When playing in the context delineated by the thesis introduced by recursive colonialism, black feminist poethical tools and procedures seem to support what the latter both diagnoses and proposes, which is the uprooting of the infrastructure of global capital. It is again a moment that includes (a) a strike from above, which is creative rather than destructive, and which unleashes (b) a downward blow—an implosion perhaps—that shifts attention to the foundations. It is as if looking at global capital from down to up reveals precisely that which is not visible from its windows because it is what sustains the walls onto which they have been carved.

“Seeing appearances as the shortcomings of a prior state of true being is indeed boring, I agree.” Warmed by the drinks, I’m warming to my theme. “Let’s work the surfaces, change the signs, fashion the possibility of a kind of being to come! We are not fallen imitations of cisters. We are prototypes of the bio-hacked beings to come! We add to the range of things that humans already edit about their bodies. We do it with the latest techniques, the latest information, in all fields. We are among the avant-garde of possible future humans. What if a world existed that could answer to the desires of our bodies?”

It is now October, when the veils between worlds become thin. In this issue, there are human worlds and more-than-human worlds, and the university worlds, world wars, and art worlds that cross between them. Tam Donner plumbs the world we live in. Have you heard the one where universities give out honorary hoods to painters and warmongers alike? Take a look at the class pictures. Andreas Petrossiants follows the lead of Mount Etna, Europe’s oldest active volcano, where Pasolini may have seen a stage—or a screen—on which to feature the volcano’s ability to communize time, showing “linear, European time for the cruel joke of modernity that it is.”

Let’s leave aside the easy target of white supremacists and the pretendians. Instead, let’s ask why, even for someone like me—who can write her ancestral relation to a place stretching back to the eleventh century rich with the fourth voice, the tragedies of dispossession and inheritance as the survivance of absence—we should not abstract the survivance and heritability of my pre-European, pre-national “nativity” into a historically undifferentiated Indigeneity. What forms of affiliation might emerge from a shared experience of survivance that locates its inheritance in the present, in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not others?

Can one reduce the digital to an analog apparatus? Of course. There are endless clumsy ways to reduce mind to body and body to mind. I am contesting whether we ought to make such a reduction. And if we ought not, then historicism and empiricism shouldn’t be primary methods in digital studies. Anathema, I know, but that’s why it’s important to scrutinize methodology.

Irigaray made real for me an autonomy and a legitimation in my search for a livable self, and now it’s the subjecthood with which I write these words, full of femme feeling. Her unlikely trans feminism has worked well in that way, regardless of anything she’s ever written, or said, that is radically insufficient on other grounds. Here I am, a brown woman to her because I present myself as one and it’s not her desire to decide on my sexual difference or my subjectivity. French feminism of a surprising sort.

How can we explain the fact that some anarchists and many other leftists are respecting health rules dictated by a “state of exception,” while fascists are the ones reclaiming their freedom to do whatever they like? There is a comedic exchange of roles, whereby fascists proclaim themselves as the “defenders of freedom” and progressives emerge as the defenders of the law.

After decades of There Is No Alternative ideology, we see a pathos of the possible that aims to quell fears about empty possibilities without potentiality. But what are the potential possibilities—as opposed to largely hypothetical ones? In Peter Osborne’s characterization, the space of art is project space, and hence the space of the projection of possibilities and the presentation of “practices of anticipation.” And indeed, much contemporary aesthetic practice is possibilist—from speculo-accelerationist “we were promised jetpacks” retro-Prometheanisms to various forms of social and political practice seeking to foster and form alternative forms of assembly and cooperation.

Music reflects changes in the world: its mechanism relies on making noise palatable by means of subjectively defined order. The dialectic between order and violence mirrors another dialectic between music and pure noise: each reveals hidden physical and social architectures. By examining degrees of deviation from order, one can decipher the social code of a society at a particular time.

For Flynt, structure art involves an underdevelopment both of structure and of the sensible content of the art. This results from the mutual tethering of one to the other. Insofar as music seeks to satisfy both poles (structural and sensible/musical) at the same time, both are diluted: structure becomes impoverished as it needs to be incarnated in sounds, and music becomes impoverished to the extent that it obeys a logic external to sounds themselves. Concept art is a way of releasing the abstract structure from the sensible carcass; when concepts are freed from incarnation, it is possible to create more complex and interesting logical structures.

Sense-making (Besinnung) cannot be restored through the negation of planetarization. Rather, thinking has to overcome this condition. This is a matter of life and death. We may want to call this kind of thinking, which is already taking form but has yet to be formulated, “planetary thinking.”

Care and its politics have been a subject of concern to the art world, made all the more urgent by the global pandemic. But is it a real concern that can lead to changes in the way we operate in our institutions and working relationships, or is it merely surface level? How can care, if studied care-fully, provide solutions to the various problems that art institutions and art workers face? How is it that contemporary art institutions are keen—and comfortable—to talk about care when they have been so care-less?

Reading the story today, it’s hard not to think of those luxury “burrows” being built in decommissioned missile silos for the protection of the ultrarich, or other gated palaces in which elites plan to sequester themselves from coming calamities. More generally, what The Trial and The Castle are for bureaucracy and legal procedure, “The Burrow” is for security architecture and surveillance: it dramatizes the will-to-safety, and its obverse, the anxiety of precarity and risk, that so dominate modern life and politics. Kafka analyzes, with clinical precision, what might be called the neurosis of security (a Freudian will recognize here a model of obsessional neurosis), with its fear of the enemy, its insatiable need for defenses and its imperative of constant vigilance—as well as its agonizing uncertainty, its postponed grand plans, and its vacillation.

The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but only these specific people. They were specific—what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental—but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefited from the dispossession of other people’s labor, thought, and lands, that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe. The phrase “all of us” is heard only after some of us feel the effects of these actions, experience the specific toxicities within which they have entangled the world. Let’s not have critical oceanic studies be taken by this con—not have an oceanic feeling be that which annihilates the specificity of how entanglements produce difference in order to erase the specific ancestral present.

To see technology only as a form of anthropogenic violence would again ignore the generative synthesis of mechanistic analysis and materialist supposition. The denial of progress, even if limited to the technological output of human beings, requires treating technological objects both mechanically and materially, as well as demonstrating particular forces and matters. Or as philosopher Gilbert Simondon approached it, technology can be defined as a designed tool on the one hand and as having a life of its own on the other.