e-flux journal issue #79（2017/02）
“Let us imagine,” David Marriott begins his essay in this issue, “that ‘black lives matter’ is a scandalous, even decadent claim, characterized, as the definition has it, by excess or luxury.” If this is so, Marriott makes clear, it is an excess we cannot afford to not afford. It is evident that #BlackLivesMatter and the organizations that coalesce the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) represent the most important and promising developments in the theory and practice of abolition. The luxury it is bound to may be communal above all else.
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Gean Moreno, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokle: “As the world falls apart…”
David Marriott: On Decadence: Bling Bling
Denise Ferreira da Silva: 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = β − β or β /β: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value
Jared Sexton: All Black Everything
Sampada Aranke: Material Matters: Black Radical Aesthetics and the Limits of Visibility
Lamin Fofana: Dis/Continuum
Patrick King: Introduction to Boggs
James Boggs: Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come
Nicholas Mirzoeff: Below the Water: Black Lives Matter and Revolutionary Time
e-flux journal issue #80（2017/03）
Division is the characteristic habit of humanity: ēthos anthropōi daimōn, as Heraclitus had it. Demons for division, we divide and are divided. Taken over by divisions within ourselves, the demonic appears as the divided self. Wherever the self realizes an apparent struggle, whenever one is possessed by another, the demon is present. Possession dramatizes self-production as a fight for local control. Demonology is the science of these heteronomous selves, these others inside us. “From the beginning” Boris Groys writes in this issue, “the contemporary artist is demonic: he is possessed by himself and cannot be relieved of his demons.”
Editors: Editorial
Amy Ireland: Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come
Charles Tonderai Mudede: Black Mirror Body
Boris Groys: Dmitri Prigov: Haunted Spaces
Nana Adusei-Poku: On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear
Achille Mbembe: Difference and Self- Determination
Barbara Cassin: More Than One Language
Carol Yinghua Lu: The Missing Front Line
Jonas Staal: Assemblism
e-flux journal issue #81（2017/04）
Art cannot solve the problems of 2017, Alexander Kluge says to Hans Ulrich Obrist in this issue, but it can start solving the problems of 2036. Though it may begin in the affective work of mourning, art moves towards a rational archeology and a realistic anticipation. We could call this “futurist realism,” a vision of the coming decades as a series of problems to be solved, rather than as a source for transcendent salvations or damnations of whatever fashion. Unlike the ecstatic or dispirited futurisms we are accustomed to, futurist realism looks forward with no false regrets. Bad-faith futurism, by contrast, is exemplified by those who, at the moment of Occidental eclipse, cynically claim the bankruptcy of that which the Occident never stood for in the first place.
Editors: Editorial
Alexander Kluge and Hans Ulrich Obrist: What Art Can Do
Yuk Hui: On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries
Xin Wang: Asian Futurism and the Non-Other
Vivian Ziherl: The Fourfold Articulation
Chen Chieh-jen: Dissenting Voices of the Unwashed, Disobedient, Noncitizens, and Exiles in their Own Homes
Arthur Jafa and Tina Campt: Love is the Message, The Plan is Death
Elizabeth A. Povinelli: Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories
David Morris: Anti-Shows
e-flux journal issue #82（2017/05）
The critique of bureaucracy slithers like a sewer - hidden, warm, and necessary - beneath the aging towers of the twentieth-century intellectual metropolis. Arising first as one answer to The Question - namely, what happened in the USSR? - bureaucracy eventually came to replace the bourgeoisie as the preferred explanation for why everything was the way it was. To this day, pseudonyms for bureaucracy remain highly fashionable pieces of conceptual hyperbole. Any characterization of instituted sociality as uniform unfreedom - the spectacle, the body without organs, libidinal economics, Empire, Bloom - has its origins in the bureaucratic obsession with control, as distinct from the bourgeois obsession with ownership.
Editors: Editorial
Boris Groys: Art, Technology, and Humanism
Oleksiy Radynski: The Great Accelerator
Jasper Bernes: The Poetry of Feedback
Gilbert Simondon: The Genesis of Technicity
Arseny Zhilyaev: Tracing Avant-Garde Museology
Dena Yago: On Ketamine and Added Value
Irmgard Emmelhainz: Fog or Smoke? Colonial Blindness and the Closure of Representation
Hamed Yousefi: ART+ART: The Avant-Garde in the Streets
Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl: Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time
e-flux journal issue #83（2017/06）
Every December, dictionaries and language societies across the globe identify the “words of the year” - words that resonated widely during the previous twelve months. In the mid-2000s, these lists were populated with words like “contempt” and “quagmire,” “ambivalence” and “conundrum.” A few years later, dominant words included “trepidation” and “precipice” and “fail,” “vitriol” and “insidious” and “bigot.” The OED’s word of the year for 2012 was “omnishambles.” 2016, however, was for OED the year of “post-truth.” Merriam-Webster selected the word “surreal.” In the wake of Brexit and the US elections, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and Turkey’s disregard for journalistic freedom, fake news and ever more puzzling hacks, and violence, all that violence, we are no longer just nervous about the state of the world: we are perplexed - bewildered in a wasteland of signs that were once familiar but no longer make any sense.
