Today’s fascisms are rife with false claims and outright lies. But confronting such lies takes more than simply telling the truth. False claims, invented threats, and delusions of grandeur exert a hold on the imagination, and furthermore produce alternate realities that are no longer reducible to fact and falsehood. The damage has already been done. And yet, perhaps other ways of imagining and acting in the world still remain open and available. In this issue, Luce deLire asks whether the hallucinatory and excessive character of contemporary political tyranny might be redirected. Looking to André Breton and the early surrealists, deLire considers how their experiments with psychoanalysis drawing on practices like the “exquisite corpse” sought contact with reality through embracing the unknown rather than compulsively denying it.
Also in this issue are two new installments of our ongoing series Fantasies of the People, commissioned by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier. The series asks how fantasy can be embraced not as an escapist or private irrational faculty, but as a collective material practice capable of surpassing the hermeticism of imagination. In “Chain of Fools FKA Fantasy,” Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos reflect on how the sensory world kindles everyday fantasies, proposing that we listen in “as things sing with things.” Then in “Ontogenetic Fantasies: Objects and Images as Crystallized Capacities,” Ludovic Coupaye invokes Bernard Stiegler and Gilbert Simondon to question the traditional dichotomy between fantasy and reality. Coupaye ultimately concludes that fantasies, far from being “unreal projections opposed to reality,” exert real material force in the world.
Lucy Steeds’s contribution to this issue begins with a question about historical repetition, asking, amongst other things, how exhibition histories are mobilized by curators to either reinforce canonization or unsettle the exhibition’s role in the reproduction of colonial culture. Indeed, can those two operations be separated? Zooming in on the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, particularly its exhibition of archival and artistic materials related to the participation of Indigenous artists in numerous historic European exhibitions, Steeds looks for how histories, and their relics, can chart other relationships with the present.
In the first of a two-part essay, Giuliana Bruno asks whether it’s time to call for a new humanism—based not in the exclusive omnipotence of the human, but rather in the mixed agency of the human with mechanical, emotional, and organic processes of becoming. Looking at artists who encounter technological and mediatic realities as ecologically determined, Bruno asks how we might derive a renewed understanding of the human from their work. How do screen-based media arise from the dynamic structures of matter and the photosynthetic life of plants?
The first part of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s two-part essay “Parallel Acts” moves through three works by Lucy Raven that enlarge the distance between land and landscape, material fact and ideological instrument. In Raven’s stagings of land subject to industrial extraction, Wolukau-Wanambwa finds wild entropic exchanges of energy, and sedimentary flows that refuse containment of any kind. Next month, part two of “Parallel Acts” looks at the photographic surfaces of landscape in a work by Zoe Leonard.
Juliana Streva interviews Denise Ferreira da Silva about how her experiences in 1980s and ’90s Brazil influenced some of Ferreira da Silva’s most powerful approaches to and against philosophy. From a youth group in Vila Aliança to a neighborhood association linked to the Communist Party, Ferreira da Silva’s participation in everyday forms of collective education was foundational to her critique of the state, cultural politics, Marxism, and radical analyses of “law that did not take the state into account.” Streva and Ferreira da Silva discuss the possibility/impossibility of reparations, decolonization, and repair.
