Editorial—“Strange Universalism”

Sorry Ukrainian hackers! In this case you are performing a social service for people, such as US farmers who are not allowed to repair their own tractors because the software remains the property of a corporation.

Table-turning—that parlor trick whereby spiritualist performers made ghosts dance for a select few—is Marx’s metaphor for the commodity. [See also David Riff, “Was Marx a Dancer?,” e-flux journal (November 2015) →

Of course, this is a complete oversimplification. People have agency. But what exactly moves people today, and how it makes them move, is difficult to assess in a world where platforms manipulate social affect through fake rage, perception management, and permanent disruption. By “platforms” I mean primarily social media, but this could also come to mean any kind of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), smart contract, or coin scheme on a blockchain or high-definition digital-address system. A great example is described in Facility Waters and Jamie Woodcock’s text‟Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo” See →

Littlefinger meets Aleksandr Dugin.

Of course they do. They also recall earlier systems of this kind, taking us back to the time of radio-instigated ethnic cleansing, printing-press disseminated anti-Semitism, and IBM/Hollerith-enabled deportation lists.

See Suely Rolniks wonderful analysis in this issue. →

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 245.

This was an argument advanced by the show “Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism,” curated by Anton Vidokle and Boris Groys at HKW earlier this year. See also Groys’s text in this issue. There is no indication that Malevich intended The Black Square to show outer space, except for abundant references to the cosmos throughout his work. Yet, reading a seeming abstraction as a portrait is encouraged by the red square of his Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions. I´ve made this point earlier in a text called The Empire of Senses (online at eipcp) where I also discuss Alain Badiou's reading of White on White in Die Passion des Realen, Alain Badiou, Das Jahrhundert, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2006, S 70ff. This point has also been made by Trevor Paglen in unpublished presentations about his project Orbital Reflector.

This point requires a lengthy explanation, which I will need to provide in a longer version of this piece to be written in the future. But the point is partly addressed in Boris Buden conversation with Darko Suvin in this issue.

And potentially sunlight organizes in a semi-intelligent way, see Stephen Squibb's text in this issue. →

See Yuk Hui in this issue. →

Thanks to Tim Morton for making this clear to me and for pointing me to "On Black Negativity, Or the Affirmation of Nothing: Jared Sexton, interviewed by Daniel Colucciello Barber," see → .

See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s piece in this issue.

See also →

I am referring to the claim by Russian’s State Tretyakov Gallery, where The Black Square is housed, that the white border of the painting bears the traces of an erased racist graffito. There are different opinions as to who scrawled it, but regardless, in my view this is what the white frame in this composition is all about. See Aleksandra Shatskikh, “Inscribed Vandalism: The Black Square at One Hundred,” e-flux journal 85 (October 2017) →.

See “Researchers capture first ‘image’ of a dark matter web that connects galaxies,” phys.org, April 12, 2017 →.