Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become a creative faculty and aesthetics emerge as a technique of individuation. Fantasies of the People is a series of texts moving across different provincial histories, calling upon disputes in anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry to interrogate the notion of fantasy as one that radically challenges what is real. Emerging from a conference convened by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier at Princeton University in 2025, the series takes as its starting point radical thinkers of the early twentieth century, such as Marxist feminist Lu M\u00e4rten and the anarchist art critic Carl Einstein, who deemed fantasy a communal sense against the hermetic cognition of imagination. Calling upon a wide range of contemporary artists, writers, and researchers for discussion, the series proposes fantasy as a collective material practice, rather than treating it as a private or irrational faculty, exploring the media of communal sense, past and present, that have been sidelined by individuation, privatization, and colonial violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For this month\u2019s installments in the series, the editors invited Ludovic Coupaye, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos to reflect on fantasy as a technical system that establishes a new relationship between imagery and collective experience. Zavitsanos\u2019s work presumes the facts of division and dependency as preconditions not for social alienation but for the formulation of a common sense. McArthur has focused on the way that accessibility and environments multiply subjects and distribute them across a community of care. Both explore the (dis)identification of abilities, and sensory experiences, across populations. Finally, Coupaye\u2019s curatorial practice and academic scholarship challenges us to approach language and culture as a syntax of operational gestures that stitches together body, object, and image.\u00a0
\u00a0
All three of these projects presume the image to be something other than a neutral reflection or a depiction of an objective, external world. Thus, the editors\u2019 writing prompt for Coupaye, McArthur, and Zavitsanos: How do you think about the interactions between signs and objects, between images and bodies, on a material level? And how does this stance inform your thinking about technology? Are there aspects of instruments\u2014whether practical, scientific, or epistemic\u2014that exceed the criterion of pure functionality and set in motion processes of collective fantasy? Finally, is there a specific class of objects that should be privileged over others as catalysts of collective fantasy?<\/p>\n
\u2014Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
CAMERA ONE<\/p>\n
Iamb you say as I just ramble on;
Across the bars in song unformed and free;
Preamble jambled gambles gone on too long;
So what, if ev\u2019rything\u2019s anomaly?\u00a0<\/p>\n
If p\u00e1me, v\u00f3lta loops much more than turn;\u00a0
And we must meet conspiracy anew;
To break our legs for this again and learn;\u00a0
How excess sicks its hold on truth accrued.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But O to bite satirical afield;
Two bees in bonnets, outta pocket, sting;
To breathe symphonically and not to yield;
For polyphonic sonnet\u2019s whispers sing.<\/p>\n
\u2019Tis form that gives a body live or dead.
And mom\u2019s spaghetti\u2019s readymade unread.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Neighbors, Strangers, and Nonsensuous Strands<\/p>\n
The gods visit us disguised as strangers.<\/p>\n
\u2014Homer,\u00a0The Odyssey<\/p>\n
There used to be a store across from my apartment\u2014I think it was a sign store because its sign was just a dove icon with a script that said \u201cSigns\u201d (and I doubt it was a dove store). The store was closed for all the time I lived across from it, and then one day about a month ago, the \u201cSigns\u201d sign was replaced by a big wraparound sign that says \u201cboost mobile\u201d; the double lowercase o\u2019s in \u201cboost\u201d are elongated and connected like an infinity symbol which I think is meant to convey that their cell phones last long. <\/p>\n
Last week a bunch of orange balloons were tied out front and some kind of AI remix of Keith Sweat\u2019s \u201cTwisted\u201d echoed down the alley. I\u2019d never seen this store open before and with the exception of the fanfare that one day last week, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s actually ever really open. During the day, the sign is there but everyone just walks by in corridoral flow. <\/p>\n
At night something more fantastical happens and the mobile store becomes more mobile and simultaneously static. <\/p>\n
[ Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? ]<\/p>\n
At night, when the store is closed, the sign lights up the whole corner, its reflection flashes in the puddles and floats across the curls of smoke from people\u2019s cigarettes below. I swear the acoustics of the alley get more punctuated too. There\u2019s a kind of synesthetic cacophony that highlights the displacement of the sign itself and whoever\u2019s under it lingering (or malingering) in this strange loop that cycles day for night bathed lemniscate. <\/p>\n
Last night I dreamt you under the sign singing \u201cI heard it in a dream\u201d but I don\u2019t know what it means. Do you?<\/p>\n
[ I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. ]<\/p>\n
