On Newsletters: An interview with Nick Thoburn

Editors: Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Our desire for this issue was two-fold: to destabilize and interrogate the nature of more universal discourses and universality’s relation to contexts, and also to inspire and facilitate a blossoming of locally situated radical writing and publishing.

On that topic of inspiring and supporting, locally situated writing that connects with immediate ecologies/economies, this issue has submissions like that from Strasbourg that invites construction workers to deface the walls of particular construction site. Other newsletters engage in other ways of flagging the local (e.g. the Albany-based project), while others engage in local appearances of globalized discourses. How might you consider the varying things of focus that are shuttled around in these newsletters- such as concrete situations (eg. the protest picket with the @ ac newsletter) or the seemingly global discourse that The Field and Terra Critica situationally engage with?

Nick: Many thanks for the invitation to reflect on these newsletters and questions of political publishing. Regarding your aim for the issue, emancipatory projects are compelled to produce synthetic analysis at global scales, as has been made all too apparent by recent events. As we speak, I’m in COVID-19 lockdown, balancing homeschooling with work while seeking adequate political responses and following streams of dynamic analysis of the biopolitical economy of the virus – in relation to industrial animal agriculture, climate catastrophe, habitat depletion, epidemiology, racializing necropolitics, monopoly tech, mutual aid, and so on. We need to act at global scales too, and what these newsletters suggest, I think, is that part of this critical thinking and acting will come through a weave of global conditions through particular projects. A newsletter might seem so slight in comparison to the magnitude of change that is required – it is! But it’s the kind of publishing form where this weave can be effective, to be combined with all sorts of different forms that operate in other ways. Reading the newsletters I totted up mentions of other media forms and technologies – radio, webpages, USBs, QR codes, mobile phones, live-streams, dazibao, archives, slogans, films, etc. – through which the newsletters are constructing media ecologies and practices, flush with particular struggles, groups, and knots of exploitation and oppression.

Editors: The other goal of this issue was to interrogate the nature of more universal discourse and its relation to contexts and practitioners who labor somehow in relation to those discourses; for critical ends enlightened by general anarchist practice, and beside autonomist Marxist theory on the nature of instituting powers. We are aware of the global and political challenges that we face in terms of rising fascism and authoritarianism in the face of climate change and now the Corona Virus, and the ongoing problems that capitalism and patriarchy institute. Beside these awarenesses, we are not so quick to discard what institutions affirmatively do. Nevertheless, we continue with a deeper critique of said instituting forces via afropessimist and decolonial thought – and wonder about the general nature of a journal’s relation to wider projects. We wonder how discursive poetics serve to destabilise or positively connect or utilize institutional reach, how language has a logistical nature.

Nick: The critique that Afropessimism and decolonial thought level at emancipatory projects is necessarily registered at institutional scales and in the full range of political forms, as you say. This includes publishing form. To take an example, I’ve written recently about the wrenching effect on the book form of the critique of “empathy” that is developed by Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson. Institutions and books, conditioned from within and without by racializing structures, have a strong tendency to pursue a solution to racism through the construction of empathetic engagement across racializing divides. But empathy, as Wilderson puts it in his Incognegro, is a liberal terrain of encounter, “the scale of abstraction [brought] back down to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and the uncontextualized realm of fair play.” At this level, empathetic resolution obscures the structural difference of racial social orders, the level at which resolution would need to be achieved to be meaningful. The empathetic encounter, then, must be persistently troubled, in favour of a wrenching structural critique that leaves institutions and publishing forms without resolution, provoked to the fraught task of problematizing their own structural relationship to racial violence, and reconfiguring the terms and practices of solidarity accordingly.

Regarding the newsletters in this journal issue, some of their formal features stand out as felicitous for engaging with racial and colonial violence: the newsletter form as occasion for a groping and self-critical relation to institutional form, against the assumption of institutional innocence or secure identity; the casting of fascism as a problem of the psyche, the individual, and the group as much as of the wider social field; the swerve away from the racializing narrative infrastructure of progress that undergirds quintessentially modern publishing forms like the manifesto. In more concrete terms, one can understand the newsletter of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab as a terrain of problematization, a publishing component in the working out of transformative engagement with colonialism, structural racism, and genocide, as experienced by Indigenous Anishinaabe people in, what is currently, Canada. The newsletter is driven not so much by a group or a political subject but by a problem, that of “rematriation” – not repatriation’s metaphoric righting of a past wrong but the forcing of new futures through reclaiming stolen lands. And it sets out criteria and means of association and critical evaluation by which this political problem can be effectively pursued.

