy.
There’s a feel to the phantasmagoric, a something from nothing (where nothing is very much a thing if but a no thing) that pulls us, lulls us, sings, sirens, calls us back to worlds we make together—in and against, in but not of, in and not outside of or looking down on or overseeing. We’re so over seeing as the primary site of knowledge. Where is vision? How do we image beyond imagination? How do we sense beyond image? Is it fantasy that is more real than the reality we’ve been told? Let us find us, the people, in these imaginative fantasies proposed—somewhere in the dropdown menu south of Houston as you say.
Or let’s just listen in as things sing with things.
i. Conspiracies Under Production
We shelter our talk with white noise
placing an overturned pot by the door.
But the door is less threshold than frame
—which is to say it holds as much as it leaks.
Somewhere within displacement and displays
are pocket doors that shift the scale of entrance,
tip the scales of place to make chiastic
an otherwise chaotic order of things.
The way things go is an undifferentiated noise tho—
just a chorus corralled in the periodic rupture of gas.
Firelight makes picture portraits on paper
in houses for dolls anywhere may.
Filters, they tend to show what’s already here:
debility in continuous play.
ii. Shells, Games, Benches
An icon is vacant and full beyond index direction;
and it’s nonfullness that sails this fold on the sea.
The nutshells we code gold discard calling
collection, roll guild twenty four karat, next one.
Abandoned, we visit buildings
as a means of remembering the hold.
Long benches we add to parks made for benches
before casting the shape of one another’s ear.
Our carriers, their names unknown we whisper
in remembrance of worlds breathing years.
When set adrift on memory bliss was just—
it was just always the tools that use us best.
Dear impasse emergency, we don’t need no water—
Signed fools sincerely, let a mother burn.
Emergence and Emergency
For science, wetness, like mass, is emergent—a quality that arises in the ensemble where it doesn’t exist in the part. In the shift of scale from H2O to many millions of water molecules clinging together, wetness—this haptic encounter or feel that describes or inscribes what we know as water—arises, bubbles up, bobbles up, bodies. This is to say, that wetness is a fantasy water makes with us. And one we hold without it. An emergent phenomenon is not real; it has no being and in such a sense (and along the nonsensual) it might be deemed a sensorial illusion: like touch, which is impossible but we do it anyway.
The fleeting image is an object insofar as it is turned over and manipulated impromptu by many. But it is not fixed into picture or captured in profile. No representation remains. There’s no inclusion or exclusion, no invitation to accept or refuse—just sequins in sequence flashing until evanescence overcomes the effervescence of a scene collectively gathered, only to disperse.
iii. It’s Not During the Fire Alarms
In the emergence of our conditions is
the condition of ever emergent means.
Absent doctors’ notes their questions
are answered by text messages yet to be read.
Our go-packs merge every contact
as the dish runs away with the bread.
We swap bank accounts for numbers
to call—call out but also call him.
How come the knives in our hands go itchy
over cuts first scored on the grill?
“Call the doctor; don’t call the doctor”
I do what I can do and can’t do times two.
We roll up to take it all down.
Get in the car and get driven away.
iv. Friends
Our speeches are swapped out for eulogies
as empty chairs pile up high.
Because another word (or fantasy) is flight—
(and we happen to still be alive).
Bells ring, we continue to wait
while our seats at the table collapse.
Fiction’s fan covers postcards in sending
tablecloths run aground under toe.
For our sonnets are dreamt neverending
(naps) three six twelve evermore.
There’s a speed to this write, a read to this time,
a manifold doubled over in couplet.
But not all that is read has been written
and twenty minutes ago I said I’d call and didn’t.
Burden (chorus)
We’re alive at a time when the total destruction of life is possible. We live at a time when life is impossible. But impossible is a polyphonic, infrasonic voice begging for a box big enough to hold it. This burden7 is our necessity and pleasure.8
v. Deposition
I said I’d come and didn’t, said I’d say and never
said this would be easy. This should be easy.
We promise earth a future of fallow
marked by stones and never by signs.
If you’ve been looking for a sign, this is it.
(Some things only signify in rhyme.)
Do autological entities submerge time
in metronomes, in charts, on display
on watches, on pockets, and stoppages
messages A the K to the A (away).
Our muses, we thought, had left us
(and given our pain you’d think they had)
but MIA keeps us in action of
missing that’s thought to be bad.
vi. Calls in the Round
Because this missing is our entire concern.
The missing and also the missed:
we miss you and don’t even know you
miss the chance occasion of us of them to be you.
Beauty say the strongmen of eugenics
as we put up posters for neighbors to take.
Their rumors catch wind against weather
or is that just the sound of the rain?
What is image [ ] body [ ] object?
(Are we instrument? Technology? Sign?)
