The one-hundredth notebook is a revised reading of Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev contrasts here the abstract art discourse of the present day with the process of concrete perception and the work of art itself. Even though today one may not be able to follow all of Arnheim’s theses, which are influenced by gestalt theory and perceptual psychology, it is valuable to re-think his theories, as well as his rejection of excessive art criticism, which “talks” the work of art “to death.” Along with a page from a 1956 reprint of the 1954 first edition of Arnheim’s book with handwritten commentaries by art critic J. P. Hodin, the notebook includes excerpts from the expanded and revised edition of 1974, with annotations by Christov-Bakargiev.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (*1957) is Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13).
Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist.

“Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultra-sensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of . . . ? What is the metric of emptiness? What is the measure of nothingness? How can we approach it?” In this notebook, Karen Barad investigates these questions and in her precise analysis couples knowledge of physics with philosophical thought—such as basic approaches to quantum physics and the epistemological ideas of Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Karen Barad (*1956) is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; she has a doctorate in theoretical physics with a concentration on quantum field theory.

This notebook provides an intimate insight into the writing process of Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), using excerpts of a facsimile manuscript of her treatise, “On Identification” (1955) which presents the pioneering child psychologist’s theory of “object relations.” Whereas Sigmund Freud defined man as an individual creature, Klein assumed that individuals are marked by their relationships to other people, primarily through early childhood interaction with the mother. The way she worked out her thesis, which was provocative in the eyes of many of her colleagues, positioned it within the scientific context, and how her writing was inspired by literary sources is documented in reproduced excerpts from the manuscript with handwritten notes, as well as by notes of quotations from philosophy and literature, and a facsimile of a letter from Joan Rivière, in which the supporter, translator, and patron of the Klein School, “expresses her fears of the multiple misunderstandings to which she feels Klein’s work is subjected.”

With an introduction by Jacqueline Rose, Professor at the Queen Mary University of London and a fellow of the British Academy.

The regulation and control of a natural phenomenon such as sleep can be described as paradigmatic for the rationalization of everyday life in the age of capitalist “hyper-modernity.” The modern regime is also sleepless—control points, surveillance cameras, police patrols, and security guards work around the clock without interruption. Using a montage of fragmented remarks and quotations, Penzin approaches the core of a larger planned publication, whose goal is to comprehend the complex connections between capitalism, “metaphysics,” sleep, waking life, and subjectivization, and to examine these issues from a political as well as a philosophical/archaeological point of view.

Alexei Penzin is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a member of the artists and intellectuals group Chto Delat/What is to be done?.

How could it be that in Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thousands of women were accused of witchcraft, horribly tortured, and murdered? This question led Silvia Federici to take a new look at the development of capitalism, as well as at the extent of destruction of societal and gender relations, upon which this development was based. Besides the threat of female sexuality, women’s skills as healers, herbalists, midwives, and brewers of love potions were also considered a menace during a time when the magical understanding of the human body was substituted by a “rational” one that reshaped it into an exploitable workforce. In order to obliterate these threats, the witch hunt became a “regime of terror” over all women, out of which emerged a new model of femininity: sexless, subordinate, confined to a sphere of reproductive activities.

Silvia Federici (*1942) is Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University in New York.

Issa Samb (*1945) is a Senegalese sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, author, critic, and co-founder of the interdisciplinary initiative, Laboratoire Agit-Art, which has had a decisive influence on the country. The notebook contains drawings, facsimile notes, and a cryptic, elliptical text characteristic of the artist, combining loosely assembled quotations from others, such as the politician Aimé Césaire, with thoughts on the state of the world and Africa in particular. As a collection of real experiences, and the thoughts and feelings that triggered them, the text transcends the boundaries of poetry, pamphlet, novel, and diary, while testifying to the artist’s duty to his immediate environment.

With an introduction by Koyo Kouoh (*1967), Artistic Director and founder of RAW MATERIAL COMPANY in Dakar, and Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).

In this notebook, the media theoretician and activist Bifo – Franco Berardi reflects on some of the intentions of dOCUMENTA (13), based on his conviction that the current crisis of the economy and global society will prove a deadly development, as long as culture and lifestyle do not react to the predominant trend of “exhaustion” of physical resources, mental energies, and social organisms. Here, art is assigned a crucial role. Artists frequently recognize and articulate the exhausted state of the world in all of its tragedy: the implosion of finance-based capitalism can be counteracted with frugality instead of accumulation, and friendship instead of rivalry, to create a new Europe 2.0 involving “institutions of exchange and solidarity, instead of competition and greed.” Projects and designs by artists such as Doug Ashford, Man Ray, William Kentridge, AND AND AND, or Gustav Metzger are cited, and accompany the text, as does a facsimile of a letter from the artist Kai Althoff (a dOCUMENTA (13) invitee) to Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; in it, he asks to be freed “from the exhausting task of his involvement.”

Bifo – Franco Berardi (*1949) teaches media aesthetics at the European School of Social Imagination in San Marino.

In this notebook, artist Francesco Matarrese undertakes a new reading of two Modernist texts: In an “extreme encounter” he contrasts “Recentness of Sculpture” (1967) by American art critic Clement Greenberg with an excerpt from “Lotta contro il lavoro!” (“Struggle against Labor!, 1965) by Mario Tronti, an Italian political philosopher and important theoretician of operaism. A “distant encounter,” according to Matarrese, “at one of the highest points . . . imaginable for a discussion of art and politics today.” From his observation and comparison of Greenberg’s concept of Modernism with Tronti’s political Marxist theories, the author develops his thoughts on an abstract or non-art that is capable of being radically outside. Besides a facsimile of Tronti’s original manuscript, the notebook also contains his actual commentary on the question posed to him by Matarrese: “Can you really be outside?”

Francesco Matarrese (*1950) lives in Bari and Rome. In 1978 he published his Telegramma di rifiuto (“a refusal of abstract labor in art”) and began creating an Impossible Catalogue of Non-Works of Art.

While researching his contribution for dOCUMENTA (13), artist Clemens von Wedemeyer came across the film script for Ulrike Meinhof’s Bambule. Fürsorge – Sorge für wen? (Bambule: Care – Care for Whom?), with handwritten notes and drawings by director Eberhard Itzenplitz, who worked with her on the realization of the film for a television channel. However, the broadcast, scheduled for May 1970, was cancelled because the journalist and later co-founder of the RAF had disappeared into the terrorist underground ten days earlier. For Wedemeyer, a script is basically film material that reflects the working environment, the production process, and (self-) censorship. He was particularly interested that in this case it is also a kind of time capsule. When the film was finally broadcast twenty-four years later, the social landscape had been fundamentally transformed. The screenplay closes the temporal gap and bears witness to the discussions held among those involved. In an epilogue, Bettina Röhl (*1962) sheds light on the motivation for the reform-home campaigns as a political program.

Clemens von Wedemeyer (*1974) is an artist living in Berlin.
Bettina Röhl (*1962) is a journalist and author living in Hamburg.

In his text, Salah M. Hassan proposes a new reception of African Marxism, in which he also aims to free Marx from Eurocentrism. During the process of decolonization and the liberation of Africa and other parts of the Third World in the twentieth century—which roughly coincided with the founding of documenta—Marxist ideology became a leading intellectual culture. As examples of the innovative force and creativity of African/Black Marxism, which is relatively ignored by today’s research, Hassan brings together texts by two key figures: the political defence speech “By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor” (1956) by Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub (1927–1971), the founder of the Sudanese Communist Party, who was executed in 1971 with other leading members of the party; and the “Letter to Maurice Thorez” (1956) by Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), the Martinique philosopher, poet, and critic, in which he lays out his reasons for his eventual exit from the French Communist Party.

Salah M. Hassan is Goldwin Smith Professor, Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; he is a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

In his contribution, philosopher Éric Alliez visually translates his planned book on diagrammatic thought and its implications for the field of contemporary art to the design of the notebook and its text. It is his response to the format of this German-English publication series, for which usually texts of 3000 words were commissioned. His contribution consists of three parts: in the first two originally French parts, only some of the words are legible in their English translation (or in original German), while the rest of the original can be deciphered from underneath the grey bars that cover it, so that the entire context can be decoded by the reader only through a continuous back and forth between languages and visibility and invisibility. Part III, on the other hand, is translated into English and German and printed without any “blackouts.” For the author, this intervention embodies the diagrammatic intervention between the (un)speakable and the (in)visible, and reflects what he summarizes at the second of the second part: “This signal-aesthetic (signestésique) policy of art can, in a contemporary sense—which is a strict alternative to its ‘conceptual’ version—be described as art after philosophy. In an ‘after’ (après) that is not an ‘according to’ (d’après) or an analytical finish (apprêt) (à la Kosuth)—to the extent that it is ontologically ‘ahead’ (en avant), along with postconceptual criticism and the clinic of philosophy that it transports.”

Philosopher Éric Alliez is a professor at the CRMEP, Kingston University, London, and at the University of Paris 8.