Rosi Braidotti, Timotheus Vermeulen, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokle: Editorial — “The New Brutality”
Nina Power: The Language of the New Brutality
Steffen Krüger: Barbarous Hordes, Brutal Elites: The Traumatic Structure of Right-Wing Populism
Geert Lovink: Overcoming Internet Disillusionment: On the Principles of Meme Design
Shumon Basar: LOL History
Aaron Schuster: Primal Scream, or Why Do Babies Cry?: A Theory of Trump
Erika Balsom: The Reality-Based Community
Marion von Osten: Human Animal Song
James T. Hong: The Suspicious Archive, Part II: Every Word Is a Prejudice
Franco "Bifo" Berardi: The Second Coming
e-flux journal issue #84（2017/09）
Indentured to the past, we drag our inherited identities through a forest of networks bursting
with mysterious intellectual fruit. We’re not sure which concepts are poisonous and which are safe. History is like a mistranslated phrasebook full of old-fashioned illustrations which everyone makes fun of on the internet. Attempts at organization feel fanciful and absurd: eclectic inventories of apocalypse-kitsch. In “A Palace of Unsaids,” Rob Goyanes considers the work of mourning under twenty-first century conditions. Does it matter if we show up to the wrong shift at the memorial-factory as long as we do our time?
Editors: Editorial
Emily Apter: Armed Response: Translation as Judicial Hearing
Boris Groys: Trump’s America: Playing the Victim
Houria Bouteldja: We, Indigenous Women
Rob Goyanes: A Palace of Unsaids
Oxana Timofeeva: Ultra-Black: Towards a Materialist Theory of Oil
Claire Fontaine: Chorus Anonymous: Voices from Documenta 14
Rijin Sahakian: What We Are Fighting For
Francesca Hughes: Truth Is in the Tower
Jacob Stewart-Halevy: We Have Never Been Post-Industrial
e-flux journal issue #85（2017/10）
The modern arrives when the boundaries dividing old and new become sites of struggle in the way that the divide between the sacred and the profane was previously. These distinctions - old/new, sacred/profane - are strategic: they refer to one embedded position in the life-world relative to another. In the October 2017 issue of e-flux journal, Noemi Smolik shows how, within Russia, the deployment of modernizing iconoclasm against the belief systems of Russia’s rural poor confounded distinctions between old and new, sacred and profane, even before the October Revolution and the Russian avant-garde.
Editors: Editorial
Jonathan Beller: The Fourth Determination
Luciana Parisi: Reprogramming Decisionism
Brian Holmes: Driving the Golden Spike
Aleksandra Shatskikh: Inscribed Vandalism: The Black Square at One Hundred
Noemi Smolik: The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?
Timothy Morton: Subscendence
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez: For Slow Institutions
Lorenza Pignatti: Experiments in Eternity: Erkki Kurenniemi
McKenzie Wark: My Collectible Ass
e-flux journal issue #86（2017/11）
Today, the most important question is not what belongs to whom but who belongs to what — as in what kind of group. Sameness trumps equality. Similarity beats solidarity. Reality is a battlefield. If the era of the October Revolution was epitomized by Malevich’s Black Square, the current one is ruled by Reality TV.
…
What is The Black Square’s equivalent in the age of Reality TV?
The answer is very simple: today, The Black Square could be anywhere. It is potentially ubiquitous. It has pervaded reality without anyone noticing. It has gone viral like a 3-D meme. Today, The Black Square is any TV or phone screen that is switched off. The Black Square has become The Black Screen. Whatever is shown on screens today is mostly numbers posing as people. In contrast, The Black Screen does not present media realisms, but rather the reality of mediation. It doesn’t show Reality TV, but demonstrates that proliferating screens are real. The black surface of the screen could be the exterior of the black-box algorithms operating behind it. In this case, The Black Screen becomes a documentary image of real-existing technology and its nontransparent mode of operation. The Black Square’s white frame is replaced by a slim metal frame bearing the name of a corporation. This is the new normal, the standard blank page or canvas.
Hito Steyerl, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokl: Editorial — “Strange Universalism”
Boris Buden and Darko Suvin: Only Intelligent Planning Can Save Us
Hito Steyerl and Rojava Film Commune: The Color of Women: An Interview with YPJ Commanders Dilovan Kobani, Nirvana, Ruken, and Zerin
Jodi Dean: Four Theses on the Comrade
ÖÇnder Çakar, Rojava Film Commune, and Hito Steyerl: “I don’t have time!”
Boris Groys: Towards a New Universalism
Yuk Hui: Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
Stephen Squibb: Parahistories of Self-Instituting Sunlight
Suely Rolnik: The Spheres of Insurrection: Suggestions for Combating the Pimping of Life
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: Base Faith
e-flux journal issue #87（2017/12）
Revolutionaries are people who need to run around in circles. Revolution is a cycle of toppling and replacing, of killing God and building a Church, as Camus says. It is nothing if not intense.
…
What if intensive performance is all that separates the avant-garde from a furniture catalog? What if the necessary changes require that we stay loose, chill out, and perform? Tadashi Suzuki once said that the only emotion an actor should feel onstage is the exhilaration of concentration. Is this intensity sufficient? Even if it looks like indifference? We might be capable, but are we interested?
Editors: Editorial
Tristan Garcia: The Intense Life: An Ethical Ideal
Jackie Wang: “This Is a Story About Nerds and Cops”: PredPol and Algorithmic Policing
Aria Dean: Notes on Blacceleration
Antonio Negri: The Common Before Power: An Example
Kuba Szreder: Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom
Irmgard Emmelhainz: Self-Destruction as Insurrection, or, How to Lift the Earth Above All That Has Died?
Karen Sherman: The Glory Hole
Theodor W. Adorno: On the Concept of Beauty
Wayne Koestenbaum: Lounge Act at Thek Lounge
The Forking Paths
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Year: 2017