e-flux journal

issue #107

03/2020 e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring essays and contributions by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. The journal is available online, in PDF format, and in print through a network of distributors.

Editors 01/01 Julieta Aranda Brian Kuan Wood Anton Vidokle

Editor-in-Chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen

Art Director Maya Tounta

Managing & Copy Editor Mike Andrews

Associate Editor Andreas Petrossiants

Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk

Poetry Editor Simone White

Graphic Design Jeff Ramsey

Layout Generator Adam Florin e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ C o l p h n

05.24.21 / 06:27:07 EDT Editors

02 pp. Editorial

Nikolay Smirnov

11 pp. Shaman, Schismatic, 01/01 Necromancer: Religious Libertarians in Russia iLianađFokianaki

11 pp. Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 2: Slow/Fast Violence

Sam Richardson

06 pp. A Saintly Curse: On Gender, Sainthood, and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Serubiri Moses

10 pp. Violent Dreaming

Oleksiy Radynski

13 pp. Is Data the New Gas?

Mostafa Heddaya and Rijin Sahakian

12 pp. Recolonize This Place

Luis Camnitzer

05 pp. Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes

McKenzie Wark

21 pp. Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ C o n t e s

05.24.21 / 06:27:06 EDT As the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads, we – the people of planet earth – are faced with a dizzying variety of responses: quarantine, containment, vigilant self-quarantine, paranoid self-isolation, and in some cases escape from the above. Suddenly, it is as if circulation itself has turned against us, making healthy freedom

01/02 of movement in the world a dealer of death. So your flight is cancelled. Your trip is over. We are staying in place for the foreseeable future. Exhibitions, symposia, gatherings of all kinds are postponed. But not sporting events. Those will go on, but without any supporters in the stands. The players will play for empty stadiums and we will watch from home. It's a good time to Editors catch up on reading.

The movement and circulation of images and Editorial words is quite literally what we all do. In the current viral climate, now that mobility is rapidly curtailed and as preparations to be contagious and contained indoors shift between potentiality and reality, certain infrastructures are laid bare in their fragility. At the same time, specific mobilities may revert to how they looked at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The loss of free and near-miraculous movement between needed international gatherings of artists isn't quite something to be celebrated either. What would it look like to gather and share ideas, works, publications traveling only by data or by foot?

Nikolay Smirnov makes visible a century of religious-based networks across Russia – old believers, shamans, libertarian groups, and spiritual outliers who have operated against or in spite of centralized state power. Smirnov also relays attempts to repress these believers, beginning with populist movements before the October Revolution and continuing to this day, with shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev's ongoing and much-disrupted march by foot to the Kremlin this year from Yakutia, Siberia, “with a mission to exorcise the ‘powerful demon’ in the Kremlin.” Through examples spanning great distances and time, Smirnov points out that at one point in the mid-nineteenth century at least, such groups could be considered to operate as an “oppositional religious confederate republic” within Russia. Oleksiy Radynski traces the long

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ E d i t s E d i t o r a l gas line of twentieth and twenty-first century fossil fuel connections, particularly between the carbon empires of Russia and Germany, in relation to Alexander Bogdanov’s proto- cybernetics to ask: How has information travelled directly through the medium of oil – and now gas – networks?

Sam Richardson enters an ongoing investigation

03.20.20 / 11:47:04 EDT into images and lived experiences of Polycystic she arrives to: “Maybe it’s about standing in the Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) through the figure of flow, not where it’s a stagnant pool or a Saint Wilgefortis, a Catholic female saint known cascading blast, but where it eddies and still for her beard. Often appearing on the cross as if trickles. Maybe that stillness is actually she were Jesus Christ, throughout history propulsion if we think again about what moves Wilgefortis’s likeness has been removed, relative to what. Maybe there are still times and considered heretical, and officially purged places that, while not free, at least enable

(1969). But, since her legend arose in the 02/02 certain bodies and signs a little breathing room. fourteenth century, she has also been venerated Maybe certain bodies need that more than as a patron saint by those who are bound as others, and hence find their way.” prisoners or held captive by abusive husbands or domestic situations, by survivors of sexual In 1960, at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes assault, rape, and incest, and as Richardson in Montevideo, Luis Camnitzer wrote: “I don’t shows, by people of many genders and believe that there is any other aesthetic premise identities, including people with PCOS. than freedom, as much personal as collective.” Continuing into 2020, Camnitzer’s pedagogical Continuing an ongoing essay on narcissistic and artistic work has developed these premises, authoritarian statism, iLiana Fokianaki gives including a deep investigation into the form to the interplay between soft power and interrelation of language and image. At the time, hard power by adding additional axes for Camnitzer wrote to his fellow travellers, art plotting emergent forms of unaccountable students and graduates: “Undoubtedly, the most coercion, reminding us of the pressures exerted common means of expression is the word. It’s on cultural workers and institutions when misused and abused. It determines thought patrons and board members perpetuate the rather than being a consequence of it. same violence that artists protest against, or Metaphors have become formal sentences that when cultural workers respond by retreating into have lost their original image, and that is how we private familism. Serubiri Moses meditates on think.” the cinematic dimension of postcolonial thought, invoking the work of Franz Fanon to ask – Editors how violence operates through fantasies and đđđđđđđđđđ× dreams. If colonialism marries legality and structural violence, then Fanon’s practice as a psychoanalyst becomes all the more crucial for uncovering the desires and unconscious fantasies that we might also understand as images and projections.

In “Recolonize This Place,” Mostafa Heddaya and Rijin Sahakian critically untangle the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1, and identify how its “belated humanization” through empathetic artists and relativistic curatorial framing extends the “hearts and minds” rhetoric of US occupation. With the billionaire owner of the infamous private military contractor Blackwater chairing PS1 affiliate MoMA’s board, and many canonical European and American artists contemplating the mediatic abstraction of war as spectacle, the experiences of Iraqi artists in the exhibition appear increasingly significant for revealing surprising overlaps between the e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ E d i t s E d i t o r a l operating logic of the art institution and that of the US occupation of Iraq.

In “Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable,” McKenzie Wark writes through and alongside the artist’s music, visual, and written artwork in the form of a remix that’s “also a theory of its own aesthetic methods.” Among other revelations

03.20.20 / 11:47:04 EDT Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, religious radicalism in Russia became associated with political opposition and a search for political alternatives. The ethical tenets of popular faiths often coincided with the aspirations of revolutionaries. The collapse of the USSR ushered in a wave of religious libertarianism. This essay

01/11 considers three recent exponents: shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev, necromancer Anatoliy Moskvin, and neo-paganist Albert Razin. The main discussion is preceded by a brief historical overview of the subject.

1. Without a Tsar at the Head In Russia, mass religious dissent is associated Nikolay Smirnov first and foremost with the Raskol (Schism). As a result of a series of reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church carried out in the latter half of Shaman, the seventeenth century, a portion of the population “went into a schism,” i.e., rejected the Schismatic, reforms. A fierce struggle ensued: The schismatics, who saw the ruling power as the Necromancer: kingdom of the Antichrist, fled abroad or to remote regions of the Empire. The regime, in turn, persecuted the dissenters, saddling them Religious with increased taxes, even burning whole villages alive. Libertarians in đđđđđđđđđđAfter a harsh campaign of suppressing open protests, elites temporarily lost interest in religious dissent. Under the banner of Russia Enlightened Absolutism, Catherine II moved to end all persecution of the schismatics. Furthermore, in 1777, she put out a decree permitting peasants to enroll in the merchant classes. As a result, Raskol, or Old Belief, came to play a pivotal role in the formation of Russian capitalism, which bore unmistakable characteristics of socialism.1 How did this come about? đđđđđđđđđđOld Believers lived in peasant communes. Many aspects of their daily lives, as well as their resources, were collectivized. Communal assets were held in a trust, referred to as obshchak (commons). After 1777, when peasants gained the right to enroll in the merchantry, Old Believer communities saw the opportunity to gain economic independence within a hostile state. The obshchak was invested in a business enterprise, nominally headed by a manager. The state considered this person to be the proprietor, but this was not the case. In this manner, toward

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b the middle of the nineteenth century Raskol became a corporation, injecting into Russian capitalism the ethical principles of a schismatic community. đđđđđđđđđđAt about the same time, the state came to suspect a “false bottom” in domestic capitalism, which led to a series of investigative expeditions in the 1840s, led by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Additionally, the government financed

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT 02/11

Terry McLean's illustrationđfor the cover of a book he co-authored with Hugh Greig:đThe Hope and the Promise: The Tender, Tragic and Often Brutal Story of the Doukhoborsđ(Stagecoach Publishing, 1977). The painting is now on display at Doukhobor Discovery Centre, Castlegar. The painting depicts the Doukhobors's burning of the arms protestđin the Southern Caucasus of Russia at midnight on June 28–29, 1895.

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT several foreign expeditions, notably that of Baron reality, at least a quarter of the population was to Haxthausen. The latter’s 1843 journey across a lesser or greater extent schismatic, i.e., held Russia virtually discovered the peasant itself in opposition to the central power. This commune. Haxthausen, moreover, was one of the gave rise to new persecutions. first to turn his attention to popular religion and đđđđđđđđđđIn the mid-nineteenth century, the findings its varieties, in particular Old Belief. He of such government expeditions were made classified religious sects into three categories: 1) public, ushering in a fashion for Raskol within those that were formed prior to the Church 03/11 Russia’s progressive circles. Studies appeared, reforms and that, in his opinion, traced their laying emphasis on the political aspirations of origins to the Gnostics; 2) schismatic doctrines, the schismatics. In particular, Afanasiy Shchapov arising in the seventeenth century in direct noted that “the shared antagonism of the consequence of the Church reforms; and 3) sects schismatics toward the Orthodox government coming into existence during the reign of Peter I and the Orthodox Church united all the under the influence of Western religion schismatics, despite doctrinal differences, into a (Molokans, Dukhobors).2 single brotherhood.”3 Shchapov considered Old đđđđđđđđđđThe results of these investigations shocked Believer networks to form a spatially dispersed the elites. It turned out that the religious beliefs oppositional religious confederate republic. of the common people differed significantly from đđđđđđđđđđThe leading Russian revolutionaries of that official Orthodoxy. It was a matter not merely of a time – Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Ogarev, and pre-reform Orthodox rite, but of a hybrid faith, a Mikhail Bakunin – made a play for religious folk Orthodoxy, comprising pagan elements as dissent. Between 1862 and 1864, Herzen and well as collectivist social ideals. The government Ogarev put out a supplement to their periodical saw clearly that popular beliefs were perilously Kolokol titled “General Assembly,” aimed at the close to Western socialist views: universal people, and specifically the Old Believers. At equality, collective property, and a rejection of Herzen’s prompting, his associate Vasiliy Kelsiev state hierarchy. Moreover, it became apparent studied the political potential of the Schism, that official population statistics grossly eventually publishing several volumes of official underestimated the number of Old Believers. In Russian documents on its history. One of these

Portrait of Anatoly Moskvin. Collage by Alexander Volozhanin as published inđNizhegorodskie Novosti (News of nizhny novgorod), no. 137, 2011. Photo by the author.đ

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT volumes, dealing with the Skoptsy sect, is 1898 and resettled in Canada. preserved in the private library of Karl Marx with đđđđđđđđđđBy this time the vast domain of religious his personal notes and marginalia. dissent was understood in somewhat greater đđđđđđđđđđThe 1860s–70s saw the rise of the Narodnik detail. It became clear, for example, that some of (Populist) movement in Russia. The radical the Old Believers were Popovtsy (Priested) – intelligentsia set out for the provinces to “rouse harboring oppositional views, but already the masses” against autocracy. The “pilgrimage integrated into the power structure of to the countryfolk” failed in its principal aim, and 04/11 institutional religion. Besides these, there were in the 1880s a disenchantment with Raskol set various and rather numerous bezpopovskie in. The Populists were replaced by Marxists at soglasia (priestless denominations). The latter the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. The recognized no hierarchy or formal institutions, revolutionaries’ attention shifted from the and considered all authority, including that of the heterodox peasant to the proletariat. At the Popovtsy, to be the rule of the Antichrist. same time, Marxist organizations continued to Priestless denominations were quite diverse and pay attention to Raskol. The Bolsheviks in the continually transforming. Many of them early twentieth century were particularly incorporated elements of paganism, comprising interested in religious sects as the most radical a hybrid popular religion, opposed to official forms of society. Within the party, this subject Orthodoxy in religious as well as social aspects. was assigned to Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. In the In his Writer’s Diary, Fyodor Dostoevsky referred 1900s–10s he published “Materials Toward a to it as “the people’s Orthodoxy” or the horizontal History and Study of Russian Sectarianism and Church, as opposed to the hierarchical Schism.” At the second Russian Social “Orthodoxy of the elites.” Democratic Labor Party congress in 1903, đđđđđđđđđđSeveral of these priestless sects gave rise Bonch-Bruevich delivered a paper titled “Schism to radical societies. For example, the Wanderers, and Sectarianism in Russia.” In consequence, also known as the Runaways, rejected all forms the party adopted a resolution calling for a of civic duty and permanent residence. The social-democratic campaign among the sects, mystical Skoptsy (Eunuchs) practiced castration, and published nine issues of the monthly leaflet while at the same time readily integrating various Dawn aimed at the sectarians. technological innovations into the life of their đđđđđđđđđđIn 1908–10, a faction of the Bolsheviks took community. These came about as a result of an interest in Bogostroitelstvo, or “God-building.” what Charles Taylor refers to as the “nova Anatoliy Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, effect,” an intensification of the secularizing Maxim Gorky, and Vladimir Bazarov sought to processes that began with the arrival of what he formulate a new religion for the proletariat calls the “Modern Era” (1500s onwards). through a synthesis of socialism and folk According to Taylor, the nova effect emerged at religion. In 1909 they organized a school for the end of the eighteenth century, bringing about workers on the island of Capri. The school’s a “galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.”5 A activities and the theoretical writings of the God- nonstop proliferation of different forms of builders drew a scornful response from Lenin, spiritual existence results in a situation in which, who criticized their efforts to create a at a certain historical point, the center of “proletarian culture” and a “proletarian religion.” spiritual fulfillment could be displaced outside of đđđđđđđđđđThe turn of the century saw an upsurge of church hierarchy, into individual religious interest in the occult, esoteric knowledge, and experience. In Russia at the end of nineteenth sectarianism across the spectrum of Russia’s century, the majority of schismatic and sectarian intellectual elite.4 A spiritual radicalization of communities shared apocalyptic views, awaiting society was underway. A public campaign to the end of the existing world order on Judgment defend the Dukhobors was a case in point. The Day. more radical elements of this sect rejected the đđđđđđđđđđThe Russian masses, however, were principles of compulsory military service, private incapable of arriving at a revolution property, prisons, courts of law, churches, and independently, despite their widespread any other institutions of state power. In 1895, oppositionist leanings. According to Orlando several Dukhobor groups carried out a mass anti- e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b Figes, this was because the peasantry operated war action: a public burning of weapons. The strictly at the level of the community (Mir), rather authorities responded with harsh reprisals. The than that of nation.6 Charles Taylor agrees with campaign to defend the Dukhobors was led by him: “Their repertory didn’t include collective Leo Tolstoy and included other prominent actions of this type at this national level; what figures, such as the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, they could understand was large-scale theater director Leopold Sulerzhitsky, and the insurrections, like the Pugachovschina, whose Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. In the end, goal was not to take over and replace central some eight thousand Dukhobors left Russia in power, but to force it to be less malignant and

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT invasive.”7 informal intellectual societies engaged in đđđđđđđđđđIt was up to the Bolsheviks then to metaphysical, religious, or esoteric pursuits. consolidate and transform native libertarianism Even official or semi-official Soviet art of that into nationwide revolutionary events. The party’s time bears a noticeable trace of traditionalist prevalent role was certainly well documented in metaphysics: one need only recall the films of subsequent historiography. Far less attention, Tarkovsky, or the neo-traditionalist writers and however, was given to the various aspects of the the “ruralist” painters. Dissident groups popular worldview which made possible the 05/11 assumed a more radical – which often meant revolutionary experience. After the original more religious – posture. The art of Soviet studies of the late nineteenth century, we might nonconformists was shot through with a mention here the Soviet historians Kirill Chistov metaphysical strain, which they opposed to the and, especially, Aleksadnr Klibanov, whose work atheist officialdom. The most radical of these dealt with popular social utopias and groups took up esotericism and occultism, as socioreligious movements.8 Soviet historians exemplified by the Yuzhin Group in Moscow in invariably emphasized the political role of the 1970s.13 popular freethinking, noting the significance đđđđđđđđđđBirgit Menzel succinctly sums up the late- ascribed to it by the classics of Marxist-Leninist Soviet plunge into metaphysics as the “occult thought. They recalled Marx and Lenin’s affinity underground,”14 while Mikhail Epstein refers to it for the Munster Commune, along with the latter’s as the “new sectarianism.” In his work Cries in statement that “expression of political protest the New Wilderness, Epstein describes several under a religious guise is common to all people at “sects” among the late-Soviet intelligentsia.15 a certain stage in their development.”9 Although the sects and the writings of their đđđđđđđđđđIn the post-Soviet period the question was leaders are fictional, the book captured the taken up by Aleksandr Pyzhikov. He traced the intellectual climate of those years. As the author foundations of the Soviet project to the Old Belief states in his introduction, “Any Russian ideology ethics of various priestless denominations, i.e., sooner or later turns into a theology … and any to the messianic radicalism of the popular faith: social movement, unless it manages to seize power, transforms into a heresy and becomes a Collective psychology with its Old Belief sect … In Russia, sectarianism is the preordained underpinning became a powerful force that means of ‘survival’ of an idea under the pushed out the old order … The worker and tremendous pressure of the state.” In presenting peasant masses literally laid down their the reader with an assortment of totalitarian bones to prevent the return of the old order heterodox ideologies, the author seeks to obviate of nobility and government bureaucracy the very possibility of totalitarianism: “Our (liberal or not), blessed by the Russian approach to pluralism is different from that of Orthodox Church … The new ideology the West – i.e., compromise and moderation of combined the Bolsheviks’ Marxist theory diverging viewpoints. Instead, taking each to its with the communal-collectivist psychology extreme we eliminate the supremacy of one.”16 of the lower classes.10 đđđđđđđđđđWith the breakdown of the USSR in the 1980s–90s, the country was inundated by a wave Pyzhikov’s conclusions dovetail with those of the of spiritual pluralism. The immediate cause was dissident Sovietologist Mikhail Avgursky, who the abolition of censorship. At the same time, argued that the mass participation of Jews in the postmodern, critically inclined intellectuals like October Revolution may be attributed to the Mikhail Epstein and the writer Vladimir Sorokin sectarian varieties of Judaism and the aimed to amplify spiritual pluralism to a radical eschatological messianic sentiments extreme. For them, this was at once a means of widespread in the community.11 dismantling the repressive Soviet system, a đđđđđđđđđđThe individualization of spiritual experience guarantee of pluralism, and a reflection of the intensified over the course of the twentieth peculiarities of Russian culture. Media outlets, century. In the 1960s it entered a new phase, a freed from the shackles of censorship, were “spiritual super-nova” according to Charles flooded with information about UFOs,

Taylor, marked by “a generalized culture of e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b extraterrestrials, healers, mediums, Satanists, ‘authenticity,’ in which people are encouraged to and all manner of other esoterica. In all, it may find their own way, discover their own well be said that today we are still witnessing an fulfillment.”12 This is the age of expressive ongoing “occult revival” in post-Soviet Russia.17 individualism. Its advent has coincided with the dismantling of the modern disciplinary society. In 2. Recent Instances of Religious Russia it took the form of a critique of the Soviet Radicalism: From Exorcism in the Name of project and of state-imposed atheism. The USSR Popular Rule to Occult Libertarianism in the 1970s saw the emergence of numerous In recent years Russia has seen a handful of

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT 06/11

Portrait of Alexandr Gabyshev via theđsakhaday.ruđwebsite. Photographer unknown.đ

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT 07/11

Alexandr Gabyshev during his march to Moscow, Siberia, early summer 2019,đvia theđsakhaday.ruđwebsite. Photographer unknown.đ

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT high-profile incidents of religious dissent. They is specifically tied to Luciferianism. Moskvin were able to draw public interest because in repeatedly indicated that he felt sorry for the each case an exotic religious stance was young girls, cut off so early in life. For him they intertwined with political statements and/or were alive, not dead, because he could hear their radical action. Still, assigning the label of restless souls. Moskvin blamed the relatives of “abnormality” to the agent appears to satisfy the deceased for abandoning their dead: both the authorities and the public at large. The according to him, he merely picked up what latter, it seems, refuses to see these incidents as 08/11 others had discarded, when they tossed their an exaggerated reflection of their own problems. dead like trash into the cemetery. Convinced that đđđđđđđđđđLet us consider the case of Anatoliy science will soon master the means of cloning Moskvin, a linguist and Celtologist from Nizhniy (which is tantamount to resurrection), the Novgorod. In 2011 police discovered twenty-nine necromancer tried to preserve the bodies of the life-size dolls in his apartment that were found dead girls as best as he could by mummifying to contain mummified remains of young girls, their remains with a view to a future aged five to fifteen. Moskvin turned out to be a resurrection. necromancer, who frequented cemeteries, đđđđđđđđđđThe genealogy of Moskvin’s spiritual quest communing with the spirits of dead girls and can be traced to the Soviet era. In his essay digging up their graves. He mummified their “Cross without a Victim” (literally “without a remains and turned them into dolls. According to crucified one”), Moskvin recalls the prohibition him, with the help of these spirits he was able to against any discussion of the swastika symbol, access worlds beyond the grave. It was also his and the interest it invariably generated among intention to resurrect the children in the future, the intellectual milieu of the 1970s–90s: “It was when science discovers the appropriate the lure of the ‘forbidden fruit’ … That time is technology. passed, hopefully for good, and no topic of đđđđđđđđđđAn analysis of Moskvin’s beliefs shows that discussion is off limits to us now.”18 This is an he had synthesized syncretic paganism with attitude wholly characteristic of the occult gnostic Luciferianism. His communion with the underground, where esoteric knowledge is avidly spirits of the dead began in his childhood. sought out by the “curious.” It is to be dug up in Subsequently, through his studies of various central libraries, and a great deal of time must be pagan traditions – particularly those of the Celts, sacrificed in its acquisition and subsequent the Yakuts, and the Mari – he absorbed their exchange with others “in the know.” views of the afterlife, namely, that contact with đđđđđđđđđđMoskvin is an example of a the world of the dead may be established religious/spiritual libertarian of the right-wing, through the help of spirits or magic dolls, which individualist variety. The individual asserts his these spirits come to inhabit. To be assured of right to access any knowledge, regardless of success, one could place something associated societal or moral taboos. This is libertarianism of with the original host, such as a tuft of hair, the Faustian or Luciferian type. It may also be inside a doll. Consequently, the items found in called “magic libertarianism” or “occult his apartment by the police were neither libertarianism”; in any event, it follows a long cadavers nor mummies, but magical dolls. tradition. Furthermore, Moskvin’s path hews Indeed, every shaman possesses a whole stable closely to the tradition of metaphysical of magical dolls: they are their principal means investigations undertaken by the Soviet of travel between the two worlds. intelligentsia, and is a reflection of a burgeoning đđđđđđđđđđBesides his paganist views, however, esoteric culture associated with post-Soviet Moskvin was also an adherent of Luciferianism. society. And yet, this same society refuses to This worldview is widely encountered in comprehend Moskvin’s actions. For the past contemporary society. All of it variants extoll seven years the necromancer has been three principal values: freedom, knowledge, and subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment, power. In the extreme, this means freedom from a form of dehumanization that uses disciplinary the shackles of materiality, access to all methods drawn from the rapidly obsolescing forbidden knowledge, and power over oneself as twentieth century, modernist arsenal. Society the highest form of power. Lucifer (or “light- e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b and the state assert an epistemological rupture bearer”) is the Christian analogue of on his behalf, thereby showing themselves Prometheus: both figures sought to grant man incapable of self-analysis. knowledge – i.e., power – and were condemned đđđđđđđđđđAnother example is the act of self- for this by the gods/God. The type of immolation carried out by the Udmurt neo- Luciferianism practiced by Moskvin bore a paganist, scholar, and activist Albert Razin gnostic, occult character. The knowledge he before the Udmurt parliament building in sought was principally associated with the September 2019. Udmurtia is an ethnic republic spirits of the dead. The prospect of resurrection in the Volga region. The Udmurt people became

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT part of the Muscovy tsardom during the reign of modern repressions have filled the world with Ivan the Terrible, in no small part as a result of troubled spirits. This is why the world has come the latter’s expansionist campaigns. Alongside to resemble a horror movie. Case in point: the other pagan tribes, the Udmurt people were vivid emergence of the Yakut horror film in the subjected to forced Christianization under their post-perestroika era, coinciding with a broad new rulers, yet managed to retain their pagan return to shamanic beliefs – both expressions of traditions to a great extent. an ethnic renaissance. As the film Setteeh Sir

đđđđđđđđđđIn late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the 09/11 suggests: this land has been stripped of its breakdown of disciplinary Soviet atheism gave tradition, as the NKVD has confiscated the rise to an ethnic and neo-pagan renaissance shaman’s tambourine. The couple at the center among Russia’s various nationalities. The of the film return to their ancestral Yakut village, breakup of the USSR functioned in a manner largely emptied in the years of Sovietization. analogous to the collapse of the Russian Empire They face a succession of difficulties, because in 1917, i.e., as the destruction of the “prison of the place is filled with ancestral spirits enraged the nations.”19 For example: the first three at their progeny. Redemption will not come easy: national congresses of the Udmurt (Votyak) malignant spirits, wrought by human evil and people took place in 1918–19, while the fourth human error, will not simply go away. In a larger did not take place until 1991. The national- sense, horror is people and ideas driven out of cultural organization Udmurt Kenesh was society. The ghoulish corpses and dolls are those founded at that time, with Albert Razin – a well- whom society has destroyed in its civilizing known and widely respected resident of the efforts. This is why Chris Dumas is able to speak republic – among its leadership. Razin urged his of a latent necrophilia in late-modernist compatriots to return to the roots of their pagan society.20 Postcolonial ideologies seek to resolve religion, proclaimed himself a shaman of the this problem by advocating for a rehabilitation of ancient tradition known as tuno, and beliefs suppressed by the modern age. Similarly, reconstructed and performed traditional Udmurt those at the forefront of various ethnic pagan rituals. renaissances, like Albert Razin, address the đđđđđđđđđđWhat was it then that compelled Razin to same imbalances. They are religious libertarians, set himself on fire? It was a law passed in 2018 operating at the ethnic, national level. They that removed the obligatory study of national speak in the name of national-ethnic societies, languages across Russia and made it voluntary. calling for the liberation of their cultures and The new law prompted a vigorous protest from beliefs. Razin, who saw in it the return of “Stalin’s policy đđđđđđđđđđThe third example is the March on the of Russification.” On September 10, 2019, his Kremlin undertaken by the shaman Aleksandr one-man protest before the parliament building Gabyshev. In August of 2019 Gabyshev set out on culminated in self-immolation. Two placards he foot from the capital of Yakutia, in the northeast held in his hands read “If my language should corner of Siberia, and headed for Moscow with a disappear tomorrow, I am ready to die today!” mission to exorcise the “powerful demon” in the and “Do I have a Fatherland?” Kremlin. Once this is accomplished, the people’s đđđđđđđđđđAccording to various pagan beliefs existing rule may finally be established in Russia. in the area of the Middle Volga basin where Gabyshev considers himself a warrior-shaman, Udmurtia is located, self-immolation is a ritual whose orders come directly from God. His is a called tipshar. Historically, its practice was fairly “double-faith,” or a popular Christianity: i.e., he widespread among the pagan tribes of this believes in Jesus Christ, but also in the region (Chuvash, Mordva, Udmurt, and multitudes of spirits of the traditional animistic Cheremis), as an assertion of one’s right, as religions. This type of religious hybridization is personal condemnation of a transgressor who not uncommon in Siberia. refuses to accept responsibility for his đđđđđđđđđđAlong the way, Gabyshev’s cause has wrongdoing, and finally as a means of gradually gained popularity. The plan was to punishment, since the soul of anyone who dies reach Moscow in the spring of 2021 with a large an untimely, violent death is unable to find peace following, which would organically grow up and continually plagues the living with a variety e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b around him in the course of his progress. of ills. Therefore, to commit tipshar before the According to Gabyshev, the entire country is enemy’s house is to set upon him one’s vengeful “behind him.” In the Trans-Baikal capital of Chita spirit. Justice exacts a high price: the one who he spoke at an opposition rally. By the time he commits tipshar deprives his soul of repose. It is reached the Buryat capital Ulan-Ude, Gabyshev an extreme measure resorted to by the was accompanied by a group of several dozen powerless and the humiliated in the face of a followers. There, his arrival precipitated a wave powerful enemy. of oppositional activity. đđđđđđđđđđAccording to the traditionalist mindset, đđđđđđđđđđIt was also in Buryatia that Gabyshev and

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT his followers ran into trouble: local “official” “Many of these are engaged in assembling their shamans of the congregation “Tengeri” own personal outlook, through a kind of denounced him as an impostor. The traffic police ‘bricolage.’”23 confiscated a car that had been donated to the đđđđđđđđđđThese instances of religious radicalism are group by supporters. Finally, on September 19, at composite constructions, therefore difficult to the border between the Buryat and Irkutsk understand, and are readily written off as regions, the shaman was arrested and driven to “abnormalities.” A significant characteristic of