Notebook 089 is a result of the immense changes that have taken place in the world since 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the utopian neoliberal fantasy of a global capitalist expansion, unfettered by the limits of any borders (psychic, physical, ethical, national, or ecological) and governed through an extension of credit/debt coupled with correlated “structural adjustments,” assumed a new function for nation-states around the world, as a privatizer of gains, and a socializer of costs. In a span of twenty years the insolvency of this paradigm has become evident; not only has an entire world been gripped by conflict, depression, extreme inequalities, and irreversible ecological damage, but, in addition, the economic basis underwriting all of this is unable to continue without the very state intervention that had supposedly been rendered unnecessary. These notes do not recount this story, but rather take place in its wake, while also marking out the process of thinking through this critical epoch, in the midst of collective meetings and discussions leading up to and through what would be called Occupy. Rather than fixing these movements, this notebook collects a series of positions, ideas, and conversations, which trace individual articulations and provide multiple cartographies of events in which people said “no” to regimes of concentrated wealth/power from Cochabamba to Tunis, from Cairo to Fukushima, from Madrid to Athens, from New York to Carbondale, and beyond. Here, one will find a continuation of those struggles for autonomy and the affirmation of different forms of life in note form.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are artists and Agents for dOCUMENTA (13).

How can it be that the Artistic Director of the dOCUMENTA (13) can talk about a certain kind of “obsolescence of the exhibition”? Dorothea von Hantelmann examines this question with reference to a conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and provides some insight in her forthcoming book project. While more museums are being built, more biennials realized, and more visitors than ever are being counted, criticism of the current forms of exhibition grows. The historical development of the museum as an institution shows that the locations in which art is presented are increasingly turning away from the task of “showing objects” (as defined by the modern middle-class society) and looking more and more to the experiential content of things. Yet, the classic works of art condense time into an object and are reliant upon a reception that extends over time—something that is only seldom achieved today. The white cube successfully shifted the focus “from the produced object to the consuming subject,” actually making exhibitions—in the sense of simply putting objects on display—obsolete. Instead, the perception of art must be a “social ritual,” and at the same time the museum’s lines of tradition and legitimating power have to be maintained.

Dorothea von Hantelmann (*1969) teaches art history at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Departing from the curatorial structure of dOCUMENTA (13) and its four states of being—under siege, on stage, on retreat, and in a state of hope—Iwona Blazwick undertakes a historical excursion into the history and concept of the exhibition. The Director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery describes an aesthetic practice of curating that has contributed considerably toward opening up the institutional frameworks of museums and galleries to alternative forms of presentation. On one hand, art increasingly leaves behind the neutral white cube of public exhibition halls, with artists preferring empty industrial buildings or storefronts. On the other, the white cube—such as the one at the Whitechapel Gallery, which is surrounded by the pulsating life of London’s East End—is able to maintain its position as a slower-paced place of retreat, “a refuge,” and can hope for the “invention of new cultural forms.”

Iwona Blazwick (*1945) is Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

How does one act in the midst of a revolution? With the key question, “What shall I do?” the author unravels a chain of thoughts in which she questions her role as an observer of/participant in the Arab Spring and the most recent events in Egypt, while taking the reader with her on a personal journey. Writing, documenting the process of decision making, and telling stories are followed by hesitation, self-doubt, and questioning of deeper meaning, because the “revolution does not need writing.” Documentary fragments are inserted between conceptual treatises and dreamlike sequences, in a prolonged process of self-reflection.

Sarah Rifky is an author and curator living in Cairo; she is Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).

Philosopher Graham Harman repeats Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s allegory from 1927 of the “two tables”: the familiar “table of everyday life” and its rival, the “scientific table” as described by physics. Both are for Harman the results of reductionism and the traditional dichotomy of natural science and humanities. The third and only “real” table belongs to the “third culture,” a culture of art that creates objects, and whose purpose is the comprehension that one cannot understand reality but can only love it. The notebook “The Third Table” introduces the philosophy of speculative realism and alludes to the chance to reanimate philosophy in its original sense of philosophia—the love of science. Graham Harman (*1968) is Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.

For this artist book, the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong had an untranslatable sentence about the act of doing nothing translated into English by various people, companies, a translation office, and Google Translate. The Chinese characters are identical on each paper, but each translation varies a great deal. The sentence and its interpretations circle around notions of doing something, doing nothing, wasting and not wasting, each containing an individual perspective on the value of human activity. With each letterhead, color, and signature, the connotation of the line shifts, and Song Dong’s own handwritten decryption oscillates between doing nothing and common everyday activities: eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, studying, forgetting, rehearsing, and understanding. At the end of the list one finds again the advice “Doing Nothing.” Song Dong (*1966) lives and works in Beijin.

In his notebook, W. J. T. Mitchell examines the visual representations of insanity in contemporary cinema. The staging of insanity in movies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries poses the question of whether cinema, in its hypervisibility, has succeeded in making the gestures of insanity perceptible. The visual theorist Mitchell believes that movies make it possible to see and hear madness “from within.” This seeing is constructed from the side of the medium and culminates in a “madness of the visible,” which allows viewers to be touched by the one who is mad. As soon as the experience of madness is mediated and accessible as a social space, the bound between the “normal” and the “insane” becomes tightened, to a degree where, to paraphrase Foucault, one day we will not know anymore what constitutes insanity. W. J. T. Mitchell (*1942) is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago.

In his notebook, Bruno Bosteels questions the relationship between art and ideology. He suggests an analogy between dream work and art, as the first draws attention to the “reflexive gestures” of and assumptions about art. Against the conception that art per se is equal to deliverance, trespassing, and resistance, Bosteels draws a theoretical outline of the ideology of art and asks whether, instead of its overestimated political subversion, “artistic freedom” could serve as a model for the ideological inscription of the individual into existing structures of society. With the help of Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-François Lyotard, he analyzes how art is bound up with the ruling order and a temporary hallucinatory satisfaction. Bruno Bosteels (*1967) is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

The German inventor Christian Kuhtz is convinced that a good conscience is nothing that can be bought, but something that has to be achieved through intellectual and bodily labor and a fond reflection of the industrial conditions of production. His notebook is a plea for the “do-it-yourself adventure” and for an ecological awareness beyond the capitalist logic of consumption, waste, and so-called eco-technique. The featured illustrations and explanations are taken from his innovative series of booklets “Einfälle statt Abfälle” and provide ideas for a self-sufficient existence. From compost toilets, wind turbines, pottery workshops, and sun collectors to handmade shoes, over the years Kuhtz has drawn inspiring instructions for self-production. Christian Kuhtz (*1958) is an inventor, constructor, and designer of resource-friendly energy solutions. He lives in Kiel.

In his notebook, philosopher Pascal Rousseau uses the medium of hypnosis and an account of its followers to draw a line from the fin de siècle to the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the moment, hypnosis is applied by various contemporary artists and cultural producers as a neo-conceptual method that transcends the polarity of active-passive and reflects on the historical roots of hypnosis. The opinions of the historic prime fathers of hypnosis, like Arthur d’Anglemont (1821–1898), Paul Souriau (1852–1926), and Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), are commented on and discussed in regard to contemporary hypnosis practices in art. As a paradoxical state of being awake, hypnosis influences the creative imagination and the self-perception of its subjects. For more then 120 years it has hovered, as artistic practice and “paradoxical sleep,” between identity, collectivity, and utopia. Pascal Rousseau (*1965) is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

For his notebook, the artist, writer and curator Raimundas Malašauskas stages a fictional séance with five other participants: the burlesque legend Dixie Evans, artist Christodoulos Panayiotou, literary theorist Ruth Robbins, artist Jessica Warboys, and dancer Hélène Vanel. The many-voiced mediumistic text starts with a phone call from actress Sally Rand, who pretends to be President Roosevelt and informs the shocked Dixie Evans about the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. “Catapulting” and “re-performing” have been key words of the neo-burlesque movement in the U.S. and Europe since the 1990s. Participants talk about the moment of re-performing clothes, bodies, and tropes, when excitement sparks through both sexual and social attraction.

In her short stories, the author Lydia Davis looks at the phenomena of the everyday. Her prose text “Two Former Students” compares the studies at a university or academy with living. The narrator describes a younger and an older man who walk “back and forth under the streetlight” at night. The younger had traveled to Europe; the older is a veteran of war and deaf in one ear. A woman is watching them from a window. Both are aware that the woman might be watching them, and the older man asks the younger to “go away, out there, in the snow, at night.” He is afraid that they could be labeled former students by the woman. And indeed, in the end the narrator’s voice reveals that they were in the woman’s mind “two former students,” rather than each being “fully himself.” Lydia Davis (*1947) is a writer and translator; she lives near Albany, New York.

In slow motion, the writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940–1975) zooms down a side street off a long, paved street, along whitish-gray facades, dark front doors, the black-green silhouettes of pot plants behind windowpanes, and finally into one of the yellow-lit embrasures. On the armchair in a middle-class living room lies an open newspaper—the photo shows a group of people looking up at a window. The short story “An Incident” describes an evening in September, somewhere in Germany: a quiet residential neighborhood, an apartment building, a brawl in front of a restaurant, a drunken man, a suicide attempt, a fire-department operation, passersby and onlookers. A woman in the settlement has locked herself in, barricaded the door with closets, and, supposedly, turned on the gas. The literary trip works with perspective shifts and déjà vu. It is accompanied with images by Rosemarie Trockel: associative black-and-white photographs from the years 1995 to 2011, among them film stills and details of artworks, fragmentary and cryptic like the story Trockel has chosen for her notebook.