Editors: This issue’s conceptualization relates to how you discuss pamphlets as communist objects… contextual, situated, the object as “comrade” and “coworker.” Can you describe a bit how you understand printed and/or digital matter as communist objects?

Nick: Let me sketch some context for the concept of the “communist object,” drawing from my book, Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing. My concern has been to tease out criteria for a communism of publishing, a communism that broadens attention from the content of publishing to its wider materiality. By materiality here, I mean the open-ended mesh of publishing forms, processes, and relations – writing, editing, design, distribution, media objects and platforms, meanings, readings, sensations – all of which bear the economies of production and consumption that govern the publishing field. In this field, publishing by communist or emancipatory ventures is traversed by crisis. I make this point not as a lament, though, for crisis is its necessary condition of existence. Communist publishing emerges from social conditions – of racialization, gender, class, and manifold other oppressions – that are fundamentally hostile. And such publishing succeeds only insofar as it interrogates and undermines these conditions – it can have no happy accommodation with capitalist society.

This is true of the content of communist publishing ventures – interrogation of social crisis is the substance of their critical ideas, their leading edge, rightly so. We know this. What is less often considered is that social crisis also conditions the materiality of such publishing. The fashioning of a publishing venture out of hostile social conditions colours the mode of writing and collaboration, the distribution and archiving, the forms of readership and social effects, the visual design and graphic style, the (anti-)economic models, the artifactual and sensory forms, and so forth. This is what gives such ventures their specific qualities and allure – often curious, uneven, jarring, or weird. Sometimes these qualities exist without much notice or self-reflection on the part of publishers or readers; occasionally publishers seek to disavow or disguise them by, say, adopting commercial styles of visual design. But other times they become the direct object of intervention, where publishing ventures interrogate and experiment with their own materiality – foregrounding their crisis-ridden conditions, straining to construct communist forms, processes, and relations within and against the publishing field. And this is where my interest lies, with the materiality of communist or emancipatory publishing as an object of attention, reflexive practice, and politicsin its own right.

This is the context within which I developed the concept of the communist object, specifically as a means to understand the political materiality of the pamphlet form (where the pamphlet is a non-periodical printed publication, typically between 5 and 48 pages, and roughly A5 format size). I wouldn’t want to impose a hard distinction between the pamphlet and other publishing forms, such as the book, magazine, blog, newsletter, zine, chapbook, leaflet, tweet, communiqué, newspaper, etc. Yet we understand a list like this because we have an intuitive sense that each of these publishing forms tends to coalesce around a specific combination of qualities and affordances that is more or less particular to it. My sense when researching these publishing forms, and their experimental development by particular publishing ventures, is that a communist materiality of publishing benefits from close attention to the specificities of form, and from developing concepts that are germane to each – even if these concepts can, one hopes, wander off into other domains of application. For example, in Anti-Book, to explore the magazine form (specifically, Mute magazine’s immersive and self-critical hybrid of numerous platforms) I fashion the concept of “diagrammatic publishing.” Or, to understand the material form of the book and its modes of authority and passion, I make use of Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of the “root book” and “rhizome book.”

But regarding the concept of the communist object, one of my sources is an enticing comment by Marx, that “Private property,” as it abstracts from the qualities of objects to turn them into value-bearing commodities, “alienates the individuality not only of people but also of things.” The inference, and it’s a beautiful idea, is that communism is the emancipation of objects as much as it is of people, that the emancipation of humanity from subjection to private property will not be achieved without the simultaneous liberation of objects from the same regime. Walter Benjamin picks this up, and insists that what Marx is getting at here is not, as Marxists often think, the release of an object’s “use value” from its corralling by commodity exchange, because “use” as we know it is occupied and conditioned to a great degree by the requirements of capitalist accumulation. Rather, as Benjamin puts it, the communist approach to the object “entails the liberation of things from the drudgery of being useful.” A communist object, then, is something that pulls away from and disrupts the capitalist values of use and exchange. As such, it has a certain fetish quality, a fetishism of the anti-commodity: it disrupts regimes of value and derails the isolated human subject that is fashioned within these regimes.

So, my suggestion is that we can detect this mode of the object, the communist object, in the material qualities of self-published pamphlets, if we suspend their “use,” their dissemination of textual content, and allow instead other material qualities to come forward. I stress that this is a mode of the object existent within capitalism, pushing against commodity values in a fledgling, groping fashion. It opens routes and poses problems that have pertinence for thinking beyond capitalism – for “the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes,” as Marx puts it – but of course the shape of socio-material life in communism remains a vast unknown.