Yakutsk. There he was charged with publicly 10/11 this complex religiosity in all three dissimilar inciting extremism, and after a psychiatric instances is their libertarianism, i.e., radical evaluation pronounced insane. The criminal religiosity here serves an emancipatory end. In charge and the label of insanity exert a double the case of Aleksandr Gabyshev we are dealing pressure: under Russian law, anyone with a with a libertarian socialism that calls for popular diagnosis of insanity may be involuntarily rule and collective action, its ultimate end being committed to a psychiatric clinic. The next step the overthrow of state hierarchy. In Razin’s case is punitive psychiatry: a means of suppressing it is an ethnic emancipation, articulated in dissent that is familiar to many Soviet nationalistic terms. Moskvin synthesizes a highly dissidents. individualized version of occult libertarianism. đđđđđđđđđđAleksandr Gabyshev does not speak on The political and personal aims of these behalf of the Yakut people. His ultimate goal is a individuals are very different. At the same time, libertarian action at the national level. The all three have evolved a kind of hybrid and radical reason is that today, religiosity/spirituality is religiosity with a powerful libertarian message. acquiring an increasingly syncretic character, đđđđđđđđđđIn the age of expressive individualism, which may be described as post-secular. In religiosity/spirituality takes on a previously Russia this process exhibits some local unseen syncretism. This, however, should not be peculiarities: post-Soviet spirituality inherits taken as a pretext to write off its excesses as from Soviet state-imposed atheism its abnormal, thereby asserting an epistemological universalist aspirations, i.e., it is “post- rupture and denying society’s capacity for self- atheistic.” Mikhail Epstein, who coined the term, knowledge. On the contrary, all these incidents proposes that whoever finds faith after the are excessive manifestations of fundamental desert of atheism is most likely to find faith processes in the realm of the religious/spiritual generally, as the antithesis of unbelief, rather today. Moreover, they are part of an important than adhere to a particular confession.21 tradition that ties religious dissent to the search đđđđđđđđđđAnother feature peculiar to Russia is the for political alternatives. An understanding of neo-pagan renaissance. Paganism is one of the these circumstances will serve to displace our more obvious choices for those seeking post- perception of the excesses of religious Soviet religious emancipation, since it is a libertarianism from the stigma of pathology system of beliefs that has seen extreme toward analytical, hermeneutic, and pragmatic oppression, both under the Russian Empire and lines of inquiry. in the USSR. Latently, however, Russia has đđđđđđđđđđ× always been far more hybridized than it had Translated from the Russian by Sergey Levchin. officially appeared. On the one hand, popular belief has always been hybridized, incorporating elements of paganism. On the other hand, Soviet Marxism exhibited an affinity for pagan animism in its attitude toward the materiality of the world and spiritualization of matter. “A revival of this whole complex of primeval religions was one of the natural consequences of the Communist project.”22 In this sense, universalist neo-pagan beliefs in Russia are post-atheist squared. đđđđđđđđđđThe beliefs of Gabyshev, Moskvin, and Razin are principally neo-pagan. At the same time, they e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b are all hybridized and syncretic, having evolved in the age of expressive individualism. Their religiosity/spirituality is the heterogenous result of inner quests, insights, epiphanies, and experiences. Today the character of religiosity continues to shift from a fellowship of like- minded members of a community toward an individual spiritual path. Or, as Taylor puts it:

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT Nikolay Smirnovđworks as an artist, a geographer, a đđđđđđ1 Mamleev on Yuzhinsky Street. curator, and a researcher regarding theory-fiction on This conclusion is largely After Mamleev’s expulsion from grounded in the seminal work of the USSR, the group continued spatial practices and representations of space and historian Aleksandr Pyzhikov. its existence into the 1990s. place in art, science, museum practices, and everyday See his Facets of the Russian Other prominent members life.đ Schism: The Secret Role of Old included Evgeniy Golovin, Rite from the Seventeenth Aleksandr Dugin, Geydar Century to 1917 (in Russian) Dzhemal, and Igor Dudinskiy. (Kontseptual, 2018). đđđđđđ14 đđđđđđ2 In The New Age of Russia: Occult

11/11 A. Haxthausen, Studien über die and Esoteric Dimensions, eds. innern Zustände, das Volksleben Birgit Menzel, Michael und insbesondere die ländlichen Hagemeister, and Bernice Einrichtungen Russlands. Glatzer Rosenthal (Verlag Otto Translated into English as The Sagner, 2012). Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions and Resources đđđđđđ15 (Chapman & Hall, 1856), 277. Translated into English as Mikhail Epstein, Cries in the New đđđđđđ3 Wilderness: From the Files of the A. L. Shchapov, The Schism of Moscow Institute of Atheism, the Russian Old Rite, Considered trans. Eve Adler (Paul Dry Books, in Connection with the Internal 2002), 236. State of the Russian Church and Civil Society in the Seventeenth đđđđđđ16 and Early Eighteenth Century For Epstein’s introduction in the (1859). Cited in Pyzhukov, Facets original Russian, see of the Russian Schism, 31. https://kph.ffon.npu.edu.ua/ !e- book/clasik/data/epstein/ đđđđđđ4 02/ns.predis.html. For more information see Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sects, đđđđđđ17 Literature, and Revolution (in Birgit Menzel, “The Occult Russian) (NLO 1998). Revival in Russia Today and Its Impact on Literature,” The đđđđđđ5 Harriman Review 16, no. 1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Spring 2007): 1–14. (Belknap Press, 2007), 300. đđđđđđ18 đđđđđđ6 Anatoliy Moskvin, “Cross Orlando Figes, A People’s without a Victim,” afterward to Tragedy (Viking, 1997), 98–101, Thomas Wilson, The Swastika, tr. 518–19. Anatoliy Moskvin (in Russian) (Knigi, 2008), 360, 362. đđđđđđ7 Taylor, A Secular Age, 259. The đđđđđđ19 “Pugachovschina” was a This sense of the word “prison,” peasant uprising, led by initially applied to Russia by Yemelian Pugachev, 1773–75. Marquis de Custine in the middle The insurrection united of nineteenth century, was later Cossacks, peasants, and various picked up by Russian ethnic populations in Russia progressive circles. In 1914 the against autocracy. Most of the term was transformed and several hundred thousand rebels popularized by Lenin as “the came from the Raskol. prison of the nations,” aiming to characterize Russian national đđđđđđ8 policy at the time. In the Soviet A. I. Klibanov, History of period it became a kind of cliché Religious Sectarianism in 1860s referring to tsarist Russia. Russia (in Russian) (Nauka, 1917); Kirill Chistov, Russian đđđđđđ20 Popular Socio-Utopian Legends, Chris Dumas, “Horror and Seventeenth to Eighteenth Psychoanalysis. An Introductory Century (in Russian) (1967). Primer,” in A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. đđđđđđ9 Benshoff (Wiley-Blackwell, V. I. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 2014), 21–37. 4, 228 (in Russian), as cited in Klibanov, History of Religious đđđđđđ21 Sectarianism, 4. Mikhail Epstein, Religion after Atheism: New Possibilities of đđđđđđ10 Theology (in Russian) (ACT- Aleksandr Pyzhikov, Roots of Press, 2013). Stalinist Bolshevism (in Russian) (Argumenty Nedeli, 2018), đđđđđđ22 530–31. Epstein, Religion after Atheism, 19.

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ N i k y S v S h a m n , c i s t N e r o : R l g u L b đđđđđđ11 Aleksandr Agurskiy, The Ideology đđđđđđ23 of National-Bolshevism (in Taylor, A Secular Age, 515. Russian) (YMCA-Press, 1980), 322.

đđđđđđ12 Taylor, A Secular Age, 299.

đđđđđđ13 An informal literary and occultist club, which met at the apartment of writer Yuri

03.30.20 / 17:49:59 EDT Continued from “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power” đđđđđđđđđđIn part one of this essay, I tried to offer a reading of new power formations by rethinking the current pattern of democratically elected authoritarian figures – brought to power with the

01/11 help of multinationals vis-à-vis the globalized, neoliberal versions of the “state” and “state power.” By examining their structures and behaviors, I tried to situate, understand, and describe counter-hegemonic cultural practices that position themselves against the state. In part one, I also named today’s configuration of power “narcissistic authoritarian statism,” iLianađFokianaki defining it as a neoliberal structure of power that merges old components of the nation-state with contemporary forms of corporate Narcissistic transnationalism defined by narcissism. I examined this corporate-state model of Authoritarian narcissistic authoritarian statism through what I called the “exo/eso axis,” in order to visually Statism, Part 2: understand how two of its basic components – territory and legitimacy – are expressed within and without its literal and metaphorical borders. Slow/Fast Using territoriality, I looked into different artistic practices that propose collective action and Violence organization as a counter-hegemony to this corporate-state model. đđđđđđđđđđIn the second part of this essay, I will examine the mechanisms of narcissistic authoritarian statism through a second axis, that of slow and fast violence. I will then discuss the ways in which the field of contemporary art is entangled in such forms of violence, and will present examples of artistic practices that lay the groundwork for new directions for cultural work.

Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism and Why It’s New I previously drew on the work of political theorists Nicos Poulantzas and Bob Jessop, primarily Poulantzas’s theory of the state as a relationship of forces, an active organism that is able to metamorphose and transform through power relations. These relations are what define and differentiate the violent aspects of narcissistic authoritarian statism. I engaged a proposition of Jessop’s, adding a fourth element to his definition of the state as composed of

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e territoriality, legitimacy, and violence: the “idea” of the state. Both theorists assist us in understanding the temporal and spatial aspects of a new understanding of the state, enacted through violence. As mentioned in the first part of this essay, we should think of narcissistic authoritarian statism as a pattern, a behavior, and a structure, which is not only recognizable in state formations and their political leaders, but

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST 02/11

Diagram by the author.

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST also in institutions and singular actors. Yet this monopoly on violence is manifested in ways such statism is always manifested through violence: a as crackdowns on demonstrations, police violence that is not simply evinced through brutality, a strong paramilitary that arrests and direct, momentary acts of aggression but which imprisons, murdering and disappearing also has various forms and intensities. Harder to dissidents or oppositional politicians and detect and describe are the forms of slow activists, and so on. Fast violence can also be violence perpetrated across vast expanses of found in the form of a sudden salary or pension time and space. Narcissistic authoritarian 03/11 cut, instantly affecting the living conditions of statism takes advantage of the slow process of individuals. As an example, the immediate molding identities and realities, redefining effects of such violence were seen during the violence and its legitimization and cashing in on first years of the financial crisis in my native the effects of neoliberalism. Greece, where more than two hundred suicides đđđđđđđđđđThe difference between narcissistic were reported due to sudden debt and authoritarian statism and historic instances of foreclosures. Fast violence in the exo-state may autocratic governance is this creation of a new take the form of military operations such as “idea” of what the state considers to be legal and those during the War on Terror, or the recent real, constantly performed through a vast murder of Iranian military leader Qassem spectrum of violent acts. In the words of artist Soleimani, ordered without any consideration of and theorist Jonas Staal, this form of statism is the potentially dire regional repercussions and in fact a propaganda machine creating a “new without a strategy, under the guise of national reality.”1 It succeeds because neoliberal subjects security concerns. There are many examples of have been brought to the point of apathy and overt operations, sanctions imposed on other detachment, but also a lack of interest in the states, hard diplomacy, the occupation of land disenfranchised, vulnerable, dependent, and for military bases, state-owned multinationals precarious, an attitude I discussed in the first that occupy and extract from territories – so on part of this essay. Since Poulantzas’s early and so forth. In both eso- and exo- versions, writings on the state in the 1970s, the merging of today’s state violence differs from the aggressive state and corporate actors, in combination with acts of previous forms of statism in that it now the increasing power of these corporate actors, has two major tools on its side: technology and specifically in the fields of surveillance turbo-capitalism. Denial (and alternative truth) is technology and social media, has created a new a large part of its modus operandi. axis, a slow and fast axis, onto which narcissistic đđđđđđđđđđSince the first notes of this essay were authoritarian statism is formed. Globalization written only a few months ago, there has been a has offered an array of examples of slow and fast shocking surge of state violence. To consider violence, marked by the scale of operations of a South America alone: in Ecuador in October new corporate state. Various scales of violence 2019, protests prompted by corporate tax cuts are perpetrated by multinationals, such as those and austerity plans led to violent clashes with producing agrochemicals, like Bayer’s subsidiary police forces. Resistance in Chile followed, and Monsanto, or mining giants like Glencore, with its the ensuing police crackdown revealed a hidden mission under the auspice of the IMF in Mexico deep state echoing the Pinochet dictatorship. In and Southeast Asia. They are likewise Santiago alone, more than two hundred perpetrated by extra-state interventions such as protesters have been deliberately blinded in one the War on Terror in the United States. The latter, eye by police forces. In Colombia, where for instance, marked a new chapter in demonstrations are a daily phenomenon, a extrastatecraft – to borrow Keller Easterling’s woman was seen on video being forced into an term – where the fabrication of truth and the unmarked car, during one of the numerous anti- denial of culpability, together with the arrogance government demonstrations. The country has and narcissism of the violent people in power, been racked by riots, triggered by widespread were followed by complete impunity. discontent with the proposed economic reforms of the rightwing president, Iván Duque. In my The Slow and Fast Violence of Narcissistic native Greece, the newly elected far-right

Authoritarian Statism e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e government has unleashed an extremely violent My concept of scales of violence is informed by crackdown on demonstrations, and has sought to Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the destroy all solidarity structures that host Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). In Nixon’s refugees. There have been graphic moments of work, “fast violence” refers to violence that is violence such as police officers stripping literal, visible, and immediate. In the case of the protesters naked and sexually harassing them – eso-state (activity conducted within the borders captured in harrowing videos that have gone viral of a state and upon its citizens), one can apply on social media. Since the end of February, when Nixon’s framework to see how the state’s Turkey opened its border to allow refugees to

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST leave the country, Greek police have launched Body and Land versus Religion and Capital aggressive pushbacks against newly arriving Since 2018 more than forty indigenous leaders refugees. As I write these lines, two refugees have been murdered in the Amazon. Brazilian have died after being shot down by border police, president Jair Bolsonaro’s denial of the climate while many are endangered in boats that are crisis (apparent in his claim that the Amazon is attacked at sea by the coast guard.2 The fast solely “Brazilian business”), and his appointment forms of violence these governments employ go of evangelical preacher Damares Alves as hand in hand with slow violence. 04/11 minister of the Cabinet for Indigenous Protection đđđđđđđđđđSlow violence as defined by Rob Nixon is in Brazil, paved the way for mining companies to accelerate the destruction of the Amazon and a violence that occurs gradually and out of isolated Amazonian tribes. Just as religion once sight, a violence of delayed destruction that operated as a justification for colonial crimes, is dispersed across time and space, an today it is used to justify the violence of attritional violence that is typically not narcissistic authoritarian statism. Interpreted by viewed as violence at all. Violence is the likes of Bolsonaro as a measure of civilization customarily conceived as an event or action and salvation, religion is used to explain the that is immediate in time, explosive and infection and murder brought forth by spectacular in space, and as erupting into multimillion-dollar mining and meat instant sensational visibility. We need, I corporations. Contemporary missionaries can believe, to engage a different kind of either enact fast violence through murder, or violence that is neither spectacular nor slow violence through preaching the word of the instantaneous, but rather incremental and Lord to uncontacted tribes and spreading accretive, its calamitous repercussions Western diseases.5 Narcissistic authoritarian playing out across a range of temporal statism builds an idea of the state through scales.3 notions of progress and development, yet these very ideals ironically work against any measures Nixon’s focus is mostly on environmental needed to address climate catastrophe – disasters, but this framework opens up a disregarding indigenous communities and valuable path to recognize other types of creating a new generation of climate refugees. undetected slow violence. For instance, consider Current states and multinationals the propaganda tactics utilized by companies narcissistically repackage their operations, such as Facebook, which slowly permeate the claiming they wish to “elevate” indigenous minds of users through targeted ads, communities from their status as “cavemen,” in manipulating and cajoling, molding societies the words of Bolsonaro. This may be an old that hate minorities. Or take the privatization of tactic, but it is now done in parallel with the healthcare in many countries – a system now construction of a new reality by demolishing the driven by cost-effectiveness and competition, credibility of science, dismissing scientific facts which limits access to services for those who are as lies, and proliferating this information through financially precarious and which can cause new technological infrastructures, which death.4 While perhaps less sensational or visible Bolsonaro and many other world leaders have than physical combat in the street, these forms done.6 of slow violence are just as destructive and have đđđđđđđđđđLanguage is a crucial tool for the longer effects, even creating societies in which narcissistic construction of the corporate state. more violence of all kinds can proliferate. Throughout the continent of Africa, companies đđđđđđđđđđBoth fast and slow violence are occurring like Lion’s Head Global Partners, with the help of without brows being raised by governmental state officials, claim they are “supporting local officials, who claim their legal right (or those of currency and promoting economic development,” the multinationals they support) to impose while calling the appropriation of cheap land for violence. These are characteristics of previous the purpose of exploitation “asset authoritarian models, but one new feature of management.”7 Sun Biofuels, a Lion’s Head narcissistic authoritarian statism is to make subsidiary that collapsed in 2011, left hundreds violence difficult to pin on specific perpetrators, e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e of Tanzanians landless, jobless, in despair, and through the use of technology and social media feeling that “this is like the return of colonialism, to spin new truths and new realities. This, colonialism in the form of investment,” as noted together with the need to generate capital at all by Athumani Mkambala, chairman of the Mhaga costs, has created a new toxic kind of village in rural Tanzania.8 Sun Biofuels Tanzania governance infused with classic narcissism: declared bankruptcy and never compensated the personal disdain and lack of empathy for others, locals. The company was directed by Christopher arrogance, and a distorted sense of superiority. Egerton-Warburton, a former Goldman Sachs banker and head of the Lion’s Head subsidiary

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST 05/11

From the opening of the exhibition Rojava Film Commune, Forms of Freedom, Galerija Nova, Zagreb, October 2019.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST company Thirty Degrees East, which is based in đđđđđđđđđđIn contrast with the Bush era, the the tax haven of Mauritius. Such hidden narcissism of the US under the leadership of locations of capital accumulation, dispersed Donald Trump has taken a new turn. In just a few around the globe, become necropolitical secret months, through a series of senseless whims, depositories, hiding sinister and unlawful Trump disrupted the already fragile political conduct – acts of acute slow and fast violence. balance of the Middle East. Equally dumbfounding as, say, the murder of Soleimani

Cultural Workers Against Narcissistic 06/11 in October 2019, was the US withdrawal from Authoritarian Statism Northern Syria and the abandonment of allied In 2004, artist Abdel Karim Khalil organized an Kurdish forces that have been combating ISIS exhibition in a small Baghdad neighborhood. It and Daesh for the last five years. On Trump’s was a group exhibition of artists from the area Twitter feed and in his public statements, one who felt the need to position themselves against witnesses the disengaged face of narcissism: “I what was occurring in the city. The exhibition hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away”; commented on both the eso-/exo- power of the “The Kurds are no angels.”9 His actions have state and the slow/fast violence Iraqi citizens sparked outrage from many US citizens, were subject to daily from both the Americans contentment from Vladimir Putin, and approval and Iraqi officials. Khalil’s sculptural installation from another grand narcissist of our time, Recep A Man from Abu Ghraib (2004) is a set of realistic Tayyip Erdoğan. marble figures depicting torture: a visual đđđđđđđđđđAmidst this “bras de faire” shines the work documentation of a historical moment that of the Rojava Film Commune, a collective disrupted and destroyed a society and a people founded in 2015 that works in the region of and initiated a new wave of exiles and refugees. Northern Syria known as Rojava. For the last four It is one of the rare examples of artistic practice years, the group has been documenting the fast that manages to directly confront eso- and exo- and slow violence of living in a war zone, while violence, in both its slow and fast forms. The simultaneously illustrating the enactment of a work unearths the violence imposed by the Iraqis new social contract drafted by the Rojavan and the Americans equally in instantaneous revolution. Their work stands between cinema, bursts of fast violence during the Gulf Wars, but documentary, and political audiovisual testimony also throughout the interim periods, during the and offers not only a glimpse of the violence the rise of ISIS and through today. The neo- Assyrian, Arab, and Kurdish populations have imperialist arrogance and grandiose illusions of endured, but a glimpse of another vision for the US military in Iraq and the region contour the living and organizing. The dynamic collective of narcissism of this type of statism and its violent young filmmakers, established filmmakers, and outbursts. students seeks to contribute to the development đđđđđđđđđđAnother example of art practice that reveals of the revolution by narrating both the history of the tropes of narcissistic authoritarian statism is the struggle and the possibilities it has opened Trevor Paglen’s 2006 series of three photographs up for the present and the future. As Rojava of US government “black sites,” which depicts rebuilds itself politically, the Rojava Film from afar the hidden locations where detainees Commune contributes to its cultural are tortured by the US state. Nondescript reconstruction: through the medium of video and buildings, doors, cars, and guards are seen from film, the members translate their newfound a distance. The Black Sites series highlights the democratic freedom into a new artistic form. For beginnings of the War on Terror, when the CIA set the Commune, speaking about and showing the up a network of secret prisons in Afghanistan histories and culture of the people who have and elsewhere around the world. Undocumented been repressed, persecuted, and killed by the and secret operations, including abductions, Syrian regime is itself revolutionary. Film here torture, and human rights violations against operates as an educational form, but also a tool thousands of “ghost prisoners,” occurred for for imagining a different future. In their work, we decades behind the walls of secret locations, the see the cultural and artistic equivalent of what it details of which were some of the Bush means to self-define, to open a space for – as

Administration’s most closely guarded secrets. e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e scholar and theorist Dilar Dirik has said – “living Paglen’s photographs of the buildings are without approval” beyond the patriarchal architectural tracings of the violence imposed by capitalist state, which Rojavans have rejected. the US government, lost in the deep state of The Rojava Film Commune exposes the real classified information. Like Khalil, the work desire behind producing art: to affirm the “living” operates as a testimony of forms of fast/slow of life. violence that are not easily traceable. The role of đđđđđđđđđđTogether with the Rojava Film Commune, the artist here is to expose, to act as film collectives such as the Syrian Abounadarra counterintelligence. and the Egyptian Mosireen produce a type of

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST “emergency cinema,” in the words of the public in 2017. Mauritius is not only a popular Abounadarra. Emergency cinema is a type of film location for money laundering, but also a locus of work that documents the life of populations exile. In 1965, just before granting Mauritius its forced to endure violence of different speeds and independence, the British government reclaimed along different spatial axes, for instance during one of its island constellations (the Chagos revolution or civil war. Through film these groups Islands) by renaming it and inventing a new aim to construct a counter-narrative to combat colony. This was orchestrated for the purposes of this enforced new reality by safeguarding real 07/11 granting the land to the US in exchange for cheap facts and the silenced realities of millions of weapons. The Chagos constellation’s largest people. The time-based and widely distributable island, Diego Garcia, operates today as the US’s medium of film may be a particularly appropriate largest military base outside US soil. It also medium for attempting to describe and tackle happens to be the location from where the War violence operating on multiple time scales, often on Terror was launched. The Chagossians are still too quick to apprehend or too slow to capture. living as refugees in inhumane conditions in đđđđđđđđđđFor her 2018 work Foul Footprints, Mauritius, and have taken the UK to the commissioned for the Antwerp exhibition “Extra International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, States,” the Dutch artist Femke Herregraven but the British Parliament claims that the chose the island of Mauritius as a site to Chagossians cannot live on Diego Garcia because investigate the slow and fast violence inflicted it is uninhabitable due to a lack of water. on both land and peoples.10 The installation, đđđđđđđđđđBut in Herregraven’s work, a collection of US which consists of films, wallpaper collage military memorabilia in vitrines and on walls – imagery, and three vitrines of objects collected photographs of soldiers who served there, by the artist, reflects on the case of the island of pamphlets from gyms on the island – proves Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is under the otherwise. A few months after the work was jurisdiction of Mauritius, a country recently in presented, on February, 25 2019, the ICJ ordered the spotlight for its role in the “Paradise Papers” the UK return the islands to the indigenous – over thirteen million documents detailing inhabitants. In May 2019, a UN vote affirmed the offshore investment schemes that were made verdict of the ICJ, ordering the UK to withdraw its

Femke Herregraven, Fool Footprints, 2018. Installation view.đPhoto by the author.

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST colonial administration and urging the UK “to two investigations into the murders of civilians. cooperate with Mauritius in facilitating the Here the fast eso-violence of individual actors resettlement” of the Chagossians. The UK, with was accompanied by the slow violence of the its narcissistic authoritarian statism, claims the eso-state. The first investigation was into the court never had jurisdiction to hear the case. The death of Pavlos Fyssas, the anti-fascist rapper violence of the UK continues in the eso-state too: murdered on September 18, 2013 in Athens. Chagossians who fled to the UK in the sixties and Fyssas was killed by Giorgos Roupakias, who had who are British passport holders are today 08/11 been armed by the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, intimidated and urged to leave the country by of which he was a member.12 The increase in migration officials – another facet of the popularity of Golden Dawn since the beginning of Windrush scandal.11 the financial crisis was facilitated by the Greek police, since many in its ranks have been aligned Cartographies of Slow and Fast Violence: for decades with its neo-nationalist and Art as Tool of Justice neofascist ideology. The investigation revealed Possibly the most complete position and that police officers not only delayed responding proposition within cultural practice that not only to the crime, but that they were passive reveals the violence of narcissistic authoritarian bystanders. The evidence gathered was statism, but activates the full potential of culture presented in court, turning cultural practice into to counteract this type of power, is that of a powerful civil-society tool in the fight against a Forensic Architecture. Since 2010, the research corrupt judicial system. agency has been documenting what they call đđđđđđđđđđUnfortunately, narcissistic authoritarian “cartographies of violence,” employing the latest statism has brought new traces of eso- and exo- technology to investigate and visualize corrupt violence to the cultural field through the ever- judicial systems, failed and authoritarian states, growing relationships between its key and corporations that bend the law. The group protagonists and art institutions. This is evident undertakes advanced architectural and media in cases such as that of Warren Kanders, research on behalf of international prosecutors, mentioned in the first part of this essay, as well human rights organizations, and political and as the Sackler family, longtime art benefactors environmental justice groups, as well as whose company, Purdue Pharma, is known for individual citizens. They have paved the way for a manufacturing opioids. In their narcissism, such new direction in architecture studies, with the agents of power apparently feel untouchable and forensics of architecture becoming a new field in irreplaceable. The initial responses to these academia, now taught at Goldsmiths University cases from institutions revealed the latter’s in London. The subject matter of Forensic inability or reluctance to position themselves Architecture’s work directly opposes narcissistic clearly against funders with dubious authoritarian statism, and so does its effect: backgrounds. It took months of letters, petitions, drafting a counter-hegemonic power structure and collective action for institutions to sever that has a tangible impact. ties. In other words, arts institutions perpetuate đđđđđđđđđđSome of the group’s investigations concern a form of violence too. eso-state fast violence, such as the horrific đđđđđđđđđđFifty years after Greek sculptor Takis abduction and murder of forty-three students in removed his sculpture from the Museum of Ayotzinapa, Mexico by state troopers and Modern Art and ignited the Art Workers’ paramilitaries on September 26, 2014. Forensic Coalition, we still seem to be fighting the same Architecture was commissioned by members of battle. The question that Takis, Hans Haacke, the Inter-American Commission on Human and others asked in 1969 – what is the political Rights to provide an account of the events and social responsibility of the art community? – through testimonies, interviews, videos, 3D today seems harder to pose. From my modeling, data mining, and graphs. They experience, posing such questions in revealed the state as an accomplice to the conferences makes colleagues roll their eyes. We organized crime groups responsible for the are used to praising the “neutral” position of art killing, and found that the students’ bodies had and the policy of “no politics in the museum.” At been burned in a garbage dump. They exposed e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e the same time, the global art market has grown the government’s fabrication of facts and so much that museums depend on it. And in discrediting of independent investigative terms of power structures, museums commissions, as well as the blatant disregard increasingly model their structures and and arrogance of local politicians who falsified legislative frameworks on those of corporations. facts, hid evidence, and produced fake scientific đđđđđđđđđđIt is not simply the well-documented effects reports – classic traits of the eso-violence of of neoliberalism’s financial uncertainty, narcissistic authoritarian statism. precarity, and joblessness that have silenced đđđđđđđđđđIn Greece, Forensic Architecture undertook culture workers. Worse is the lack of interest in

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST speaking out, due to what Lynne Layton has radically aware of our roles and fuctions within named “amoral familism, a retreat into an and outside (eso- and exo-) the institution, so individualistic private sphere and a tendency to that we understand exactly what we can do from extend care only to those in one’s family and this position. Refusing to address the dire issues immediate intimate circle.”13 We ourselves have of our time, out of some fear of being singled out been performing narcissistic authoritarian or shunned, will lead to more detachment, statism on the individual level. The star curators apathy, and indifference. This is not an adequate of the 1990s, who have been accused of abuses 09/11 response to what might be not only the end of of power behind closed doors for decades, are democracy as we know it, but the end of art. We examples of this. cannot continue to mind our own business and đđđđđđđđđđWhat is to be done? In the words of Audre remain silent in the face of violence, in order to Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle maintain our membership in the flock. For under the master’s house.”14 The problem is not only the pretense of neutrality, we hide our the master, but the house itself. Contemporary complicity.15 The only way out of this poly-axial art’s house, built on neoliberal individualism, conundrum of the slow/fast, eso-/exo-violence reproduces narcissistic authoritarian statism. of narcissistic authoritarian statism is to expose “Nuanced” and meek positions vis-à-vis its multifaceted modus operandi, while we ultranationalism, the alt-right, and neofascism propose, imagine, and produce forms of and its aesthetic signifiers promote a theoretical counterpower. position that seems to deny the very existence of đđđđđđđđđđI am finishing this essay in between ideology. We thus fail to understand that while attending the biggest trial Europe has seen since the art world desires and imagines itself to be a Nuremberg. It is the trial of the ultranationalist neutral space, neutrality itself is an ideology – a neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. This trial has been luxurious fantasy that can only be enjoyed by almost forgotten by the international media, and those who do not feel vulnerable. the Greek media, now in line with the new right- đđđđđđđđđđAlthough a renewed focus on identity wing government, barely mentions it. During politics has forced open many conversations, these cold days in the Athens Court of Appeals, narcissism in the cultural field continues to six lawyers representing the victims of Golden increase. Afraid to be left off the train of Dawn are aiming to convict the group of an array contemporaneity, institutions are addressing of crimes – not just as a neo-Nazi party but as a diversity, but in entirely superficial ways, criminal organization. Golden Dawn is being reluctant to relinquish any actual power. Thus charged with several racist attacks, including the diversity initiatives are crudely done, tokenizing murder of Pavlos Fyssas. As I write, the lawyers and creating frictions among individuals with are giving their closing statements. One of them, similar struggles, forcing identity politics into Thanasis Kabayiannis, represents a family of dead ends that undermine intersectionality. It is Egyptian fishermen who were attacked on June a tactic reminiscent of classic colonialism: divide 12, 2013 in their home by a Golden Dawn squad and conquer. that broke down their door and smashed their đđđđđđđđđđFrom the time of the Art Workers’ Coalition windows, threw teargas in their home, and to today, we are indeed estranged from the stabbed them, leaving them for dead. In his modern promise of an art tied to revolutionary closing statement the lawyer said: “Hannah transformation. What we must admit is that this Arendt – whose book on the banality of evil was has become, in retrospect, a collective loss. Can inspired by the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann – we move forward with this modern promise into a would have much to say about how easily future that is less grim? The examples of cultural everyday people can let themselves be practices presented in this two-part essay make instrumentalized as cogs in a machine such as it possible, I hope, to understand the forms of this, either by active participation or silence.” counter-hegemony that can be found in the đđđđđđđđđđPostscript: During the editing of this essay, realm of art, against the plague of narcissistic the situation on the border between Greece and authoritarian statism. Cultural practice can still Turkey escalated into a humanitarian emergency. be an act not of only whistleblowing and While the Erdoğan regime is pushing refugees resistance, but also of reimagining and e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e towards the borders, weaponizing humans in producing a future form of power, one that order to force a new refugee deal on Europe, the remains within our grasp. If we see the role of the Greek state has suspended all asylum cultural worker not simply as an agent applications for one month and has established, provocateur but as an author of counter- with the assistance of Frontex, a heavy narratives, as a creator of new agitprop counter- militarized zone along the border, blocking hegemonies, we can develop a more tangible refugees from entering the country and violently vision of a new and more just power structure. It pushing them back. Reports have surfaced that, is crucial that we as cultural workers become as of this writing, two refugees have died after

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST being shot with rubber bullets. While the Greek iLiana Fokianakiđis a Greek curator, researcher, and state denies these reports as “fake news and theorist based in Athens and Rotterdam. She is the Turkish propaganda,” on March 4 Forensic founder and director of the art institutionđState of Concept, Athens, founder of the research platform The Architecture released a report demonstrating Bureau of Care, and lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute. how Mohammad al-Arab, a Syrian refugee, was indeed fatally wounded by a rubber bullet at the Greek border on March 2. Since then, more reports of violence against refugees have 10/11 surfaced, while testimonies and videos show paramilitary “patrols” of Greek neo-Nazis and nationalists attacking and “arresting” refugees. German and Swedish neo-Nazis have also traveled to the area and have been seen attacking aid workers, journalists, and refugees. In the last ten days, there have been reports of other attacks on migrants and NGO workers, and arson at refugee aid facilities. đđđđđđđđđđ× The author would like to thank Laura Raicovich for the discussion about her forthcoming book on cultural institutions and the myth of neutrality; the artist Jonas Staal for his book Propaganda Art in the 21st Century, which informed the propaganda aspect of narcissistic authoritarian statism; and all the comrades in courtrooms and streets, and on screens and pages. e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST đđđđđđ1 Dom Phillips, “Bolsonaro See Jonas Staal, Propaganda Art Declares ‘The Amazon Is Ours’ in the 21st Century (MIT Press, and Calls Deforestation Data 2019). ‘Lies,’” The Guardian, July 19, 2019 đđđđđđ2 https://www.theguardian.com/ “Syrian Migrant Killed as world/2019/jul/19/jair-bolso Thousands Try to Cross into naro-brazil-amazon-rainfores t- Greece, Turkish Authorities Say,” deforestation. France 24, March 2, 2020 https://www.france24.com/en/ đđđđđđ7

20200302-syrian-migrant-kill From the Lion’s Head website 11/11 ed-as-thousands-attempt-to-c https://lhgp.com/. ross-from-turkey-into-greece ; and “Syrian Boy Drowns off đđđđđđ8 Greece as Migrants Risk Dash Damian Carrington, “UK Firm’s through Turkey’s Open Border,” Failed Biofuel Dream Wrecks Australian Broadcasting Lives of Tanzania Villagers,” The Company, March 1, 2020 Guardian, October 30, 2011 https://www.abc.net.au/news/ https://www.theguardian.com/ 2020-03-03/child-dies-as-mig environment/2011/oct/30/afri rants-rush-to-cross-greek-tu ca-poor-west-biofuel-betraya l. rkish-border/12019460. đđđđđđ9 đđđđđđ3 From Donald Trump’s tweets, Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the October 14, 2019, and a meeting Environmentalism of the Poor with the Italian President, (Harvard University Press, 2011), streamed live on PBS NewsHour, 2. October 16, 2019.