In his notebook, quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger provides insight into a crucial phase of his scientific research. It features excerpts from his personal notebooks from March to June, 1993—a time in which he undertook early experiments with multiphoton states and entangled photons. The key terms for this emerging quantum-information technology were quantum computation, quantum communication, quantum cryptography, quantum cloning, and quantum teleportation. Zeilinger offers us a view of what is likely the first sketch of the teleportation scheme, notations of multiports and entanglements between two photons in higher-dimensional Hilbert spaces. For non-experts in this field, Zeilinger’s solid introduction, and his drawings, codes, and calculations, open a door to a world. Anton Zeilinger (*1945) is Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and Director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Science; he is a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

“Art is thinking but is not theory.” In her notebook, Chus Martínez unsettles, theoretically and visually, the constraint of permanently assigning meaning in the public as well as in the private realm. Martínez emphasizes the need for collective thinking that can create a lively and—in its ambiguity—productive condition: knowledge. She thus undertakes a redefinition of “artistic research,” a practice that can initiate a real public debate in society and that produces errors and nonsense in an age of consensus. “Unexpress the Expressible” asks about the role of contemporary art in our imaginations and our actions within or against the rules of society. Chus Martínez (*1972) is Member of the Core Agent Group and Head of Department for dOCUMENTA (13).

“Placing the artist, not the art”—Alanna Heiss, founder and longtime curator of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, reveals her crucial credos in her notebook “Placing the Artist.” According to Heiss, the primary task of a curator is to remain neutral. Against the idea of “curating-as-art,” Heiss highlights the importance of placing the artist and his or her work in the center. The curator’s role is to provide space for the artist to make coherent statements and establish a dialogue with the public. This position comes along with the discretion, help, and carefulness of the curator, who should basically act like a “concierge” (analogous to the commissaire, the French word for “curator”), who works in the background. Alanna Heiss founded and was Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from 1976 to 2008 and is Director of the Clocktower Gallery and its radio station, ARTonAIR.org, New York.

Since 2004/5, the artist Dinh Q. Lê has collected watercolors and ink drawings of Vietcong artists from North and South Vietnam. In his notebook, in an interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, he describes the historical and autobiographical correlations of his intense passion for collecting these drawings. In 1978, at the age of ten, Lê fled his hometown, Hà Tiên, with his family from the Communist regime and the Khmer Rouge. In 1997, after two decades in the U.S., he returned to Vietnam and settled there. The drawings that make up his collection have a melancholic mood. They depict people in idealized landscapes, as if they were looking for normality and natural life in the years of war. These very personal sketches and their “politics of form” suggest another reality against “official” propaganda images; they reveal a collective condition of waiting, a uniting hope. Dinh Q. Lê (*1968) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (*1957) is Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13).

On the basis of a 3-D postcard of the Twin Towers entitled Cosmos & Damian (1974) by Joseph Beuys, the author David Levi Strauss examines Beuys’ prophetism and the means of his “art of healing.” Twenty-seven years before the World Trade Center became the target of an international fundamentalist terror group, Beuys recognized the towers as a symbol of a cold “death zone” where capital rules. Beuys named those sibling wounds of society after two historical traveling healers, the Arab twins and Christian saints Cosmas and Damian, by inscribing their names over the towers. Tracing the origin of the Indo-European myth, Levi Strauss travels through art history and fills Beuys “therapeutic magic of images” with a new life. Author David Levi Strauss is Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The American artist Marc Lombardi (1951–2000) produced visual networks and diagrams that made visible the hidden connections between political and economic processes, corporations, and individuals. This notebook does not feature his well-known delicate drawings and networks, but reveals his research and thinking material. The former librarian Lombardi, known for his meticulousness, sorted and archived his material, drawn from publicly accessible media sources, through a system of index cards, reprinted here. In her introduction, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev describes her personal experience of that outstanding artistic oeuvre, whose lines and connections are subordinated to the facts of financial scandals, terror attacks, and (economic) crime, while revealing names.

“30 years later we find that we are all still like we were in ’45.” The artist, experimental poet, and writer Nanni Balestrini (*1935) describes in frenzied flashbacks the miserable living and working conditions in postwar Italy, as well as the gruesome and traumatic experiences in an SS prison camp in Germany from the perspective of a disaffected but fierce survivor. He reports in detail and without punctuation. After being rejected upon his return due to his political beliefs, he finds work in the mines of Carbonia. The ruthless exploitation of the workers, and the impenitent Fascists, recall memories of war and unleash his Communist ideals. The strike of the mine workers of Carbonia becomes “his strike,” as Communism is for him the only possibility to unite with his comrades and to break the silence. “Carbonia (We Were All Communists)” is the testimony of a man who lived different lives in Sardegna, Germany, and Australia, and record of his unconditional fight for justice.

The text of this notebook is an excerpt from Furio Jesi’s book Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta (Spartacus: Symbol of the Revolt) of 1968–69. Jesi was preoccupied with the interdependence of myth and politics. His thinking was based in part on the questioning of the thesis of mythologist Karl Kerényi (1897–1973). The revolt of the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), which started on December 29, 1918, with a national congress in Berlin, for Jesi constitutes the starting point for a reflection about the specific temporality of “revolt” in contrast to that of “revolution” or “party.” In the moment of revolt, historical time is suspended and makes room for a symbolic space-time, in which an entire collective can find refuge. Thereafter, however, “normal time” returns, which serves the ruling political system. The “being out of time” of revolt, as Andrea Cavaletti calls it in his foreword, constitutes a paradoxical collective experience, which inspired Jesi to an ingenious political theory. Andrea Cavaletti (*1967) teaches Aesthetics and Contemporary Literature at Università Iuav di Venezia. Furio Jesi was born in Turin in 1941 and died in Genoa in 1980. He taught German Literature at the University of Palermo.

“To understand how love can be the central, constitutive mode and motor of politics” is philosopher Michael Hardt’s primary aim in his notebook. “The Procedures of Love” looks at love as a project with its own temporality, which involves processes of composition and decomposition. A political concept of love revives the revolutionary event and the ceremony of return, also outside the private realm. In this sense, love is examined as a phenomenon, which is intimate and social at the same time, embracing multiplicities and choreographing movements. Following Jean Genet (1910–1986), we must “open up the field” for events in a ritualized way, says Hardt, in order to introduce them and “make” them. In addition, a political connotation of the term “love” can only become effective through institutions that make the ceremonies of recurrence an experience. Ceremonies transform the temporality of events, as the recurrence of social encounter happens each time unforeseeably, despite familiar patterns. Political philosopher and literary theorist Michael Hardt (*1960) is Professor of Literature and Italian Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Hannah Ryggen was born in 1894 in Malmö, Sweden, and lived until her death on a farm in Norway. Over fifty years, the artist wove tapestries with critical contemporary motifs. In her introduction to Ryggen’s notebook, Marta Kuzma recapitulates the crucial phase at the beginning of the world economic crisis of 1928, when the rise of fascism in Europe caused an existential dilemma for many people. Walter Benjamin described the precariousness of the situation with the figure of a “little hunchback,” as a metaphor for the broken and desperate situation in which many Europeans were stuck. Instead of falling into resignation, the pacifist, communist, and feminist Ryggen materialized her thoughts about her time in an unsuspicious medium. In a deeply ideological and fear-driven time, she hung her hand-woven tapestries that depicted and reordered the power constellations and atrocity of society in dreamlike sceneries outside her window during the German occupation of Norway. With images, a short autobiography of the artist, and a textile-coloring recipe. Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) was a Norwegian artist, born in Sweden. Marta Kuzma (*1964) is a curator and lecturer, and Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo; she is a member of dOCUMENTA (13)’s Core Agent Group.

“Love involves not being dead for the other, and the other not being dead for one,” Judith Butler writes about the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and love. On the basis of his short essay “Love” (1797–98) and the “Fragment of a System” (1800), she examines Hegel’s early reflections on love. According to Butler, the key lies in reversibility, as it happens that in Hegel’s writing, just as in love, the authorial voice changes direction and makes a statement that puts the previous one in question. Butler states that love has a logic “defined by its indefinite openness.” Self-hatred and self-love, the relationship between the individual and the world, between the living and the dead, the emergence of the material world and love as dispossession of the self, are some of the topics of this essay about the “root of our own being.” Philosopher Judith Butler (*1956) is Professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature Departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York.

“Poetry puts language into a dream state, thereby reassuring itself of the impinging realities.” With this line, which is central not only to Durs Grünbein’s poetic project but to his aesthetics as a whole, literary critic Michael Eskin begins his introduction to the poet’s dream work. By sharing parts of his meticulous dream index, complete with notes, Grünbein remembers a multitude of dreams—of his daughters swimming out of their apartment like mermaids, of a picnic with his parents next to a bloodbath in Cameroon, of a seductive woman on a plane, of a toad with palatal eyes. “Dreams endow existence with poetic density, arming us with the impenetrability of the moment,” notes Grünbein. Gestures are the most indecipherable element in dreams—a wink of the eye can turn the whole drama in a completely new direction. The notebook “Dream Index” draws from lived experience and brings poetry back into daily life. Durs Grünbein (*1962) is a poet, translator, and essayist living in Berlin. Author Michael Eskin is co-founder and Vice President of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., New York.