To get an impression of the pamphlet as communist object, it’s helpful to contrast it to the political magazine. Political journals and magazines have had a preeminent role in the history of revolutionary and avant-garde politics. Think, for example, of how the journals La Révolution surréaliste, Internationale situationniste, and Quaderni rossi are something like the mobile ground upon which Surrealism, the Situationists, and Italian Operaismo came into being through time – key sites and means by which these currents and movements honed their ideas and aesthetic styles, established group coherence, and gained purchase on the social imaginary. Of course, that is necessary for any revolutionary movement, and yet in the correlation between movement and published medium, the magazine reveals itself to be just that little bit too obedient, ordered and contained by the requirements of a movement.

Small-press pamphlets, by contrast, tend to be much less correlated with social movements, allowing them a more indeterminate, exploratory, and critical character. True of their textual content, this also manifests in their material form. They’re occasional or one-off publications, with ueven infrastructures of distribution at best, loosened from movement-consolidating and marketing imperatives, and encountered by readers as much by chance as intent. As such, small-press pamphlets are self-enclosed and independent objects, or “monads,” that circulate as charged potential, potential that unfolds in encounters that generate their own spatiotemporal consistency. There are numerous aspects to this monad quality of the pamphlet form, some of which I can list here: the physical vulnerability of the pamphlet, which generates intimate and self-instituting modes of association; the “barbaric asceticism” of its pared-down form, in Adorno’s phrase, a “strategic nonsynchronous” relation to the united front of new media and capital; its ephemerality as bearer of the ruptural time of revolution; its disregard for “popularity,” that value par excellence of social media and commodity circulation; and its awkward relation to work and work abolition, produced as flight from the dictatorship of work while revealing the impossibility of such flight under social conditions of capitalism.

Editors: How do you distinguish the idea of a concept from it it joining into a printed (digital and the virtual) object, and also from the wider network of discourse and the milieu of ideas to which that object tends to?

Nick: I’d like to take your question in terms of the relation between political ideas and the practice of political publishing, for it’s one that has occupied me a good deal. When writers and publishing ventures turn reflexive attention to their publications, there’s a common mistake of seeking in their publishing forms and practices a direct manifestation of their ideas. It sounds initially like the right move to make, a marriage of content and form, but it can end up losing the specific qualities and effects of publishing materiality by subordinating them to the ideas, leaving the materiality of publishing to become merely the confirmation of ideas and not something with qualities and effects of its own. This approach tends to work with a rather limited understanding and palette of publishing materiality – the simple assertion of the “tactile” value of print over digital platforms, for example, or leaving all the reflexive work to certain paper stock, covers, or typography and page layout. In consequence, materiality ends up playing the role of a cute or clunky illustration, lacking anything like the nuance and complexity of the ideas it carries.

If, on the other hand, publishing ventures foreground and interrogate the open-ended mesh of publishing forms, process, and relations, then publishing materiality becomes an arena of critical practice in its own right, no longer corralled by its textual content. I don’t mean to say that the ideas become irrelevant, not at all. An emancipatory publishing venture is typically, and rightly, driven by the critical ideas germane to its knots of social crisis and intervention. But if it becomes self-reflexive about its publishing materiality beyond clichéd manifestations, then the relation between its ideas and wider materiality takes shape, as I understand it, as a baggy fit. It’s an approach I develop from Rosalind Krauss’s wonderful formulation that certain artworks take form as “self-differing mediums.” As a self-differing medium, an artwork produces recursive loops between its aesthetic aims and a selection of the materialities that comprise its medium, such that the medium is itself transformed in and as the work. In this recursive relation, neither aesthetic aim nor medium is the leading party.

In the domain of publishing, this baggy fit between idea and material form is sometimes quite tight – for example, when a prison-abolition journal includes authorship models that favor texts by prisoners, and adopts a distribution structure premised on prisoners receiving hard copies for free. Other times the fit between ideas and published form is much looser – the same publication might choose to break with corporate platforms to run on open-source software. In this latter example, the loose, baggy association between content and publishing form doesn’t necessarily make the form less significant to the specific qualities of the journal. Indeed, one might find that the use of open source induces critical ideas of its own, ideas that filter into the journal’s content, regarding the racializing dimensions of corporate publishing, the limitations of Open Source scenes or easily assumed technical fixes to social problems. Now we see that publishing materiality can generate its own critical ideas and become a domain of political intervention in its own right – and we should remember here that publishing bears and fuels capitalist accumulation, and its racializing and gendering modalities, as much as does audiovisual or social media, making it a far from negligible point of focus for revolutionary critique and practice.