đđđđđđ4 đđđđđđ10 For an analysis of the effects of Femke Herregraven, Foul the privatization of healthcare in Footprints – No1: Engineering the EU, and the marketization of the Island, 2018, commissioned the industry, I suggest one of for “Extra States: Nations in many excellent articles by Liquidation,” a group exhibition Corporate Europe Observatory at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, (CEO), a research and campaign September 2018. group working to expose and challenge the privileged access đđđđđđ11 and influence enjoyed by Katie McQue, Mark Townsend, corporations and their lobbying and Katie Armour, “Windrush groups across the EU. See Scandal Continues as Chagos Rachel Tansey, “The Creeping Islanders Are Pressed to ‘Go Privatisation of Healthcare,” Back,’” The Guardian, July 28, CEO, June 2, 2017 2019 https://corporateeurope.org/ https://www.theguardian.com/ en/power-lobbies/2017/06/cre world/2019/jul/28/windrush-s eping-privatisation-healthca re. candal-continues-in-crawley- as-chagos-islanders-told-go- đđđđđđ5 back. See “Brazil Accuses US Missionary of Putting Isolated đđđđđđ12 Tribe’s Lives at Risk,” The Last year Roupakias grotesquely Guardian, January 23, 2019 claimed that “it was just a https://www.theguardian.com/ simple homicide, he literally world/2019/jan/23/brazil-us- stepped on my knife, the whole missionary-isolated-tribe-li ves- thing is blown out of proportion.” at-risk-steve-campbell; and See “Roupakias Describes “Amazon Gold Miners Invade Fyssas’ Murder as a ‘Simple Indigenous Village in Brazil after Homicide,’” Ekathimerini, July its Leader Is Killed,” The 18, 2019 Guardian, July 28, 2019 http://www.ekathimerini.com/ https://www.theguardian.com/ 242738/article/ekathimerini/ world/2019/jul/28/amazon-gol news/roupakias-describes-fys d-miners-invade-indigenous-v sas-murder-as-simple-homicid illage-brazil-leader-killed. In e. 2018, an American evangelist preacher named John Chau đđđđđđ13 visited North Sentinel Island in Lynne Layton, Toward a Social the Bay of Bengal, home to the Psychoanalysis: Culture, uncontacted indigenous Character, and Normative Sentinelese tribe, endangering Unconscious Processes their lives by exposing them to (Routledge, 2020), 180. disease and infection. “My name is John, and I love you and Jesus đđđđđđ14 loves you,” he was reported to Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools have said to them. Chau was not Will Never Dismantle the

seen again and is presumed to Master’s House” (1984), in Sister e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ i L F k N a r c i s t A u h o n S m , P 2 : l w / F V e been killed by the tribesmen. Outsider: Essays and Speeches See Michael Safi, “American (Crossing Press, 2007), 110–14. Killed by Isolated Tribe on North Sentinel Island in Andamans,” đđđđđđ15 The Guardian, November 22, For an excellent analysis on 2018 neutrality as complicity, I refer https://www.theguardian.com/ you to a 2017 text by Teddy Cruz world/2018/nov/21/american-k and Fonna Forman on Trump, the illed-isolated-indian-tribe- border wall, and architecture north-sentinel-island. https://research.gsd.harvard .edu/mci/neutrality-is-compl đđđđđđ6 icity.

12.21.20 / 21:31:04 EST History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories – triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectically – has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

01/21 – Grace Lee Boggs1

Part 1: Her Second Coming The Nailing of the Cross of St. Kümmernis depicts the fourteenth-century crucifixion of St. Wilgefortis, a medieval bearded female saint. The early nineteenth-century painting by Leopold Sam Richardson Pellaucher replaced another depiction of the saint at St. Veits Chapel in Austria, which had been destroyed by an overzealous Franciscan A Saintly Curse: clerk. Rather than the typical image of Wilgefortis already nailed to the cross, On Gender, Pellaucher opted to depict the scene leading up to her crucifixion, showing a distressed St. Sainthood, and Wilgefortis, an angry father who has ordered his daughter’s execution, and weeping female witnesses to the martyrdom.2 In choosing this Polycystic moment, the painting also equates Wilgefortis’s crucifixion with the rebirth or renewal associated Ovary with generic Christian interpretations of Christ. Christ’s crucifixion is symbolic of a second coming, his resurrection; Wilgefortis’s “second Syndrome coming” is perhaps representative of a necessary escape to a separate life in order to begin anew. đđđđđđđđđđOriginally either a pagan noblewoman or the princess of Portugal (her origins are disputed), St. Wilgefortis was promised to a suitor by her father.3 The suitor’s identity is also disputed. Some accounts identify him as a non-Christian and say that Wilgefortis wished to keep her Christian body pure.4 Either way, she did not wish to wed this man, and the night before her wedding she prayed to God to make her repulsive to the suitor. When she awoke she found that she had grown a beard. The suitor called off the wedding and her father, enraged, had Wilgefortis crucified. đđđđđđđđđđSt. Wilgefortis came to be the patron saint of relief from tribulations. Historically, she has been venerated by those who wish to be disencumbered, in particular by women who wish to be liberated from abusive husbands or

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m domestic situations, as well as by survivors of sexual assault, rape, and incest. She has also been historically worshipped by those who are bound or restricted, and thus by prisoners and others in captivity. In various regions and time periods she has been known by other names, such as St. Kümmernis (Germany), St. Uncumber (England), and St. Liberata (Italy). I will refer to her here as St. Wilgefortis.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT Leopold Puellacher, The Nailing of the Cross of St. Kümmernis, ca.1820/30, oil on canvas, 65 x 78 cm. St Veits Chapel, Telfs, Austria.

St. Wilgefortis in Westminster Abbey, Henry VII Lady’s Chapel, London, England.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT 03/21

Myself below Kummerniskreuz statue from the 12th century.đChurch of Rankweil, Austria, 2019.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT St. Wilgefortis sculpture from the 1730s in the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows at Loreto Sacntuary,đPrague, Czech Republic, 2019.

St. Kummernus sculpture from the 18th century. Previously this sculpture was housed in the Chapel St. Michael and Kummernus at the Church of Axams, Austria. It has since been put in offsite storage – I discovered when I went to visitđin the summer of 2019.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT đđđđđđđđđđIn the latter half of the twentieth century, Chapel. I wandered in and started asking most of the shrines and likenesses of St. docents where to find her. A younger woman and Wilgefortis were destroyed or left to deteriorate an older man responded, somewhat excitedly, after the suppression of her sainthood during the “Ayy, the one with the beard?” Together, we Catholic liturgical purge of 1969.5 Art historian located her in the upper level of the Lady Chapel. Ilse E. Friesen, who has done extensive research The entire space is lined, up to its high ceilings, on the visual representations of Wilgefortis, with statues of various saints selected by Henry states that the presence and worship of this 05/21 VII. Wilgefortis lives on the left end of a row of saint became identified with anti-Christian, anti- five saints, sporting a long beard and reading a Catholic, and deviant behavior. Her gender book placed upon a pedestal. I had not really presentation was seen as grotesque and a thought I would find her. But, there she was, denigration of Christ. Her suppression led to the quiet, regal, and beautiful. After we located her, loss of a saint that offered visibility to survivors the two guides recommended that I go to the of abuse and assault. We must also recognize library, and directed me down a few stone this loss as a part of the continual erasure of corridors – cloisters – to a large wooden door. I violence against women, trans, and nonbinary rang its doorbell, and a voice came through a people. In contemporary times she has also been small intercom. interpreted by some as the patron saint of intersex people, asexual people, transgender people, and a powerful lesbian virgin. đđđđđđđđđđThere have been instances, in particular at sites in the Tyrolean region of western Austria, where carvings or renditions of Christ have been remade or altered to be Wilgefortis. This act is a queering of the body of Christ. Subtly, this radical gesture creates a visual history of the queer body. The most notable and surviving example of this is in Brixen, at the northern tip of Italy. Friesen writes of this statue:

On certain religious holidays, this venerated statue was decorated with costly garments, lace accessories, pieces of jewelry and precious shoes … These items, once placed on the statue, made it appear more feminine and ornate. Ironically it does not seem to have been the intention of these believers to transform the gender of the statue through these sartorial additions. Nevertheless, the dramatic contrast between the adorned and the unadorned statue left visitors with two radically differing impressions – one of the unadorned statue itself (generally recognizable as being male, in spite of the long robe that constituted part of the carving), the other, its lavishly dressed and What remains of a sculpture of St. Wilgefortis modified to resemble more apparently feminine counterpart. Jesus Christ. Brixen, Italy. Photo by the author. With the passage of time and the increasingly creative copying of the time in distant locations, it was often left up to đđđđđđđđđđ“Hello?” individual believers to determine for “Hi, umm, I was wondering if I could talk to themselves the extent to which the statue someone about a saint?” could be regarded as either male or female “Come in, close the door behind you!” – or even both at once.6 BUZZ. đđđđđđđđđđOnce inside the door, I walked up a creaky I went to Westminster to find St. Wilgefortis. staircase to an attic-like space. Ladders leaned Supposedly, there was a remaining sculpture of against shelves bearing old volumes. It was a her in Henry VII’s massive and ornate Lady small but bountiful library. An endearingly

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT St. Kummernus sculpture, Chapel St. Michael and Kummernus at the Church of Axams, Austria.

S. Wilgefortis Sive Liberata is a Romanesque sculpture inside a Baroque altar dating from 1661, Church of Neufahrn, Bavaria. This was the only church I visited that was locked, and the only church known to be explicitly dedicated to St. Wilgefortis.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT disheveled middle-aged man came to the specimen of abnormality; and the witches from mezzanine and asked how he could help. He left Macbeth, who are not of our world and sexless in and came back a few minutes later with a stack their ability to control reality. of articles and books. I sat at a small desk in a đđđđđđđđđđNot mentioned in the article was side room to go through them, making notes. An Wilgefortis, whose sainted likeness was carved elderly woman sat across the room from me, into the hallowed building in which I sat. seemingly charged with making sure that I did Wilgefortis is a body doubly suppressed: in life not take photos or write on the materials. I did 07/21 for her gender presentation; and in the afterlife manage to take one selfie. It felt only right to when the Church repressed imagery of her, along record an important moment I was experiencing with the cult of her martyrdom, due to shifting all alone. conceptions of gender. This repression continues, as evidenced by her absence from the academic article on hyperandrogenism. For centuries, then, violence perpetrated against the female/femme, nonbinary, and queer body has been erased. đđđđđđđđđđWhen does history end and the present begin for the patriarchal gender binary? Queerness and non-cis bodies have always existed, but value and care for their well-being and survival have changed over time. Figures like Wilgefortis show how certain markers of “gender,” as we understand it now, were seen as symbolically and religiously significant in the Middle Ages. As historian Caroline Walker Bynum writes:

Because preachers, confessors, and spiritual directors assumed the person to be a psychosomatic unity, they not only read unusual bodily events as expressions of the soul, but also expected body itself to offer a means of access to the divine. Because they worshiped a God who became incarnate and died for the sins of others, they viewed all bodily events – the hideous wounds of martyrs or stigmatics as well as the rosy-faced beauty of virgins – as possible manifestations of grace. Because they associated the female with the fleshy, Letter to the Editor, responding to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Department of Medicine at University of Birmingham, “The they expected somatic expressions to Consequences of Hyperandrogenism in Young Women” inđJournal of characterize women’s spirituality.7 the Royal Society of Medicine,đvol. 80 (December 1987). Take, for instance, beards. Their association with đđđđđđđđđđIn the archives, I found the above attached power, regardless of assigned sex, led certain to a medical article about hyperandrogenism in medieval non-male, bearded bodies to gain women, published by the Royal Society of recognition and respect. Within this history, a Medicine in 1987. Hyperandrogenism is a “woman” with a beard was something to be condition among people Assigned Female at marveled at and revered. In fact, beards Birth (AFAB) that is associated with high levels of sometimes protected or freed the women who androgens, or “male” hormones, such as had them from the particular ridicule and testosterone. The article discussed the biological expectations of traditional womanhood. anatomy of hormones in a very dry and clinical đđđđđđđđđđFrom Lady Magdalena Ventura of Abruzzi, to tone. Despite being otherwise uninterested in Madame Clofullia, to the bearded lady of the addressing the sociological effects of said circus, there exists a strong, if shifting, condition, the article began with a brief historical foundation in Western history of bearded women introduction that covered a few recorded finding safety and power beyond gender instances: Magdalena Ventura, a noblewoman expectations. This is not to say that bearded with a full beard who nursed a child and who was women in the medieval era were necessarily idolized as a physical wonder, a fascinating beloved, or thought of as beautiful, but they did

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT threaten the established hierarchy of masculinity Part 2: Good Gender and power. Mark Albert Johnston, who has Danielle: researched the politics of the beard in early modern England, writes specifically about St. I went to see a doctor. I was probably Wilgefortis: fifteen? She walked in and the first thing she said to me was, “Ohhh, you’re a pretty At stake for early modern English culture in PCOS [Polycystic Ovary Syndrome] patient.”

the image of bearded Uncumber [St. 08/21 And I’ll never forget it because that was Wilgefortis] was not simply male mastery; before I knew much about PCOS, but that the more profound threat posed by bearded implied that people with PCOS are ugly. And women and the female autonomy they I guess I was flattered, which was sad. represented lay in their refusal to submit to I remember trying to deal with PCOS well the reproductive imperative – an because they prescribed me Metformin, insubordination that threatens the which is the same drug my grandfather was perpetuation of patriarchy itself … Despite on for diabetes. Basically, when someone the destruction of iconography venerating tells you that you can be “cured” of your Uncumber, the threat her bearded specter PCOS symptoms, that implies that you’re presented to systems of power in post- gonna be beautiful and skinny. So I made Reformation England haunted the early myself take Metformin three times a day modern cultural imagination, not only and it made me extremely nauseous. There informing the values attributed to female was a summer in high school where I went beardedness generally but also coloring home every night in extreme nausea, but I attitudes toward all independent, just kept taking it cuz I figured I’d be unmarried, un(re)productive women.8 beautiful and all my problems would be solved if I could just handle Metformin three times a day. But eventually I gave that đđđđđđđđđđ up. It was a bunch of bullshit, it made no change.

Danielle photographed by the author.đ

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT 09/21

Screenshot of a message board on a PCOS page detailing different conversations and concerns of the community, 2019.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT From what I understand, it’s a problem of literature mentioned that in the medical field, insulin resistance. You can address this PCOS’s nickname is “The Thief of Womanhood.” yourself by eating the right food, and by đđđđđđđđđđHearing this term marked the first time I exercising and taking care of yourself. My began to think more critically, rather than concern is my reproductive system and physically, about what this syndrome eggs – if all of that works properly due to represented, and why I felt a deep sense of PCOS. No one really knows. The problem shame. It was the first time that the physical

with the syndrome is that there are a lot of 10/21 symptoms – facial hair, lack of ovulation – question marks. Right now I don’t treat it, I seemed to be theorized outside of my body, and just live my life and try to be healthy and thus a self-reflexive moment was possible. PCOS take care of myself. I’d rather not be on reveals how the medical-industrial complex is random pharmaceuticals if I don’t have to closely linked to capitalist gain, and how both of be. these are tightly bound to controlling the gender binary and reproducing it for profit. The When you Google “Polycystic Ovary Syndrome,” a symptoms themselves are described in terms of hormonal disorder common among women of deviations from the heteronormative “female” reproductive age, you might stumble upon St. body (such as the ability to reproduce) and from Wilgefortis. Her new, unofficial, post-liturgical- the expected feminine presentation (hairless purge identity is the patron saint of PCOS. face, slim body, clear skin).9 As described in the đđđđđđđđđđI was diagnosed with PCOS at age twenty- pamphlet my doctor handed me, the syndrome two after a number of years of very irregular makes you less womanly, less desirable, and less periods, combined with an inability to lose productive in a hetero-capitalist society. Just weight. From a young age I also experienced “less than.” “abnormal” hair growth (hirsutism) and high đđđđđđđđđđThere are myriad PCOS groups on Facebook, levels of testosterone. My doctors handed me along with numerous online forums, message some literature on the syndrome, its symptoms, boards, and meetups. These online spaces are treatments, and possible severe long-term often filled with cis women from around the effects, such as uterine cancer and diabetes. The United States who are genuinely heartbroken by

Clara photographed by the author.đ

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT Jusepe de Ribera, Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son or The Bearded Lady, 1631, Spain. Oil on canvas. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT 12/21

Self-Portrait of the Thief of Womanhood, Brooklyn, New York, 2018.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT their inability to conceive a child. What stands comparatively recent case study of a out on these platforms is not just PCOS-related woman with PCOS (Michael, Zolese, & experiences of infertility, but a wider and deeper Dinan, 1996) speculates that her feeling of inadequacy. These women report “abnormal” sexual desires were influenced feeling “less than” because they cannot perform by physical unattractiveness. The recurrent as AFAB people and meet the expectations of assumption is that failure to conform with reproduction, since people with PCOS often feminine appearance leads to deviant cannot conceive. 13/21 sexuality.10 đđđđđđđđđđThe only reason PCOS exists as a “syndrome” and not just as individual symptoms This research seems to suggest that sexuality in is because the medical industry is committed to “women” is correlated with their level of perpetuating and depending on a binary that has masculinity: less masculine women have a more only furthered its scope since hormones were refined and lower sex drive and deviancy rate. Of sexed “male” and “female.” Information about course, deviancy is historically linked to the PCOS that is disseminated in the doctor’s office pathologizing of queerness and homosexuality, reinforces this binary. Nonbinary, gender- and to “promiscuous” behavior of any kind. Each nonconforming, and trans people are excluded of these assumptions is false. They fail to from this dominant discourse about PCOS. Each account for the varying ways in which women, body that experiences PCOS has a different femmes, nonbinary, and trans people express reality of it and its affects. Many spaces and their sexuality and desire. It seems disturbing to situations, whether the doctor’s office, church, associate a physical syndrome with identity and or a first date, continue to enforce silence and sex drive, yet it is one of the easiest ways to cruelty around gender difference, expression, denigrate a body and consider it outside the and experience. realm of “normal.” Although rooted in a đđđđđđđđđđAround the time that I was diagnosed, I was progressive “feminist perspective” on PCOS, this also starting to identify my own queerness, research falls flat because it identifies which has no doubt informed and influenced the queerness and homosexuality as “symptoms.” way I have come to internalize gender and its presentation, as well as unpack it. I wonder, at Kitzinger highlights the recurrence of the word times, if my queerness – a marker of difference “freak” in many women’s own accounts of their and even of potential danger – is exactly what PCOS, especially in indicating their feeling of protects me from feeling truly “afflicted” by standing outside of “normal ‘femininity.’” In her PCOS. I feel no responsibility to bear children, studies, she notes, “nearly a third of women either physically or politically. Responsibility used the term ‘freak’ (or ‘freaky,’ ‘freakish’) does not always equate with desire, of course. specifically to describe how they felt about đđđđđđđđđđSociologist Celia Kitzinger observes that themselves, or the condition, and virtually historically, everyone talked about feeling ‘abnormal,’ ‘unwomanly,’ ‘weird,’ ‘different’ in some way.”11 medical research has linked PCOS with “abnormal” sexuality: for example, Meyer Despite her analysis around sexual deviancy and and Zerssen (1960) identify a “deep-rooted its correlation to queerness, Kitzinger is one of insecurity” concerning the sexual role of the only researchers who has considered AFAB patients with hirsutism, especially those people from a sociological and perhaps with PCOS, but report that “complete “feminist” lens. She must also be credited with masculine identification and overt giving voices to those with PCOS outside of the homosexuality seem to be rare”; Money and realm of judgment; instead, Kitzinger shared the Clopper (1974) note that dating and psychological effects that such a syndrome and romantic interests are frequently its stigma manifest. disrupted, though “bisexuality and lesbianism are not, in general, a problem”; With all this in mind, I have recorded experiences and Gorzynski and Katz (1977) report an shared with me by others who have PCOS. These

apparent increase in sexual drive in women e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m voices shed light on the varied experiences of with PCOS, and suggest that “a sense of PCOS. They also reveal how the queerness of the uncontrollable sexual urge may be syndrome connects to the queer legacy of distressing (or at least puzzling) to the Wilgefortis. It has become clear that people with young woman with polycystic ovaries.” Two different gender identities/presentations, within studies have reported an apparent link different social and cultural contexts, have very between PCOS and female-to-male different experiences of the syndrome and its transsexualism (Bosinksi et. al., 1997; effects.12 Futterweit, Weiss, & Fagerstrom, 1986). A đđđđđđđđđđClara:

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT male closer and debunk [the separation] in I definitely don’t present that feminine. But a way. That was a big task for myself. Like that is hard to connect with a medical fuck this, that’s bullshit. I can do anything condition because I’ve been like this since I that I want, not because I am this kind [of can remember … It preceded me having my person]. I [know] I am going to be told that I period, being sexual. I just knew I wanted to can’t, but I just try and I just do it. It’s not wear boys’ clothes … I’m not attached to that difficult … So my understanding of

the word “gender” at all. When people are 14/21 myself is connected to, willingly, being kind like, “Oh, you have a really cool gender,” of what I am not supposed to be. “You’re gender is great!” I don’t even know what that means. What is ascribed to I do not see gender as a fixed identity, or one that gender there? It’s just not something I’m has specific roles or presentations associated very connected with … like how gender with “man” or “woman.” However, I do still feel presentation is this thing that can be pressure to present myself to the world in a recognized beyond the fields of being certain way, a “feminine” way. My queerness and “female” or “male.” I mean, I understand politics do not protect me from this pressure, that there is more nuance, but I don’t from seeking security and power through an understand the word “gender” attached to expected gender presentation. And although I that conjunction of sexuality, sociability, would like to think that the people I am attracted aesthetic, appearance, you know what I to would still want to fuck me if I let my beard mean? That is kind of what is supposed to grow, in truth I’m not so sure; I don’t yet feel safe manifest in gender, but I just don’t in making this assumption.13 understand how “good gender” as a word đđđđđđđđđđIt was precisely this feeling that led me to addresses that kind of matrix of markers. research historical figures whose bodily presentation (like having a beard) stood in opposition to their assigned-at-birth genders, at … I want to be capable of doing things that least by traditional gender standards. Maybe I bring this separation between female and was looking for friends (and strangely close to

Aaron photographed by the author.đ

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT Various hair removal products.đIn order to contend, you must spend. Here are some of the things that a person with PCOS might spend money on, such as:đ Jolen bleach: $6.40

Waxing treatment, whole face except eyebrows: $45.00 + $9.00 tip × 15 = $810 per year. A full-face wax costs about $50.00. This is the price affixed to performing and maintaining what I desire to be seen as. When does violence become self-inflicted and to what ends? How can we be liberated from ideas of gender and queer the world if we consistently are in the process of undoing our own notions of constriction?

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT home, given my own Catholic heritage). “femaleness.” For another, her healthy and đđđđđđđđđđBy no means are the depictions of conspicuous beard and position in comparison to womanhood found in the story of St. Wilgefortis her husband affirms her power and place. This universal. Hers is first and foremost a story of a may also be connected to her class status. white woman in Europe with a beard, an Perhaps she has gained an unquestionable aberration worthy, apparently, of sainthood at middle ground of power and visibility by being one time. Had she been of a different class, or a neither easily feminized nor relegated to woman of color, the account might have ended 16/21 freakdom – as would come to mark later there – or at least differently. Since some experiences of PCOS. sources racialize Wilgefortis's suitor, it is đđđđđđđđđđFor women with beards in the nineteenth perhaps her whiteness that protects her from century, the ambivalent power afforded to them further violence, even elevating her to holiness. by their facial hair unfolded differently. Annie Jones, who was sold to P. T. Barnum’s traveling Part 3: The Binary Collapses show as an infant, and Julia Pastrana, an Aaron: indigenous Mexican woman, experienced very mixed forms of acceptance. Jones was part of It just seems to me that doctors – or maybe Barnum’s “Freak Show” and died at a young age no one has explained it to me, but I would while campaigning to abolish the term “freak” have hoped that someone would have … from sideshow acts. Pastrana was nicknamed But sometimes I just don’t think that “ape woman” for her facial features and long hair doctors understand what hormones do in that covered her whole body. She was also the body, so there is this sort of black-and- subjected to further display in death. Her body white thinking about it. Which you see a lot was stuffed and preserved and toured right now, in the way testosterone is spoken posthumously, robbing her of any agency she had about in terms of athletics, and the over her own representation. I thought of inclusion of trans and intersex people in Pastrana when I encountered artist and athletics. And the way that testosterone is photographer Zoe Leonard’s bearded woman talked about as the male hormone, which of photograph series from the early 1990s, which course is false, because everyone – well shows the stuffed head of a bearded woman that not everyone, but most people’s bodies was preserved as a museum specimen. Leonard regardless of gender – produce photographed the head from three angles in testosterone in varying amounts. black and white. Although Leonard’s photographs might be motivated in part by her own outrage at the treatment of this woman, That binary collapses under closer scrutiny. they may nonetheless inflict further violence I sometimes wonder, do people fully against her, insofar as they offer her to be yet understand how hormones regulate certain again stared at without any further information aspects of the body? or attention to her identity or worth. đđđđđđđđđđOther nineteenth-century women capitalized monetarily off their bearded status – For me there wasn’t so much I needed to some more successfully than others. Madame necessarily treat. From the perspective of Clofullia traveled with Barnum’s “American affirming my own gender, I don’t need to be Museum” for many years, and historical adding estrogen to my body … Even though accounts of her life seem to indicate a degree of birth control was suggested to me a bunch praise and respect from mainstream audiences. of times, even before I was diagnosed, I feel In some cases, feminine performance can like I never understood it that well. It just compensate for non-feminine appearance. wasn’t really ever explained well to me. Whiteness and upper-class status also help.14 Instead, it was just “this is what you have, đđđđđđđđđđToday, there remain both psychic and and here is one way to treat it.” Most other monetary costs of maintaining a “feminine” things I have learned about it come from presentation. Some bodies must work harder –

talking to people or looking on the internet. e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m and spend more money – to be seen as they would like to be seen, and be treated as they Magdalena Ventura is probably one of the most would like to be treated. Personally speaking, as recognizable historical women with a beard. a hostess in my early twenties at an upscale New Painted in Spain by Jusepe de Ribera in 1631, York City restaurant, I could never show up to Ventura is pictured breastfeeding her child and work with any hint of “unnecessary” facial hair, standing in front of her husband. The depiction let alone a beard. But as an artist’s assistant in here can be taken in many ways. For one, being my late twenties, the expectations and pictured with the child affirms Ventura’s boundaries of self-presentation were more

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT Gillette Venus Extra Smooth women’s razor blade: $7.99

Nair facial hair remover cream with sweet almond oil, 2 oz: $4.69.