Is the middle class our new revolutionary class? In his notebook, Brian Holmes attempts to connect Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Spanish “Indignados,” and the uprisings in North Africa. For Holmes, the link lies in the financial system—connecting the places where capital is jeopardized and the regions from which it is extracted. The transnational movement of demonstrators, and the dictates of financial capital, are analyzed from a cultural-critical perspective. Using the image of a casino, Holmes describes how after 1968 a generation of “middle-class heroes” emerged who approved the suppression of revolution. Today, the members of this “new class” are themselves subjected to speculating capital—and now a fear of the future, and loans and mortgage payments, force them, too, out onto the streets. Brian Holmes is a cultural critic and autonomous researcher, based in Chicago.

“My sickness is my power.” This notebook is written from the perspective of a two-hundred-year-old human being, who grew up in the mid-nineteenth century and mistakenly relied on contemporary thinkers such as Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Now, in the twenty-first century, he corrects his misapprehensions and describes his thinking as “a form of reasoning grounded in skepticism rather than in certitude.” Through this medium, Critical Art Ensemble announces an earnest warning: the currently circulating rhetoric shows patterns of argumentation that are problematic in similar ways to discredited evolutionary theories. The current problem is double-ended: on the one hand, “sickness” is associated with individuals or a “susceptible” population group; on the other hand, the backbiting politics of “prophylaxis” obscure the real causes. Critical Art Ensemble (CCA) was founded in 1987 by five media practitioner.

This notebook is a philosophical and cultural-critical examination of Israel’s policy of occupation. The architect Eyal Weizman uses the term “forensic,” derived from the Latin forensis, “forum,” to reconstruct the history of attacks on and violations of buildings. Drawing from the fields of judicial medicine and psychiatry, “Forensic Architecture” serves in revisiting damaged Palestinian houses and ruins. Weizman, who is a member of the collective Decolonizing Architecture, founded in 2007, describes Forensic Architecture as “the archaeology of the very recent past” and “a form of assembling for the future.” Forensic Aesthetics mirror relationships and logics of action, objective and subjective probabilities; what is needed is an interpreter who addresses the public in the name of a destroyed home. Eyal Weizman (*1970) is an architect based in London; he runs “Forensic Architecture,” a European Research Council project, at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Claire Pentecost’s “Notes from Underground” uncover a peculiar and trans-disciplinary knowledge about soil, its preferences and inhabitants. We learn forgotten and new things about composting, the rehabilitation of lifeless soil, bacterial molecules that produce collective signals, and the radical proximity of two organisms when an undigested organism lives inside another. In her deeply grounded critique, which she illustrates with drawings of an “internal world,” the artist and activist Pentecost reflects upon the threat to collective identity and the dreams of human beings within capitalism. In her “turning around,” analyzing and mixing agricultural, ecological, and molecular micro-processes beyond the background of current socio-political developments allows her to germinate ideas regarding the conflicted interrelatedness of “nature” and economy. Claire Pentecost (*1956) is an artist and writer based in Chicago.

During the Soviet regime, the artist, author, and philosopher Vyacheslav Akhunov hid his notebooks in stables and barns, in murals and matchboxes. For the artist, the notebook is an autonomous artistic medium. Between 1973 and 2000, he archived more than three thousand of his ironic, visionary drawings and collages on paper for two hundred projects. In this notebook, one finds excerpts from works dated between 1974 and 1982. Leeza Ahmady’s introduction to Akhunov’s drawings and collages, which the artist refers to as “art-facts,” interprets and reveals these as sensitive forebodings of the fall of the socialist era and as a contemporary document conceived to outlast the present. Vyacheslav Akhunov was born in 1948 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. Leeza Ahmady is a freelance curator living in New York; she is the director of the New York Asian Contemporary Art Week and Agent of dOCUMENTA (13).

In his notebook, Hrach Bayadyan, one of Armenia’s leading cultural critics, re-conceptualizes the “post-Soviet.” Following the sociologist Manuel Castell, he reminds us that the term alone means nothing but being “ex-” and expressive of a distance from the Soviet past. Beyond the specific history of Armenia’s century-long colonization, Bayadyan looks at the Armenian situation through the lens of postcolonial theory. Due to the lack of dialogue with the past, the relationships between East and West Armenia, and the differences between Soviet and diaspora Armenia, have until today been neglected. “Becoming Post-Soviet” constitutes the beginning of a project to write and speak “from the inside” of this entanglement. Cultural critic Hrach Bayadan (*1957) lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia; he teaches Media and Cultural Studies at the Yerevan State University.

Jolyon Leslie tells the century-old tale of an Afghan garden named Qal’a-ye Fatuh. This garden and its adjunct building are witnesses to the life of Alim Khan, Emir of Buchara, who spent twenty years of exile in this retreat. After Afghanistan’s occupation by the Russian Empire in 1868, and attacks by the Turkish general lieutenant Enver Pascha, Alim Khan’s home, Fergana, receded into a dim distance. Many traces tell about the original elegance and beauty of the edifice and its garden, as well as about the violent events and battles that happened there. Since 1996, members of Al-Qaeda have settled in the neighborhood, and, according to Leslie, new craters are to be found in the landscape—carved by “smart rockets.” “The garden of exile” is to be studied like an organic notebook, the pages of which are grounded in the earth. Jolyon Leslie (*1956) is an architect based in Afghanistan since 1989.

For his notebook, Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has compiled excerpts and notations from his personal sketchbook, as well as associative photographs. Cruzvillegas playfully picks up notions of sense, sensibility, reason, and fantasy—the four basic terms of the “human mind and soul” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe built his chromatic circle of 1809—and combines them with handwritten thoughts about the structural and creative aspects of artistic production. This notebook is a colorful collage of ideas opposing the appropriation of art by capitalism, against which Cruzvillegas reacts with collective, living, and “definitely unfinished” social sculptures—involving people, animals, and things—that come to life in the streets. Abraham Cruzvillegas (*1968) is a member of the International Taoist Tai Chi Society; he lives and works Mexico City.

Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro addresses the prejudices against “binary thought” associated with structural ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Viveiros de Castro, the key to deconstructing this—for him, wrongly discredited—scheme lies in the axis of a community: “Our problem is to determine conceptually the nature of the internal meridian line that separates the two moieties.” This notebook relocates the meridian line again and again, arguing that for Lévi-Strauss, the binary system was anything but a simplifying “modus operandi.” Lévi-Strauss had already expounded the problem of dualism during his lifetime and had used dual structures to think about notions of incommensurability, chromaticism, and dynamics. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (*1951) is a Brazilian anthropologist and Professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, was a writer who, as a young adult, developed a deep interest in mathematics, in particular in Charles Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine. This notebook includes a full reproduction of her famous “Note G,” one of several notes that supplemented her translation of a text by Luigi Federico Menebrae about Babbage’s research. Note G contains an algorithm that functions as a software to enable Babbage’s Engine—which did not yet exist—to perform computing processes and is widely regarded as the first computer program. While Note G expresses the author’s doubt about a computer’s capability to develop what we would call “artificial intelligence,” in other places she foresees that computers could go beyond pure calculation. In her thinking, Lovelace “managed to combine scientific rationalism with subjective imagination.” Additionally to Note G, this notebook contains selected transcripts and reproductions of letters exchanged between her and Babbage, as well as her sonnet “The Rainbow.” Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an English writer. Joasia Krysa is a curator, academic and Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).

In this notebook, Stephen Muecke describes the works of the Aboriginal artist Butcher Joe from Goolarabooloo, who visualized key ideas of his culture in the drawings reproduced here. They show places where the dead visit the living, events at the threshold between waking and sleeping: legends of dreamtime that explain how everything came into existence and that constitute the rules according to which people live. We see dancing, hunting, and working people, spirits, animals, skeletons—particular scenes from history, partially translations of visual and acoustic memories, in which spirits can turn into humans and humans into animals. As a portrait of a particular Indigenous Australian aesthetic, these drawings and the descriptive essay in the notebook allow the reader a personal insight into the world and life of the people and their mythical principles, according to which all—be it animal, human, or plant—is viewed in its potential to transform. Butcher Joe Nangan (1902–1989) was an artist from Broome, West Australia. Stephen Muecke is a writer based in Sydney.

The topic of this notebook by Jill Bennett is life in the anthropocene, the present eon, which is characterized by human activities. Derived from geology, the term anthropocene circumscribes an era that began with the industrialization and spans a vanishingly brief time of 250 years, in which, however, a paradigm change has occurred. Its implications have generated some resistance, uttered, for example, when denying that climate change, a decisive trait of the anthropocene, is a man-made phenomenon. The comprehensive change in our understanding of the world has had effects on how we eat, shop, and move around, but it also offers the potential for inventions in the socio-ecological systems: when ecological thinking begins to influence our ways of working, it may eventually lead to a transdisciplinary revolution. Bennett names examples of transdisciplinary processes from the realm of art, such as Amy Balkin’s work Public Smog (2004–ongoing), which incorporates the earth’s atmosphere. In the end, it is the actively recognized paradigm change that opens possibilities for innovations. Jill Bennett is a writer, researcher and cultural critic based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, Sydney.

