The modern arrives when the boundaries dividing old and new become sites of struggle in the way that the divide between the sacred and the profane was previously. These distinctions—old/new, sacred/profane—are strategic: they refer to one embedded position in the life-world relative to another. In the October 2017 issue of e-flux journal, Noemi Smolik shows how, within Russia, the deployment of modernizing iconoclasm against the belief systems of Russia’s rural poor confounded distinctions between old and new, sacred and profane, even before the October Revolution and the Russian avant-garde. Aleksandra Shatskikh diagnoses a contemporary symptom of this misrecognition in the attribution to Malevich of a racialized joke scribbled by a vandal under his Black Square after it had been painted…

Editorial
Editors

The Fourth Determination
Jonathan Beller

Reprogramming Decisionism
Luciana Parisi

Driving the Golden Spike
Brian Holmes

Inscribed Vandalism: The Black Square at One Hundred
Aleksandra Shatskikh

The Russian Avant-Garde: A Projection Screen for Modern Utopian Thinking?
Noemi Smolik

Subscendence
Timothy Morton

For Slow Institutions
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Experiments in Eternity: Erkki Kurenniemi
Lorenza Pignatti

My Collectible Ass
McKenzie Wark