Our fleeting thought is: depends on who’s asking
consider us any, all, or none by design.
Consider us burdens asleep in
action: bass choruses tuned wrong unaligned.
vii. The Big Four-Oh Circle
We float away for deeper connection
move apart by no choice of our own.
Common fields sensed farther than first
imagined, oh please someone get on the identified.
TVs on shimmer atop tables
while objects scatter the floor.
Our journals are out for the taking
amid baseballs and armor galore.
Leave early and forget all direction.
Leave late at the room’s great advice.
Stomp, stamp, send out again for collection,
plead “excuse me” “excuse me” at least thrice.
Because another word for fantasy is mourning
cry lysis irresistible.
CAMERA TWO
If Pictures still by capture is it worth;
The carceral bars aflame burnt smelt to flair;
A meaning returned all that’s ablaze to earth;
So wherein all that’s solid melts to air.
But what is body every nowhere if;9
Dependency is but nonlocal free;
A Koerner of truth in our mouths err riff;
Nonmatriculated lacustrine sea.
To everything there is a turn (tropein);
Repeat indexic dream diegetic;
J’s car go anywhere from here (careen);
Just cargo in deictic dialectic.
But we don’t mind a little sieve and slide
On body’s cymbal ride it’s live and die.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Poems (Edward Moxon, 1842).
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin Books, 1999).
Theodore Roethke, “The Waking,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961).
Roethke, “The Waking.”
We recognize that in many cases signs and objects (and signifiers and signified) do indeed differ drastically and that their prior or possible connections are often lost or broken from linkage, but this break itself, for us, remains a (non)site of a common connection that difference can hold. We also acknowledge how some shifts in what signs actually signify are sites of violence meant to confuse us in attempts to dislodge our common sense(s), but we prefer here to stick with the sensual (and nonsensual, or extrasensual) in the ongoing collective construction of the consensual “feeling with” fantasy beyond consensus-formed reality because we feel fantasy and reality themselves have been inverted. These acts of separation at times can also seek to separate us from one another, from things, and from the world or the worlds we make in what Benjamin might deem “magical reading” alongside “nonsensuous similarity.” See Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” trans. Michael W. Jennings, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–1934 (Belknap Press, 1999).
The “concatenation of dreams and waking life” can refer to many things here, like the blur of hypnagogic sensorial knowledge, the way that things (or even artworks) can have a certain sociality with one another, or what we think that Fumi Okiji might both elaborate and fold up in the concept of the “nonsensuous standard” which we understand as an ineffable encounter that emerges from the ensemble as much as it is enformed in it, thus challenging the scientific notion of “emergence” altogether and operating more from haptics than from a fidelity of representation with respect to mimesis. See Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025), 77–84; and “Fumi Okiji Book Chat,” posted February 24, 2025, by Townsend Center for the Humanities, YouTube →. We also mean this phrase literally as the linkage (however broken, fused, or apparently distanced yet tethered) of what constitutes reality and what may be relegated as fantasy. The “contestation” refers to the illusory or even disillusionment of the process we are embedded in while imaging reality or receiving its image made without us. For “hybridization” we are thinking about the time since 2020 in which a proliferation of virtuality has been contrasted with reality and in which fantasy has been further sublimated to imagination. “This spring I went ‘back to normal’ or whatever it is they’re calling it these days when you go to work in person to show digital slides, but go to the doctor on a video call to show your actual body. I thought it would be this great boon to basic social engagement after years of hanging in the park with neighbors and strangers and small groups of close friends. I was craving the mids, the like-minded encounters with comrades who aren’t best friends and family. After so much hybrid time, I was thirsty for the real, but what I found out fast was that everyone’s still hybrid. I don’t just mean the virtual portals that people drift through while their bodies block out space; I mean the ‘here’ and ‘there’ delinked in a subdivided deixis where ‘there’ and ‘here’ are so multivalent that they collapse into an unhere and nothere that somehow still doubles down on a certain occupation of space and time, like as if people’s bodies were being sublet in some kind of supersaturated Cartesian overload.”—CZ
In music and poetry, a “burden” functions as a refrain or chorus that repeats throughout a song. It serves as a recurring phrase, particularly in folk music and carols, designed to highlight the main theme. Time / Repetition: What started out differently can become a burden (a line or phrase that becomes a chorus-burden by being repeated). Shakespeare: “I would sing my song without a burden; thou bringest me out of tune.” Merriam-Webster for burden, 3 of 3 noun archaic: a bass or accompanying part.
See Jenny Nachtigall and Kerstin Stakemeier, “Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten’s Feminist ‘Objectivity,’” October, no. 178 (2021).
Geelia Ronkina, “To Live Not in But as Daydream: On ‘Projects 195: Park McArthur,’” The Contemporary Journal, no. 1 (March 9, 2020).