In this notebook, philosopher and writer Daniel Heller-Roazen poses the question, “Might language guard something of its own, hidden in everything that is said?” With his mastery of language and its cryptic, coded nature, he dives into the fundamental question and mystery of speech and “text” itself. Heller-Roazen refers to the ninth-century thinker Al-Jāḥiẓ and his notion of guarding a secret and holding the tongue, and his idea that we need two skills to handle a secret: how not to speak at the wrong time, and how not to lose a secret by divulging it. A secret affects the bodies’ organs and physical being, mainly the tongue and chest, and through a discussion of Al-Jāḥiẓ’s methods, the life of the secret is revealed: from how it traverses the body, seeping into every movement and gesture, every glance of the secret keeper, to how, once it escapes the tongue into a single ear, it is no longer a secret and becomes something else—public scandal, private shame—or at best passes into another discourse altogether, information.          Daniel Heller-Roazen (*1974) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

In a lifetime of work with farmers around the world, George Chan, the father of integrated farming, has been searching for a formula that would transform “waste into wealth”. He brought together their ancient knowledge with new technologies and elaborated a theory based on circularity and sustainable recycling where farming can exist with zero input and zero emissions—the Integrated Farming and Waste Management System. For the so-called Dream Farms, a sustainable cycle was developed using material and energy in different stages, such as raising chickens and using their waste as extra nutrients for the plants, effecting an increase of crop and gain. Chan has been a pioneer of our modern take on non-pollution and bio-farming, but unfortunately his revolutionary model comes out of site-specific research and exchanges and thus remains for the most part unknown. This notebook brings together key ideas of this committed thinker in the form of drawings, diagrams, notes, and photographs, which are introduced by Fernando García-Dory, who has carefully compiled these papers in close exchange with Chan. George Chan (*1923) is an environmental engineer. Fernando García-Dory (*1978) is an artist and agro-ecologist living between Madrid, Berlin, and the northern Spanish mountains.

During their exile from Nazi Germany, an intensive exchange unfolded between the writer Thomas Mann and the forty-years-younger philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. The two letters from Mann to Adorno, reproduced here, from 1943 and 1945, are associated with Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Adorno was his adviser for questions concerning musicology and musical theories, in particular about the twelve-tone-technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg, which Mann used in his novel—without mentioning its creator. This led Schoenberg to accuse the writer of plagiarism—the novelist Enrique Vila-Matas refers to the story in his introduction. Mann responds to the charge with a lack of understanding, as he thought his principle of montage, in the sense of appropriation without identification of its source, and which he explains in detail in the later of the two letters, was “perhaps outrageous” but finally legitimate. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a novelist and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was a sociologist and philosopher. Enrique Vila-Matas (*1948) is an author living in Barcelona.

“We live in a world of our own construction . . ., and I want to look at that strangeness in the framework of material,” the artist Jimmie Durham says. Taking the form of notes from a series of lectures given in Venice, Durham explores our relationship to the world through materials, whether they are concrete substance such as wood, oak, petroleum, or plastics, or abstract, theoretical matters such as math, prime numbers, or computing. His notebook breathes life into the notion that “our knowledge of the world comes from the way we are constructed. We construct the world as we are constructed”. By using wood and petroleum as his focal points, he leads us through the history of the construction of Venice, to a sculpture and its built-in mistake, and finally to how the tissue in fish is filled with so much plastic that a scientist friend no longer eats the animals.      Jimmie Durham (*1940) is an artist, political activist, and writer living in Berlin and Rome.

In a self-reflexive narrative, the Egyptian author and human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi questions the meaning of homeland versus birthplace in a controversial location such as contemporary Cairo. She weaves personal childhood memories into the shifting Egyptian political climate, as well as the new social, intergenerational relations that currently exist. The recent trial of Mubarak, and her personal perceptions and feelings watching it, become the backdrop for El Saadawi’s notebook contribution. In a literary twist, El Saadawi fixates on the broken television set in her house, which is broadcasting Mubarak’s trial, as a metaphor and a way of marking the passing of time of the various presidential regimes, while revealing her own perceptual shifts from guilt and blame to “gleams of childish, mysterious hope.” El Saadawi reveals the trial as a play that is regulated by the media and scriptwriters; while themes of heritage, time, love, and the difficulty of recording your life’s work through writing slowly emerge. Nawal El Saadawi (*1931) is an Egyptian feminist writer, novelist, activist, physician, and psychiatrist living in Cairo.

The Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim delivers in his notebook an insight into two of his novels, which are written in a rather documentary style, telling a personal story within a political system using excerpts from newspapers or speeches. One of the protagonists, Dhat, experiences suffering and tragedy in their life related to the political situation in her country. The other, Warda, dedicates her life to the liberation of humanity. Ibrahim, who is known for his radical views and his open critique for which he was imprisoned in Egypt during the 1960s, asks himself how he can escape contemporary Egyptian political and social life through his constructed characters. This notebook’s point of departure confronts the post-1970s and -’80s Egyptian society with its changes in social justice and its devaluation of education and culture. In constructing a self-reflexive examination of his own work, Ibrahim explores gender roles in Arab society and suggests how the sense of hope for the future of Arab countries could be fulfilled through the actions of young women.   Sonallah Ibrahim (*1937) is a novelist living in Cairo.

In times when the exchange with the world largely takes place on the Internet, the search engine Google primarily regulates the parameters and formats of this conversation. For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google thus takes on the traditional role of philosophy and religion. Philosophical precursors for the dissolution of different kinds of discourses, the emancipation of words from grammar and accordingly their equalizing, as Google produces it, span from Plato to Saussure’s structuralism to Derrida’s deconstruction. Another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde’s production of word clouds that are freed from their context, in particular the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. As a result of the radical freeing of words, Groys names “the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information—the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space.” Philosopher, art critic, and media theorist Boris Groys (*1947) is Global Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University.

Cultural critic Andrew Ross, who is a supporter of an alternative globalization approach, focuses in his texts on topics such as precarious cognitive labor, the organization of work, and urban society. In this notebook he questions the price we have to pay for the never-ending increase in efficiency and productivity and analyzes the correlation between self-exploitation in the Western economic system and the exploitation of the human workforce in Asia. Many freelance and creative producers spend all their waking hours on their laptops—their electronic notebooks—which allow them to work anytime and anywhere, leading to mistaken ideas about flexibility and independent work hours. Ross provides an example of the harsh labor conditions of the manufacturers of these machines in an investigation into the largest private employer in China, the Taiwanese company Foxconn, where a series of suicides occurred among the mostly adolescent workers. The most important medium of the only supposedly free, individually defined labor in Western neoliberalism owes its existence to degrading work conditions in other parts of the world. Andrew Ross (*1956) is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

In this notebook,artist Ana Prvacki and scholar Irina Aristarkhova discuss the social idea of the greeting and the gestures and ethics of hospitality. As an artist of Romanian heritage, Prvacki recalls stories of her grandmother’s generous nature even in dark times, and her childhood mistake of putting snow in the boots of guests she didn’t like. Prvacki’s personal approach to etiquette allows a certain history of artistic and political hospitality methods to be portrayed: from the faux pas of Borat, and the Singapore Kindness Movement, to Daniel Bozhkov’s Training in Assertive Hospitality project. Aristarkhova’s voice adds a theoretical lineage of the history and ethics of hospitality, from Immanuel Kant and his concept of “civility” to luminaries such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King. Due to different approaches to hospitality protocols, awkward tensions will happen, but as Aristarkhova says, “dealing with difference is better than pretending we are all exactly alike.” Ana Prvacki (*1976) is an artist based in Singapore and New York. Irina Aristarkhova (*1969) holds a joint appointment in Women’s Studies and Visual Art at Pennsylvania State University.

Artist Ida Applebroog uses a wide variety of media to express themes of struggles within gender and political roles, as well as sexual-identity issues. The publication Scripts is a facsimile of excerpts from one of her personal notebooks containing a compilation of handwritten notes, storyboards, mise-en-scène drawings, and musical notations. Underlining, as well as annotations in different colors, shows that the artist has intensively worked through her notes several times. Some of the fragments on these pages read: “Silences are the undercurrent of all dramatic events.” “Each performance should be more of silence than words.” “Any silence must be punctuated by sound eventually.” For Applebroog, the staged scenes function as “a mode of narration,” and “the narratives are not meant to be truths; the characters simply are.” With only a few words and brief instructions, Applebroog develops stage plays of great dramatic density that she simultaneously comments on, questions, and interprets, thus delivering an insight into her working method. Ida Applebroog (*1929) is an artist living in New York.

