Abstract Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as “the production of human beings” and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno-utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an “undercommons” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small-scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho-abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici.

Abstract On November 23, 2022, three original core members of the all-woman art collective DISBAND—Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, and Martha Wilson—sat down to discuss the therapeutic effects of collaborative performance, the role of comedy in addressing traumatic topics, and the activist potential of feminist collectivizing. Between 1978 and 1982, DISBAND performed in a diverse cultural circuit in downtown New York City where the burgeoning performance art, no wave, and feminist art scenes collided. The multidisciplinary backgrounds of the women in DISBAND matched the hybridity of this cultural circuit; other members included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy (former editor in chief of Artforum), Diane Torr (performance artist, drag king, and gender activist), Barbara Ess (photographer and member of the no wave band Y Pants), and Daile Kaplan (photographer and drummer of The Gynecologists). The women of DISBAND approached the song format fluidly, combining hymn, anthem, cheer, and protest movement (stomping, chanting, clapping) with rapid-fire improvisation. DISBAND's songs reflected the members’ personal and collective political concerns, often focusing directly on female oppression. The women's use of costumes, role-playing, and DIY instruments brought levity and playfulness to what they describe as an apocalyptic moment.

Abstract We are entering a period of abrupt and irreversible environmental change. Currently dominant assumptions about what is politically appropriate and realistic will be obliterated as vast masses of people find the conditions for their collective survival annihilated in coming decades. This article argues that it is imperative we deepen the debate about strategies to provoke revolutionary ruptures within the fossil-capitalist world system. We need viable strategies to generalize mutual aid and disaster communism, and these strategies must provide concrete solutions to the intersecting climate crises on different scales, from the local to the global. The abolition of fossil capital through the building of counterpower—in all senses of that term—should be a key strategic priority of the global movement for ecosocialism. The article discusses the Public Power NY campaign, which has established itself as a potent counterpower within the corporate-dominated US energy system. Constituted on the heels of the campaign's legislative success, the Public Power Observatory is an interdisciplinary formation dedicated to monitoring and building this counterpower and, in so doing, reclaiming the energy commons. The article discusses some of the suite of transmedia tools currently being developed by the Public Power Observatory.

Abstract This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones’ discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action.

Abstract This interview with the intellectual historian Gary Wilder explores the philosophical and methodological theses in his overall work, particularly focusing on his 2022 book Concrete Utopianism. The conversation explores such themes as relationships among solidarity, filiality, and freedom; the forces and fears of normative claims; the definition of an image; and the place of the flesh in a critical Marxism, among others. This is the second conversation in a series initiated by Salma Shamel (PhD candidate at New York University) with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and media theorists whose work is located at the intersection of intellectual history, critical theory, and historical change.

Abstract Spectacle is central to protest efficacy, yet the term performance has a history of being used pejoratively to discredit both protestors and their causes. This deflects analysis from the ubiquitous tactical performances enacted by institutional representatives themselves. Following Cape Town mayor Dan Plato's 2020 dismissal of an eviction resistance on the grounds that it was a “staged act,” this article identifies various repertoires of performative intimidation enacted by local authorities against South African land occupiers during 2019–22. These staged acts were strategically performed with a dual audience in mind: one direct and the other, necessarily, oblique. In recasting such repertoires as rational actions in response to radical acts, municipal officials control the means of identifying and critiquing cynical public performance.

Abstract This article returns to the work of Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman to theorize the spatial imaginary of fascism, a dimension missing from existing analyses of the social psychology of the authoritarian personality. The fascist spatial imaginary can be defined in terms of a Manichean sense of world space, a dominance of spatial binaries such as inside versus outside, mythic/romantic spatial imagery, a paranoid mood, and finally, spatial projection in which internal contradictions are externalized. As a historical case study, the article charts the rise and fall of the American fascist compound and its replacement by more flexible and mobile terrorist cells, connecting this change in fascist spatial formations to underlying shifts in the composition of capitalism. In conclusion, the article turns to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben to argue that, in the last instance, the fascist spatial imaginary cannot conceptualize thresholds, states of indistinction where the inside-outside binary blurs, and that dwelling within the threshold (rather than closing it) might be a tactic to disrupt the power of fascist spatial logics.

Abstract This article works with a definition of care that encompasses expansive models of kinship and collective and communal life. Specifically, it explores representations of such interdependencies in the liminal space of the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) through the literary and artistic creations of two understudied African American artists. Fiction writer Robert Dean Pharr and visual artist Frederick Weston created their work in SROs in New York City beginning in the 1960s, during a time of massive transformation of the city's built environment in the name of urban renewal. Their novels and artwork, respectively, provide some of the only uncovered (to date) literary and cultural representations of New York City's SROs. Pharr's and Weston's works memorialize rituals of survival that center care and interdependencies over and against competitive individualism and a climate of uncare. Further, both explicitly articulate this vision by working with conceptual and material waste. Trash is their literal and metaphoric medium. These artists relied upon what is seen as surplus value by the city. But as Pharr and Weston use it, trash offers a critique of negative assumptions about the lives of SRO residents. The pandemic has shocked us into awareness of our inescapable interdependencies. Therefore, it behooves us to revisit these understudied, early proponents of care—an ethics that today's mutual aid and other liberation movements often center. Pharr's and Weston's documentation and interpretation of care offer us ways to survive within our current environments in crisis without repeating the death-making logic and history of urban renewal.

Abstract What is the ontologizing effect of a care framework? And how can clay cease to insist on itself as an abstracted medium of self-making? The artists Jade Montserrat, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, and Cassils each work clay as a material in their performance. Their toil of working with this organic material signals to the work of self-care as maintenance and ecological maintenance, a sign of the forces of reproduction that may befall marginalized people and communities within the collective care of the earth. Drawing up an analysis of the maintenance work of these three clay performances, this article builds toward an ecocritical framework that takes account of the literal dimensions of what might otherwise fall into the trappings of an abstract, conceptual affinity. That is, existing as conceptually closer to nonhuman nature carries duties and responsibilities, labor and toil, burdens of care, self-care, maintenance, and the sweaty, untidy, unraveling, by nature always unfinished work of recovery. The article explores a notion of transactional care, asking after the distributed ontologizing effect, the widened field of enclosure, and the matrices of legibility that earth-care paradigms might afford.