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT blurred. I needed both jobs equally in order to every month to control my appearance.16 support myself, but by gaining social and artistic đđđđđđđđđđWhen my facial hair first started to appear capital, I was able to access workspaces where I in eighth grade as a mustache, a close friend (a could afford to not perform a “feminine” cis man) pointed it out and laughed. I started appearance so deliberately. using any available method to hide it. First, it đđđđđđđđđđAs a queer body in the twenty-first century was bleach, then Nair, and eventually self- – not personally attached to defining my gender waxing. When my beard started to come in, at in a specific and/or fixed form for the most part – 18/21 around age eighteen, I added electrolysis I am committed to dismantling and tearing apart treatments. But nothing has worked the notion of a binary. But my body is also filled permanently. I continue to go to professional with the privilege of whiteness and cis-ness (or waxers, but also let my beard be somewhat at least the predominant presentation of cis- visible at times. I attribute this mainly to my ness). Thus the impact of my identity on my daily queerness, and my own slow churn towards experience is relatively minor.15 undoing and unlearning rigid binary ideas of đđđđđđđđđđSo why continue to fight my natural gender and representation. Another factor is, presentation? I have a beard, but I do not love my honestly, fatigue: maintenance can be tiring and beard. I am not proud of it. And sadly, I certainly expensive. I also exist primarily in communities do not find power in it. Not consistently at least. and spaces where my face as-is, for better or In fleeting moments, perhaps. Theoretically, I worse, is not unacceptable and does not make know this is bullshit; I know I should find extreme me vulnerable to violence or danger. It helps to confidence in my beard. The gender binary and have become somewhat liberated from its violent history are written onto me; they internalizes gender binaries and dependence on shape how I perceive my own (queer) body. Other economic situations where I could not openly be bodies that I desire, the lovers I take, who I am. fantastically challenge this conventional gender đđđđđđđđđđThe gender binary can only persist within presentation. I fall deeply in lust for that which structures that also inflict violence more broadly cannot be labeled and owned by a violent – policing, prisons, capitalism, the state, to gendered history. Yet I persist in paying $50.00 name a few. Such structures perpetuate a

Rachel as photographed by the author.đ

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT system in which there is no room for the “in figure was developed as a figure of salvation and between” or the undefinable. It is precisely the power mostly for women, but not only. And it's precarity of queerness that renders it beautiful not only to help against violence, that's her and tragic all at once. To live and fuck in the way second function, but she is first a figure for one desires, outside of the belief system of women to have a female salvation figure, not only capitalist patriarchal productivity, is to live in a a male salvation figure.”17 constant state of pleasure mixed with terror. But đđđđđđđđđđThere has always been queer representation this mixture also leads to a kind of freeing 19/21 within historical record. St. Wilgefortis is euphoria. particular to the Catholic faith, but she has also served as one of the only visible icons that exists Part 4: Gay Anatomy for people outside of the gender binary. Rachel: Additionally, she has been adopted and brought into the PCOS community as a patron saint to the I definitely get a knot in my stomach, very symptoms, and perhaps a signifier that a PCOS nervous, thinking about it, talking about it, experience is only “abnormal” within a techno- but in a way that feels productive and scientific paradigm, that our experience is not destigmatizing for myself. I have lacking or incomplete or less than, and that there internalized a lot of shame around it … Even is power in that. when I think about you doing a project, that means you are talking to multiple people, Historian Lewis Wallace argues that Wilgefortis’s who are all thinking about this. That is “so-called disfigurement” was in fact deeply deeply comforting to me. I’m sure I could ennobling: google it and there are groups online, I’m sure … But I haven’t, I haven’t looked into Wilgefortis’s beard is meant to rob her of this on my own. beauty, but as we have seen, it is precisely this so-called disfigurement that brings her closer to Christ and ultimately leads to her I think it’s about gender. It’s also, for me, sainthood. Wilgefortis’s loss of feminine tied to sexuality. Leaning a little more into beauty is her miracle; what is presented as having PCOS is concurrent for me with her ugliness makes her identical to Christ. leaning more into thinking intentionally This particular paradox does not appear about my queerness, and about my femme- with such precision in any other virgin- ness. They are happening together. martyr narrative. In the case of Wilgefortis, we see not merely female eliding into male but also deformity eliding into perfection.18 The more I’m able to accept and think about my PCOS in an open and self-conscious I do not think it is my PCOS that has made me way, in a way that actually feels good, the queer, but I do see PCOS as a strangely beautiful more I’m able to talk about my queerness, and accidental queering of the body, or of my and about the fact that I’m not the most body at least. In conversation with Rachel, I femme. Some days I’m more femme than responded to her statement above by saying: others. For me they are all part of one conversation. Most of the people I’ve talked to about this are queer, you know. Some people are in certain types of relationships, and some What my body can do, how I present my aren’t. It’s funny because I think about it as body, and how my body is sexual – they are a queering of the body, if we are going to all part of the same thing. think of bodies as binary, biologically. Then this is a pushback, which I find to be so St. Wilgefortis’s story of martyrdom is multiply cool. This is like “Gay Anatomy.” queer. Her female body, made unruly by her miraculous beard, queers Christ’s body. Or, as art e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m Through obsessive thought and research on historian Ulrike Woerner told me in an interview PCOS, I have come to realize that I feel farther this summer about her research on St. from womanhood than ever before. It feels Wilgefortis: “She was developed in a certain disingenuous for me to claim my womanhood social situation of religiousness in the 15th when I no longer believe in a gender binary. At the century where you had the first women's same time, it also feels wrong to not recognize movement in religion and Christianity, in the that people’s experiences are culturally shaped Catholic Church. At this time you have only the along gender lines. Catholic church, and in this spirituality this đđđđđđđđđđIn essence, I have come to undo and unlearn

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT much of what I have internalized about gender Sam Richardsonđis an interdisciplinary artist working over time. A friend recently told me that when we primarily in photography, as well as video, sound, and first met, he had no doubt that I was writing. She is based in Los Angeles, CA. As an image maker working in a documentary-informed practice, “genderqueer, or just very androgynous.” In that Richardson strives to unlearn, break open, and find moment I felt held and warm. I have clung to new ways of creating images that interrogate womanhood and femininity for so long because it collaboration and photographic relationships in the has brought me comfort and community. Those context of the body, trauma, and care. She utilizes her past work as a Crisis Counselor to survivors in the ER are not things I wish to lose. I still do, and always 20/21 of New York City and personal experience to enter her will, love women and womanhood – I just don’t work with a practice of care and investigation into think they mean the same things to me as they personal and shared experience. once did. Today I find myself wanting to shake off the entire complex of gender identity. I wish to float in ambiguity, but not sink. I know I am not alone in this. đđđđđđđđđđLast week I was walking with my lover, my person, from the library to her house, when she shared thoughts she had the first time we met. Her roommate had told her that a friend named Sam was coming over, who she assumed was a (cis) man. When I arrived, she was immediately intrigued, she said – tall, deep voice, and obviously not a (cis) man. She just didn’t really know what my gender was, and that’s what initially attracted her, she said. Earlier that day I had told her that no one has ever made me feel so at ease and so desired in my body. We held hands, walking along Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles. My beard was just visibly growing back in. đđđđđđđđđđ× Thank you to everyone who worked with me, talked to me and leant their stories, knowledge and thought to this ongoing exploration. I am forever grateful for your time and generosity: Aaron Kelley,đClara López Menéndez, Danielle Schwab, Rachel Smith, Ulrike Woerner, Sara Frier, Virgil Benjamin Taylor, Johanna Bampi, Robert Mills. e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT đđđđđđ1 experience as a white woman Grace Lee Boggs, The Next living in the United States is American Revolution: particular. I cannot speak to the Sustainable Activism for the experiences of women of color Twenty-First Century (University and or those in different regions of California Press, 2011), 79. where culturally and religiously specific notions of beauty and đđđđđđ2 femininity, along with the effects Ilse E. Friesen, The Female of colonialism and white Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis supremacy, are felt on a bodily Since the Middle Ages (Wilfred level. In an ideal future version

Laurier University Press, 2001), of this text, such voices would 21/21 107. also be included.

đđđđđđ3 đđđđđđ13 Another purported origin of That said, I have been pleasantly Wilgefortis’s cult is that she was and genuinely surprised by confused with the Volto Santo, a select lovers who have accepted Roman Catholic crucifix of Jesus and even been attracted to this Christ dressed in regalia, aspect of my presentation. For including a dress-like gown. that I am forever grateful. Those moments have yielded true đđđđđđ4 intimacy and growth. It should be noted that some of these accounts specifically đđđđđđ14 identify the suitor as Muslim. “Why did Clofullia’s Victorian Wilgefortis’s refusal and American audiences respond so commitment to Christian purity favorably? Partly it’s because has thus also been subject to she ‘acted’ like a nineteenth- Islamophobic and potentially century woman. In a society with racist interpretation. deeply entrenched gender norms, Clofullia fit the part: She đđđđđđ5 was demure, nurturing, and “By the directives of demonstrated excellence in Sacrosantum Concilium of needlework and other ‘feminine’ Vatican II (1963), in which one arts. In the face of all this, what can find the statement that was a beard?” Sean Trainor, ‘incongruous’ practices may “Lesson of the Bearded Lady,” ‘foster devotion of doubtful The Atlantic, December 5, 2015 orthodoxy.’ Zealous efforts, both https://www.theatlantic.com/ before and following these new national/archive/2015/12/les directives, resulted in numerous sons-of-the-bearded-lady/418 churches being stripped of any 038/. traces of the former veneration of the crucified female saint – đđđđđđ15 often to the pride of certain PCOS affects a variety of clerics, but to the regret of different AFAB people numerous parishioners and regardless of race or ethnicity, visitors.” Ilse E. Friesen, The and experiences may also differ Female Crucifix: Images of St. based on different cultural or Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages regional understandings of (Wilfred Laurier University Press, beauty standards. 2001). đđđđđđ16 đđđđđđ6 Lewis Wallace, “Bearded Friesen, The Female Crucifix, 94. Woman, Female Christ: Gendered Transformations in the đđđđđđ7 Legends and Cult of Saint Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Wilgefortis,” Journal of Feminist Female Body and Religious Studies in Religion 30, no. 1 Practice in the Later Middle (Spring 2014): 54. Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Body: Part I, ed. Michel đđđđđđ17 Feher (Zone Books, 1989). Ulrike Woerner, in conversation with the author, August 2019. đđđđđđ8 Mark Albert Johnston, Beard đđđđđđ18 Fetish in Early Modern England: Lewis Wallace, “Bearded Sex, Gender, and Registers of Woman, Female Christ: Value (Routledge, 2016), 181. Gendered Transformations in the Legends and Cult of Saint đđđđđđ9 Wilgefortis,” Journal of Feminist All of this is rooted in historical Studies in Religion 30, no. 1 and contemporary white, (Spring 2014): 54. Eurocentric, classist, and ableist beauty standards.

đđđđđđ10

Celia Kitzinger, “‘The Thief of e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S R i d s A S a i n t l y C u r s e : O G d , h o P c v m Womanhood’: Women’s Experience of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome,” Social Sciences and Medicine, no. 54 (2002).

đđđđđđ11 Kitzinger, “‘The Thief of Womanhood.’”

đđđđđđ12 Experiences of hirsutism vary regionally and culturally. My

03.30.20 / 13:55:15 EDT 1. Violence If postcolonial thought can be said to have a cinematic dimension, we might begin by asking how violence operates as a fantasy.1 But first, it is important to define what we understand violence to be. In law, violence is “the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the

01/10 exhibition of such force.”2 There are distinctions between lawful and unlawful violence, where criminal violence is carried out illegally – against the state, for instance – and lawful violence is most often carried out by the state, which is also responsible for laws and their enforcement. Herbert Spencer has written: “Not only does magisterial power exist because of evil, but it Serubiri Moses exists by evil. Violence is employed to maintain it; and all violence involves criminality.”3 đđđđđđđđđđIn the legal use of violence in various forms Violent of law enforcement, one often encounters an interchangeability of right with violence. Hegel’s Dreaming Philosophy of Right connected the discourse of right to self-consciousness, absolute free will, and moral rightness, where right is “freedom as idea” and “something holy, because it is the embodiment of self-conscious freedom.”4 Karl Marx referred to right in relation to property and ownership, or what Hegel had previously called “the absolute right of appropriation which man has over all things.”5 Marx’s statement on the function of commodities and wealth in chattel slavery reflects the Hegelian notion of right: “The sale and purchase of slaves is formally also a sale and purchase of commodities. But money cannot perform this function without the existence of slavery. If slavery exists, then money can be invested in the purchase of slaves.”6 đđđđđđđđđđJean-Jacques Rousseau, however, suggested that “the words right and slave contradict each other.”7 Insofar as slaves were considered property and commodities, any violence carried out against them was considered as right, and thus lawful. Similarly, violence was deemed lawful when carried out against natives of an occupied territory (as in the colonization of San Domingo by Spain, and later France). In the postcolony and in postcolonial analysis, the question of violence is premised on events occurring in the colonies or within occupied territories, where the notion of right, or lawful violence, has a subject, which is the colonizing subject. How, then, do we interrogate

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S b i M s V i o l e n t D r a m g the idea of free will and freedom in occupied lands and colonies? When nature, land, and enslaved persons are most often considered as the exclusive property of white colonizers, lawful violence becomes the right and abstract free will of white colonizers. đđđđđđđđđđFrantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) touched on the theme of whiteness, which he explored in greater detail in his earlier Black

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST Cover of the Penguin edition of Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth.

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST Skin, White Masks (1952). Consider Fanon’s pathology inherent to postcolonial nationalism (a statements concerning property, race, wealth, topic he devotes an entire chapter to in Wretched and colonial occupation: “There is no native who of the Earth)? doesn’t dream at least once a day of setting đđđđđđđđđđIn Black Skin, White Masks Fanon describes himself up in the settler’s place,” and “You are how mulatto women in Martinique were deemed rich because you are white.”8 Clearly, Fanon superior to blacks (both men and women) in the considered the right to wealth – and the abstract territory because white male French colonists relation of right to wealth – to be one of the 03/10 found them desirable – a desire that foundational myths of European colonialism. The approximated mulatto women’s freedom: “From theorist further described the colonial enterprise one day to the next the mulatto went from the as if it were a business, writing of French colonial class of slaves to that of masters.”11 The Algeria that “the colonies have become a pathology of blacks in Martinique had to do with market.”9 this slippage in their social status. Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant observed 2. Fantasy something similar in the US, where an obsession There are tensions between Fanon’s two books with family ancestry was haunted by “the from 1952 and 1961. The question of desire does intrusion of Negro blood.”12 The Algerian soldiers, not transpose very well from one text to the on the other hand, fighting a war of other. The racial pathology that Fanon observed independence that Fanon himself later joined, in Martinique – “this desire to be suddenly were embroiled in a national struggle in which white” – is not the pathology he witnessed in the use of violence was undeniable, yet they French Algeria among the Algerian soldiers who remained haunted by the guilt of killing innocent were his patients.10 Racial pathology – the Algerians. deeply internalized racism causing blacks and đđđđđđđđđđAn expert psychoanalyst, Fanon made people of color, perhaps unconsciously, to desire seamless connections between racial and whiteness – contrasts with the horrific fantasies colonial pathologies for which questions of of his Algerian patients haunted by guilt from desire are inescapable. Regarding Algeria, his their military service during the Algerian War, analysis is embedded in a study of postcolonial which led them to have terrifying visions of those nationalism, and for Martinique, in a study of they had killed. Could it be described as a whiteness. To reference Fanon’s remark once

Film still from Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014).

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST more: “There is no native who doesn’t dream at Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self- least once a day of setting himself up in the Defense, when a white settler in Rhodesia says settler’s place.”13 By uttering this fantasy of the that a black servant told his female master as he colonized, Fanon awakens and brings this washed her car that he would one day be driving fantasy into language. it.16 To this conscious spoken fantasy, the white đđđđđđđđđđIt is hard not to think of cinema when settler being interviewed in the film retorted, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva “Before getting out we would turn the lights off,” writes that “the role of language is essential for 04/10 suggesting something more violent – that they the formation of fantasies.”14 She also remarks: would burn the car before giving it to the natives. “Analytical work consists of making the fantasy Or as Fanon might have said, the unspoken fear conscious – formulating the phantasmatic of the settler is: “They want to take our place.” narrative and interpreting it – in order to dissolve đđđđđđđđđđAs a cinematic work, Concerning Violence the symptom.”15 Could we use this same predominantly draws from European television formulation to suggest that, for Fanon, analytical footage of different anti-colonial uprisings in work consisted of revealing these unconscious Africa: Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola, and fantasies in the realm of his patient’s Guinea-Conakry. What desires can be identified experiences of racism and colonial war? The use in these images and what unconscious fantasies of violence, which Spencer called evil, to protect are implied by those same desires? In an earlier wealth and property caused the pathologies criticism of this film, I argued that the Non- Fanon theorized. Fanon considered violence to Aligned Movement – the organization of be the basis of life in the colony; it was part of independent Asian and African nation-states – the quotidian experience of colonial subjects. constituted a form of anti-colonial self- Could we thus argue that Fanon built narratives defense.17 Why was the Bandung Conference, of violence in order to diagnose these concurrent with the Mau Mau (aka Kenya Land pathologies in his patients? and Freedom Army) Uprising, not considered an đđđđđđđđđđFanon’s narratives of his patients’ fantasies instance of anti-imperialist self-defense by articulate desires for the settler’s house, desires Fanon (and therefore by Olsson)? The omission of to own what the white man owns, for the right to this significant project in the film is surprising. I be free. We see such desires portrayed in Göran have seen footage of Fanon attending a Pan- Hugo Olsson’s 2014 film Concerning Violence: African conference in Zaire, where he met Patrice

Film still from Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014).

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST Lumumba. Why was this special encounter not subjectivity, and embodies the “aspirations” to part of the film’s singular depiction of the anti- European values as protocol. Evident colonial colonial movement in Africa? anxieties that emerge from these subjectivities readily contradict such freedoms,21 further 3. Alienation elucidating the subject of freedom in Fanon’s In postcolonial historian C. L. R. James’s analysis writing about the “violence with which the of eighteenth-century events in Haiti leading up supremacy of white values is affirmed and the to the Haitian Revolution, the idea of “return” 05/10 aggressiveness which has permeated the victory offered a kind of freedom where death and of these values over the (native’s) ways of life and cultural retention coincided: “Life was hard and thought.”22 The violent and destructive policies death, they believed, meant not only release but of settler colonialism are, for Fanon, forms of a return to Africa.”18 For James, freedom is also dispossession: the burning and looting of the insurrectionary memory that caused black anything the native owns, chasing them off their revolt. In a complimentary sense, for Fanon, land, and repossessing it for the purpose of forms of freedom manifest in desire and mineral extraction and economic exploitation. revelations of desire in racial and colonial Fanon’s reuse of Hegelian alienation applies to pathologies. For Fanon, freedom is premised on the redistribution of stolen wealth through the native’s violent confrontations with violence, an everyday violence that seamlessly whiteness, and her ultimate anthropophagia of connects the Caribbean to French colonial whiteness. James’s analysis considers Haitians’ Algeria. cultural memory of Africa and uses both ethnography and Marxist analysis to give 4. Desire evidence of African consciousness and its In Fanon’s chapter “Concerning Violence” in The revolutionary potential. Wretched of the Earth and its translation to đđđđđđđđđđUnlike Isaac Julien’s 1995 documentary cinema in Olsson’s film, I am drawn to the feature film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White former’s suggestion that for the native, violence Mask, which depicted Fanon as a psychiatrist, is the only means to real autonomy and freedom. Olsson’s film remains didactic in its approach to He writes: “The colonized man finds his freedom Fanon’s text. However, the film reflects another in, and through, violence.”23 This impulse in pragmatic philosophy. When we see women Fanon’s writing could be described as Kantian, in fighters in Mozambique at a typing and copying the sense that Basterra confirms that violence station they have set up for printing and “prov[es] freedom’s existence.”24 Basterra’s publishing at a forest camp, it becomes evident inquiry asks whether we can know freedom at that for Olsson, knowledge production is key. One all, yet she adds that for Kant, practical reason of the characters in this scene conveys to the was possibly aimed at revealing the power of camera something that had previously been desire. unspoken – that a strategy of colonialism was to đđđđđđđđđđFanon followed Kant in his unwavering disempower the native by denying them conviction to articulate and reveal the native’s education. But, if the right to education is a right desires and fantasies. Basterra further explains to freedom, this line of thinking would diverge how these ideas of analyzing freedom can be from Fanon’s thesis on the freedom and contradictory. How, for example, do we prove liberation of oppressed Algerians: “What is the freedom’s existence? In her book, The Subject of true nature of violence? We have seen that it is Freedom, Basterra makes clear that the ways the true intuition of the colonized masses that “freedom constitutes the subject is not easy to their liberation must, and can only, be achieved explain.”25 She considers Kant’s practical by force.”19 While Fanon’s use of the Hegelian philosophy and its gesturing towards the power alienation of “self and other” was fundamental of desire, writing: “Proving freedom’s existence to his assessment of the condition of and its causality in constituting the subject is colonization, Olsson’s film exhibits a pragmatic the challenge Kant’s practical philosophy must approach by showing sites of knowledge meet. Here, theoretical reason is charged with production as manifesting freedom. the formidable task of explaining how practical

đđđđđđđđđđ“Freedom manifests itself through moral e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S b i M s V i o l e n t D r a m g reason – a reason that does not reason – law,” Gabriella Basterra has written, reflecting on motivates the power of desire.”26 Kant.20 While the origins of the law are not easily đđđđđđđđđđThrough Basterra’s readings of Kant, it determined, and notwithstanding that freedom is becomes clear that Fanon’s practical philosophy not easily proven to exist in Kant, the law can rests on the analytical work of his psychiatry. The still be grasped – it is actual and it exists. Thus, challenge for Fanon, therefore, is identifying if freedom is inextricably linked to law, then law subjectivity through his patients’ fantasies and, in the frame of colonization (e.g., the Black Code perhaps unconsciously, through their desires. and other penal codes) shapes colonial Basterra names the unconditional freedom being

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST called into question “excess,” a word that Kant disembodied woman rose up before him in also used. In Fanon, that same freedom redoubled horror.”28 The text mentions that the unconditioned by colonial laws is a kind of soldier had been part of a mission that left two anarchic fantasy, whether conscious or Algerian civilians killed. unconscious. Fanon’s analysis suggests that the đđđđđđđđđđThis is firstly a nightmare, but also an actual colonial subject is shaped by dreams of anarchy, fantasy about a woman the soldier murdered and the possibility of attaining these dreams – while fighting for the FLN. Earlier, Fanon brings that is, his practical philosophy – is 06/10 up the question of guilt, which he attributes in a characterized by the power of desire, a desire footnote to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia.29 masked, at least in part, by violent dreaming. The thought of having survived a war in which others have perished returns in this section and 5. Nightmare with this patient. The terror brought by the According to Kristeva, a condition is diagnosed wounded and dead woman in the nightmare is by identifying both conscious and unconscious triggered, in the Freudian sense, possibly, by the fantasies.27 Fanon’s case studies in The guilt of having committed murder: “At nightfall Wretched of the Earth – his patients whose that evening, as soon as the patient went to bed, accounts are noted and reproduced in the book – the room was ‘invaded by women’ in spite of provide the basis for his postcolonial critique everything.”30 and Kantian analysis. The invocation that “the đđđđđđđđđđWhile no actual adaptation of these colonized man finds his freedom in, and through, fantasies appears in Olsson’s film, a battle scene violence” emerges directly from Fanon’s dutiful in a forest with a wounded Portuguese soldier study of his patients and his commitment to fighting in Guinea does approach horror. In this their psychological well-being. Among the many dire situation, four or five men perform a medical patients he examined, two stand out. The first is procedure on the wounded. The fantasy that “Case No. 3,” an Algerian soldier fighting on Fanon identifies in these soldiers is mostly behalf of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the unconscious, and the patient is not necessarily Algerian nationalist anti-colonial organization: aware of the impact of this fantasy on his “When he started thinking of his mother, the psyche. The fantasy – in this case, of being

Cover of an English edition of Frantz Fanon's bookđBlack Skin, White Masks.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST 07/10

Film still from Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014).

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST haunted and terrorized by dead or zombie-like to be located in the cinematic frame. Though women – speaks to Fanon’s placement of fantasies of anarchy can be traced back to Kant’s violence and dispossession at the center of concept of unconditioned freedom, in the space analysis, whether dispossession of property or of excess we also experience a “reason that does the armed, gendered violence evident in the not reason,” in the words of Basterra.34 The experiences of Case No. 3. second noteworthy patient who Fanon examines đđđđđđđđđđFollowing Basterra’s ideas on subjectivity in Wretched feels overwhelming guilt at “having and freedom, can we seek an unconditioned 08/10 murdered one’s mother.”35 The patient’s recurring freedom in Fanon’s patients or in their fantasies? fantasy is a horror at carrying out violence on In observing the reality of the Algerian War one’s own people, or one’s kin. A further horror (1954–62) – the war of independence between neither depicted in Wretched nor in its film the French Army and the FLN – Fanon compares adaptation is the massacre of natives who fought the case of a white army officer fighting for on behalf of France in the war. According to France to an Algerian officer fighting for the FLN. anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, “What Now, if subjectivity is formed by the patient’s ‘horrifies’ the modern political sensibility is not participation in violence, then how do the violence per se but violence that does not make fantasies and desires of the white soldiers sense.”36 How does the idea of sense-making fighting on behalf of France diverge from those of connect to the modern political sensibility? If the Algerian soldiers fighting for the FLN? In violence is sensible when attached to progress, considering lawful violence, what can be said of where can Fanon’s question of desire be placed the native Algerian soldiers fighting on behalf of or juxtaposed in relation to unlawful violence? In colonial France? Are they to be seen as traitors? a modern political context, is the colonial subject What happens to their subjectivity after the war meant to experience the unconditioned freedom is over? Subsequent accounts show that the that Basterra describes? French failed to repatriate the Algerian soldiers đđđđđđđđđđWhile Mamdani references Belgian colonial who fought on their behalf. After losing the war, policy in Rwanda and customary law in Uganda these native soldiers were hunted down and focused on ethnic and racialized subjectivity, we killed. are, as readers, still faced with his argument’s đđđđđđđđđđCase No. 3 diagnoses the unavoidable moral and theological challenge, which is rooted banality of violence in the French colony during in the notion of the sensible and sense-making the Algerian War to reveal fantasies of that he borrows from Paul Ricoeur, who “redoubled horror,” but similarly opens the “explored the problem of how to account for the question of the gendered nature of these existence of evil.”37 For Mamdani, sense-making pathologies.31 In her spoken preface to Olsson’s in the colonial contexts of Rwanda and Uganda film, philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak begins with race and ethnicity as a means of points out that, though anti-colonial struggle identifying a process of colonial subject temporarily brought women to the front lines in formation. Though there is little doubt as to equal standing, old gender barriers returned which colonial policies and customary laws once the war of liberation was won.32 Thus, produce the racialized and ethnic subject, I am fantasies of horror in Case No. 3’s experiences drawn here to Ricoeur’s interpretation explicitly reference the violence inflicted upon predicated on a “making sense of the existence native women in colonial Algeria. of evil.”38 By shifting focus from the postcolonial violence that Mamdani has identified in the 6. Horror pluralist legal system, to evil proper, I aim to Horror and catharsis are fundamental to how highlight the theological roots of Mamdani’s history ends up being told, especially the history argument. Could it be that, by revealing the of the transition from being the colony of another fantasies of anarchy that possess natives and nation to being an independent nation. Kristeva their desires, Fanon is purposefully articulating says that the ancient Greeks experienced both subjectivity and freedom? What can be catharsis through the myth of Oedipus,33 and made of Fanon’s reliance on Freudian analyses of Glissant shows that this has persisted into the guilt? Should we then uphold the idea that twentieth century, for example in Faulkner’s e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S b i M s V i o l e n t D r a m g postcolonial violence is sinful? Where does this novel Absalom! Absalom! That cinema is ethical line of thinking leave native soldiers who particularly rich in horror as a subject reveals its murdered innocent Algerian civilians? These debt to the plays of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and questions of freedom and desire in the Schiller, among others. Fanon’s thesis in the postcolony are always marked by pathologies section on violence in Wretched – once again, the and forms of anarchy that run the risk of claim that “the colonized subject attains his betraying both progress and sense-making. freedom in, and through, violence” – prompts me đđđđđđđđđđ× to ask how postcolonial horror and catharsis are

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST Serubiri Moses is a writer and curator who lives in New đđđđđđ1 Kristeva, “Fantasy and Cinema.” York. He is cocurator of “Greater New York 2020,” This essay is a version of a lecture I gave for the art theory đđđđđđ16 MoMA PS1’s survey of contemporary art. Moses was course “Postcolonial Theory as Göran Hugo Olsson, Concerning part of the curatorial team for the Berlin Biennale X Cinematic Fantasy” at the New Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti- (2017–18). From 2013 to 2017, Moses traveled Center for Research and Imperialistic Self-Defense, 2014. extensively to participate in curatorial residencies, Practice, Fall 2019. See also The main title of Olsson’s film is Serubiri Moses, “Notes on borrowed from the title of the conferences, and juries across Africa, Asia, Latin Postcolonial Theory as first chapter of Wretched of the America, and Europe. In 2015, Moses held the position Cinematic Fantasy,” Arts.Black, Earth (“Concerning Violence”). of Stadtschreiber at the Bayreuth Academy of December 15, 2015 09/10 https://arts.black/essays/20 đđđđđđ17 Advanced African Studies, and in 2014 he cocurated 15/12/notes-on-postcolonial- Moses, “Notes on Postcolonial the second public art biennial in Kampala, KLA ART – theory-as-cinematic-fantasy/ . Theory as Cinematic Fantasy.” entitled “Unmapped” – and organized a four-part The title “Violent Dreaming” is a play on the title of K. Sello đđđđđđ18 public program at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala. Duiker’s novel The Quiet Violence C. L. R. James, The Black Moses completed his Masters of Arts in Curatorial of Dreams (2001). Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture Studies at Bard College, and is an Adjunct Assistant and the Santo Domingo Professor in the Art Department at Hunter College. đđđđđđ2 Revolution (Vintage Books, “Violence,” Oxford English 1963), 15, 16. Dictionary. đđđđđđ19 đđđđđđ3 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Herbert Spencer, “The Right to 73. Ignore the State,” in Social Statics, Or, The Conditions đđđđđđ20 Essential to Human Happiness Gabriella Basterra, The Subject Specified, and the First of Them of Freedom: Kant, Levinas Developed (Williams and (Fordham University Press, Norgate, 1868), 230. 2015), 9.

đđđđđđ4 đđđđđđ21 Georg H. W. Hegel, Philosophy of See V. S. Naipaul, A House for Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Cosimo, Mr. Biswas (Random House, 2008). 1961); Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (Heinemann Educational đđđđđđ5 Publishers, 1966); Chinua Hegel, Philosophy of Right. Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann Educational đđđđđđ6 Publishers, 1958); and Chinua Karl Marx, “The Circulation of Achebe, No Longer at Ease Money-Capital,” Capital, vol. 2, (Heinnemann Educational 1893. Available here Publishers, 1960). https://www.marxists.org/arc hive/marx/works/1885-c2/inde đđđđđđ22 x.htm. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 43. đđđđđđ7 Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the đđđđđđ23 Social Contract, trans. C. D. H. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Cole (Dover, 2003), 7. 86.