On the highway today every sign was out of time. So far beyond late and outdated. The fact that I can read them makes me cry. That I conceive of myself as moving in a direction of my choosing makes me cry. Population 3,894. Settled. Founded. Limits. Established. Home of the Bobcats. Does a sign know when a baby is born?<\/p>\n
When asked about signs and objects and how they differ, we aren\u2019t fully sure how they do. That they do differ, when they do differ, seems obvious enough but so often signs and objects still seem to render suffused. Sometimes it seems like every object is a sign and it pretty much always feels to us that every sign is an object. We don\u2019t object to a world of things and we count ourselves among the myriad material and shifting situations: just another choratic occasion in a very long chain of interactions that continually construct scenes. <\/p>\n
Recently we\u2019ve noticed a cut though\u2014some kinda bifurcation in our basic being. (Maybe it\u2019s some bildung showing a bit; maybe it\u2019s Maybelline.) That maybe line though, that hybridization of what is and what may be, is the line we wanna draw out and reel back. Ever since the real came back in style there\u2019s been some contestation in the concatenation of dreams and waking life. <\/p>\n
We still love imagination\u2014if only for the automatic, autonomic query latent in its colloquial use\u2014but we refuse the singularity of subjection asserted by im\u0101gin\u0101ti\u014d because that\u2019s precisely where it fails us, and any we. Clearly some kinda telescoping is needed to truly touch these times, something that hits a little more real for the necessarily collective construction of reality and fantasy. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a feel to the phantasmagoric, a something from nothing (where nothing is very much a thing if but a no thing) that pulls us, lulls us, sings, sirens, calls us back to worlds we make together\u2014in and against, in but not of, in and not outside of or looking down on or overseeing. We\u2019re so over seeing as the primary site of knowledge. Where is vision? How do we image beyond imagination? How do we sense beyond image? Is it fantasy that is more real than the reality we\u2019ve been told? Let us find us, the people, in these imaginative fantasies proposed\u2014somewhere in the dropdown menu south of Houston as you say. <\/p>\n
Or let\u2019s just listen in as things sing with things.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
i. Conspiracies Under Production<\/p>\n
We shelter our talk with white noise
placing an overturned pot by the door.<\/p>\n
But the door is less threshold than frame
\u2014which is to say it holds as much as it leaks.<\/p>\n
Somewhere within displacement and displays
are pocket doors that shift the scale of entrance,<\/p>\n
tip the scales of place to make chiastic
an otherwise chaotic order of things.<\/p>\n
The way things go is an undifferentiated noise tho\u2014
just a chorus corralled in the periodic rupture of gas.<\/p>\n
Firelight makes picture portraits on paper
in houses for dolls anywhere may.<\/p>\n
Filters, they tend to show what\u2019s already here:
debility in continuous play.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
ii. Shells, Games, Benches<\/p>\n
An icon is vacant and full beyond index direction;
and it\u2019s nonfullness that sails this fold on the sea.<\/p>\n
The nutshells we code gold discard calling
collection, roll guild twenty four karat, next one.<\/p>\n
Abandoned, we visit buildings
as a means of remembering the hold.<\/p>\n
Long benches we add to parks made for benches
before casting the shape of one another\u2019s ear. <\/p>\n
Our carriers, their names unknown we whisper
in remembrance of worlds breathing years.<\/p>\n
When set adrift on memory bliss was just\u2014
it was just always the tools that use us best.<\/p>\n
Dear impasse emergency, we don\u2019t need no water\u2014
Signed fools sincerely, let a mother burn.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Emergence and Emergency<\/p>\n
For science, wetness, like mass, is emergent\u2014a quality that arises in the ensemble where it doesn\u2019t exist in the part. In the shift of scale from\u00a0H2O to many millions of water molecules clinging together, wetness\u2014this haptic encounter or feel that describes or inscribes what we know as water\u2014arises, bubbles up, bobbles up, bodies. This is to say, that wetness is a fantasy water makes with us. And one we hold without it. An emergent phenomenon is not real; it has no being and in such a sense (and along the nonsensual) it might be deemed a sensorial illusion: like touch, which is impossible but we do it anyway. <\/p>\n
The fleeting image is an object insofar as it is turned over and manipulated impromptu by many. But it is not fixed into picture or captured in profile. No representation remains. There\u2019s no inclusion or exclusion, no invitation to accept or refuse\u2014just sequins in sequence flashing until evanescence overcomes the effervescence of a scene collectively gathered, only to disperse.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
iii. It\u2019s Not During the Fire Alarms \u00a0<\/p>\n
In the emergence of our conditions is
the condition of ever emergent means.<\/p>\n
Absent doctors\u2019 notes their questions
are answered by text messages yet to be read. <\/p>\n
Our go-packs merge every contact
as the dish runs away with the bread. <\/p>\n
We swap bank accounts for numbers
to call\u2014call out but also call him. <\/p>\n
How come the knives in our hands go itchy
over cuts first scored on the grill?<\/p>\n
\u201cCall the doctor; don\u2019t call the doctor\u201d
I do what I can do and can\u2019t do times two.<\/p>\n
We roll up to take it all down.