Avery F. Gordon was invited by the artist Ines Schaber to, collaborate on her project, titled The Workhouse. In this notebook, Gordon is engaged in a portrait of Breitenau, the twelfth-century Benedictine monastery, located twenty kilometers south of Kassel, that has been used throughout its history for various purposes, and since the nineteenth century has been a site of confinement and “correction.” Turned into a workhouse in 1874, it subsequently became a concentration camp in Nazi years, then a girls’ reformatory until the 1970s, and is now an open psychiatric residential treatment facility and a rehabilitation center, as well as a Gedenkstätte memorial and research center. During a site visit with Schaber, Gordon, with the help of the memorial’s cofounder and director Gunnar Richter, immerses herself in Breitenau’s history and recalls its function as a place for the enclosure of “disobedient social subjects” and their ideas, developing “a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner.” Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Visiting Faculty at the Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev reflects on the historical as well as personal notion of destruction and art, as well as on the potential healing power that art can have. Guiding us through a web of etymological, historical, philosophical, personal, and art historical references, she takes the reader from Melanie Klein’s thinking about the dyadic relationship between mother and child and Walter Benjamin’s reflection on Klee’s Angelus Novus, to object studies starting with Man Ray’s metronomes, his Objects of Destruction, and Lee Miller’s photographs from the end of World War II, to Gustav Metzger’s “Manifesto of Auto-Destruction,” to melted objects from the Beirut National Museum and the blown-up Bamiyan Buddhas, which are accompanied by Michael Petzet’s report of ICOMOS’s response to the destroyed monuments, followed by artworks by Michael Rakowitz and drawings with poems by Anna Boghiguian, in addition to a postscript by art historian Dario Gamboni on the destruction of art, the concept of “world heritage,” and the legislation around it. For Christov-Bakargiev, “the sphere of art is poised on the edge of the private and of history, and becomes the location where one can experiment the possibilities of being on the edge of the anthropocentric, where the rubble lies.” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (*1957) is Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13).

Fear of death and the wish for immortality were central notions in Dalí’s lifetime: his older brother, who was also named Salvador, died just nine months before the artist was born. This particular sensibility became even more prevalent after the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Dalí’s initial plan to have his body frozen after death was replaced by a deep fascination with the sciences, in particular the discovery of the structure of DNA, which he believed to be the central component in our understanding of life. The previously unpublished notes by Dalí reproduced here contain anecdotes about author Stefan Zweig, who helped introduce the artist to Sigmund Freud. Additionally reprinted is an article from Scientific American, a magazine regularly read and commented on with handwritten notes by Dalí. In his introduction, Ignacio Vidal-Folch writes about Dalí’s search for immortality, and different views on the topic from scientists and authors such as Ray Kurzweil, Elias Canetti, and Eugène Ionesco.  Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was a Spanish artist. Ignacio Vidal-Folch (*1956) is a journalist and author living in Barcelona.

This notebook is a homage of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to the French author, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), who passed away this year. Glissant, one of the most influential figures of the French-speaking Caribbean and a pioneer of postcolonial thinking, called “attention to means of global exchange which do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge”. Obrist encountered Glissant at the beginning of his curatorial path, following a recommendation by Alighiero Boetti, then through his books, and later in person. In the introduction, Obrist creates a multilayered portrait of the intellectual, laying out some of his key concepts: the creolization of the world, “archipelic thought,” and the museum as archipelago, as well as utopia. These ideas are expressed in a personal tone by Glissant in a selection of title pages of his books with drawings, notations and poetic dedications that are reproduced here in facsimile. Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a French writer, poet, and philosopher. Curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist (*1968) is Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

In his work David Link generates (apparently) interactive projects, at the interface between art, science, and technology. For LoveLetters_1.0, Link reconstructed a functional replica of one of the earliest programmable computers, the Ferranti Mark I, and an equally early program, invented in 1952 by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester. To produce computer-generated love letters, written using a built-in random generator. Anonymously addressed to “Darling Love” or “Jewel Duck,” the letters talk to the reader in a surprisingly human and tender way. In his introduction, Geoff Cox highlights the question, already suggested by the apparently contradictory title of this notebook, Machine Heart, of whether the human capacity for thinking and feeling has been captured by machines. David Link (*1971) is an artist and media archaeologist; he lives and works in Cologne. David Link (*1971) is an artist and media archaeologist; he lives and works in Cologne. Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher at the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University, Denmark.

In his notebook, the author and journalist Dietmar Dath captures ten personal moments of art and moments of life. They are about relationships between people, their ways of dealing with one another, communication, friendship, love, art, and criticism. The protagonists include a weasel, Dath’s daughter, his father, his friend Mareike, and the artist Jeronimo Voss, who engaged in a dialogue about art with Dath while preparing an artwork for dOCUMENTA (13). In the end, the thoughts of a weasel, who is living in the author’s fridge, crystallize into a true recognition: “Not finishing flourishes in art. It is a kind of succeeding. Failure does not come into it. That is because art is there to invent goals, but not to reach them. An exhibition opening is celebrated and talked about. But its end is passed over in silence.” Author and translator Dietmar Dath (*1970) is Editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; he lives in Frankfurt/Main, Freiburg, and Leipzig.

For Search, novelist and artist Matias Faldbakken went into the log of his different hard drives and extracted parts of his Google search histories. The search phrases are printed chronologically according to when they were typed into the search box. The texts are largely based on image searches. In many respects they show the verbal semi-absurd foundation for the artist’s image production: they are partly his notes, partly his research. These search-word texts are almost like automatic writing: unconscious (or accidental) text production. They allow the reader to witness part of his working process and could be seen as a cross section of his thinking. The texts occupy a space in between the artist’s visual and textual production, ending up here as a form of (concrete) poetry. Matias Faldbakken (*1973) lives and works as an artist and writer in Oslo.

Berlin-based author Ingo Niermann deals with the subject matter called “drill.” In this notebook, he proclaims the self-determined drill as a new societal doctrine and gives practical instructions. After an era of opening and transgressing borders, drill could be the next step: the freedom to coerce oneself. For this purpose, the reader can participate in actions proposed by the author, such as “Join the U.S. Army,” where non-Americans can offer their services to the U.S. Army; or could decide to live a year as if it were the last. The culmination is the Drill Palace, modeled on Cedric Price’s unrealized Fun Palace, where you participate in drills, develop drills, or witness them as a spectator. With an introduction by Chus Martínez. Ingo Niermann (*1969) is a writer living in Berlin. Chus Martínez (*1972) is Member of the Core Agent Group and Head of Department for dOCUMENTA (13).

“Consider a fictional multiple integral equation that is a flawed trope and a serious joke in an effort to picture what an intersectional—or intra-actional—theory might look like in Terrapolis. Think of this formalism as the mathematics of sf. Sf is that potent material semiotic sign for the riches of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, science fantasy—and, I suggest, string figures.” In her text, Donna Haraway, author of the influential “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), devises the formula for a possible world, Terrapolis, and places it in connection to string figures, which, as pictures of cosmological constellations and creation myths, constitute a popular cultural practice among the Navajo to this day. Cultural theorist, biologist, and feminist Donna Haraway (*1944) is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

In 1989, the members of Group Material—Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher—were invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley University Art Museum to deal with the subject of AIDS. The artists assembled their research into an overview, structured by year, of the circumstances under which the epidemic had turned into a national crisis. Among the objects of investigation were events in the fields of medicine, politics, and statistics, representations of AIDS in the media, and artistic responses. The AIDS Timeline, which is reprinted in this notebook, supplies background information on the widespread stigmatization of people with AIDS, documents the impact that homophobia and racism have had on the formation of public policy, and places these structures in a larger socio-political context. Doug Ashford (*1958) is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Julie Ault (*1957) works as an artist, curator, editor, and writer.

In his literary texts, regardless of their length, Alexander Kluge says what needs to be said in the most succinct way possible. He notes his texts down on plain A4 pads in order to dictate them afterward. In this notebook, he outlines, in the space of a few lines, the emotional state of a woman named Gesine, who is unhappily in love with a man who has long since lost interest in her, if he was ever interested at all. She can’t get away from him. She suffers and is consoled by her best friend—the first-person narrator. Kluge’s syntactical austerity in the description of emotional entanglements, the objective, distanced style of a more or less documentary character, gives rise to a precise consolidation of complex subject matter. Thus, out of only one portrayed instance, an entire life unfolds. Alexander Kluge (*1932) is an author and a filmmaker.

Writing notes is an essential component of academic life, a ritual that is performed with as many handwritings as there are individuals. In her essay, Pamela M. Lee addresses the phenomenon of illegibility within notes: of what use are notes if they cannot be deciphered at a later time? Lee develops her “semiotics of illegibility” with reference to the extensive archive of notes written by the prominent American art historian Meyer Schapiro. In Lee’s view, the illegibility of Schapiro’s script stands in especially stark contrast to the clarity of his texts. Incorporating psychoanalysis and literary criticism, Lee’s study draws from Schapiro’s own unique approaches to the theory of signs, and in particular from his canonical paper “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” which can be traced back to notes, excerpts of which are reproduced in this publication. Art historian and cultural critic Pamela M. Lee (*1967) is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

In the form of a lexicon, artist Mariam Ghani describes, together with her father, the renowned anthropologist and political scientist Ashraf Ghani, the cycle of repeated collapse and recovery that Afghanistan has undergone over the course of the twentieth century. The lexicon comprises seventy-one mostly illustrated terms that include central figures and places, words that carry a specific (political) meaning in the Afghan context, and entries on recurring events and defining themes. The notebook’s point of departure is a detailed reflection on the reign of King Amanullah Khan (1919–29), whose successes and failures yielded a model for reformers who succeeded him. These thoughts are followed by a series of terms related to, among other things, Dar ul-Aman Palace, now ruin, which was part of Amanullah’s design for a “new city,” and which characterized—as a space of exception, a center of conflict, a prototype for future plans, and a symbol of past failures—twentieth-century Afghan planning policy. Mariam Ghani (*1978) is an artist based in New York and Kabul. Ashraf Ghani (*1949), author of Fixing Failed States (in English) and A Window to a Just Order (in Dari and Pashtu), lives in Kabul.