đđđđđđ8 đđđđđđ24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Basterra, The Subject of the Earth, trans. Constance Freedom, 8. Farrington (Grove Press, 1963), 39, 40. đđđđđđ25 Basterra, The Subject of đđđđđđ9 Freedom, 8. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 65. đđđđđđ26 Basterra, The Subject of đđđđđđ10 Freedom, 8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam đđđđđđ27 Markmann (Pluto, 1986), 63. Kristeva, “Fantasy and Cinema.”

đđđđđđ11 đđđđđđ28 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 58. 264.

đđđđđđ12 đđđđđđ29 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of “It was a matter of finding out Relation, trans. Betsy Wing whether we had to deal with an (University of Michigan Press, unconscious guilt complex 1997), 57. following on the death of the mother, as Freud has described

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S b i M s V i o l e n t D r a m g đđđđđđ13 in Mourning and Melancholia.” Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 39. 262.

đđđđđđ14 đđđđđđ30 Julia Kristeva, “Fantasy and Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Cinema,” in Intimate Revolt: The 264. Power and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, trans. đđđđđđ31 Jeanine Herman (Columbia Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, University Press, 2002). 264.

đđđđđđ15 đđđđđđ32

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Preface to Concerning Violence,” Film Quarterly 68, no. 1 (Fall 2014).

đđđđđđ33 Kristeva, “Fantasy and Cinema.”

đđđđđđ34 Basterra, The Subject of Freedom. 10/10 đđđđđđ35 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 261–64.

đđđđđđ36 Mahmood Mamdani, “Making Sense of Postcolonial Violence in Postcolonial Africa,” in Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta 11_Platform 2, eds. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Hatje Cantz, 2002).

đđđđđđ37 David Pellauer and Bernard Dauenhauer, “Paul Ricoeur,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016 edition https://plato.stanford.edu/e ntries/ricoeur/?PHPSESSID=56 1db4b102b8496850cd634406cb0b c8.

đđđđđđ38 Pellauer and Dauenhauer, “Paul Ricoeur.” e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ S b i M s V i o l e n t D r a m g

12.21.20 / 21:31:17 EST 1. In Brussels on May 1, 2019, Rick Perry, then-US energy secretary, announced that “seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States was again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent.” And, in the twenty-first century, he

01/13 added, “rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”1 Perry was referring to a deal that would double the size of US gas exports to Europe. But from what, exactly, would Perry’s “freedom gas” liberate Europe? đđđđđđđđđđPerry’s colorful statement came as an explicit snub to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a Oleksiy Radynski project that Russia and Germany have been pursuing since the 2010s to link the two countries directly via the Baltic seabed. The Is Data the New pipeline’s route bypasses intermediary countries like Ukraine, whose state budget depends Gas? heavily on gas transit revenues. Nord Stream 2 is expected to double the capacity of the already existing Nord Stream pipeline, increasing the volume of transmitted gas up to 110 billion cubic meters a year. Into 2020, Merkel’s government continues to defend this massive gas infrastructure project that’s been mired in controversy from the start. đđđđđđđđđđStrangely enough, most of the criticism facing the Nord Stream 2 project comes from a geopolitical, rather than an ecological, perspective.2 Its critics say that this pipeline would disproportionately increase the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel exports.3 It’s also quite clear that the actual political rationale for this project is to render obsolete the subterranean, Soviet-era natural gas arteries that run through large parts of the European continent that are no longer under Russia’s control. Following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2014, Merkel’s government’s adherence to the Nord Stream 2 project did not cease to raise eyebrows.4 After the downing of a passenger plane over the Donbass in July 2014 by pro- Russian proxies, the ensuing sanctions against Russia did not affect the project in any way. In German public debate, the fact that the completion of Nord Stream 2 would likely cause the economy of Ukraine to collapse, a country at war with Russia, has been constantly referenced

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? – but to little avail.5 đđđđđđđđđđThe intricacies of the ongoing Nord Stream 2 debate, however, miss a rather large elephant in the room. Without questioning the importance of countering Russia’s neocolonial wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, it is easy to see why the biggest problem with the new pipeline is not at all the fact that it will deprive Russia’s neighbors of their transit revenues. Such revenues, in fact,

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST 02/13

Smiley-face graffiti on a gas pipe at the Nord Stream 2 construction site in Lubmin, Germany. Copyright:đNordđStreamđ2 / Axel Schmidt.

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST 03/13

Gerhard Schröder, ex-chancellor of Germany and chairman of the board of directors of NordđStreamđ2, and Matthias Warnig, former member of the Stasi and CEO of NordđStreamđ2. Copyright:đNordđStreamđ2 / Wolfram Scheible.

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST fuel gross corruption schemes, like those that the Russian Federation, one of the world’s define Ukraine’s political process, and guarantee largest exporters of fossil fuels and, according to the concentration of exorbitant wealth in the most estimates, the owner of the largest stock of hands of oligarchs.6 Nor is the biggest problem reserves of natural gas on Earth. This particular the fact that Nord Stream 2 will provide the list of “threats and challenges” also happens to Russian autocratic elite with another powerful coincide more or less with a number of actions tool to subvert European politics. The real that are necessary to undertake if humanity is problem is that this tool, just like its countless 04/13 serious about its survival on the planet. As it counterparts, undermines the future of planet becomes increasingly evident that the future of Earth by bringing the irreversibility of climate humankind depends on its ability to switch to a change one large step closer. And this time, global economic model that would make the placing the blame squarely on Russia is clearly industrial burning of fossil fuels obsolete, the not an option. mere hope of such a switch – however distant it đđđđđđđđđđWith Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard might seem at the moment – is now officially Schroeder as a manager, and Mathias Warnig (an recognized as a threat to the regime that governs ex-Stasi officer with a long-standing connection Russia. Clearly, the Russian political model to Vladimir Putin) serving as the CEO of the values the future of fossil fuel and capital flows project, it is not surprising that the German over the future of the innumerable species government values its Nord Stream 2 (including humans) whose existence is commitment more than its widely anticipated threatened by climate change. A question worth green transition. In a truly Orwellian move, Nord asking, then: Is the Russian government actually Stream 2 presents itself as an environmentally being, perversely, more straightforward than friendly initiative that will help decrease carbon most other governments about the fact that they emissions from oil and coal, fossil fuels that are, are ultimately accountable to entities such as it is claimed, much dirtier than natural gas. This gas, oil, and their derivative petrocurrencies, argument is refuted by ecologists who assert rather than to the members of human society that, despite being relatively “cleaner” than who voted them into power? much of the existing carbon infrastructure, đđđđđđđđđđWell before Trump came to power, it was projects like Nord Stream 2 would increase the abundantly clear that the global carbon-based structural, long-term dependency on fossil fuels capitalist model is incompatible with the futures to such an extent that a transition to a carbon- of democracy and of the environment. Despite free economy – something that the Earth’s the broad scientific consensus on the grave biosphere needs much earlier than we plan to effects of the fossilized economy on the institute – might actually never occur. planetary climate, and despite the cautious đđđđđđđđđđAt the time of this writing, the construction intergovernmental half-measures to prevent a of Nord Stream 2 has been halted due to US catastrophic scenario (like the nonbinding Paris sanctions against the project, which will most Accord of 2015, which the US government has likely merely delay the pipeline’s completion by already opted out of anyway), “extreme” fossil about a year. But why is it that the only real form fuels investments continue to surge.8 Of all the of opposition to Nord Stream 2 comes from the fringe ideologies and discarded ideas that the power that would simply prefer to cook the Trump presidency has brought into the planet with its own “freedom gas”? mainstream, climate change denialism could probably have the most lasting and damaging 2. impact on the future of humankind. Of course, In May 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin Donald Trump’s “climate skepticism” is far more signed an executive order titled “On the Strategy publicized than that of his Russian counterpart of Economic Security of the Russian Federation and political patron – even though the effect of until 2030.” This order includes a list of ongoing the latter could be more fundamental, given “challenges and threats to the economic Putin’s global support of fossil fuel kleptocrats security” of Russia identified at that time. High and right-wing conspiracists, Trump included. on the list – number six of twenty-five points – is Like Trump, Putin has repeatedly questioned the a threat formulated as follows: “Changes in the e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? human-made nature of climate change, and went structure of global demand for energy resources as far as to ridicule the use of alternative energy and their consumption patterns; development of sources like wind turbines for the alleged harm energy-saving technologies and reduction of their vibration may cause to worms, urging them material consumption; development of ‘green to “come out of the ground.” (The US president, technologies.’”7 meanwhile, focuses on turbines’ apparently đđđđđđđđđđThis statement warrants closer attention. murderous effect on birds). Again, this It’s not difficult to see why the “development of unprecedented (and scientifically baseless), ‘green technologies’” is an existential threat to disproportionate concern for subterranean,

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST 05/13

Participants in the Baltic Sea Day Environmental Forum 2017 couldn’t care less about the ecological aspects of Nord Stream 2. Copyright:đNordđStreamđ2 / Anatolij Medved.

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST nonhuman entities – inanimate, like oil and gas, problem afflicting oil-producing states to other or animate, like worms – provides clues as to the limits of carbon democracy?”11 As natural gas actual allegiance of a certain public servant overtakes oil’s previous status as the most named Vladimir Putin. important fossil fuel of the current century, this đđđđđđđđđđMost commonly, the Russian political model inquiry should be extended. Will oil-based liquid is the object of human rights–based, modernity make way for a data-based, gaseous postcolonial,9 or liberal-democratic criticism of postmodernity? what the Putinists themselves call “the illiberal 06/13 đđđđđđđđđđWhat follows is an attempt to “follow the model.” In order to make sense beyond the carbon itself,” by tracing and collaging its various redundantly anti-communist “post-sovietology” footprints within histories of ideas, technology, in the vein of “Cold War 2.0,” these perspectives and popular culture, in an effort to grasp the should necessarily be supplemented with (or evasive substance of natural gas through the no- sublated in) more universalist – that is, less-evasive field of the social imagination – ecological – modes of critique. It is well-known informed by the Cold War and the current that the infrastructure for the extraction and geopolitical attempts at its reenactment. transportation of fossil fuels – mainly, the oil and đđđđđđđđđđIn 2017, The Economist famously claimed gas pipelines that cover the Eurasian continent – that “data is the new oil.” At the time, Wendy form the basic source of the economic and Chun’s response to this statement was: “Big data political survival of Putinism. Moreover, those is the new COAL. The result: global social networks guaranteed the emergence of a change. Intensely energized and unstable particular political regime, which arose in the clouds.”12 Still, both coal and oil are likely to 1990s on the ruins of the Soviet Union and decline as energy sources. Another question solidified in the early 2000s – largely due to high worth asking, then, is: what if data is actually the prices of oil and gas on the global market. new gas? đđđđđđđđđđSurprisingly, Russia’s catastrophic climate policies are largely ignored in most critical 3. accounts of the looming ecological disaster. The first-ever computer hacker to feature in a Naomi Klein’s verdict in This Changes Everything Soviet film appeared in a political drama called (2015) – that capitalism is incompatible with the Deal of the Century (1985). In one scene, this survival of planetary ecology – is nowhere more American hacker (played by popular actor obvious than in the case of Russia’s current Valentin Gaft) struggles to break the computer capitalist model. Still, Russia is conspicuously security system of a Soviet trade mission in absent from Klein’s critique: in This Changes Germany, in his effort to prevent the signing of a Everything, Russia is only mentioned twice; the gas contract between West Germany and the collapse of the USSR also gets two mentions. For USSR. The film is generously interspersed with the ecological critique of capitalism to become a documentary news footage of the Reagan truly global political front, as Klein urges, administration’s attempts to prevent the deal Russia’s disproportionate exemption must be that would allow the export of Siberian gas to overcome. West Germany. Those attempts did, in fact, đđđđđđđđđđGiven the overwhelming importance of oil in happen, but they failed to halt a decades-long the twentieth-century economy, political and process that ultimately led to the emergence of economic theorists have given this kind of fossil the Soviet Union – and later, of Russia – as a fuel a great deal of attention. In many cases, this major carbon empire. scrutiny is informed by the notion of the “oil đđđđđđđđđđIn 1970, the Soviet Union and West Germany curse,” that is, the tendency of oil-rich states to signed the contract that inspired the film. The evolve into autocracies: internally oppressive, contract was preceded by a decade-long global externally aggressive, and overall inefficient. dispute following the discovery of This notion has of course been unfavorably unprecedented reserves of natural gas in Siberia. applied to Russia and the fossil fuel lobby that is The Soviet Union lacked the technology to running the country, along with Iran, Venezuela, construct the pipeline system needed to Nigeria, and other states “cursed by oil.” In transport the gas to consumers, while West

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? Germany – whose industry was capable of Oil, Timothy Mitchell exposes the limitations of providing these pipes – began showing interest the “oil curse” theory. Instead, Mitchell in helping the Soviets build this system. West undertakes a study of “democracy as oil – as a Germany’s offer of assistance with construction form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple came with the condition that the new pipelines levels involve the process of producing and using would penetrate the Iron Curtain and that carbon energy.”10 Mitchell’s book seeks to Siberian gas would flow to the West. Throughout answer a critical question: “Can we follow the the early 1960s the US government fiercely carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the opposed the idea, and in 1963 then-chancellor

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST 07/13

A munitions clearance operationđonđthe Nordstream 2 pipeline route, which runs in close proximity to World War II chemical weapons dumping grounds. Copyright:đAxel Schmidt.

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST Adenauer had to ban German pipe exports to the Eastern Europe. USSR. Still, part of German industry cherished đđđđđđđđđđIn public, Glushkov held that his Druzhba the plan, and in 1970 the pipe ban was overcome. network was an example of a perfect marriage of After the deal was signed in Essen in 1970, it was cybernetics and ecology, claiming that colloquially called “gas in exchange for the pipes.” Russian historians unequivocally refer to we’ve developed methods that allow for the this contract as “the deal of the century.” This use of contemporary computing machines was the first in a long series of deals between 08/13 to predict the behavior of all kinds of Western powers and the Soviet Union that, after ecological systems, to model all future its collapse, has led to the emergence of an options for the development of these autocratic system based on a ruthless systems, and to discover the solutions that extractivist attitude to the Earth’s resources, would allow us to find the right compromise facilitated by transcontinental oil and gas between the economic needs of the people transportation networks. and their natural need to preserve the đđđđđđđđđđThose networks – the world’s longest at the environment.14 time – required unprecedented technological expertise, and in this regard the Soviet Union During closed-door meetings, however, he could not count on Western technology (as it did delivered much darker accounts of his fossil fuel with the German pipes). In the Soviet TV series networks, claiming that they were not Acceleration (1984), a group of cybernetic economically feasible due to the inevitable scientists are tasked with computerizing the exhaustion of oil resources.15 natural gas transportation network after the US đđđđđđđđđđGlushkov’s cybernetics had its roots in the blocks delivery of some needed technology. In Cold War reception of Norbert Wiener’s one of the scenes, the cyberneticians discuss cybernetic theories, which proliferated in the this gas network as a self-regulating living USSR soon after Stalin’s death. However, organism. One of them proposes the concept of Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a tool for the “animation/resuscitation of the mastering nature stemmed from a strand of equipment.”13 In other words, they recommend philosophical thought that had much deeper reframing the gas network as an intelligent being roots in the Soviet context. It’s hard to ignore the with a subjectivity of its own, carrying billions of affinity between Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics cubic meters of natural gas to be emitted into as a mode of total socialist management and the the atmosphere – a truly post-humanist utopia “universal organizational science” of Alexander of a Soviet kind. Bogdanov – philosopher, natural scientist, and đđđđđđđđđđThis animation or resuscitation of the gas militant Bolshevik. Bogdanov coined the term network wasn’t an outlandish fantasy on the part “tektology” to describe his totalizing vision of a of the filmmakers. In fact, the plot of neopositivist science outlining the universal Acceleration was loosely based on the life story principles (those of organization as opposed to of Viktor Glushkov, a pioneering computer disorganization) that underlie every known scientist tasked with building oil pipeline phenomena in the universe: from galaxies to networks, among other things, after his bold idea human societies to bacteria. Bogdanov radically of an information network for the USSR was undermined not just the distinction between shelved, and his groundbreaking research on natural sciences and the humanities, but also socialist artificial intelligence was put on the between theory and practice – a stance later back burner by authorities. Glushkov was a adopted by Glushkov, who claimed “unity of leading figure in Soviet cybernetic science, a theory with practice” as a founding principle of science that he claimed had to be applied to his cybernetic science. The latter’s position also each and every sphere of socialist society. He shared with Bogdanov’s tektology the belief that declared that cybernetics allowed for the natural, social, and technological systems transformation of “the social sciences into exact function according to the same organizational sciences.” As a result, he claimed, society as a principles, which may be scientifically identified whole would function as one gigantic cybernetic and put to purposeful use. organism running on feedback loops and e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? đđđđđđđđđđFor Bogdanov, nature was “changeable,” socialist self-regulation. In 1970 – the same year following knowledge of the universal rules of of the “deal of the century” – top party officials progress that he had offered to the Bolsheviks downsized Glushkov’s idea for an overwhelming (no wonder that McKenzie Wark, in her 2015 book information-management-and-control network Molecular Red, regards Bogdanov as a Soviet to a series of smaller-scale, disparate network prophet of the Anthropocene). Bogdanov’s work projects. For the better part of the 1970s, he was on tektology, published in the Soviet Union busy computerizing the Druzhba (Friendship) oil throughout the 1920s, was no doubt a major pipeline network that carried Siberian oil into influence on the Bolshevik project of

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST 09/13

Construction corridor for the Russian onshore section of Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Copyright: NordđStreamđ2 AG / Agiteco.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST “revolutionizing nature,” as Oksana Timofeeva warfare. names the Soviet effort of “diverting rivers, đđđđđđđđđđBy that time, massive amounts of Siberian blasting mountains, making animals speak: the natural gas were being exported to Western idea was to transform the Earth by means of Europe, and new contracts signed in the wake of technology in order to make it, as Andrei the Soviet–German “deal of the century” were Platonov says, more ‘kind to us.’”16 Bogdanov’s proliferating. This caused consternation amongst tektology is also cited as a major (albeit, US officials, who saw this German strategy as uncredited) influence on Ludwig von 10/13 suicidal: not only would Europe’s access to Bertalanffy’s general system theory, the energy be dependent on Soviet gas networks, but cybernetic theories of Ross Ashby, and the the latter could also, according to some military writings of Norbert Wiener himself – via the experts, be used to fuel the Soviet army in case German translation of Tektology, published in of European invasion. The Germans themselves, 1926. For instance, it’s been pointed out that in though, had adopted a more dialectical- Tektology, Bogdanov described the notion of materialist approach to the problem of Soviet feedback, crucial for cybernetic science, using a natural gas. different term of his own coinage: “bi- đđđđđđđđđđOtto Wolf von Amerongen, chairman of the regulation.” In the Soviet Union, Bogdanov’s German East–West Trade Committee from 1955 writings were officially denounced as idealistic to 2000, later recalled the logic behind the deal: perversions of materialist dogmas. His tektology “The gas pipe through the continent is, if you only made a comeback in the postwar decades, wish, an instrument that not only makes us as it was incorporated into Western cybernetic dependent on the Soviet imports, but also, vice science and reimported back to the USSR in a versa, renders their ‘crane’ dependent on the vertiginous transcontinental give-and-take of West.”19 In his conversations with German ideas. chancellor Ludwig Erhard, von Amerongen đđđđđđđđđđThe abridged English translation of introduced the political dimension into this Tektology starts with a claim that’s actually dialectical vision: “If we are linked together absent in Bogdanov’s original – at least in such through our gas pipelines, this will mean much straightforward terms: “In the struggle of more than the sale of pipes or the purchase of mankind, its aim is dominion over nature. gas. The will also lead to a positive change in the Dominion is a relationship of the organizer to the political picture in the Soviet Union.”20 organized.”17 Still, this entangled paraphrase of đđđđđđđđđđWhat kind of change would that be, and how Bogdanov accurately reflects the perception of would it be achieved? Von Amerongen: “I was his ideas by later practitioners. When Glushkov always sure that this deal had introduced proposed building a computer network for the another constant medium of communication, a total management of economic and information reliable bridge for further development, or to be flows, he was setting out on a truly tektological more precise, the rebirth of the traditional endeavor. When the Soviets were building the German–Russian connections that were lost in transcontinental networks for fossil fuel flows, the course of decades after the October coup in they were guided by the idea of “changeable” Russia in 1917.”21 nature. Few could see the direction this change đđđđđđđđđđWith gas as a medium of communication, was taking. what kind of message did its networks convey? At stake was no less than the legacy of what von 4. Amerongen (an ex-Nazi) referred to as “the In the summer of 1982, a gas explosion of October coup.” In the 1980s, with the Soviet unprecedented proportions was said to have economy failing while (and, in fact, because of) destroyed the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline. In his the lucrative fossil fuel export deals proliferated, 2004 memoir At the Abyss, Reagan party elites were faced with the chance to put administration official Thomas Reed claims that this enormous wealth to personal gain. The top- this explosion was caused by Canadian down collapse of Soviet Communism was, among equipment added to the pipeline – sabotage via other things, the result of a successful attempt a Trojan horse tactic. (Post-)Soviet experts, on by the party apparatus to privatize the enormous the other hand, vehemently deny that this e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? profits derived from the extractivist economic explosion ever took place.18 They claim that the model in its transition to capitalism. The Trans-Siberian gas pipeline network could not be message delivered by the Western elites to their hacked at the time, because it was not yet Soviet counterparts – “abandon communism for computerized to a sufficient degree. Given the your personal profit!” – was conveyed through lack of evidence related to this purported the medium of natural gas.22 explosion, it seems that the gas network hack đđđđđđđđđđIn the post–Cold War world, after the “end took place in the realm of information, rather of history” – which is gradually morphing into the than through technology – a case of information end of a habitable climate – is a project like Nord

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST Stream 2 designed to serve as another channel accused of plotting a terrorist attack as a of constant communication? With US sanctions protest against the annexation of Crimea by against Nord Stream 2 strangely appearing as a the Russian army. Detained in Crimea, reenactment of the Reagan-era sanctions Sentsov and Kolchenko were then against the Trans-Siberian pipeline, are we kidnapped and transported to the Russian definitively stuck in a final historical loop, a dead Federation, where, in defiance of all judicial end in which the only real resistance to this norms, the two were stripped of their politically and environmentally devastating 11/13 Ukrainian citizenship and put on a show project comes from a no-less-devastating trial that found them guilty – despite the competitor whose only solution is: burn absence of evidence, and on the basis of “freedom gas” instead? Abandon the planet for forced confessions by two other tortured your personal profit! – this is the message political prisoners. Sentsov and Kolchenko conveyed by virtually every communications were sentenced, respectively, to twenty and medium in this echo chamber, be it the medium ten years in prison camps. In Russia, this of an underwater gas pipeline or a liquid natural trial had been instrumental in silencing any gas terminal.23 possibility of dissent against the 2014 đđđđđđđđđđBut if carbon infrastructure is a medium of occupation of Crimea and Russia’s sparking communication, then it can be – like any other of the war in East Ukraine. This silencing such medium – disrupted, subverted, and especially targeted artists and cultural hacked. This is where, to quote Nick Dyer- workers: the scapegoating by the Russian Witheford, the dominant structures are most secret services of Oleg Sentsov, who had vulnerable today: “If we’re going to look at the worked in Crimea as an auteur filmmaker, equivalent of something that was like strike was conspicuously random, as if its sole power, we need to look to hacking, we need to meaning was to send a message to other look at the new vulnerabilities of capital that lie artists: stay away from politics, for this can in its transportation and logistics networks, we happen to anyone. In a similar vein, the need to look at the possibilities of the conviction of Olexander Kolchenko was interruption of its various types of energy flows: meant to introduce a purely Orwellian both electrical and otherwise.”24 But who would dimension into this process: a committed be the agent of this strike power? anti-fascist, he, along with Sentsov, was đđđđđđđđđđOne recent development in the extraction accused of participation in a far-right industry provides a glimpse of what form this Ukrainian group. The imprisonment of agent might take. In January 2020, Russian Sentsov and Kolchenko led to a swift Gazprom announced a major decrease in its deterioration of cultural and artistic links monthly production of natural gas. The reason for between Russia and Ukraine, with this decrease? Unexpectedly high temperatures numerous Ukrainian artists and cultural in gas extraction areas.25 workers boycotting any Russia-related đđđđđđđđđđPostscript: This is a revised version of an projects. As a counterpart to this boycott, essay that was intended for publication in the since 2015 I’ve been practicing a strategy of Almanac of the Center for Experimental accepting invitations from Russian non- Museology, but it was withdrawn by the author state institutions with the purpose of after it was censored by the publisher, V-A-C hijacking public debate and staging Press (Moscow). The fragment excised by the interventions based on the cases of editors is reproduced here in full: Sentsov and Kolchenko. While working on this particular essay, I was surprised to The moment at which this text is written is discover that no special intervention of this crucial and greatly impacts what I have to kind would even be needed in this case, as say in the following paragraphs. I’m writing my research trajectory had actually brought these lines on the fortieth day of Ukrainian me to a point that reflects the context of film director Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike, Sentsov’s case with unexpected clarity. while he is held in a Russian prison camp in While this research is focused on the

the Arctic. Sentsov demands the immediate e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? manifold ways that the exploitation of release of all political prisoners from natural resources, primarily natural gas, Ukraine currently jailed in Russia. Before he affects cultural and political developments was kidnapped by the Russian Federal by boosting colonial and authoritarian Security Service during the military practices, Sentsov is holding his hunger occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in strike in a town called Labytnangi in the May 2014, Sentsov resided with his family Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region in in Crimea. Together with the anti-fascist Russia’s Far North, which is where one of eco-activist Olexander Kolchenko, he was the world’s largest gas fields is located.

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST There, reduced to the position of homo Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in sacer, Sentsov is challenging the regime Kyiv. His films have been screened at Oberhausen from the very heart of Russia’s natural gas International Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig,đBar Laika by empire. It is an extremely dire, but e-flux,đand Kmytiv Museum among other venues, and somehow, still strangely hopeful received awards at a number of film festivals. His texts coincidence which reinforces the intuitions have been published inđProxy Politics: Power and that brought this text into existence. Subversion in a Networked Ageđ(Archive Books, 2017),đArt and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East 12/13 Europe: A Critical Anthologyđ(MoMA, 2018),đBeing As of March 2020: Oleg Sentsov survived his Together Precedes Beingđ(Archive Books, 2019), and hunger strike, which lasted for 145 days. He and inđe-flux journal. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Oleksander Kolchenko were released by the Academy, he studied at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Russian government in a prisoner swap in Workspace Program (Beirut). Radynski is a participant September 2019. of the Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. đđđđđđđđđđV-A-C press is a project of V-A-C Currently, he is a BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele Foundation, cofounded by Leonid Mikhelson, kunst, Utrecht. head of Novatek company, Russia’s second- largest natural gas producer, based in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region where Oleg Sentsov was held illegally. đđđđđđđđđđ× e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ?

