Sorting it Out

We are all rightly suspicious of the categorical impulse that seeks to sort things out—once and for all. Yet, as we each entropically accumulate objects (in our homes and on our hard drives), it gets hard to manage without some kind of taxonomy. This ambivalence is well captured by an artist such as Bas Jan Ader, whose film Primary time (1974) consists of a cropped figure neurotically arranging and rearranging a bouquet of flower stems according to the primary cadmiums we might associate with a classic Piet Mondrian (first red, then yellow, then white). The artist Susan Hiller, meanwhile, in a text she wrote after a period working in London’s Freud Museum, also gave voice to the forbidden childhood pleasures of taxonomizing (before we learn to put away such childish things):

[Collection] seems to be on the one hand the kind of sheer accumulating process that all children enjoy, you know, a collection of dolls or little cars or comic books or anything like that, and then after that initial kind of accumulation children go into the sorting process in typologies, putting all the green pencils to one side and the red pencils, all the Superman comic books and all the Spiderman comic books, making categories and then some kind of analysis of these categories and all of that. It is a very pleasurable kind of thing, and certainly most people have done that, and then later at a certain point you just chuck out all your collections.1

This fifth issue of the e-flux Index, containing the whole breadth of pieces published by e-flux.com in August and September 2024, comprises nine new categories of its own. These are titled: Is That All There Is?; What a Body Can Do; The Physicists’ Laugh; Dens, clubs, hives, and cells; The Tourist; Flickers; Promethean Shame; Proxies; and Inextinguishable Fires. In the exploratory spirit of Jan Ader or Hiller, more than that of Linnaeus, each of these categories represents an attempt at daisy cutting samples from the dynamic, complex meadow of discourse across the arts, architecture, education, theory, and politics. This deviant taxonomy is not designed to reduce or abstract away from the complexity of critical discourse and artistic activity in the present moment, but rather to do justice to this very heterogeneity.

***

Index #5 commences this time with a long sigh that asks—Is That All There Is?, in a section titled after Peggy Lee’s disquieting 1969 hit song, with its expression of neverending disappointment.2 In Hunter Bolin’s essay on Günther Anders we read of this German antifascist philosopher’s “negative anthropology,” and the uprootedness and indeterminacy that for him defined the postwar condition—the scratch that couldn’t ever quite be itched. Elsewhere, in two reviews of a new Jenny Holzer show and the latest edition of Riga’s “Survival Kit” festival it becomes evident how physical ruins abound in contemporary art and curation, as so many bits of shrapnel lodged in the culture. Elena Vogman writes of the curious feeling of saudade, while Yuk Hui examines the political instrumentalization of widespread fantasies of lost homelands by those who promise to make things “great again.” Finally, Pramodha Weerasekera’s proile of the video artist Pallavi Paul addresses her work with the attentive communities of care which assemble at sites of mourning, loss, grief, and death.

Aside from the inevitabilities of death and taxes, we are still yet to fully figure out What a Body Can Do.3 In the third part of his essay for e-flux Journal “On Paralysis,” Evan Calder Williams hones in on neo-Taylorist discourses of management, which seek to minutely control and discipline laboring bodies, as well as on the bodies that manage to resist them. Aubrey Knox meanwhile takes us into the museum: a sterile space often constructed for “minds on legs” who are presumed to need neither hydration nor rest breaks. In a review from Venice, Kenny Fries introduces a disability arts movement that broke with the stigma of “the poor cripple,” and in his essay for e-flux Film Notes Thotti explores the tactile and haptic dimensions of the moving image, as well as the disembodiment of its chthonic spectators. Finally, in the (onto) political domain, Jörg Heiser finds the rhetorical figure of the decaying Volkskörper (the “people’s body”) at large in Steirischer Herbst ’24, and Boris Groys writes on the cultic linkage between youthful bodies and the genesis of new political orders.

In The Physicists’ Laugh, we peek under the microscope at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Luis Camnitzer asks: How is its dominance ensured through the sidelining of certain questions? In her essay on Indigenous textile art María Iñigo Clavo points to a growing movement of writers and artists countering the occidental dismissal of ancestral and Indigenous knowledge production with a call for greater epistemic diversity. Barbara Hammer analogizes her approach to queer filmmaking according to the particle-wave duality of quantum behaviour, while Artavazd Peleshyan expounds his “unified field theory” of “montage at a distance.” Beyond all this, and behind the closed doors of a remote industrial park, Ina Valkanova writes on obscure and nonspeciic “special economic zones” corralling STEM research to the ends of global capital.