With her reading of a selection of works by Charlotte Salomon, Griselda Pollock offers a radically new, non-autobiographical interpretation of the oeuvre of an artist who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 because she was a Jewish woman. Already in 1940, Charlotte Salomon had been interned in the French concentration camp Gurs, after which experience she began to produce expressionistic gouaches with transparent overlays as a theatre of memory. In only six months between 1941 and 1942 she created an enormous narrative cycle which encompasses 1,325 images and texts as well as musical indications for the singing of the texts. Salomon left the cycle, as a complete work provocatively titled (), in a box with a doctor in Nice. The individual pages provide intimate insight into the cultural and affective world of a nameless person whose sole registration of her status as an artist during her lifetime  is to be found on the list deporting her to Auschwitz,  and who gained a name—and thereby due recognition as an art maker—only with immense delay. Griselda Pollock (*1949) is Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art.

Bifo’s essay is a critical examination of the current political situation that prevails in his homeland, Italy, where both media and politics have been under the influence of Prime Minister and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi for three decades now. The author draws an image of “Berlusconiland,” where the Italian language—its collective imagination and its sensuousness—has been debased, and where the policies of “Mafia media moguls” take effect like a “psychopoison” that slowly destroys everything. Television and advertisement continuously become more pornographic and obscene, which has led to a form of false “pleasure expectations,” self-hatred, and aggressive shame. Bifo describes the aggressive competition between macho men, whose main pleasure lies in the soiling of the female body—an expression of their all-encompassing scorn for women. Finally, it is neither a moral nor a political ethics that the author proposes as “therapy,” but rather an ethics that begins with skepticism and leads to the reactivation of empathy as a way toward pleasure and “Great Compassion,” which is a political condition. The author, media theorist, and activist Bifo – Franco Berardi (*1949), founder of Radio Alice in the 1970s teaches, Media Aesthetics at the European School of Social Imagination in San Marino of which he is a co-founder.

In his notebook, Mario Garcia Torres invites the reader to share in his thoughts on the relation between being a guest and being a host. What kind of reactions are provoked when one gets an invitation? How does one act within a given context, and how can this context be escaped? How can the functions of guest and host be interchanged? Garcia Torres centers his essay on these questions, employing examples provided by other artists who have explicitly put themselves in one of these two roles: as hosts, Alighieri Boetti with his One Hotel in Kabul and Allen Ruppersberg with Al’s Grand Hotel in Los Angeles; as guests, Daniel Buren in the Virgin Islands, where he installed in situ works, residing on Saint Croix in a resort that was destroyed in 1989 by a hurricane, and Martin Kippenberger, who lived in the Hotel Chelsea in Cologne. We are Garcia Torres’s guests and must decide what to bring along: a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers. Mario Garcia Torres (*1975) is an artist living in Mexico City.  

“As I see it, creativity includes things like opening a hotel in Kabul,” explained Alighiero Boetti, and he went on to realize this plan in 1971 on his second stay in Afghanistan, during which he opened the One Hotel with his friend Gholam Dastaghir. The hotel remained open for six years. Annemarie Sauzeau was married to the Italian artist for more than twenty years, and in her personal reminiscence, she recounts Boetti’s time in Kabul, where she occasionally accompanied him. How was it possible to open a hotel in Afghanistan? Who were the hotel guests? What happened on a typical day in the hotel? She also describes the close relationship Boetti had with this country, where he spent at least four weeks twice a year, and which assumed a significant role in his oeuvre. Annemarie Sauzeau is an art critic and writer and currently Director of the Archivio Alighiero Boetti in Rome.

According to Roy Wagner’s anthropological approach, the unspoken, the unheard, and the unknown are just as important as what is there. The absences, described by Wagner as “anti-twins,” are essential to the formation of culture and the study thereof. In this notebook, Mariana Castillo Deball creates a two-level communication with the re-printing of a text excerpted from Wagner’s writings. On one level, the conversation unfolds between Wagner and his anti-twin Coyote, who expresses what is absent while also countering Wagner’s statements. On the other, the artist’s filigree drawings—of fantasy figures and objects, closely related to Mexican folklore, and especially produced for this notebook—accompany and comment on Wagner’s text. Mariana Castillo Deball (*1975) is an artist living in Berlin and Amsterdam. Roy Wagner (*1938) is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia.

In his essay, Arjun Appadurai reflects on the significance of Gandhi’s ideas on non-violence as a form of political action in India, pursuing the thesis that Gandhi’s thought and practices exhibit a double genealogy. While one genealogy is related to Indian notions of asceticism, avoidance, and abstinence, the second is influenced by kingship, sacrifice, and martial prowess and has no regard for the injury of living beings. According to Indian traditions of warrior asceticism, both genealogies intermingle, which constitutes a vital resource for a politics of militant religiousness in India today. Nalini Malani responds to this essay with drawings that sometimes overlay the text, sometimes accompany it, sensually reflecting Appadurai’s elaborations. Nalini Malani (*1946) is an artist living in Bombay. Arjun Appadurai (*1949) is an anthropologist and Goddard Professor for Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

In recent decades, the art world’s interest in archives has increased steadily, developing into a true “compulsion to archive.” In her text, Suely Rolnik describes the root of this tendency in Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, and focusing on the countries of Latin America that were under military dictatorships. She sees one explanation for this in “unconscious colonial repression,” which, like the dictatorial regimes in these countries, left behind a far-reaching trauma and led to a split between the poetic and the political, widened through the misunderstandings of “official” art history, which interprets the artistic practices that are found there in terms of a “political” or “ideological” Conceptual art. Against this background erupts the will to turn toward the archives anew and reactivate the fusion of poetic and political forces. Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, curator, and cultural theorist based in Brazil.    

Three important, closely linked concepts stand at the center of the thought of philosopher, economist, social critic, political thinker, and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997): the imaginary, creation, and autonomy. They refer to the wide spectrum of meanings through which a society develops symbolic forms and institutional structures in order to express its identity. The radical left-wing group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Castoriadis in 1948 together with Claude Lefort, influenced numerous labor movements throughout Europe. For his notes on topics in philosophy, economic science, politics, mathematics, and psychoanalysis, selected by cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis, excerpts of which are reproduced here, Castoriadis never used a notebook, but rather any material within his reach, whether the backs of ration cards or the empty lines in a conference program. With an introduction by Nikos Papastergiadis (*1962), Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communications at the University of Melbourne.

Romaine Moreton is an Australian writer, filmmaker, and performance poet, and is of the Goernpil and the Bundjalung  people. She lives in Katoomba, New South Wales, and is one of the most experimental contemporary poets writing today in the English language. As an Indigenous writer today, her political and poetic writing expresses linguistic focus and outrage, and her readers are both confronted and challenged by her poems. Commenting her new poems in this notebook, Moreton states, “The things I have to say and how I say them are a direct response to the environment in which I have grown up and continue to live in. To create works that do not deal with the morbid and mortal affects of racism for one, and the beauty of Indigenous culture for another, would be for me personally, to produce works that are farcical.”

In this notebook, Dario Gamboni embarks on the trail of the notoriously restless European 19th-century artist Paul Gauguin. During the “period of incubation” that the artist customarily underwent after arriving in a new environment, such as Brittany, New Zealand, or Tahiti, he drew in order to familiarize himself with the place. Gamboni followed Gauguin’s traces, capturing his own observations in photographs, drawings, and notes. The resulting comparisons, elaborated in extensive captions, bear witness to the intensive approach made by the author toward Gauguin’s way of working and thinking. In his introduction, Gamboni delves into processes of perception and cognition, employing various techniques—among them the note-taking after Gauguin’s notes—that he applies in his own practice, techniques that lead him to a form of imitative agency, witnessing witness. Dario Gamboni (*1954) is Professor of Art History at the University of Geneva.

Mario Bellatin’s oeuvre is characterized by an experimental and fragmented mode of narration that artfully links reality and fiction. In his text, the author, claiming he wishes to be surrounded by his books at all times, devises the project The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin: one hundred books written by himself, each of which is to be printed in an edition of one thousand. The hundred themes of this enterprise include such diverse topics as the importance of a certain dog without a hind leg in the life of Mario Bellatin, the donation of a Hewlett-Packard camera to one hundred artists around the world, and the abandonment of a Doberman puppy called Jesús. What appears at first to be an unstructured list gradually takes shape as a peculiar narration of its own. Mario Bellatin (*1960) is an author living in Mexico City and a member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of dOCUMENTA (13).

In a letter to Bettina Funcke, dOCUMENTA (13)’s Head of Publications, New York–based poet Kenneth Goldsmith (*1961) weaves the strands of his artistic practice into an overall picture of his work. He begins with the online archive UbuWeb, which he founded in 1996: a noncommercial platform where he collects and presents material from all areas of avant-garde artistic production (poetry, film, video, sound, etc. The descriptions of his work on UbuWeb, as a writer (who retypes existing texts), as a host of a weekly radio show (who reads out other DJs’ set lists and texts from blogs), and as a professor of English literature (who teaches “uncreative writing”), together with theoretical and poetic inserts, condense to a complex reflection about poetry under the influence of appropriation.