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST đđđđđđ1 ion.org/atlas-of-transformat Labetskaya, Lukyanov, Slobodin, Frédéric Simon, “‘Freedom Gas’: ion/html/p/postcolonial-post - and Shpakov, “Truba v US Opens LNG Floodgates to soviet/is-the-post-in-postc beskonechnost,’” emphasis Europe,” EURACTIV, May 2, 2019 olonial-the-post-in-post-sov mine. https://www.euractiv.com/sec iet-toward-a-global-postcolo tion/energy/news/freedom-gas - nial-critique-david-chioni-m đđđđđđ22 us-opens-lng-floodgates-to- oore.html. When discussing carbon europe/. infrastructure, Aleksander đđđđđđ10 Etkind claims that during the đđđđđđ2 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Cold War gas was as essential to One notable, albeit decidedly Democracy: Political Power in the state socialism as oil was to belated, exception is found in Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 5. 13/13 capitalism. Since it was much Maria Haensch, “Green Group harder to stockpile gas than oil, Challenges Nord Stream 2 đđđđđđ11 gas was transported based on Permit in Germany,” Montel Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 6. long-term guaranteed contracts, News, March 5, 2020 which, according to Etkind, https://www.montelnews.com/d đđđđđđ12 made it an ideal resource for the e/story/green-group-challeng See planned economy. Furthermore, es-nord-stream-2-permit-in-g https://twitter.com/whkchun/ he writes that liquefied gas ermany/1094429. It's also status/927576076796203008. changed the political economy curious that most of the of gas: it could now be stored available ecological criticism of đđđđđđ13 and sold according to need – Nord Stream 2 focuses mostly In the original Russian: that is, gas became a market on the damage done by the “одушевление оборудования.” commodity. Aleksander Etkind, pipeline to the Baltic seabed, Priroda zla: Syrie i gosudarstvo rather than the problem of đđđđđđ14 (Evil nature: Raw materials and increased emissions as a result As quoted in the film Plenyat' the state) (Novoye Literaturnoye of the project. Zadachey Nebyvaloy Obozreniye, 2019). (Kievnauchfilm, 1982). đđđđđđ3 đđđđđđ23 See, for example the Rethink đđđđđđ15 In the context of Russian Nord Stream 2 Campaign Victor Glushkov, “Pro political economy, data is quite https://rethinkthedeal.eu/. ekonomicheskuyu kibernetiku. literally the new gas: the Doklad na zasedanii Prezidiuma superprofits acquired through đđđđđđ4 AN USSR” (About economic fossil fuel exports make it See, for instance, this document cybernetics: Report at a meeting possible for the Russian state to by Rethink Nord Stream 2 of the Presidium of the Academy fund its massive disinformation https://rethinkthedeal.eu/wp - of Sciences of the Ukrainian campaigns around the globe, as content/uploads/sites/4/201 SSR), sound recording. well as high-profile hacking 9/10/Brochure-A4-Germany-EN- operations, troll armies, and Web.pdf. đđđđđđ16 proxy militias. Gas is exported to Oxana Timofeeva, “Ultra-Black: foreign consumers whose đđđđđđ5 Towards a Materialist Theory of payments are then converted In December 2019, a contract on Oil,” e-flux journal, no. 84 into malicious data, unleashed gas transit between Russia and (September 2017) upon those consumers Ukraine was extended for five https://www.e-flux.com/journ themselves. more years, which helped to al/84/149335/ultra-black-tow avoid a full-blown “gas war” of ards-a-materialist-theory-of - đđđđđđ24 the kind that happened in 2009, oil/. Nick Dyer-Witheford, but still looks more like an “Cybernetic Revolutions and attempt to extend the agony. See đđđđđđ17 Surplus Populations,” lecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wik Alexander Bogdanov, Essays in delivered at The School of Kyiv, i/2009_Russia%E2%80%93Ukrain Tektology, trans. George Gorelk October 25, 2015, Q&A. e_gas_dispute. (Intersystems Publications, 1980), 1. Thank you to David đđđđđđ25 đđđđđđ6 Muñoz Alcantara for See The fact that a certain Ukrainian inadvertently drawing my https://meduza.io/news/2020/ natural gas company, of all attention to this translational 02/02/dobycha-gazproma-v-yan things that Trump messed with, misunderstanding. vare-upala-do-minimuma-za-tr found itself at the epicenter of i-goda-iz-za-neozhidanno-tep the recent impeachment đđđđđđ18 loy-pogody?utm_source=telegr proceedings, speaks volumes of An essay refuting Reed’s am&utm_medium=live&utm_campaign=live. the unprecedented political hypothesis was cowritten by importance of post-Soviet none other than Viktor carbon infrastructure. Glushkov’s daughter, Vera Glushkova: V. D. Zakhmatov, V. V. đđđđđđ7 Glushkova, and O. A. Kryazhich, See http://kremlin.ru/acts/bank/ “Vzryv, kotorogo … ne bylo!” (An 41921/page/1. explosion that … wasn’t!) http://ogas.kiev.ua/perspect đđđđđđ8 ive/vzryv-kotorogo-ne-bylo-5 81. Arthur Nelson, “’Extreme’ Fossil Fuel Investment Have Surged đđđđđđ19 Under Donald Trump, Report Ekaterina Labetskaya, Fedor Reveals,” The Guardian, March Lukyanov, Alexey Slobodin, and 28, 2018 Yuri Shpakov, “Truba v https://www.theguardian.com/ beskonechnost' Khronika samoy environment/2018/mar/28/extr bol'shoy sdelki v rossiysko-

eme-fossil-fuel-investments- germanskoy istorii” (Pipe to e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ O k s i y R d I s D a t h e N w G ? have-surged-under-donald-tru infinity: A chronicle of the mp-report-reveals. largest deal in Russian-German history) đđđđđđ9 http://www.vremya.ru/print/3 See, for instance, David Chioni 739.html. Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post- đđđđđđ20 Soviet? Toward a Global Labetskaya, Lukyanov, Slobodin, Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA and Shpakov, “Truba v 116, no. 1 (January 2002). beskonechnost.'” Available at http://monumenttotransformat đđđđđđ21

12.21.20 / 21:31:41 EST “The war in the Persian Gulf ended just three months ago,” the New York Times alerted its readers in May 1991, “but some museums are already collecting artifacts from the conflict.”1 Spooky spolia from America’s “first” Iraq campaign – such as Barbara Bush’s fatigue jacket or cookies found in discarded Iraqi

01/12 uniforms – were making their way to assorted US military and state museums for public display. The objects said this is what we did, but these cast-offs of imperial plunder came also to be wrapped in revisionist identitarian empathy for the plunderers. The Times quotes a Smithsonian curator proudly proclaiming, “If you had come to this museum in 1960, it was essentially a white, Mostafa Heddaya and Rijin elitist story. We have tried to convey that this is a Sahakian much more complicated, much different story. Just as we have George Washington’s uniform, we want to have uniforms of a sergeant from a Recolonize This tank unit.”2 đđđđđđđđđđIn the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Place Allan Sekula described that asymmetrical liberal empathy surrounding the first American war in Iraq as a selective mathematics of “innumerable third world bodies” and “precisely enumerated first world bodies.”3 But today’s theater of American exhibition-making flips these terms: precisely enumerated “others” counterpose innumerable masters lost in the fog of American regret. This reversal is characteristic of the empathetic errand of “unstrangering” foundational to modern humanitarianism and American counterinsurgency alike, for it drives the motor of military domination by juicing it culturally.4 Though it verges on the paranoid, this is one way a visitor to “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” might have understood how the curators at MoMA PS1 – the Museum of Modern Art’s affiliate in Queens, New York, where the exhibition was on display from November 2019 to early March 2020 – came to deck their galleries with so many “hearts and minds”: artistic victims, witnesses, and far-flung observers of endless (Iraq) war. đđđđđđđđđđWe empathize with our imagined visitor’s paranoia. While the exhibition tinged its titular historical event with a generic humanist regret for its toll, it all took place, after all, in an institution at whose organizational summit sits a certain Leon Black – billionaire investor, Iraq war profiteer, and chairman of the MoMA board.

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a (While PS1 began as an independent institution in 1971, it was acquired by MoMA in 2000.5) Black is the founder and CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management (named for a god the Greeks called Ἀλεξίκακος – Alexicacus, “averter of evil”). He has profited from the Iraq campaign through Apollo’s ownership of a grim menagerie of private military contractors, including the civilian-murder outfit formerly known as

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 02/12

Installation view of Allan Sekula, War Without Bodies,đ1991/1996.đOn view in the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1, New York, 2020. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 03/12

Michel Auder,đGulf War TV War (still),đ1991.đ(Edited 2017). Hi8 video and mini-DV transferred to digital video,đ102 min. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York.

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 04/12

Left: Cover of the catalog for “Theater of Operations”đ(MoMA PS1, 2019). Right:đJeremy Deller,đIt Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, 2008, exhibition view at New Museum, New York.

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Blackwater. And Black’s connection to US war- refuses to construct an organizing counter- making in Iraq doesn’t stop there. On the board of narrative of its own, then admits that its Apollo sits A. B. Krongard, the executive director reckoning – “undoubtedly” – made things worse? of the Central Intelligence Agency during the run- One could say that the exhibition’s contortionist up to the 2003 ground invasion of Iraq. (Krongard contrition itself sounds a lot like the current was responsible for the CIA’s initial hiring of “mainstream narratives” of the Iraq wars, in Blackwater under a lucrative Afghanistan which critical-historical accounting for cause contract in 2002; he was repaid in turn when 05/12 and effect is voided by a scattershot plurality of Blackwater’s then-owner Erik Prince asked him times and places, people and events, stories and to join its board in 2007; and he quickly vacated mediations. Curatorially evacuated of historical his Blackwater board seat under subsequent and institutional consciousness, “Theater of conflict-of-interest scrutiny.6) Further, the Operations” has a posthistorical event par exhibition thanks and features works lent by the excellence – the titular “Gulf Wars 1991–2011” – person who has overseen the Iraqi national come home to roost at the posthistorical pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 2013, museum.11 Tamara Chalabi, scion and on-the-ground đđđđđđđđđđ“Rather than reducing this complex subject accomplice of a crucial CIA-funded “native” into a linear trajectory,” PS1 director Kate Fowle asset in that invasion, Ahmed Chalabi.7 One explains in her foreword to the catalog, “Theater could go on. of Operations offers a range of responses made đđđđđđđđđđCount on us for the vulgar tally: Three in the context of two US-led wars in Iraq.”12 That hundred artworks from around eighty artists; two much is clear, more or less – the two-wars curators (Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib); one narrative, as her colleagues acknowledge in their exhibition (“Theater of Operations”) about a essays, is a fabulation of the public-relations twenty-year period (1991–2011) understood to apparatus of endless war. But there’s a linear represent the historical frame of the Iraq wars, trajectory right there in the exhibition title – a occupying all three floors of MoMA PS1. One chronology, perhaps even a period – that the billionaire MoMA board chairman (Leon Black); actual exhibition shirks at every turn. This failed nine formerly separate private military historical burden comes into view earlier in the contractors rolled into a conglomerate same foreword, when Fowle gives three (Constellis) now owned by Black’s Apollo Global examples of similar exhibitions that Management; seventeen Iraqi civilians murdered “foregrounded this institution’s commitment to in the infamous Nisour Square massacre of 2007, such historical presentations”: “EXPO 1” (2013); perpetrated by mercenaries employed by “Stalin’s Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism Blackwater – a company that is now part of 1932–1956” (1993); and “The Short Century: Constellis8 (and that was twice renamed after Independence and Liberation Movements in said murders “tarnished its brand”); one million Africa, 1945–1994” (2002). Fowle was right to overall civilian deaths (too many to rebrand). group them, since they all represent different đđđđđđđđđđFirst the inventory, then the self- reactions to the historical subjects of the accounting. Near the beginning of their catalog, posthistorical museum: the first exhibition by the exhibition’s cocurators, Eleey and Katrib, moving toward the futural mode of “speculation” explain: “The artworks brought together here (the house style of posthistorical historicism); convey experiences and positions that counter the second through rote semi-triumphalist the essentializing tendencies of mainstream nostalgia toward the aesthetically and politically narratives, particularly those that seek to define defeated; and the last, organized by the late certain people as the ‘enemy’ and attempt to Okwui Enwezor (it traveled to PS1), through a place them beyond the reach of our empathy.”9 valiant postcolonial resuscitation of the task of Soon this revisionist empathy cracks up: Eleey, in critical periodization.13 his longer essay later in the catalog, self- đđđđđđđđđđInstead of critical periodization, “Theater of critically hedges that framing Iraqi artistic Operations” punts the Gulf Wars in favor of a grab production “through the reductive lenses of bag of poorly articulated “stories” resolving to an violence and victimhood” might be underlying curatorial ethos of confused regret, a counterproductive. Delirious acrobatics follow: e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a self-flagellating self-congratulation. It mirrors “In assembling this exhibition, we worked with the lack of serious investigation into the Gulf an awareness of these distorting pressures of Wars by most American left-liberals, who either reception, undoubtedly reinforced some of their believed that they “should not have happened” political deformations, which must also be or simply withdrew rather than tangle deeply understood to have affected Western artists, with the reality and spread of their ongoing albeit differently.”10 repercussions. When it came time for the New đđđđđđđđđđHow to address an exhibition that professes York Times to cover the exhibition, arts writer to “counter … mainstream narratives,” then Jason Farago decided to forego a traditional

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST review and instead printed a “conversation” with Venice, whose conditions of existence abutt and a former Times Baghdad bureau chief.14 The abetted that war. latter wondered, after seeing the exhibition, đđđđđđđđđđAt the level of layout and content, the show “what contemporary art in Iraq might have itself was garlanded by 24/7 distraction, with looked like” if the wars hadn’t taken place. (Never cable television anachronized as material and mind that the Times had stenographed the case medium, a kind of Internet 1.0: the oversized for war to its credulous readers.) This exculpatory Necklace, CNN, a self-explanatory 2002 counterfactual speaks to the logic of 06/12 sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn, was installed identification and identity at the center of this alone in the gallery opposite the building’s show’s morbid humanitarianism: Iraqis are entrance. Hirschhorn’s gold-foil-enrobed links indelibly marked by the travesty we have made of teased the sequence of large projections that their country, but their ethical nobility consists patterned the rest of the exhibition’s ground purely in their impossible resilience to this mark floor, where video works by Monira Al Qadiri we made. Our greatest form of empathetic (Behind the Sun, 2013) and Michel Auder (Gulf identification, then, is to spare them in War TV War, 1991/2017) framed the exhibition’s retroaction, un-marking them as we un-mark first impression with the grainy spectacle of ourselves. The only form of identification cable B-roll, blown up beyond the scale of even ultimately imaginable is for “us” to hold out for the biggest-screen TV, curatorially montaged into Iraqis the image we hold of ourselves: we, the canonical media works from Harun Farocki and shifty half of aggressor and aggressed – guilty, Dara Birnbaum, among others. And there are maybe, but whole and holier for it. many others. It is as if, since the Gulf Wars began đđđđđđđđđđThe loose suggestion of the exhibition’s some decades ago, there has been no central historical conceit – that it produces a examination that might compel the show to kind of Iraqi art history – is undercut by the update either its media-theoretical determinism cluttered and forced juxtaposition of artworks or clash-of-civilizations historicism, evident in made by so-called “Western” and “non-Western” lame distributions of passive and active agency: artists and the modish refusal to chronologize or East/West, viewer/soldier, Iraqi/non-Iraqi. The even synthesize these contents spatially as an wars were not even enacted by a strictly event-driven transnational history. Neither the geographic “West.” The first Gulf War was largely physical arrangements nor accompanying texts funded by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United do much to examine Iraq’s deep and deeply Arab Emirates. (The 2003 invasion and scattered modes of artistic production. In this, subsequent regional wars were made possible by “Theater of Operations” reenacts that most Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, which remains the tedious trope of postcolonial critique: the West largest US base in the region.) Many of the artists as concept, the East as content. in the show have lived outside of Iraq, in “the đđđđđđđđđđIn the rare moments where the show West,” for almost the entirety of their formation promises to narrate an Iraqi art history worth and career, again blurring the curatorial considering, as in Shakir Hassan Al Said’s vulgarism of identity. extraordinary twinned paintings Fragmentation đđđđđđđđđđThe purpose of the show was, ostensibly, to No. 1 and Wall #1, both from 1991, the wall texts examine “the legacies of these conflicts do little to explain how they fit into the histories beginning with the Gulf War in 1991, featuring to which they allude. To wit: “Al Said’s works over 300 works by more than 80 artists based in provide a crucial point of reference for many of Iraq and its diasporas, as well as those the artists in Theater of Operations, who have responding to the war from the West.”15 As looked to him as a leading advocate for the laudable and relevant as this may be, the establishment of abstraction as a key strategy in exhibition overdetermines the legacy of the wars Iraqi art.” This is a surprisingly important (or was it “conflicts”?) by pinning it all on the sentence to find secreted away in the middle of a screen, as if to say it was the media, stupid! A small paragraph in a remote gallery on the selection from Jean Baudrillard’s “Gulf War” exhibition’s second floor, and odder still that writings is the exhibition catalogue’s first outside these paintings are installed next to Paul Chan’s text, appearing sandwiched between essays by

2003 video Baghdad in No Particular Order, a e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a the show’s two curators. The first Gulf War’s work whose appearance here might perhaps be televisual, more-than-real mediation was best explained by applying its title to the infamously figured as noneventfulness by curatorial method of “Theater of Operations.” Al Baudrillard, who also wrote that Western Said’s work, like the Iraqi art history of which it is audiences all live “in a uniform shameful a part, cannot and should not be understood indifference.”16 But the idea that millions of within the singular framework of war, even and citizens were simply slackjawed out of historical especially as staged in the unexamined frame of consciousness by CNN soothsayers institutions, like PS1 or the Iraq pavilion in oversimplifies a much more enduring passivity, if

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 07/12

NYPD at the MoMA Divest protest at PS1, March 1, 2020. Photo: MoMA Divest.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST not complicity, in ongoing massacres in Iraq that Mumford and Francis Alÿs, the former embedded remain on display. As nicely packaged a theory as with US troops (2003–11), the latter embedded the medium it aims to critique, the delirium of with Kurdish forces in a 2016 commission by the cable news did not exactly spirit away our ability aforementioned Tamara Chalabi’s Ruya to confront his guerre du Golfe, nor fast-forward Foundation.18 “It Is Still Ongoing” is the title of a its brutal body count. The stupor was not catalog essay by one of the exhibition’s curators, alchemically induced but somehow willed. prompting one to imagine that the

đđđđđđđđđđMoreover, the exhibition’s swerve to 08/12 contextualization of Iraq’s ongoing violence has telecommunicative mediation seems at cross- in fact been subversively understood. Instead, purposes with its desire to foreground work by here the curators rehabilitate Iraq’s pop-military “Iraqi” artists. This appears to suggest that the narration and similarly constructed artistic civilian on the ground in Iraq was inaccessible to theater. American audiences as an ethical subject at the đđđđđđđđđđFixed squarely inside this exhibition is the time, justifying the exhibition’s concern with assumption that Iraqis should be grateful for an artistic practice as a kind of belated American institution of note finally humanization. Artists in Iraq, particularly young acknowledging these wars, however superficial artists who came of age during the invasion, have this acknowledgment might be. Yet the violence never lacked the desire or ability to create art. of these wars lives irrevocably on inside the US But globally visible contemporary art, as anyone and its “coalition partners,” and addressing that in the field knows, often assumes a ladder of is hardly a benevolent act. Perhaps worst of all prestigious art-school attendance, production for a contemporary art institution, the attempt to support, mentorship, residencies, international generalize and pluralize the theme of a brutal travel, and social skill, usually in English. At and ongoing campaign of terror resulted in an Iraq’s two main art schools in Baghdad, which exhibition that precisely mirrors the crux of the are free of cost, middle- and working-class problem when it comes to US thinking on Iraq: it students hardly have access to resources is not rooted in any substantial understanding or reserved for elites. Instead of journalists attempt to address the complexity of Iraqi speculating what Iraqi art could have looked like experience. Iraqis inside Iraq are today revolting – or curators failing to engage with artists against the iterative “theaters of operations” outside their comfort class – it would be more that have taken their voices and their lives and useful to consider how actually-existing forms of all but canceled their future. They are – production could be supported and understood. remarkably, and historically – resisting with their Young Iraqi artists never stopped working, and own protests and artworks. And these protests are informed – formally and informally – by the have no inroads into “Theater of Operations” at extensive visual and political histories that PS1 because the exhibition – outside of stretch from the Sumerian era to Baghdad’s profiteering board members – does not current sprawling metropolis. Which “Iraq” is communicate, in any way, with Baghdad. ultimately being recuperated in this exhibition? đđđđđđđđđđThe cost of the exhibition’s incapacity to đđđđđđđđđđOne of these is that of big-budget American stage a historically situated claim to artistic films like Jarhead (2005) and Hurt Locker (2008). production around the Gulf Wars, and the These Hollywood dramas exhibit Iraqis as an inevitable contradictions of its institutional enemy staged prophylactically against linkages to American capital (and therefore sympathetic and identifiable American forces, American war), was perhaps most evident in its though this extends even to Werner Herzog’s alienated and alienating treatment of the only Lessons of Darkness (1992), which was screened two artists in the show who had any recent on both the opening and the closing days of the residence in Baghdad, Ali Eyal (b. 1994) and Ali PS1 show. It applies as well to Jeremy Deller’s It Yass (b. 1992). Yass, currently living as a refugee Is What It Is (2009) videos, also screened for the in Berlin, planned to use proxies to intentionally show; these videos are part of a larger artwork tear his work on display at the show – childhood that included an American PSYOPS officer, an sketches that comprised 1992; Now, (2016–17) – American curator, an Iraqi military translator on the final day of the exhibition. Conceived as a newly arrived to the US, and Deller himself in an e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a protest against the museum’s silence regarding all-male traveling crew of supposedly “non- Black’s position on its board, Yass’s action was biased” experts on Iraq and/or the art of unauthorized, unlike several other politically conversation.17 (The translational gimmick of the flavored – and officially sactioned – “Theater of Operations” catalog cover calls back interventions on the exhibition’s public program to a banner Deller produced, its theater of Arabic of “performances.”19 This kind of reactive script curtaining the untranslated English of its antagonism toward the institution has long been contents.) Along with the film screenings, the accepted as a part of the officially unofficial exhibition included works by artists Steve culture of artistic discourse, an artistic “right” of

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 09/12

Ali Eyal,đNightmare, 2020. Black ink on pillowcase. Courtesy of the artist. Photo:đDiana Cantarey.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST which MoMA has a long history and to which Yass in the exhibition – have called on the museum to alluded in his own explanation.20 But here PS1 “divest” itself of Leon Black and other unsavory felt threatened by this insubordination, funders in an open letter. summarily deinstalling his work prior to the last đđđđđđđđđđThis “toxic philanthropy” narrative rushes to day of the exhibition and making the rare fill the void left by an absence of conceptual decision to escalate the presence of private precision and clear thinking about “empathetic” security guards by calling in armed police to the exhibitions like “Theater of Operations.”23 In the gallery in which Yass had choreographed an 10/12 case of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Warren B. activist group (MoMA Divest) to express his Kanders was a peripheral figure easily sacrificed artistic position.21 to preserve the broader unity of the philanthropic đđđđđđđđđđEyal, for his part, discovered that an image apparatus. Leon Black is impunity incarnate, his of his work from the show, Painting Size 80x60cm wealth and power so vast that even publicized (2018), was being used on social media by PS1 to connections with the late pedophile Jeffrey advertise free admission for military veterans on Epstein, let alone war crimes in Iraq, have not the American holiday Veteran’s Day. The work is moved him from MoMA’s board. This may be one comprised of pillowcases on which the artist has reason why that open letter sent to the MoMA drawn illustrations and writing in Arabic, board, administrators, and curatorial staff was recounting the dreams of the members of an ignored, save for refusals of the artists’ requests Iraqi family who have lost loved ones in the war. to register their objections in the galleries by These acts of alternative memorialization are updating their work. Yes, these artists had not part of an ongoing series. The museum, which been previously aware of the relationship does not own Eyal’s work and did not remunerate between Black and Blackwater; they learned of him (or any other artist) for participating in the this long-public fact at the time of the exhibition, had not sought permission to use his exhibition’s opening from the authors of this artwork in this way. Eyal later produced a new essay. This is not a recrimination but a broader pillowcase work on the “nightmare” of having his comment on the political limitations of art cater to “the ones responsible for the haphazard or belated artistic denunciations of destruction in my country.” In his youth he had “toxic philanthropy.” Not only is such experienced American soldiers as a violent philanthropy immanent to the social basis of art occupying force, abusing civilians in his under capitalism; curatorial malpractice here neighborhood and invading the home he shared and elsewhere exacerbates and disguises the with his mother south of Baghdad. In their problem, trolling the political consciousness of above-quoted preface, the curators toggle artists by pressing catchall liberal-ethical conceptually and grammatically between objects messaging into ever greater and more explicit (“artworks”) and subjects (“certain people,” i.e., contradiction with the facts of the museum’s Iraqis). These objects are subject-oriented: economic reality. according to the curators, the exhibition of the đđđđđđđđđđAs far as haphazard and overwhelming former is meant to produce “empathy” for the thematic exhibitions go, “Theater of Operations” latter. A paradox of autonomy, because those to was in some sense par for the course: An whom “empathy” is due (“certain people”) are, of unwieldy conceit. A doddering artist list whose course, also producing artworks for their magnitude and claims to exposure and discovery exhibition. belied its procurement from a small number of đđđđđđđđđđOn the exhibition’s opening day last prominent private collections. An eccentric November, Constellis posted a job listing for a catalog, to which one of the authors of this piece “Designated Defensive Marksman” – which is to contributed an essay. For all of the show’s say a sniper – for its Baghdad theater of problems, there remain works that should be operation.22 The same week that the call for a seen, conversations that ought to be had, sniper to join Leon Black’s company went out, failures that need to be documented. more than 250 Iraqi protesters were killed by Unfortunately, while the exhibition’s curators military-grade tear gas canisters and live fire rightly noted that the time for an examination of from an array of irregular “security forces” in Iraq is overdue, there seems to have been little

Iraq, including snipers. The countrywide youth- e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a research or thought given to the specific time led protests, past their half-year mark, have period addressed – a period which, properly galvanized the Iraqi public’s frustration with framed, could have allowed PS1 to show how crushing corruption, unemployment, and heavily advanced creative work can turn received ideas deteriorated living conditions – in short, the about history on their head. immeasurably traumatic and ongoing legacies of đđđđđđđđđđ× the Gulf Wars. Inevitably, some artists and organizations – MoMA Divest, the Veterans Art Movement, and thirty-seven artists participating

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Mostafa Heddaya is a critic and PhD candidate in art đđđđđđ1 history at Princeton University, USA. Our title, besides being a riff on đđđđđđ5 the activist group-cum-slogan In private discussions with one “Decolonize This Place,” is of the authors of this article and Rijin Sahakian is a writer and former director of Sada, meant to make the negative various exhibition participants, a nonprofit project for young artists in Baghdad. image of cultural the curators of this show have “decolonization” productive, contended that PS1 and MoMA especially as raised by the are distinct entities. This is specific institutional and essentially untrue. The chairman historical frame of “Theater of of the board of the Museum of Operations: The Gulf Wars Modern Art has a permanent

11/12 1991–2011,” a recent exhibition appointment, ex officio, on the at MoMA PS1 in New York. PS1 board. Insofar as PS1 is, for Activist reaction aside, we historical and logistical reasons wonder how the immanent relating to the public land it violence of the institution might occupies, a separate legal entity, be thought here in terms of the MoMA is the “sole corporate intellectual duties of exhibition. member” of that separate legal We are prompted also by a entity. Here is how MoMA has recent work by Francisco Godoy described this relationship in its Vega, who has proposed a tax filings: “The Museum as sole “recolonial” understanding of Member of PS1 Contemporary exhibitions of Latin American art Art Center, Inc (DBA MoMA PS1). staged in the Iberian peninsula In 2000 MoMA PS1 and the during roughly the same period Museum entered into an covered by “Theater of affiliation to promote the study, Operations” – a similar historical knowledge, enjoyment and encounter between the avowedly appreciation of modern and redemptive cultural politics of contemporary art through a “decolonization” and the collaborative program of political economy of exhibitions, research, special colonialisms past and present. projects and other educational See Francisco Godoy Vega, La and curatorial activities. MoMA exposición como recolonización: PS1 retained its separate Exposiciones de arte corporate status and is a latinoamericano en el Estado support corporation of the español, 1989–2010 (The Museum with the Museum as its exhibition as recolonization: sole corporate member. The Exhibitions of Latin American art Museum has the right to appoint in the Spanish state, 1989–2010) all members of the MoMA PS1 (2018). board of Directors. MoMA PS1 and the Museum entered into a đđđđđđ2 management assistance and “Souvenirs of Gulf War Find Way services agreement whereby the to Museums,” New York Times, Museum provides management May 28, 1991 http://e- assistance and service to MoMA flux.com/journal. PS1 in certain areas, including accounting and payroll, đđđđđđ3 fundraising and development, Allan Sekula, “War Without coordination of MoMA PS1’s Bodies,” pamphlet and article in information technology, Artforum, November 1991. insurance and legal affairs.” Museum of Modern Art, Internal đđđđđđ4 Revenue Service Form 990, See Rijin Sahakian, “A Reply to Schedule I, Part IV, Page 2 Nato Thompson’s ‘The (2016). Insurgents, Part I,’” e-flux journal, no. 48 (October 2013) đđđđđđ6 https://www.e-flux.com/journ A. B. Krongrad served as the al/48/60042/a-reply-to-nato- executive director of the CIA thompson-s-the-insurgents-pa from 2001 to 2004; see his bio rt-i/. The historian Keith here Watenpaugh has argued that the https://www.apollo.com/stock “history of modern holders/corporate-governance . humanitarianism tells us that at He briefly served on the board of the center of humanitarian Blackwater, resigning after an reason is a project of incredible episode in which his unstrangering the object of brother, who was then the State humanitarianism.” What he Department inspector general means is that humanitarianism and therefore responsible for belongs not to the liberal investigating the company, schema of stranger-ethics, that perjured himself when asked opening up of “compassion – as under oath if his brother A. B. opposed to pity – to the generic was on its board. See Scott stranger,” but rather positions Shane, “Brothers, Bad Blood and its others as “knowable, similar, the Blackwater Tangle,” New and deserving.” See Keith York Times, November 17, 2007 Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: https://www.nytimes.com/2007

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a The Middle East and the Making /11/17/us/17brothers.html. of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, đđđđđđ7 2015), 19. For a broader view on Mostafa Heddaya, “An the epistemic implication of the Outsourced Vision? The Trouble humanitarian frame in the with Iraq’s ‘Neocolonial’ Venice construction of “global” Pavilion,” ARTINFO, April 2, 2015 historical narratives, see Daniel https://web.archive.org/web/ Bertrand Monk and Andrew 20160330151727/http:/www.blo Herscher (and respondents) in “A uinartinfo.com/news/story/11 Discussion on the Global and the 26765/an-outsourced-vision-t Universal,” Grey Room 61 (Fall he-trouble-with-iraqs-neocol 2015): 66–127. onial. In a review of Tamara