Get in the car and get driven away.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
iv. Friends<\/p>\n
Our speeches are swapped out for eulogies
as empty chairs pile up high.<\/p>\n
Because another word (or fantasy) is flight\u2014
(and we happen to still be alive).<\/p>\n
Bells ring, we continue to wait
while our seats at the table collapse. <\/p>\n
Fiction\u2019s fan covers postcards in sending
tablecloths run aground under toe.<\/p>\n
For our sonnets are dreamt neverending\u00a0
(naps) three six twelve evermore.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a speed to this write, a read to this time,
a manifold doubled over in couplet.<\/p>\n
But not all that is read has been written
and twenty minutes ago I said I\u2019d call and didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Burden (chorus) <\/p>\n
We\u2019re alive at a time when the total destruction of life is possible. We live at a time when life is impossible. But impossible is a polyphonic, infrasonic voice begging for a box big enough to hold it. This burden is our necessity and pleasure.<\/p>\n
v. Deposition <\/p>\n
I said I\u2019d come and didn\u2019t, said I\u2019d say and never
said this would be easy. This should be easy.<\/p>\n
We promise earth a future of fallow
marked by stones and never by signs.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve been looking for a sign, this is it.
(Some things only signify in rhyme.)<\/p>\n
on watches, on pockets, and stoppages
messages A the K to the A (away).<\/p>\n
but MIA keeps us in action of
missing that\u2019s thought to be bad.<\/p>\n
vi. Calls in the Round<\/p>\n
we miss you and don\u2019t even know you
miss the chance occasion of us of them to be you.
Beauty say the strongmen of eugenics
as we put up posters for neighbors to take.<\/p>\n
Our fleeting thought is: depends on who\u2019s asking
consider us any, all, or none by design.<\/p>\n
Consider us burdens asleep in
action: bass choruses tuned wrong unaligned.<\/p>\n
vii. The Big Four-Oh Circle<\/p>\n
We float away for deeper connection
move apart by no choice of our own.<\/p>\n
Common fields sensed farther than first
imagined, oh please someone get on the identified.<\/p>\n
TVs on shimmer atop tables
while objects scatter the floor.<\/p>\n
Our journals are out for the taking
amid baseballs and armor galore.<\/p>\n
Leave early and forget all direction.\u00a0
Leave late at the room\u2019s great advice.<\/p>\n
Stomp, stamp, send out again for collection,\u00a0
plead \u201cexcuse me\u201d \u201cexcuse me\u201d at least thrice. <\/p>\n
Because another word for fantasy is mourning
cry lysis irresistible.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
If Pictures still by capture is it worth;
The carceral bars aflame burnt smelt to flair;
A meaning returned all that\u2019s ablaze to earth;
So wherein all that\u2019s solid melts to air.<\/p>\n
But what is body every nowhere if;
Dependency is but nonlocal free;
A Koerner of truth in our mouths err riff;
Nonmatriculated lacustrine sea.<\/p>\n
To everything there is a turn (tropein);
Repeat indexic dream diegetic;
J\u2019s car go anywhere from here (careen);
Just cargo in deictic dialectic.<\/p>\n
But we don\u2019t mind a little sieve and slide
On body\u2019s cymbal ride it\u2019s live and die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[288335,146,288336,85,46,37256,288334],"class_list":["post-639167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-critical-theory","tag-entertainment","tag-fantasies-of-the-people-series","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-poetry","tag-psychology-psychoanalysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}