History happens slowly, then quickly, then slowly again, in waves of contracting and expanding potential. At the moment, political changes are tearing through the streets and election systems of multiple cities and countries, forcing open new possibilities for the future that just days or weeks ago seemed sealed off. The odd thing, however, about convulsive fits of rage on streets and in voting booths is not that they instantaneously change anything, but that they have immense representational power to foretell what is to come by narrowing a field of possibilities: They telescope our vision forward to presage a structure of life that seems suddenly real enough to look backward at us from the future. In this issue of e-flux journal, Giuliana Bruno continues with the second part of her essay elaborating on how projection is more than just an image of light flashing forward onto a screen or a psychoanalytic displacement. It is also an alchemical force seeking the conversion and transmutation of matter, a magnetic field that draws together organic and nonorganic elements into a mixed environment of material and sensory exchange.
Also in this issue, Giulia Colletti speaks with Metahaven’s Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden about their latest book, The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures, and how it deals with the politics of perception and the AI modeling of cognition. What is the particular form of cognition that art invites? Can it be said to project another kind of model that is navigable through empathy—itself a “feeling into” that projects into another person’s inner world and motivations?
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev invites us to consider the presence of angels, and how their role as divine intermediaries carries a very different kind of address and agency than the agentic AI systems that anticipate and predict with prophetic effects, but really only mold the future based on the known coordinates of what they have amassed. Such an overaccumulation of data causes a deadening and overwhelming saturation that moves counter to the very bodily experience of absence and emptiness that is also a readiness for actually new and unforeseen knowledge, thought, and art to enter and bring about transformation—what used to be called “grace,” which is unattainable by machines.
Dante Philp asks in this issue: “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?” His essay dives deep into the historical reverberations and consequences of a presentation by two members of the radical Italian group Lotta Continua in Buffalo in 1971, which we also publish in this issue—the first time it has seen the light of day since it circulated as a pamphlet in London and beyond over fifty years ago. Reporting from Italy’s exploding “long ’68,” the Lotta Continua militants (Gianni Safri and Franco Caprotti) speak of their attempts to translate revolutionary experiences from elsewhere into their own context. Philps reads the reception of the text at the conference alongside the reception of “laboratory Italy” in England, where groups like Big Flame studied the tactics of Lotta Continua and similar organizations. Returning to the original text today, then, is not purely an exercise in historicizing what might be unperiodizable, but rather a bid to reignite flames, and to change our time for a different one—a projection in its own right.
After probing three major works by Lucy Raven in our last issue, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa returns with part two of his essay “Parallel Acts,” this time focused on the epic photographic series Al río / To the River (2016–22) by Zoe Leonard. The series consists of over five hundred photographs taken along a 1200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande, which runs along the US-Mexico border. In his meticulous reflection on Al río / To the River, Wolukau-Wanambwa shows how Leonard’s interest in iteration undermines certain staid modernist conventions about the authority of the photographic gaze. “In Al río,” he writes, “iteration presses back against solipsistic illusions … just as Leonard’s work responds to multiple entangled histories of imaging, and to the political implications of our hereditary or chosen points of view.”
A conversation between Anselm Franke and Fumi Okiji in this issue continues our ongoing series Fantasies of the People, commissioned by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier to ask 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 “Reoriginating Our Unreality,” Franke and Okiji discuss the role of fantasy in the backwards-projecting construction of origin stories and myths. Perhaps it is where historical power becomes the most openly yet seductively performative that the existential imagination runs wild, dreaming up essences of our selves coming from the cosmos, from our own ingenuity, from elements, or from our stories of becoming.
And what of the dead—including those who animate the histories unfolding in our present and who have been written out of the conversation? Beny Wagner probes how the enclosure of land also saw the expulsion of ghosts and spirits from our worlds. Indeed, it turns out that decades before the publication of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, the word “communism” first appeared in a text fragment by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin titled “Communism of Spirits” (Communismus der Geister). For Wagner, the enclosure of the dead continues today with AI services termed variously “GriefTech” or “DeathTech,” which welcome the dead back into the fold, remade and reanimated by LLMs. He asks: “What is lost in our relational framework to the past and future when the dead are captured and reappear in the commodity form? Where will we find a communism of spirits?”
This month, e-flux journal slightly shifts its publishing rhythm to a bimonthly format spanning all months of the year, including summer and winter holidays. Issue 167 is the first in this new format, with the following issue in January—our first January issue in some time. Thank you as always for reading!