To beat the whites with the red wedge is not only to win the Civil War, improve the economy, and build collectivism; it is also to force the wedge into all the white zones of experience. . . . the closed, all-enveloping roundness of white investment must everywhere be opened and pierced by red sharpness.

—Jean-Franois Lyotard, celebrating the famous 1919 poster by El Lissitzky. Translated by Yve-Alain Bois in El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility, Art in America, April 1988.