In his essay, Péter György reflects on the apparently unconnected “two Kassels” that exist next to each other. On the one hand, the former residential city in the middle of Germany, which was mostly destroyed in World War II and which became a border city through the inner division of Germany into East and West. On the other, the documenta city, which every five years, during the time of the exhibition, becomes the destination of an international audience and pushes the actual Kassel into the background with its “machinery of representation.” Looking toward dOCUMENTA (13), György sees a paradigm shift in the curatorial concept, which will involve as one of its sites Breitenau, a former Benedict cloister near Kassel that has been used for various functions (as a camp in Nazi years and as a girls’ reformatory until the 1970s): a shift to the connection of the contemporary art world with local history.

The art historian and culture critic Péter György (*1954) is Head of the Graduate Program for Film, Media, and Cultural History at the ELTE Budapest.

In a conversation with dOCUMENTA (13) Agents Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, New York–based video artist Paul Ryan talks about the theoretical and biographical background to his work, about formative experiences while being an assistant to Marshall McLuhan, and about his role within the video group Raindance and their magazine Radical Software—and about how all these influences shaped his desire to connect his artistic practice with revolutionary social action. Ryan’s idea of Threeing lies at the center. Based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, Threeing is a voluntary practice of relating, in which three people take turns playing three roles. The conversation is complemented by a detailed appendix with illustrated texts on Threeing and on Ryan’s concept of the Relational Circuit.

The Chilean director, cartoonist, composer, and visual artist Alejandro Jodorowsky (*1929) dedicated a voluminous notebook to the script for his film Dune, after the 1965 science-fiction novel of the same name by Frank Herbert. He even printed the title on this book. But his ambitious project remained unrealized, and in the end, the 1974 notebook instead brings together his intensive research about the historical Tarot de Marseille. For three years, Jodorowsky followed the paths of the famous tarot deck to explore its origins and its historical development, as well as the various teachings and interpretations embedded within it. The notebook contains the result of his encounters, conversations, and studies in the form of texts, collages, and diagrams, which are reproduced here in a selection.

With an introduction by Chus Martínez, Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department for dOCUMENTA (13).

In his essay, G. M. Tamás (*1948), Hungarian philosopher as well as former and actual dissident, examines the character of “innocent power.” Power is per se destructive, and its effects are visible in different kinds of ruins, such as romantic ruins, war ruins, and ruins created by contemporary art. Innocent power, like capital, is impersonal and conceptual; it is a collection of concepts that has the “legitimizing” character of “knowledge.” Its recognition as the prevalent order is linked to the way we know.  Thus, resistance against innocent power is illegal and unintelligent. But if there are still possible forms of resistance and rebellion against the consequences it may have, such as servitude and humiliation or deliberate imposition of misery, they are made ipso facto unreasonable.

Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva (*1952) demonstrates in a matter-of-fact way how corporations gain control over our lives. The patenting of life—from bacteria and plants to cloned animals with certain genetic characteristics—implies the reification and commercialization of life. An agreement of the World Trade Organization allows corporations to patent nearly everything we can imagine. One of the repercussions is biopiracy, the reclaiming of ancient traditional use and breeding of plants as the corporations’ own “invention,” as Shiva shows through the examples of the neem tree and basmati rice. The monopolization of seeds has forced farmers in large parts of India into dependence on corporations, which undermines the farmers’ basis of living.

In the second edition of his book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003), Jalal Toufic notes: “I was for years concerned with schizophrenia and with schizophrenics, who appeared in my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; and I am now interested in ‘the little girl,’ whom I expect to appear in my coming vampire film. . . . At one level, the Thirteenth Series in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, 1969, ‘The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ can thus be retrospectively viewed as a program for the work of a decade on my part.” In this new essay, he writes on the portrait of the pubescent girl, included in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “The successful portrait of a pubescent girl is not a rite of passage but a rite of non-passage; what needs a rite is not passage, which is the natural state (at least for historical societies), but non-passage, the radical differentiation between the before, in this case a pubescent girl, and the after, a woman.” From the portrait of the pubescent girl, Toufic moves to the portrait in general and its paradigmatic relation to the angel; thus the title of this notebook: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically.

Most of Jalal Toufic’s books are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com.

In his essay, Christoph Menke (*1958), Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, focuses on the question of how and where there is equality between human beings. The author examines different notions throughout the history of philosophy, as well as varying political concepts, such as the contrarian interpretations of fascism and communism, and the differing reflections on the connection between equality and reason by Aristotle and Descartes. Responding to our current debate about the question of equality, Menke proposes a continuation through an “aesthetics of equality,” which radicalizes enlightenment’s assumption according to which all people have the same ability to reason. Here, equality consists of a force, an agency to imagine, given to all people—the equality of the possibility for an exercised and exercising formation of reason, which is not a given but a socially acquired capacity.

The whole world is divided up by a system of arbitrarily sanctioned units: meter, kilogram, second, hour. This gives rise to many questions of a physical, technological, and philosophical nature. Especially: What is time? And how can one oppose its enforced standardization? Answers might be found anywhere from a dynamite attack on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to Einstein’s theory of relativity to quantum physics. In a congenial long-term collaboration with Peter L. Galison, historian, author, filmmaker, and Professor of the History of Science and Physics at Harvard University, South African artist William Kentridge is researching such solutions in The Refusal of Time, a project for dOCUMENTA (13) into which this notebook offers first insights.

For this series, artist Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942) has made an artist’s book in exactly the same format (A6) and with the same number of pages (24) as his first contribution to documenta 5 in 1972, curated by Harald Szeemann. The partly handwritten instructions, statements, definitions, poems, and pictograms give an insight into his artistic practice and—as eloquently as poetically—transfer his ideas around dOCUMENTA (13) into language. A central figure in Conceptual art from its beginnings, Weiner works in a wide variety of media including video, books, performance, and installation.

A reprint of diary pages from October 1980 by Erkki Kuriennemi (b. 1941), nuclear physicist turned artist and protagonist of electronic music in Finland whose work refutes, with a radical imagination, the common place that bases technology in frigid thought and loss of sensuality. Over decades, Kurenniemi incessantly built up an archive comprised of photographs, floppy discs and harddrives, hundreds of video and audiotapes as well as dozens of notebooks, like the one presented here.

In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.

In 1973, an employee of the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg identified the influential sociologist of literature and Marxist György Lukács (1885–1971) as the owner of a mass of material that had been deposited there in 1917. Among the sixteen hundred letters and text fragments of the collection, known as the “Heidelberg Suitcase” among researchers, was the notebook that has been partially reproduced in this publication. The content of the notebook is in two parts: In the front are notes Lukács took in German during lectures by Georg Simmel on “Logic and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy,” held at the Berlin University in 1906. A few years later, Lukács used the notebook again and, starting from its end, wrote in Hungarian a draft with the title “Sociology of Art.”

With an introduction by Lívia Páldi, Director of BAC – Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden and Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).

This notebook combines photographs by artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir’s photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel. A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl’s reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist’s diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss’ textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered.

In her “Letter to a Friend,” dOCUMENTA (13)’s artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives an insight into her working process, outlining some of the key issues around the 2012 exhibition. In shifting voices, such as storytelling, theoretical speculation, travel diary, press release, or critical reflection, she describes dOCUMENTA (13) as something more than an exhibition—for her it is a state of mind. It is a constellation of artistic acts and gestures that are already taking place as well as an exhibition that will open on June 9, 2012, and that will run for 100 days. Given the heterogeneity of the audience it addresses and the historical development of group exhibitions as “a non-commercial place to intensely aggregate,” what can this exhibition be today? Opening the boundaries of disciplines and fields of knowledge and emphasizing the procedural questions, dOCUMENTA (13) is coming together by thinking through a number of composite entangled ontologies instead of following a defined curatorial concept.

In 1955, the first documenta took place in Kassel. Originally planned as a one-time exhibition, it now takes place every five years and has become a primary periodic moment of exhibition and reflection on contemporary art. In this 1987 lecture, held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Ian Wallace sheds light on the first documenta. After World War II, the exhibition followed the aim to represent and rehabilitate those artists who had been vilified as “degenerate” by the National Socialist regime. The first documenta is a mirror and protagonist of the postwar cultural and political climate. Under the guidance of Arnold Bode, and with the help of Werner Haftmann, it has notably contributed to what has been called “the triumphal march of abstraction,” which helped West-Germany to reintegrate itself into European modernity.

Ian Wallace (* 1943) is artist and lives in Vancouver.

What is it that makes notebooks so fascinating? Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for whom fieldwork notebooks are an indispensable tool, discusses this very question. A starting point of his investigation is Walter Benjamin, who obsessively filled his own notebooks and was intrigued by their materiality. Roland Barthes, Le Corbusier, and Joan Didion are some of the many other notorious note takers that Taussig visits so as to crystallize his ideas of what a notebook really is. Far more than a mere “thing,” Taussig argues that a notebook develops a life of its own, a life, which is often fed by what hasn’t been written down and other externalities.  In the end, this history can even take possession of its possessor by transforming a notebook into a magical object, a fetish.

Anthropologist Michael Taussig (*1940) is a professor at Columbia University, New York.