Once we stop ourselves from seeing like a state, in Dens, clubs, hives, and cells the world over, the same question crops up: How to be governed less (like that)?4 Harry Burke’s review of the Busan Biennale shows how this exhibition found one answer amidst the self-governing pirate settlements of Madagascar. Elsewhere, Sol Pérez-Martinez and Ana María Gómez López show how radical 1970s pedagogues and the “self-avowed magicians” of the Amsterdam counter-culture alike suggested the answer might be found in a new style of educational relationship to our environments. For the “Precarious Workers Brigade”—in a text originally published at the height of the 2010 UK student movement and republished online during e-flux.com’s August summer break—the art of not being governed was driven home under truncheon blows: inside the “pedagogy of the kettle.” Meanwhile, in a searching essay, Mila Samdub shows how the ambivalent language of horizontally networked societies is being rhetorically co-opted for centralized ethnonationalist megaprojects in Modi’s India.

From questions of horizontal organizing, Index #5 takes to the runway and prepares for take-off. Each of the pieces gathered in The Tourist asks: What is at stake in fantasies of smooth, frictionless travel? Of being “bound to nothing specific?”5 Debra Lennard reviews the lyrical, participatory work of David Medalla, which celebrated the passing thrills of nomadism, and Juan José Santos the most recent edition of Manifesta in Barcelona—where the city’s blight of overtourism informed the curatorial team’s choice of exhibition spaces. Meanwhile, a trenchant, collectively authored, intervention from Solveig Font, Coco Fusco, Celia Irina González, and others interrogates the risks of “artwashing” attached to cultural tourism for biennials and triennials. Finally, two pieces from a recent e-flux Architecture project on “New Silk Roads,” analyze two infrastructural dreams of cross-border travel and “sanction-proof” trade: the Transhelvetican Canal and the International North–South Transit Corridor (INSTC) respectively.6

In the next category, Flickers, the lights keep going on and off. To meet the reductions in European energy consumption necessary to avoid accelerating climate catastrophe, a winking “modest proposal” from Dehlia Hannah suggests engineering blackouts to “unplug Frankenstein’s monster.” Meanwhile under wartime conditions of actually existing involuntary power shortages, Kateryna Iakovlenko glimpses how shadows have begun to appear everywhere in the work of Ukrainian artists. In a remarkable critique of the early cinema written in 1926 and republished by Film Notes, Virginia Woolf finds herself fighting in the dark with the “agreeable somnolence” of the movie theater. Finally, Furqat Palvan-Zade documents the immense human and ecological cost that lay behind achieving the Soviet project of “power plus electrification” in Central Asia.

From the hydroelectric dams of the remote steppes we proceed to consider the condition of hubristic overreach, or Promethean Shame. “Après moi, le déluge” (after me, the flood)—so drawled Louis XV, in a remark that has come to embody the short-termist indifference of privileged ruling classes then and now. Starting from the abandoned corpse of an early East India Company colonist on the shore of Ascension Island in Jonas Staal’s essay, this section journeys on with Stephanie Sherman into the ruins of the Ford Motor Companies rubber plantations in the Amazon jungle, and encounters through Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s speculative essay the neo-Gothic horror of twenty-first century industries’ Dark Satanic Mills (Why isn’t the factory smoking? Is there a strike?). Confronted with this extractivist landscape, one ravaged by imperial hubris, colonial overreach, and unforseen consequences, Henk Slager shows how various artistic researchers continue seeking out ways to “maintain, continue, and repair our world.”

The post-truth is out there, and in Proxies everything is not quite what it seems. In the first part of a major investigation from Trevor Paglen, we learn about a community of Ufologists coaxed into mania by a sustained secret programme of psychological operations (psy-ops) that spread throughout America in the 1980s. In New York, Orit Gat reviews an exhibition of photographs that brings our gaze to enormous telescopes in Northern California desperately scouring the universe for signs we are not alone. Gary Zhexi Zhang finds something unexpected lurking behind the twee facades of a new mock-Central European development in the Gui’an New Area, in China’s southwestern province of Guizhou. In an Ivy League college, Vijay Masharani writes on a group of students undertaking an innovative poster campaign to express dissent against their institution’s complicity in the Gaza genocide—an intervention staged against a “culture of muteness.”

In January 2025, the Lancet published a peer-reviewed report confirming what many had long suspected: that the official death toll from Israel’s unremitting assault on Gaza since October 2023 had been substantially underreported, and that the actual figure was considerably higher—its authors alighted on 64,260 people, or “approximately one in thirty-five inhabitants” of Gaza’s pre-war population, with the number forced to flee five times this.7The final category of Index#5, Inextinguishable Fires, includes an essay from the French philosopher Étienne Balibar on Gaza, which eloquently articulates the “universal cause” of the growing demand for an unconditional ceaseire.8 Elsewhere, Leo Goldsmith finds the “burning legacy” of Harun Farocki’s unflinching approach to modern warfare somewhat muted by a blue chip gallery presentation, while Azadeh Mashayekhi and Rend Beiruti examine how the recent urban development of Baghdad has been shaped and reshaped by its experience of conflict. Finally, in an increasingly pugilistic historical moment, Index #5 ends with a fragile if ominous moment of calm, as Nathan Brown draws together the repose inside Peter Zumthor’s Saint Benedict Chapel and a rereading of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “celebration of peace.”

—Berlin, January 2025