Physics aspires to describe nature through the language of math, while poetry does not have—and cannot have—a commensurably precise form of notation. The language of poetry is always, necessarily, contaminated with a spillover of meaning from elsewhere, and it benefits from that. But one thing poetry might have in common with physical laws is the way poetry abstracts, certainly more than prose does. Physical laws—like those of statistical mechanics—allow you to abstract from having to describe every possible configuration of stuff. Where some poetry may come close here is in its freedom to abstract from exhaustive description.

In Leonard’s work, iteration reanimates photography’s contingency and incompleteness, its incapacity to see and know all from a fixed point in space. It resurfaces the copresence of a wider variety of discernible “subjects” than can tend to articulate themselves in a visual economy driven by autonomy’s logic of exception. The recursive nature of iteration materializes the multiplicity of varying connections that exist between places in time, and it materializes the manifold connections that exist between images in space. Iteration in this way makes multivalence available, perceptually, by infusing the vertiginous force of instantaneity into the horizontal plasticity of time.

This does not mean that in our opinion there is nothing more to be learned from Lenin or Luxemburg. On the contrary, it simply means that we intend to present here a contribution of our own experience. This seems to be the correct way for us to participate in this discussion; first of all, because we consider that the praxis in a specific situation constitutes the only possible measure of the validity of any theory; and secondly, because we think that the problem of organization cannot be reduced to a simple theoretical problem or even a technical-administrative one, but rather must always be seen in strict relationship to a determinate class situation and to a certain political program. In other words, the question of “how to organize” depends strictly on another question, “Why organize, and under what conditions?”

If theories are valid only to the degree that they relate to definite “praxis” in given situations, then what prospects are there for learning lessons from past struggles? This difficulty would have doubtless agonized some of the American audience members, listening excitedly about the unrest in Italy and watching their own revolutionary movements fragment—much as we today look longingly at insurrections in other countries and ask why “we” fail to take such initiative. Reports from an accelerating succession of upheavals—from the renters’ and student revolts in Spain and France, to the shock electoral mobilizations in Serbia and Brazil—have prompted a similar wave of studied envy by those of us in relatively subdued atmospheres elsewhere.

The consequences of algorithms are entirely material—energy consumption, heat, labor, spatial infrastructures, and, increasingly, decisions affecting human and nonhuman lives—yet the operation itself remains procedurally enclosed. It produces results but cannot itself ground the conditions through which those results acquire meaning. The angel and the agent are thus not two names for the same intermediary function. They indicate different epistemological regimes: what is received and what is made; what addresses and what executes; what may transform the receiver through encounter and what transforms inputs according to operations.

Seeking a grounding in this horror is the quest of those Lord of the Rings fantasies that dominate and terrorize white politics. I like to call these fantasies a symptom of a crisis of origination. It begins with the disavowal and denial of an originary violence. The pathos of those symptoms is truly pathetic. But what passes as fantasy in that industry is not what you propose, and I wonder what it means for you to take the fantastic seriously and differently, as you propose in Billie’s Bent Elbow, which reads the orisha Èṣù’s aporetic bearing and Yoruba aesthetics as something closer to technique than to origin.

It is well known that the idea of projection became central to psychoanalysis and the arts of technological modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. But it is not well known that its history is also deeply rooted in environmental processes, and that its meaning goes much further back in time. The term “projection” actually originated in alchemy, where it was already in use in the late fifteenth century. This is a fundamental genealogy to unearth, because it speaks of projection as the act of transforming organic and inorganic matter. This genealogy is consequential not only for rethinking what the term “projective” means but also for understanding what a projective model of knowledge can do.

The dead form the connective tissue between the body and place, between signs and signification, between the built environment and the nonhuman world. Their absent presence in the material and immaterial relations that structure life means that when those relations are reconfigured, the dead take on new forms. Perhaps different historical regimes of enclosure continuously displace the dead, and in the process, reconfigure the scope of possibilities for their appearance or disappearance among the living.