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Chalabi’s 2011 family memoir, a đđđđđđ14 YouTube New York Times reporter fondly Jason Farago and Tim Arango, https://www.youtube.com/watc recounts meeting her while “These Artists Refuse to Forget h?v=yXEMyzfGzcg. embedded with US Special the Wars in Iraq,” New York Forces: “The Chalabis occupied Times, November 15, 2019 đđđđđđ21 the one intact structure on the https://www.nytimes.com/2019 According to a spokesperson for bombed-out, postage-stamp- /11/14/arts/design/iraq-wars - the museum, “There are no size air defense installation, art-momaps1-review.html. circumstances under which while we camped in the twisted MoMA PS1 would accept the ruins and fly-infested dirt. đđđđđđ15 destruction of artworks or Tamara graciously shared with See MoMA’s description of the aggression towards our staff or me the transformer shed she exhibition on its website 12/12 visitors. When a few dozen had rigged into a shower.” Linda https://www.moma.org/calenda protesters arrived at MoMA PS1 Robinson, “By the Banks of the r/exhibitions/5084. on the last day of ‘Theater of Tigris,” New York Times, January Operations,’ they were offered 21, 2011 đđđđđđ16 public space within the museum https://www.nytimes.com/2011 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War to be heard. The protesters’ /01/23/books/review/Robinson - Did Not Take Place (Indiana threats to staff, property, and art t.html. Bookforum’s reviewer University Press, 1995), 24. The forced the temporary closure of was less sanguine: granting of keystone catalog real several exhibition galleries to https://www.bookforum.com/pr estate to that catastrophizing the public. We are proud of the int/1704/tamara-chalabi-s-me Cassandra of posthistory is unwavering respect and moir-sidesteps-her-father-s- meant as a keyword association professionalism our team role-in-the-iraq-invasion-66 74. with the Gulf War but is also a showed to all.” Quoted in Alex calling card for the Greenberger, ARTnews, March 2, đđđđđđ8 “posthistorical museum” itself, 2020 See Mike Stone, “Apollo Global which took shape during the very https://www.artnews.com/art- in Talks to Buy Constellis,” same period called into question news/news/ali-yass-moma-ps1- Reuters, August 5, 2016 by this exhibition. For protest-removal-1202679638/. https://www.reuters.com/arti Baudrillard, the Gulf War was a cle/us-constellis-m-a-apollo - case study in the violent đđđđđđ22 idUSKCN10G26P. mediations of “anorexic history” The listing, which has since that he, along with other disappeared, was posted on the đđđđđđ9 diagnosticians of posthistory on Constellis website Theater of Operations: The Gulf either side of the Atlantic, had https://constellis.jobs.net/ Wars 1991–2011, exhibition signaled in the penultimate search?missing_job=true. catalog, eds. Peter Eleey and decade of the twentieth century. Ruba Katrib (MoMA PS1, 2019), “Theater of Operations” đđđđđđ23 10. portends to dissolve this old The term “toxic philanthropy” posthistory, what with its past came into currency around the đđđđđđ10 flattening of Iraqi agency, only to public strafing of Whitney Theater of Operations, 27. propose a new one that sounds trustee Warren B. Kanders in just like it – a “contiguous connection with that museum’s đđđđđđ11 globalized ether that 2019 biennial, where, like We are influenced in this presupposes a borderless “Theater of Operations,” liberal- formulation not only by the relationality internally ethical messaging (and exhibition’s reanimation of Jean consistent with itself,” per the contemporaneous media Baudrillard, to whom we will curatorial jargonization. outrages) highlighted a briefly return below, but also by longstanding institutional Baudrillard’s emplotment in a đđđđđđ17 affiliation with carceral border broader intellectual history, one See Rijin Sahakian, “It Is What It policing, at least in the form of critically engaged by Lutz Is,” Jadaliyya, February 22, 2012 Kanders’s business interests. Niethammer’s Posthistoire: Has https://www.jadaliyya.com/De While the public humiliation of History Come to an End?, trans. tails/25300. plutocrats is never unproductive, Patrick Camiller (Verso 1994), “toxic philanthropy” is and Hal Foster’s The Return of đđđđđđ18 nevertheless an imprecise the Real: Art and Theory at the “Francis Alÿs on his Embedment sobriquet: it turns the identity of End of the Century (October with the Kurdish Army in Mosul,” capital into a reformable trait. Books, 1996), in which the term Artforum, February 9, 2017 David Joselit recently proposed “posthistorical museum” also https://www.artforum.com/int a parallel if ultimately different makes an early appearance. In erviews/francis-alys-on-his- diagnosis of the “double bind” an evocative footnote, Foster embedment-with-the-kurdish-a between artistic reaction and quotes the artist Ashley rmy-in-mosul-66451. institutional messaging. See Bickerton’s posthistorical Joselit, “Toxic Philanthropy,” identification with an end of đđđđđđ19 October, no. 170 (Fall 2019). For politics: “We are now in a post- Dia Azzawi darkened the gallery an example of the toxic political situation,” 257n34. room that held his work Mission philanthropy narrative used in of Destruction (2004–07) on the context of “Theater of đđđđđđ12 February 6, 2020, to mark the Operations,” see Zachary Small, Kate Fowle, “Foreword,” in anniversary of Colin Powell’s UN “Michael Rakowitz Wants to Theater of Operations, 7. speech claiming that Saddam Pause His Video Work at MoMA Hussein possessed weapons of PS1 as a Protest Against đđđđđđ13 mass destruction. On the same Museum’s ties to ‘Toxic As Enwezor wrote about “The day, and to mark the same event, Philanthropy,’” The Art Short Century”: “Perhaps there Wafaa Bilal held a performance, Newspaper, December 2, 2019 is a need to clarify a central October, that involved altering https://www.theartnewspaper. operating principle of this books that visitors had brought com/news/michael-rakowitz-sa exhibition, namely to examine into the museum, which were to ys-moma-ps1-curators-repeate

the link between independence be sent to the College of Fine e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a dly-denied-his-requests-to-p movements and liberation Arts in Baghdad. ause-video-work-in-gulf-war- struggles as methods for exhibition-as-a-protest-of-m achieving African political đđđđđđ20 oma-trustees. autonomy and cultural self- In his words: “By remaking this awareness.” Okwui Enwezor, “An piece yet again through its Introduction,” The Short Century: unmaking, I claim my right to Independence and Liberation resistance, in the museum, and Movements in Africa 1945–1994, in solidarity with Iraqis leading a exhibition catalog, eds. Okwui revolution against their Enwezor and Chinua Achebe destruction and exploitation (Prestel, 2001), 11. today.” See the video of Yass delivering his statement on

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST In 1958, thanks to the efforts of its students and the Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Uruguay, the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA) in Montevideo was integrated into the national university. This allowed students and graduates to participate in the government of the school and to effect curricular reform in a hitherto

01/05 extremely conservative art academy. The text below was an attempt to bring together collective ideas and suggestions that could structure that reform. Some students had already started to work on this in the early fifties. Until 1958 the school had been rigidly controlled by the Ministry of Education and Culture, which had made change impossible. This is an abridged text Luis Camnitzer composed of fragments from the much longer document which I have translated from the original Spanish. Footnotes have been added for Escuela the reader’s benefit. đđđđđđđđđđI don’t believe that there is any other Nacional de aesthetic premise than freedom, as much personal as collective. As this is also an ethical Bellas Artes premise, I don’t believe that one can detach aesthetic premises from pedagogical methodologies. In reference to art, leaving aside any precise definition, I understand that it should be a universal form of expression, since every action should be aesthetic and everything should be creative. The opposite is neutral and stagnant. I understand that there is no “anti-art” but, if anything, there is an “other-art” with the same rights and validity. đđđđđđđđđđUndoubtedly, the most common means of expression is the word. It’s misused and abused. It determines thought rather than being a consequence of it. Metaphors have become formal sentences that have lost their original image, and that is how we think. đđđđđđđđđđThe academy tends to undergo this same process in other forms of artistic expression. It is a totalitarian process, inasmuch as it tries to annul individual creativity and impose an ultimate and absolute truth. Technique tends to repeat that same process in the other forms of expression by forcing alienated structures onto the individual rather than allowing the individual to challenge, change, and create structures. đđđđđđđđđđFrom an ideal point of view, the classification of “artistic” and “non-artistic” forms of expression is as arbitrary and absurd as the classification of “major” and “minor” art

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ L i s C t z E s c u e l a N i o n d B A r t forms. I understand that the ENBA must eradicate this division. In saying this I’m also saying that art is an attitude and, following this, that it is an attitude of freedom (which is obviously an engagement; freedom is the correct use of individual potential). And in a panorama that comprises “word,” “academy,” and “technique,” art is a warmongering attitude, where the weapon serves as much to kill as to

12.21.20 / 21:32:06 EST give birth. need for subsistence and replicating the market. đđđđđđđđđđI understand that every human being is able Instead they will express the militancy that to express him- or herself artistically. It is done arises automatically between an individual to a greater or lesser degree, or it’s not done at aware of freedom and an environment of all (a case I consider hypothetical) depending on oppression. the interference of academies, of empty forms, đđđđđđđđđđIn the case of sculpture, it’s no longer about and of prejudice, all of which generally hamper making equestrian monuments, intimate natural development. 02/05 portraits, or objects for the shelf, all of which đđđđđđđđđđI understand that there are individuals with subordinate space to their own existence. a greater potential for sensitivity than others, Sculpture has to create spaces, not subordinate although I also believe that sensitivity can be them. It must take a human scale, and the developed. A child is not considered to be a valid militancy that corresponds to it is an education artist only because their position is not validated that refuses hyper- and infrahuman scales. It is by the community. The same is true of the in this sense that a science of design following mentally impaired, but they too are capable of the ideas of Gropius may have validity. But we expressing their sensitivities without being should go even further. It’s not about creating inhibited by superstructures. spaces for the people, but about teaching people đđđđđđđđđđAs Maria Montessori wrote: “Free drawings to create their own spaces. It’s only from here are only possible if we have a free child who was that artists may spring onward, owing to a higher allowed to grow and perfectly assimilate the degree of specialization and vocation, and not surrounding environment … and who, left free to because of accident (“my son draws very well”) create and express, really creates and or manual skills. This is the only way an artist expresses.”1 I understand that this is equally true can be a normal human being, like a shoemaker, of adults, and this should be one of the whose higher degree of professionalization is fundamental tenets for the pedagogy at the indispensable for the community. Klee once said: ENBA. Our society is not composed of “free “We have all the conditions to be artists, what we children,” nor are those who will attend our lack is a people.” In our case we have the school “free.” The school has to transform them conditions for neither, and their formation is and give them the strength to transform others. closely linked. For that it has to return to them the capacity for đđđđđđđđđđLet’s now discuss the organization of the original and primitive experience, the capacity to Fundamental Sculpture Studio. For this there are renew their naivety, the capacity for unprocessed two considerations: the studio is a community of feelings, discovery, invention, and play in Fröbel’s shared interests, and it’s also a conglomerate of sense.2 The First Period of the ENBA [curriculum] individuals. This will be reflected in both team achieves some of this by introducing the student activities and individual works, beyond to different techniques and materials in order to permanent group discussions. The work plan define a path. Or better, a sensorial orientation.3 sketched out here is open to revisions and đđđđđđđđđđThis sensorial orientation should be changes according to group discussions and intensified during the Fundamental Studios [the individual needs (a discussion, by the way, Second Period of the curriculum]. Here the should not necessarily be limited to the use of instructors will be better equipped than the words). The plan for the studio has two areas: technicians [in the First Period] to calibrate the one is the more or less animalistic relation with needs of the student, since the student will the material, with a slow integration of already have some idea of their own direction connective and formal elements; the other, with and a panoramic overview of a vast range of a plastic intention, goes from formal speculation materials that will allow, at any moment, for to the placement in the environment (which for synthesis (a minimum to be demanded from the some may be a further development of the Second Period). This means that everything will formal speculation). It is in this second area be reflected in the student’s attitude toward the where the individuality of the student may offer material. The choice of material will no longer be some danger to the instructor. At this stage, the arbitrary, but has to be directed first toward the student’s confidence is still fragile when self- achievement of a pure experience and then e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ L i s C t z E s c u e l a N i o n d B A r t criticism is applied to their intuitive instruments toward a special experience. This is what will rather than their practical decisions, as was the define the Fundamental Sculpture Studio, as case in the first area. A lack of doubt may lead to long as this title is not limited by the historical the wrong path, and an excess of doubt may meaning of the words. inhibit the work. đđđđđđđđđđThe student will aim at a total revision of đđđđđđđđđđI understand that, at moments like this, it’s herself and of her relations with the useful for the instructor to delineate the basic environment. These relations will no longer be limits of each student. Not dividing by type along reduced to a chain of actions governed by the Kretschmer’s or Jung’s categories, which done

12.21.20 / 21:32:06 EST without proper knowledge may be too schematic, the same time the geometry instructor will but by studying the student’s reactions when discuss geometric and non-geometric confronted with specific problems, including the connections, and present exercises in use of tests. Without the use of complex tools topological geometry. like Rorschach blots, one may reach conclusions đđđđđđđđđđThe following work is about mixed by comparing a drawing by the student with his structures in which forms and textures are or her handwriting (looking at consistency, combined, and also considers the colors of the conventionality in either, family influence in the 03/05 materials: for example, finding four materials in handwriting, etc.); by gauging their reaction when the garden to build a vertical structure. having to fill space (fear, shyness, crowding, or đđđđđđđđđđOver time, academic art favored some emptiness); or their representation in a self- materials over others based on their physical portrait (for example, the placement within a durability. This created a dogmatic faith in some rectangular frame of a profile implies materials over others and precludes the free use inhibitions). With these elements one may avoid of new materials. The process of study here tries undesirable dead ends for the student, and find to reconsider this hierarchy. Newsprint is a a path by construction rather than by destruction material as valid as gold and, according to how (like those students who have to overcome it’s used, may have more expressive possibilities. academic training). It’s only beyond a certain level of progress in the đđđđđđđđđđThe first step in the studio is creating an aims of expression that durability may become original experience of the material. The student an issue. While a scientific research into the will take a piece of clay and press it through his durability of a material is beyond the fingers, tear off pieces, feel it with more and less requirements of the Fundamental Studio, it may water. Splinter a piece of wood in different be picked up later in the specific Technical directions; tear and fold a sheet of paper; dent Studios according to the student’s interest and and perforate metal; let ink drip into water; the practical resources of the school. In the create smoke and move it into shapes. There will event that the school doesn’t have the facilities be an immediate critical reaction that will define to address the research, links with commercial a basic sensorial range: viscous, soft, etc.; and a industries or the Industrial School should be set second comparative one: dry, humid, wet. Each up, but always under supervision of the student will draw personal theoretical corresponding ENBA instructor. conclusions from this. They should be written đđđđđđđđđđThe problems that ensue are spatial. The down and fed into teamwork, where the work will student will evolve forms, first in two be complemented [by the experiences of the dimensions, to understand the essence of the group]. A second step in this will be to allow assignment, and then in three dimensions, to materials to generate their own forms: shapes study its kinetic aspects. In the first case a basic that were created during the first step, but that shape will be drawn (triangle, square, etc.) to hadn’t been properly focused on. The results will study variations on the page: square, square with present texture and structure problems. Texture open side, broken open side, different angles, will be explored by repeating the first step and by etc. In the second case, different materials will grouping the results of different materials: be used. A wire square may be deformed into fabric, glass, sandpaper, brick, etc. After a period different shapes without cutting the wire. The of individual research, the team will classify the same may be done with an open square, to be experiences according to different criteria: closed after it has been deformed. Different smooth to rough, glossy to matte, etc. rules may be introduced (taking a square without Individually again there will be experimentation adding or subtracting material, but introducing with structure, like paper balls, fabric extended cuts into the surface). in space, and so on. The structure problem will đđđđđđđđđđThe next series of assignments studies light be solved by making constructions that minimize and shadow. The student determines a desired waste, from mountains and stalactites made shape for a shadow and builds a structure that, with wet sand, to towers made with sticks, using a fixed light source, casts a shadow to fit folded paper structures that bear weight, and the shape. After a first trial, the next step self-supporting wire structures. The difference e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ L i s C t z E s c u e l a N i o n d B A r t includes predetermined shadows on and between the first and second becomes blurred, between the things used. The exercise will be and the next step is to compose and to integrate repeated as teamwork. basic functions: shapes made to touch, to roll, to đđđđđđđđđđI consider education toward teamwork to be push, activities that merge with the material. The crucial, as a problem’s complexity often results will be classified individually and surpasses the ability of a single individual to collectively into collections. The cultural history solve it. Teamwork is an effective instrument to instructor will help situate the experience in the bring a problem down to a manageable scale. context of the histories of different cultures.4 At Teams shall work horizontally, and every member

12.21.20 / 21:32:06 EST has to participate. Later teams will be expanded Luis Camnitzer is an Uruguayan artist living in New to include members of other studios, so that York. ultimately they will be able to work with architects and industry. đđđđđđđđđđBesides the development of a personal vantage point, the sensitivity of the student has to extend to the perception and digestion of the reality of the environment. For our purposes this 04/05 reality has two parts: an ethical one and a plastic one. Sensitizing in the first part is the responsibility of the cultural history instructor. The second part is the responsibility of the studio instructor. This does not mean that the studio experience should extend to ingesting mescaline, but it should make it possible to reconsider previous studio experiences when confronted with everyday objects. The student should be able, imaginatively, to abstract and compose from fixed reality (meaning reality that cannot be [physically] transformed by the perceiver): to find signs, characters, and monsters, to speculate with the development of a shadow, to deform and distort spaces without touching them. This phase includes interpretive exercises in the spirit of Johannes Itten in regards to a corner of the studio, the garden, street, table, flower vase, or even a work of art. They will be expressed fundamentally through sketches. The student now will have to make sure that expression is consistent or, even more, that when confronted with existing things he or she uses consistent attitudes. đđđđđđđđđđThe group of students will be supplied with a phrase made up of two words which are as incommensurate as possible. Each student will have to find a mode of expression that makes them coherent, thus putting order into his universe. The words will first refer to objects (car, faucet), then in a more complex step to concepts or qualities (fatness, finality). At this point the student is already on a personal path. Corrections will eliminate any subordination of the plastic form to the natural form, trying to give the plastic form a new origin. Obsequious realism does not belong to the sphere of art. The problem is not of imitating reality, but of the translation or the direct use of things. đđđđđđđđđđMaybe this is an aesthetic postulate, though for me it continues at the same time to be an ethical one. The student now is free in the sense of being able to aim the act of creation at whatever he or she pleases. It will be the student e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ L i s C t z E s c u e l a N i o n d B A r t who dictates the place from which the instructor works, and any discussion of the student’s production has to respect that demand, or not take place at all. đđđđđđđđđđ× This text,đoriginally written in 1960, is an excerpt fromđOne Number Is Worth One Word by Luis Camnitzer, forthcoming in April 2020 from e-flux journal and Sternberg Press.

12.21.20 / 21:32:06 EST đđđđđđ1 Maria Montessori, The Advanced Montessori Method (Montessori- Pierson, 2007), 308.

đđđđđđ2 Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) was a German educationalist best known for his promotion of learning through play and the invention of the kindergarten. 05/05 đđđđđđ3 In his Crónicas del entusiasmo (Banda Orintal, 2018), historian Gabriel Peluffo Linari refers to this period of the ENBA as “experimentalist.” The observation is illustrative, because the contact with the array of techniques was not intended to develop crafts, but to experience materials and dimensions.

đđđđđđ4 The course was called “Cultural and Historical Instruction.” e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ L i s C t z E s c u e l a N i o n d B A r t

12.21.20 / 21:32:06 EST It was such a great moment that I barely remember it. Juliana Huxtable played us through to dawn at the itinerant queer techno rave party known as unter. Images of Jessie’s blond hair floating through the fog, of Yaya’s painted nails gripping her fan. I texted them to ask that they remember it for me. Yaya: “We worked hard, like

01/21 Chinese hand fans. It was queer euphoria, Planet Huxtable and we had landed.” Jessie: “It was a really astonishing fusion that never felt like genre mashing or jumping, just raw intensity of speech and propulsion.” đđđđđđđđđđJuliana and I only hung out once. I don’t know her. I want to write about her on a first- name basis, but I don’t want that read as either McKenzie Wark familiar or diminishing. Quite the opposite. There’s power in routing around the patronymic, even that of an adoptive screen dad. Rawness, Reality Cabaret: intensity, and propulsion on a planet where day and night change places, where none of us know On Juliana our names. đđđđđđđđđđAfter unter, I started coming to her shows, Huxtable and listening to her dj mixes on Soundcloud.1 The vocal samples that hook me (versus those that don’t) clock me relative to Juliana at different velocities in history and geography: “Playgirl” by Ladytron, “Boys Wanna Be Her” by Peaches, “Pigeon Man” by Jamilla Woods, “Sleeper in Metropolis” by Anne Clark, and “Spleen” by Charles Baudelaire. Moments in a social graph where our playlists intersect. #okboomer: that her hip-hop samples don’t resonate situates me as middle-aged, middle-class, white, antipodean, and – ever since I cracked my egg – trans. đđđđđđđđđđI’m picturing Juliana as I saw her at another unter: standing in the night, in the chillout yard, looking out over the heads of the crowd that parts and flows around. She is in the flow, always, but cutting it off, shaping it, seeing it while being seen. A singular point in the torrent of signed and signed-off bodies, an instance of how to be a 21c artist. I said hello but she doesn’t register. I don’t stand out in this crowd; she has no option not to. đđđđđđđđđđOne time I was hanging with my friend Jackie and I read aloud the title piece to Juliana’s book Mucus in My Pineal Gland while Jackie improvised on piano.2 And there it was again, astonishment, fusion, propulsion. Mucus in My Pineal Gland is, among other things, a kind of

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x aberrant black, queer, trans autobiography, but one where the larval Juliana is legible only as refracted, or not, through mediating surfaces. COLORING IN COLORING BOOKS, DISNEY PRINCESSES WITH CRAYON BROWN FACES AND CRAYON BLACK COIFS, AS IF THEY HAD RELAXERS IN WHATEVER PARALLEL TIME THEY WERE “IN.”3 Agency in a world of presets. It’s writing that’s also a theory of its own aesthetic

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST methods. I want to write with this writing, rather place expected. than about it. Think of this as a remix. Everything đđđđđđđđđđLet’s rewind. The possibilities for Juliana to in ALL-CAPS is from Juliana. become Juliana emerge, among other things, out đđđđđđđđđđI ALWAYS PICKED THE GIRLS WHEN I of a particular moment in the evolution of media PLAYED VIDEO GAMES. IF FOR NO OTHER technics. One in which the internet vectored REASON THAT OUT OF SHEER SPITE AT THE through the space of the domestic and turned it EASE OF IDENTIFICATION THE BOYS AROUND ME inside out. It’s the witching hours. Bodies as

HAD WITH THEIR UNINTERESTINGLY 02/21 lonesome as the blackened ocean of night reach PHALLIC/KAMEHAMEHA SUPER-HEROES … I out through the wires for other information. I WENT TO EVERY LAN PARTY IN HOPES I COULD DISCOVERED NIGHT AS A PLACE OF REMOVE … WITNESS THEM LOSE BATTLE AFTER BATTLE TO HOUSEHOLD SOUNDS HOPEFULLY DISTRACTING HYPERBOLIC DEPICTIONS OF THE SAME ANY ROLLING SLEEPER WHO MIGHT HEAR THE FIGURES THEY WOULD LATER JERK OFF TO … GUST OF A DELL PC EXHAUST FAN UPON THE SAME IMAGINARY CUNTS AND STARTUP.5 Night as remove from the familiar and PHANTASTICAL PUSSIES THAT WOULD (AND familial, where bodies are what they are, but STILL DO) TEMPT THEM TO TOUCH AND their desires are opaque. Night as glowing with CONQUER THE VITAMIN ENRICHED TUNA OF MY glints and murmurs of what bodies aren’t but are BODY.4 motivated to want: a Nuwaubian Princess, for đđđđđđđđđđThe boys want to be her; the girls want to be instance, as in a 2013 piece. A fuck-off stare her. I imagine a work like Untitled (Lil’ Marvel) from two Julianas, bodies rippling as sand from 2017 as embodying that fantastical pussy, ripples, some serene alien night. slicked onto the skin and into an image. Braids đđđđđđđđđđThe codes of race, of gender, of sex, so fly, the hands summon some magical power, seemingly immutable in daylight, in the IRL while the figure stands, probably on her own world, flip over into something else, at night, planet, against a night sky of the chaos of stars. through the wires. PORN NEVER REALLY To be in the place that is the attractor of APPEALED TO ME (I WAS RAISED A FEMINIST attention, a lot of which you don’t want, and turn AND ANTI-RACIST) BUT WHAT I SAW WAS AN it back into the world, but not quite from the INVITATION TO AN INTIMACY I QUESTIONED BUT

Instagram flyer forđUnter x Discwomanđ18th May 2018, designed by Ryan Davis, based on a classic British rave poster by Tim 'The Thrill of Zilch' Ryan.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST HONESTLY COULDN’T DECLINE – A CLOSE THE 35-YEAR OLD “PEDOPHILE” … IT WAS 4AM PROXIMITY TO THE VERTIGO I FELT WHEN I FIRST AND I’D SNUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE TO MEET SAW PHOTOS OF LYNCHINGS.6 Daylight is a HIM. IN SO MANY WAYS, IT WAS THE MOST phantasm of the real; by nightlight here comes “NATURAL” WAY FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME TO the real of the phantasm. In the light of day, a DISCOVER THEIR SEXUALITY.10 Sleep your way reminder of the night, like in History (Period out of your hometown. Piece) from 2013: Juliana confronts the gaze, the đđđđđđđđđđThe discovery of any sexuality is always flags of two empires reduced to decorating a 03/21 mediated. Maybe the discovery of one’s sex is hairstyle, a colonial scene in the background. The too. Maybe technics is a third gender that colonial and pornographic gazes seem like night distributes bodies into the other two (or not). The and day but are maybe related, just in different transsexual body isn’t unique in relation to the degrees of privacy and privation. third gender of technics, but it highlights the role đđđđđđđđđđThe internet mediates the images which of that technics for all bodies, of any sex or might mediate a turn to a fugitive life, at night.7 I gender. The transsexual body is nowhere more WAS ALWAYS TURNED ON BY PRIVACY. LIKE legible than in porn, where at least our bodies MANY, I EXPLORED MY ADOLESCENT SEXUAL exist, are wanted, fuckable, even have agency. CURIOSITY IN AIM CHAT ROOMS, CAT-FISHING Okay so maybe it’s not great “representation,” FOR THE REPRESSED BABY-BOOMERS WHO but it’s better than what we get in most movie NEVER ENJOYED SUCH A LUXURY IN THEIR OWN matinées. YOUTH.8 The dynamism of the forces of đđđđđđđđđđIn the daylight hours, the fever dreams of production burst through the backyard stasis transphobes become a panic ideology in which pooling in postwar suburbia. THERE ARE SO we are the secret agents for some phantasmal MANY SKELETAL REMAINS IN LOCKED XANGAS, empire.11 The 2017 piece Transsexual Empire is LIVEJOURNAL, AND MYSPACE ACCOUNTS. THE mounted like a poster on metal, surrounded by FINAL FRONTIER OF THE OLD TRIBES AND fridge magnets, the everyday vernacular of THEOLOGIES.9 slogans and logos we mistake for our own đđđđđđđđđđWhat seems bound by property and privacy thoughts. EVERY 18–32 YEAR OLD IN THE in daylight harbors covert vectors of the night. DEVELOPED WORLD NOW KNOWS THE TRUTH OF LIVE FEEDS OF MYSELF TO 600 MATURBATING THE TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE ARMING PSEUDO- MEN IN BUSH’S AMERICA. CONNECTING WITH WOMEN WITH VAGINAS IN SERVICE OF THE

Screenshots of the author's favorite Juliana Huxtable mixes on Soundcloud.đ

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đLil' Marvel, 2015.đColor inkjet print, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST 05/21

Juliana Huxtable,đUntitled (Anachronism), 2013.đColor inkjet print. 10.50 x 15.75 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.đ

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đTranssexual Empire, 2017.đInkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet. 96 x 48 in.đPhoto: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.

Juliana Huxtable, Herculine's Prophecy, 2017. Inkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet. 96 x 48 in. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đThe Feminist Scam, 2017. Inkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet. 96 x 48 in. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.

Juliana Huxtable,đS.H.A.R.P., 2018.đOil, acrylic, fabric, handmade buttons, metal grommets and inkjet print on canvas,35 7/8 x 31 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London.đ

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST CURIOUS MEN BAITED AND PUBLICLY BROUGHT đđđđđđđđđđWhich came first, the transsexual or the TO JUSTICE ON TO CATCH A PREDATOR.12 egg? There are positive feedback loops between đđđđđđđđđđThe trans-image mostly exists to comfort the form of images and the form of bodies, where the cis by figuring the limit case of what the cis the form of one is the content of the other. body is not. The cis gaze reads the trans body MAYBE WHEN I GET MY SURGERY, ASSUMING through a grid marked by a lust-disgust axis and THAT I DO AT SOME POINT, I WILL FINALLY FEEL a pity-envy axis. Pity and disgust are the public, LIKE THE WOMAN I AM INSIDE BY POSTING daytime cis gaze; envy and lust are their private, 08/21 PHOTOS OF THE $32,000 PUSSY GOD GAVE A nighttime doubles. And so: WE’VE BEEN TALENTED SURGEON IN THAILAND THE ABILITY EXPORTED AS SYMBOLS ENUNCIATED IN THE TO SCULPT FROM A SCARRED BODY DISTORTED REFLECTION BETWEEN THE TRENCHES OF BY YEARS OF DYSPHORIA. IN REALITY, THE PORNHUB AND THE PATHETIC, DESPERATE PHOTOS WOULD BE NO MORE A TESTAMENT TO TREMBLE OF [ANOHNI] AS SHE SANG “YOU ARE THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER THAN TO THE MY SISTER.”13 Where Pornhub is the private, IMPLOSION OF THE LINK BETWEEN nighttime lust-attractor and “You Are My Sister,” TEMPORALITY, USER-NAME-IN-PHOTO, AND for the cis gaze, attracts a more respectable cis TRUTH.17 The old night/day, private/public, attention, whose affect is pity. lust/disgust matrices no longer hold the body in đđđđđđđđđđThe trans-image is a hard thing to free from a grid of observation. The images flood and eddy this infertile matrix. We trans-es shape ourselves and pool. Without the lure of rarity the image by selecting from presets made in different – and lacks the power to charge desire. conflicting – discourses, to make the real of the đđđđđđđđđđDigital image culture, that anime monster, phantasm over into a body-image for the fed by nocturnal vectors, blindsided by its own phantasm of the real. This real of nocturnal fetishistic love/hate matrices of gender, sex, and transmissions is a hard one to live out in the race, balloons out to swallow us. IT’S A fantastic day that imagines it is all that exists, in DISGUSTING HYPERTROPHY THAT’S KILLED MY which we’re wandering spirits with no country, CURIOSITY, SEXUAL DRIVE AND DESIRE FOR SEX and always trailing into daylight the attention the REASSIGNMENT IN ONE BLOW.18 It short-circuits cis gaze would rather lavish while itself out of lack and desire, but maybe also bursting like an sight. overripe fruity pustule out of the symbolic order. đđđđđđđđđđNocturnal transmissions: the secret history In The Feminist Scam (2017), we see panic-signs of America might be encoded in the dark. AND from, in this case, a black masculinist vertigo WHERE ARE THE LOVERS? PRESUMABLY about the power of women and queers. The NOWHERE. LEFT IN PRIVATE ARGUMENTS WITH codes mutate and replicate into any and every PARTNERS OVER UNEARTHED SHEMALE PORN, combination, some more viral than others, but all DELETED EMAILS FROM ANONYMOUS of them out there in the night for the dedicated ACCOUNTS ON HOOKUP SITES THAT A FEW wanderer through obscure websites, reddits, DATABASE ENGINEERS AT THE NSA COULD podcasts, streams. PLAUSIBLY DISCOVER.14 The private gaze has an đđđđđđđđđđPositive feedback loopdy-loop between uncanny habit of becoming overexposed. body and sign, mediated by the internet vector, đđđđđđđđđđHerculine’s Prophecy (2017) name-checks drives bodies to seek IRL worlds that might Herculine Barbin, an intersex memoirist made replicate their teeming phantasmagoria. Perhaps famous by Foucault.15 Herculine’s sensual diary, the night of the net could be doubled by the night particularly its early pages of resonant non- of the street. And so, Juliana takes the Yellow genital pleasures, foreshadows this proliferating Brick Road to New York City. THE SPACES I GREW and often inadvertent documenting of the UP WANTING TO INHABIT WERE DIGITAL – SIMS twilight of the sex-and-gender regime, one where CLUBS, LABYRINTH AND UNDERWATER WORLDS clinical categories such as “intersex” or the older IN 3D FISHTANK SCREEN SAVERS, PLAY-PLACE “hermaphrodite,” with their obsession with STRUCTURES IN FLASH ANIMATED SITES WHOSE classifying everyone’s bits, don’t necessarily CONTENTS TOOK UP TO TWENTY MINUTES TO have purchase. Neither do categories of LOAD … THE VISUAL, SONIC AND SCULPTURAL “transsexual” and “transgender.” Increasingly POTENTIALS OF A SPACE WERE ALL IN SPITE OF aggressive practices, institutional as well as e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x THE CORPORATE EARMARKINGS OF THE REAL memetic, try to shine a bright-enough light to (IRL) SPACES AROUND ME AND NOW THE SAME keep the categories clear, but the insomnia of IS TRUE OF BOTH.19 reason breeds monsters.16 Transsexual and đđđđđđđđđđFor a hot minute, the night of the real could intersex bodies have to be fixed, by medicine or be lived on net and street, but the commodity law, to one category or another. If allowed to form caught up with information and mutated to propagate or differentiate – then these limit consume it, and all our bodies with it. The fuck- cases might no longer function to secure the cis off stare in the 2015 image Untitled (Psychosocial body as unproblematic given. Stuntin’) may be returning the viewer’s gaze-

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST 09/21

Juliana Huxtable, Untitled (Wall), 2017. Detail view.đPaint and images printed on vellum. Dimensions vary.đPhoto: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST filters at dawn or at dusk, either way the constrained by race- and gender-coded psychosocial power comes from access to codes surveillance and policing, is an MFA in itself.22 you don’t have, and even if you could access OVER-DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS OF them, by then, they wouldn’t work. CONSUMPTION, SATURATING THE LIQUIDATED đđđđđđđđđđIt’s an open question whether the city is still MARKETS OF FACTORY PRODUCED HOUSEHOLD a space of promise in an information economy in ORNAMENTS. SIMULTANEOUSLY SUPPORTING which to live as a bohemian in the city is to live in THE FOUNDATION’S ENTERPRISE AND a terrarium and have one’s cultural organs 10/21 TEACHING ME FUNDAMENTALS OF A VISUAL harvested for branded real estate.20 In this mode LANGUAGE, CASTRATED OF ITS GRAMMATICAL of production, the rave is less a utopia to come, STRUCTURE IN THIS FORM.23 No more syntax as more a legacy refuge. WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO daddy – even if he comes back, again and again, NEW YORK IT SEEMED LIKE EVERYONE HAD now in unambiguously monstrous form, precisely GIVEN UP ON THE ENDEAVOR ALTOGETHER, because he’s no stand-in for the big other WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE NIGHT. YET EVEN anymore. Meanwhile, even in daylight, HERE, THE FLYER WAS THE AESTHETIC PRE- information as commodity now affixes itself like LOADED WITH REFERENCES, COORDINATES FOR a hormone patch to any warm impulse. GOOGLE SEARCHES AND HASHTAGS. BUT THE đđđđđđđđđđThe bursting out of order of signs as flows EDIFICES WERE BARREN, EPHEMERAL, A LASY rather than forms is a liberation from residual LASER AND FOG MACHINE.21 dumb hierarchies but in favor of other, dumber đđđđđđđđđđWorks like Corporeal Anarchy (2017) and ones. Untitled (Wall) from 2017 tracks just one S.H.A.R.P. (2019) extract from the detritus of potential thread of memetic stupidity spooling night some swatches of ornament, peeled from out of the conflicted matrix of the white gaze. It’s bodies or bathroom walls. Archaeological cold comfort that the signs of racial authenticity evidence of this civilization, such as it is, that are always taken from someone else. will never be on display in a millennium from now REPRODUCTIONS FLATTENED THE TEXTURES that may not even be there to archive us. The LEFT IN THE TRIALS OF BRUSH STROKES AND work of the work of art is not now for posterity. MERGED THE MOST BENEVOLENT SYMBOLS IN đđđđđđđđđđRoaming about New York City, a dérive THIS LEXICON TO THE MOST IMMEDIATE “ON

Juliana Huxtable, Invisible Chattel, 2017.đInkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet. 243.84 x 121.92 cm96 x 48 in.đ Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.đ

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đBlue Jeans, 2017. C-type print, 24 3/8 x 16 1/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London.đ

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đUntitled (HM2), 2016.đOil, acrylic, inkjet print on canvas and mylar, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST Juliana Huxtable,đUntitled, 2019.đ12 color archival ink print on linen, collage and homemade badges in artist frame, 54 x 42 1/8 x 2 3/8 in. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST SALE” MONSTERS OF THE NEOLIBERAL the night. I’VE MET NEARLY EVERYONE I KNOW ORDER.24 Gone the hand of the author, the AT NIGHT. A TIME/PLACE AMONG THOSE WHO authority, the authentic, which separates the real SIMULTANEOUSLY LIVED WITH AND IDOLIZED object of desire from its panting fans. That part EACH OTHER WITHOUT MOURNING DECADES is clear as day. PAST. A PLAYGROUND OF CAREER AESTHETES, đđđđđđđđđđDesire no longer negates the object it lacks. QUEENS (OF ALL VARIETY), CRITICALLY- Want gorges on the images that flood it. The trick INCLINED CURMUDGEONS-WHO-WRITE, is to picture how this works without reanimating 14/21 INTERNET PERSONALITIES, AND ARTISTS negativity by positing the loss of negativity in WHOSE WORKS I ONLY SAW AS PROPS IF AT ALL general as the condition of thinking the – YOUNG AT HEART IF NOT IN SPITE OF YEARS present.25 If there’s only an aesthetics of ACCRUED.29 affirming the plurality of proliferating wants, how đđđđđđđđđđJust speaking for myself and my friends: to make the right fusion within the glut? The War sometimes it’s only space tattooed by pounding on Proof – as a 2017 work names it – is a tricky beats pummeling my dysphoric body that make business when you want neither to affirm several me feel incorporated in my own flesh. Even if you sediments of sentimental hogwash about various have to use your elbows to make elbow room. empires nor propagate the mental herpes that SUBWOOFERS SHOVED ME INTO A FLOATING were its idiot cultural givens. AND BOUNDLESS MASS OF SHADE FROM đđđđđđđđđđMaybe it’s about standing in the flow, not SHITTY FAGGOTS, ANGRY BIDDIES, AND where it’s a stagnant pool or a cascading blast, DISENFRANCHISED BROS.30 Which is pretty but where it eddies and still trickles. Maybe that much what Jessie, Katie, and I had to contend stillness is actually propulsion if we think again with dancing to Juliana at Basement – and we’re about what moves relative to what. Maybe there white girls. are still times and places that, while not free, at đđđđđđđđđđRiffing on Hito Steyerl on Frantz Fanon: THE least enable certain bodies and signs a little DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC breathing room. Maybe certain bodies need that PRODUCTION AND ACCESSIBILITY ATTACKED more than others, and hence find their way. THE WHITE-WASHED LEGACY OF MISSHAPES, EVERYTIME MY HAIR IS TOO UNKEMPT, I MIS- PITCHFORK, AND RUFF CLUB WITH A BASS- SPEAK, MISPRONOUNCE A WORD IN WHITE DRIVEN SIEGE FROM THE WRETCHED OF THE SPACES, SO MANY MIRRORS ARE HELD UP TO, EARTH, BOTH ABROAD AND WITHIN THE CITY THROWN AT MY FACE. RACIAL DIVIDES AND LIMITS.31 As came up in her dialog with Che PROHIBITIONS PERSIST IN AN EROTIC Gossett, in nightlife was the possibility of DEMILITARIZED ZONE.26 existing, both as a black and a trans woman.32 đđđđđđđđđđOne might as well live in a phantasmal There were precedents, there were openings. The elsewhere, as in Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru economy of who and what has value differs from Cataclysm) from 2015, which gives us a human day to night. What is denied in the light is sought figure in otherworldly greens and yellows. “Nibiru in the dark. Well, that’s problematic – but it’s a cataclysm” supposedly refers to ancient living, a life. Sumerian astronomy about a mysterious Planet X đđđđđđđđđđIf you want to know how culture codes work, that will collide or near-miss the Earth. The look not to the text, the piece, the file – but to figure in this work seems to contemplate that the bodies to which they attach. The fridge possibility with equanimity. magnet pieces could also be buttons, badges đđđđđđđđđđJuliana wanders uptown: THERE IS STILL A pinned through flesh. THE SUPERSTRUCTURES PLACE WHERE BLACK UNICORNS RUN FREELY … MAKE THEMSELVES KNOWN, PRESENT IN WHERE THE ONTOLOGICAL CHAINS OF THE microRNA – DISTILLED AND ELEMENTAL – IN ATLANTIC TRIANGLE REVERBERATE TO ACTS OF FLESH – DANCING, FIGHTING, FUCKING SHATTERING POINT IN PATTERNS, BEATS, – WE REWORK.33 Bodies process ripples of signs, RHYMES AND TECHNICOLOR INSISTENCES ON A heat, light, noise – into meaty pulsations and NEW WORLD.27 Decolonizing the third nature of propulsions. Sometimes it’s the best you can do the vector, like decolonizing the second nature of to render yourself as useless animation, the body the empire, starts with acknowledging the whipped along by its own propulsion but to no leadership, political or aesthetic, of the e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x productive purpose. colonized. The paranoid intuition of being an đđđđđđđđđđWhat percentage of Uber rides are for Invisible Chattel (2017) bears further hookups? The vector, rendered mobile by the investigation. The transubstantiation of the cellphone, extends nighttime wanting all over the commodity form from the ownership of things to map. SHOUT OUT TO MY URBAN ANGELS the ownership of information seems still to have SEARCHING FOR POST OR PRE-GENITAL DESIRE plenty of ways of classifying and enslaving VIA GPS. LIKE SNOT, MUCUS, CUM, SHIT, SWEAT bodies, and much the same bodies.28 – THE UNITING ELEMENTS THAT FORM THE đđđđđđđđđđJuliana still finds discrete niches folded into BASIS OF REALITY.34 The leaky goo that smears

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST 15/21

Juliana Huxtable, COW 1, 2019. Inkjet mounted on Dibond, 39 3/4 x 26 1/2 in.đPhoto: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine art, NY/LA.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST 16/21

Juliana Huxtable, BAT 3, 2019. Inkjet mounted on Dibond. 29 3/4 x 44 3/4 in.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST bodies out of themselves. MUCUS IN MY PINEAL AND FAMILIAL RELATIONS, SUPPLEMENT THE GLAND: the pineal is the seat of the soul for HIERARCHICAL NATURE OF PARENT/CHILD.40 Descartes, but in Bataille, is a monstrous eye- Maybe that’s all we have: covens of care, and the opening out of the top of the skull onto the work we do for each other outside of reproducing blackness that negates the pure expenditure of either commodity value or “family values.” Even the sun.35 It’s maybe something else again here. if these gestures too are recuperable as Its over-coded symbolic function congested after information and commodified. a good, hard fuck. There’s a far more 17/21 đđđđđđđđđđUntitled (HM 2), from 2016: Whenever we contemporary, less Catholic, more gather, we’re always already ghosting. Checking unselfconsciously ecstatic play at the edges of out to check phones. Bringing the real of the the visible here, at a far remove too from phantasmagoria into every conversation. I’VE #edgelord wannabes. TRIED ROMANTICIZING ACTUAL IRL CONVOS AS đđđđđđđđđđThe collapse of desire and lack into want CONTRABAND, BUT I KNOW THAT’S A SILLY and excess doesn’t succeed in eroding the old CONCEPT GIVEN THE CAPABILITIES OF SHAZAM codes, just in making them presets. THEY HAD SOFTWARE.41 Your friends have seen your outfit DEVELOPED THE MOST ADVANCED SYSTEMS as an Insta bathroom selfie before you even FOR MAPPING DESIRE KNOWN TO MAN make it to the club. ATOMIZATION HAS (LITERALLY). THEY ALL SEEMED SATISFIED TO DESTROYED CONCEALMENT. WHAT DO WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF TOPS/BOTTOMS, GATHER AROUND? FOR WHAT PURPOSES? MASCS/FEMS DIVIDED INTO VARIOUS SIZE, PICKING UP PIECES OF OUR NEED FOR CONTACT SHAPE, HAIR LEVEL, AFFILIATIONS. IT WAS LESS IN THE FACE OF ITS COLLAPSE.42 It’s hard A RESULT OF SEXUAL EXPLORATION THAN A enough to be a body, let alone a coven of care, MARKETPLACE THAT MIMICKED THE ARTIFICIAL when there’s a technics that gloms on, not to VOLUTION OFFERED BY A SHOPPING MALL.36 bodies or selves but to parts, both psychic and We’re just beginning to think what we know we corporeal. NOT THAT US IS EVEN US AT THIS feel: that the commodification of want in the POINT AS OUR SEPARATIONS DISSOLVE WITH fast, hard, techno loop of information is a EVERY CAUSTIC “AGREE TO TERMS OF colonizing vector that ramifies through the SERVICE.”43 sedimentary layers of past colonizations. In Blue đđđđđđđđđđSometimes I think of the trans people I Jeans (2017) it appears as if they are tattooed on know as actually having one advantage against a black person’s back. Product of forced and the torrent, despite the many and multiple sweated labor, returned as in Kafka’s “The Penal disadvantages. We have to actually attend with Colony” as the punishment for being black while intention to how images stick to us, how we being.37 process them through flesh. THE iMOBLE, EVER đđđđđđđđđđThe information vector troubles the old PRESENT SHARE-TUMBLE-TWEET-POST- empire of day and night presets: cis straight girls REBLOG REGIME SEEMS TO HAVE wanna cruise; cis gay boys wanna marry. There SUCCESSFULLY KILLED THE FLESH OF IT ALL. are apps for both. But perhaps there’s still some THE BODY BEHIND THE IMAGE.44 It might not be other way of honoring each other’s mutable, the worst thing to have to actively shape the sign-riddled bodies. STEADY SINGULAR LOVE OF flesh as well in order to live. An image like TBT MUTABILITY AND CONTINUAL SHAPE-SHIFTING à (2019) hovers in the quadrant, a fluctuating la THE CYBORG AS LOVER. A CONSTANT DECAY attractor for lust-disgust and pity-envy. It all AND BIRTH, SOME PIECES ARE PERMANENT, depends on where the viewer locates their own OTHERS EPHEMERAL, DIMINISHING AGAINST boundaries in the act of looking. In this case the THE HORIZON OF OPENNESS AS A PRE-EMPTIVE image edges also towards that deeply troubled TO DIVORCE.38 fever dream in which some bodies are not even đđđđđđđđđđIt’s a #nodads world, where it might if human. anything at least not be a disadvantage not to đđđđđđđđđđThat which cannot be negated need not be have one, at least emotionally. Even if there’s a affirmed. One might affirm instead that which downside to not inheriting his property when his threads through the raw intensity to another raw #dadbod gives out. Instead, family by choice, intensity, one that connects all those others that although maybe it’s not much of a choice, and e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x the panic mode of digital fascism would (and not so much about choice as about labor, will) annihilate if it can. TO THE DEGREE THAT thought in terms of who does the work.39 I’VE ALWAYS BEEN AS NOSEY AS I WAS CURIOUS, INFORMED AND FORMED BY COLLECTIVE THE CULT OF PERSONALITY THAT BIRTHED MEMORIES OF DENIED LABOR. THE LABOR OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HAS TURNED ON A SELF-CARE, THE LABOR OF LOVE, THE LABOR OF POPULATION IN WHICH WE ARE EACH OTHER’S FAMILIAL CONTRIBUTION AND PARTICIPATION … PERSONALITIES. EACH OF US AN ICON IN OUR THE LABOR OF MEDIATION … SISTERHOOD AND OWN RIGHT WITH LEGACIES AND MYTHOLOGIES BROTHERHOOD AS MODELS OF LATERAL SOCIAL – AND DIRTY MATERIAL – LINGERING IN BINARY

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST CODES. I NOW FIND MYSELF FIGHTING AN body in the ultimate place of whiteness. A black INCESSANT NEED TO UNVEIL AND TO REVEAL that shades into iridescent greens and blues THE FALLIBILITY OF THE INFALLIBLE from another planet. I can’t but think of how the POPULATION OF COWARDLY WITCH-HUNTERS.45 classical orders, art of Greek slavery, became Maybe better to be discreet about who even clip art for American slavery. I’m reminded here knows about our covens of care. too of C. Riley Snorton’s devastating critique of đđđđđđđđđđBy day, they hate us; by night they desire us. the origins of the modern categories of gender in

A desire only kept afloat by the pretense of a 18/21 scientific experiments on black bodies.47 Two prohibition, always honored in the breech and deadened orders of visibility: the aesthetic and sans-breeches. The trans body as the last the scientific, both based on the body as thing. frontier of desire, suspended in a bubble of Any possible future art that cuts against these negativity fueled by prohibition. One of the few currents has to improvise hard and fast, look for last unutterable desires, none of them pretty. anything of use as it flees. It might have to THE AMERICAN DREAM THAT SUSTAINED THE discard this fine piece as it flees, though, FANTASY OF MOBILITY IS HAVING ITS OLD immobile as it is. ACCOUNTS AND DRUNKEN TEXTS BROUGHT TO đđđđđđđđđđI’m personally aware of those cis dudes who THE PUBLIC’S ATTENTION. THE UNDERBELLY OF want to be dommed by trans women. I’m not of PRIVACY IT PROUDLY PROTECTED HAS EMERGED those white dudes who want to be dommed by AS CRAIGSLIST, PORN, THE RIGHT TO KILL black men. Or of how, when the sun sets, race in TRESPASSERS.46 That’s the problem: they buck America becomes the real of the phantasm. up a fascist desire that can only negate its America’s latent destiny seems to be a play-party object. Fuck it; kill it. It’s why they are ashamed of racialized lust that in daylight hours can and we’re not. scarcely be acknowledged. THE MYTHICAL đđđđđđđđđđFrank Benson’s sculpture Juliana (2015) BLACK PHALLUS INSIDE OF WHITE ORIFICES – A ports something from the Dionysian world of GESTURE THAT FASCINATES THE MIND OF THE night into the Apollonian day. It's Juliana as WORLD OVER, BUT IN ITS TRUEST FORM IN classic, an object of contemplation. Beauty of AMERIKKA. AS LIMITING AS THIS PENETRATIVE form, harmony of parts (these parts). The black ROLE MAY BE, IT’S ALSO, AT A MINIMUM, A

Instagramđselfie by the author at Juliana Huxtable,đInterfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back, Reena Spaulings, New York 12th October 2019.

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST SUGGESTION OF STRENGTH AND VIRILITY IN HAD-COME.51 BLACKNESS. AS IF WHITE AMERICA, BY đđđđđđđđđđWell that’s a #mood. As a chaser, let me INCORPORATING THE RECEPTION OF BLACK loop back to a Juliana unter rave moment, as DICK AS A RITE OF PASSAGE, SOMEHOW described by my friend Nick: “It consisted of, if I MITIGATES THE HISTORY OF EMASCULATION can remember properly, about three THAT PROMPTED THE STATEMENT “I AM A simultaneously layered decks of churning, MAN.”48 The bodies that have no choice but to be magmatic industrial/hardcore tracks, mixed not visible versus those allowed to see. 19/21 for precision but such that they created an đđđđđđđđđđWhat if one took the particularities of the immersive mutant sonic texture, throbbing, self, not as an identity at all, but as an eddy in machinic lurching, almost helicopter-like as they the flow from which to sense and touch what’s noisily pulsed in and out of phase. Then on a elided in the bright-lit glitter of what (white) fourth deck over the top of this Juliana mixed in a washes over us? EVERY LIKE ON dementedly pitched up a cappella (or more likely MEDIEVALPOC.TUMBLR.COM AS AN she was layering in the original, but who can say) AFFIRMATION THAT THE ESTIMATION OF MY – "Ring of Fire." It was a really interesting PLACE ISN’T TOTALLY WHITEWASHED NOR citation or reference for me especially TAINTED BY THE TUCK UNDERNEATH MY considering Juliana’s whole thing about queering PETTICOAT HIDING THE BLACK MEMBER THAT representations of American history in all her BETRAYS ANY CLAIM TO A LEGACY-BASED other aesthetic work.” As the empire falls, ENTANGLEMENT WITH HERSTORY THAT I MIGHT dancing in raw space to its digital detritus is HAVE.49 where you’ll find us Nexus Sevens. đđđđđđđđđđMaybe a black, trans body might find ways đđđđđđđđđđ× to connect itself to others that the operative categories of history and phantasm might exclude or render only as monstrous. I want to end with Juliana’s 2019 show “Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back.” As in her work in sound and text, there’s a plunge into raw intensity and a crossing of information flows. Here, borrowing from the visual language of furry subcultures, layered together with certain unpleasant facts about industrial livestock farming. The not-human body, both as site of production and site of pleasure. đđđđđđđđđđA becoming-animal of the human juxtaposed with the becoming-object of the animal. The animal being that’s taken is one denied the industrialized animal body. The fake headlines imagine a bigoted response to the body of the becoming animal as doubled by an extension of the labor demands of the human to the animal. As Eva Hayward reminds us, the linguistic ripple of “trans” could pulse between species as much as between genders, and already does.50 đđđđđđđđđđRight now, before the flood, before the seven lean years, as we realize the life we could have but which, in the midnight hour, we feel in our bones are just borrowed time, I click for signals that pulse with the possibility of at least dancing in the ruins. I asked my friend Katie once, in a break between sets, what we’ll do e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x when there’s no electricity to power the music or to deliver our hormones. Without missing a beat, she says: “We’re going down with the ship.” THE THRUST OF DRIED RIVERBEDS UNENDING. A CAPITAL V VITALITY. BLOOD! DUSTY MOTHERBOARDS SPIT FLICKERS OF SPILLED SOLAR ENTRAILS. PAST INFRARED FOSSILS SEDIMENT; WE, NEXUS POINTS YET TO NEVER-

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST McKenzie Wark (she/her) teaches at The New School đđđđđđ1 and is the author, most recently, of Capital is Dead The Well I Guess | Finally đđđđđđ19 (Extended Playgirl Remix), Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal (Verso 2019) and Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotext(e) 2020). Discwoman Mix: Schizoanalysis, Gland, 92. and She’s Manic are my favorites. đđđđđđ20 Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal đđđđđđ2 Spirits: A Bestiary of the You can hear Juliana herself Commons (nai010, 2009). read that piece on her She’s Manic mix on Soundcloud, at đđđđđđ21

20/21 about forty-three minutes in. Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 92. đđđđđđ3 Juliana Huxtable, Mucus in My đđđđđđ22 Pineal Gland (Capacious & Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Wonder, 2017), 172. Jelly-Schapiro, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas đđđđđđ4 (University of California Press, Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal 2016). Gland, 23. đđđđđđ23 đđđđđđ5 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 97. Gland, 33. đđđđđđ24 đđđđđđ6 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 97. Gland, 71. đđđđđđ25 đđđđđđ7 How I’m thinking about the The figure of the fugitive is in “decline in symbolic efficiency,” honor of Stefano Harney and as thought by Jodi Dean, Blog Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Theory: Feedback and Capture in Fugitive Planning and Black the Circuits of Drive (Polity Study (Minor Compositions, Press, 2010). 2013). đđđđđđ26 đđđđđđ8 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 78. Gland, 45. đđđđđđ27 đđđđđđ9 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 109. Gland, 16. đđđđđđ28 đđđđđđ10 See Jackie Wang, Carceral Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2019) Gland, 34. on algorithmic policing as the control logic of the prison- đđđđđđ11 industrial complex. Arthur Kroker, Panic Encyclopedia (St Martin’s Press, đđđđđđ29 1989). Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 91. đđđđđđ12 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal đđđđđđ30 Gland, 45. Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 51. đđđđđđ13 Antony and the Johnsons, “You đđđđđđ31 Are My Sister,” from the album I Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Am A Bird Now, 2005. She Gland, 53. Antony uses the name Anohni. Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal đđđđđđ32 Gland, 39. In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of đđđđđđ14 Visibility, eds. Reina Gossett, Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Gland, 39. Burton (MIT Press, 2017).

đđđđđđ15 đđđđđđ33 Michel Foucault, Herculine Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Barbin (Vintage, 1980). Gland, 59.

đđđđđđ16 đđđđđđ34 On the trans body and the Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal monstrous, see Susan Stryker, Gland, 7.

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village đđđđđđ35 of Chamounix: Performing George Bataille, Visions of Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1, no. 3 Excess: Selected Writings (1994): 237–54. 1927–1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). đđđđđđ17 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal đđđđđđ36 Gland, 46. Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 37. đđđđđđ18 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal đđđđđđ37 Gland, 48. Franz Kafka, Complete Stories

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST (Shocken Books, 1995).

đđđđđđ38 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 12.

đđđđđđ39 On family by choice and its limits, see Sarah Schulman, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (The New

Press, 2012). 21/21

đđđđđđ40 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 87.

đđđđđđ41 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 47.

đđđđđđ42 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 18.

đđđđđđ43 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 16.

đđđđđđ44 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 47.

đđđđđđ45 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 47.

đđđđđđ46 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 47.

đđđđđđ47 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

đđđđđđ48 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 64.

đđđđđđ49 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 172.

đđđđđđ50 Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Sex,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2008).

đđđđđđ51 Huxtable, Mucus in My Pineal Gland, 184. e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M K z i W k R e a l i t y C b r : O n J u H x

12.21.20 / 21:32:29 EST

The print edition of e-flux journal Beirut, Giza N Projects, Toowoomba can be found at: Center for Contemporary Arts, Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi Trieste Contemporanea, Trieste A Glasgow e-flux, New York U De Appel, Amsterdam ICA, London ICI, New York Bildmuseet, Umeå University Rijksakademie van beeldende Grazer Kunstverein Printed Matter, Inc, New York BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, kunsten, Amsterdam Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Nottingham Contemporary, Utrecht CCA Andratx Medien, Graz Nottingham Casco-Office for Art, Design and M HKA, Museum van Kunsthaus Graz Good Weather, North Little Rock Theory, Utrecht Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen para_SITE Gallery, Graz O V Aarhus Art Building, Århus LABoral Centre for Art and Bemis Center for Contemporary Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 01/01 OMMU, Athens Creative Industries, Grijon Arts, Omaha Vaduz split/fountain, Auckland H Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo Malta Contemporary Art Arthouse at the Jones Center, Kunstverein, Hamburg Modern Art Oxford Foundation, Valletta Austin Museum of Contemporary Art P ARTSPEAK, Vancouver B KIASMA, Helsinki Fondazione March, Padona Fillip, Vancouver Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden- CAST Gallery, Hobart castillo/corrales - Section 7 Morris and Helen Belkin Art Baden INFLIGHT, Hobart Books, Paris Gallery, University of British Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Centre Pompidou, Paris Columbia, Vancouver Centre I Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Motto, Vancouver Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck Paris READ Books, Charles H. Scott MACBA, Barcelona theartstudent at University of BODEGA, Philadelphia Gallery, Emily Carr University of Kunsthalle Basel, Museum fur Arts, Iași Portland Institute for Art and Design, Vancouver Gegenwartskunst, Basel BAS, Istanbul Contemporary Art, (PICA) Kunsthalle Vienna Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing DEPO, Istanbul Publication Studio, Portland Salon für Kunstbuch 21er-Haus, and Guangzhou Galeri Zilberman, Istanbul Museu de Arte Contemporânea Vienna 98weeks, Beirut SALT, Istanbul de Serralves, Porto MARCO, Museo de Arte Cultural Centre of Belgrade J Dox Centre for Contemporary Contemporanea de Vigo Bergen Kunsthall Center for Historical Art, Prague Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), b_books, Berlin Reenactments, Johannesburg Stacion–Center for Vilnius Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ K Contemporary Art Prishtina Montehermoso Kulturunea, DAAD, Berlin La Cucaracha Press, Kansas City AS220, Providence Vitoria-Gasteiz do you read me? Berlin Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt R BAC, Baltic Art Center, Visby Motto, Berlin and Zurich Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Reykjavik Art Museum W NBK, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein Kristiansand Kim?, Riga Garage Center for Contemporary Pro qm, Berlin L A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro Culture, Warsaw Kunsthalle Bern Pavilion, Leeds Capacete, Rio de Janeiro Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Lehrerzimmer, Bern Maumaus, Escola de Artes MACRO Museo d’Arte Sztuki / Zachęta National Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok Visuais, Lisbon Contemporanea Roma Gallery of Art, Warsaw Bielefelder Kunstverein Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon Opera Rebis, Rome Nassauischer Kunstverein (NKV), Eastside Projects, Birmingham OPORTO, Lisbon Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam Wiesbaden MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana Witte de With, Rotterdam Y di Bologna Mostyn, Llandudno S Armenian Center For Kunsthaus Bregenz Architectural Association / Le Grand Cafe, Centre D’art Contemporary Experimental Art, Arnolfini, Bristol Bedford Press, London Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire NPAK, Yerevan Wiels, Brussels Calvert 22, London Salzburger Kunstverein Z National Museum of Chisenhale Gallery, London Artpace, San Antonio Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Contemporary Art Bucharest Gasworks, London Master in Visual Arts, Faculdade Zagreb Pavilion Unicredit, Bucharest ICA, London Santa Marcelina, São Paulo Gallery Nova, Zagreb C Serpentine Gallery, London Kunsthalle São Paulo Institute for Duration, Location Contemporary Image Collective The Showroom, London Sarajevo Center for and Variables, DeLVe, Zagreb (CIC), Cairo Visiting Arts, London Contempoarary Art Postgraduate Program in Townhouse Gallery, Cairo REDCAT, Los Angeles The Book Society, Seoul Curating, Zürich University of the The New Gallery, Calgary LACMA, Los Angeles Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s Arts Wysing Arts Center, Cambridge Casino Luxembourg University, Sherbrooke Shedhalle, Zurich Graham Foundation, Chicago M Press to Exit Project Space, White Space, Zurich The Renaissance Society, Jan van Eyck Academie, Skopje Chicago Maastricht ICA Sofia Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Brumaria, Madrid Performing Arts Forum, PAF, St Overgaden, Copenhagen CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Erme Outre et Ramecourt D Mayo, Madrid White Flag Projects, St. Louis CCA Derry~Londonderry, Derry Pensart, Madrid Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm Traffic, Dubai Ballroom, Marfa IASPIS, Stockholm e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — 3 / 2 đ D i s t r b u o n Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Monash University Museum of Index, Stockholm Lane, Dublin Art, Melbourne Konstfack, University College of Project Arts Centre, Dublin World Food Books, Melbourne Art, Craft and Design, Stockholm Kunstverein für die Rheinlande Librería Casa Bosques, Mexico Tensta konsthall, Stockholm und Westfalen, Dusseldorf City Württembergischer Kunstverein E Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City Stuttgart Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, T F Milan Kumu Art Museum of Estonia, Konsthall C, Farsta Hangar Bicocca, Milan Tallinn Portikus/Städelschule, Milton Keynes Gallery Sazmanab Platform for Frankfurt Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Contemporary Arts, Tehran G Canadian Centre for Stroom Den Haag, The Hague Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Architecture, Montreal Mercer Union, Toronto Łaźnia, Gdansk Garage, Moscow The Power Plant, Toronto Centre de la photographie, Haus der Kunst Munich, Walther Centre of Contemporary Art Genève Koenig Bookshop Znaki Czasu in Torun S.M.A.K, Ghent Museum Villa Stuck, Munich Raygun Contemporary Art

05.24.21 / 06:27:11 EDT