Finally on this question of the relation between ideas and publishing form, sometimes publishing materialities have critical and expressive effects in their own right, “mute redundancies,” as Guattari characterizes them, that take shape in visual, sensory, temporal, organizational, and technological dimensions against the linguistic “overcoding” of the text that they carry.

Editors: We wonder how you might distinguish a newsletter from a pamphlet. Picking up a point you made earlier, in your Communist Object essay, you describe a pamphlet thusly: “As a monad — a dense and self-enclosed world — the pamphlet circulates as a charged potential, a potential that unfolds in encounters that generate their own spatiotemporal consistency.” Our issue’s submission call was for newsletters rather than pamphlets, because we were interested in the institution that a newsletter suggests and the time-based commitment the newsletter seems to contain. But we were also interested in the monad-like nature of what you ascribe to pamphlets, in how they relate to specific practice and context. How would you flesh out these distinctions?

Nick: I agree that the publishing form of the newsletter is closely associated with the formation and endurance of institutions or groups. Certainly, many of the groups that responded to your call for submissions appear to have been encouraged by this form to take their newsletters as means of institutional development. I read in them statements of institutional purpose; sketches of the historical emergence of groups; reports on recent activities; day-to-day institutional announcements, plans, and news. There is an intimate, particular quality to these features. It’s an intimacy which is internal to institutional practice but that also points outward to the external reader, who is snagged by the affect of intimacy, drawn in to engage. It was interesting to me too that such form-typical features of institutional formation are often combined in these newsletters with self-reflexive analysis of a group’s institutional form, a groping, testing movement, where an institution’s successes and failures, limits, and possibilities are brought into the open – again, for purposes internal to the group but also for outsiders to encounter and engage with.

In this self-reflexive quality, the newsletter works in a rather different fashion to another publishing form that political and avant-garde groups have historically reached for, the manifesto, whose performative structure relies on the exterior presentation of a strong and confident group subjectivity, hiding away the cracks, discords, and instabilities of group existence. True, the manifesto form can develop through deconstructive or reflexive procedures of its own, as is a tendency in feminist manifestos – the brilliant, wrenching examples of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE,” for instance. But if your call had been for manifestos rather than newsletters, I suspect that reflexive questions of form, design, and institutional practice would not have been pursued in so enticing a fashion as they have been here.

There is also reflection in these newsletters on the different scales, layering, and interpenetration of groups. The sketches of group practice in the newsletter by the Casual School Collective includes involvement, for example, with the institution of a psychiatric hospital, when a personal reading project on a ward, necessarily public, opened out into a collective conversation about neoliberal systems between both patients and nurses, and which continued after the group member left the hospital. Or the Fragments for an antifascist newsletter, by the artists’ organization Five Years, pursues the psycho-affective dimensions of fascism as they operate at the scales of the group and the individual, and in various social formations, including a bus journey – while reflexively turning this research back upon their group practice itself.

Another newsletter, by @.ac, casts the problem of institution as one of disruption, giving itself over as a vehicle for the 14-day strike by UK university workers in early 2020. The strike features here both as the disruption of the university – today, a quintessential neoliberal institution – and as the fashioning of its own kind of critical institution. It’s an institution-in-disruption that the newsletter posits with a beguiling economy – just two sentences, serving as both slogans and models: “INDUSTRIAL ACTION IS THE ONLY ART PRACTICE;” “THE PICKET LINE IS THE TRUE SPACE OF PEDAGOGY.”

One newsletter, by Black Book, casts the institution into a crucial problem of our time, that of global solidarity, linking newsletter-like information about the 2019-20 uprising in Hong Kong and the Wuhan COVID-19 lockdown with critical reflection on solidarity across struggles in Haiti, Ecuador, Sudan, Chile, Lebanon, and Honduras. The Black Book newsletter also shows how the newsletter form is adept at holding together the functions of institutional news and abstract, critical analysis.

You ask about the “monad” quality of the newsletter, where a monad is a particular selection or contraction of the world that is at the same time wholly singular, a self-enclosed vessel ready to burst open. I discuss this above with regard to the pamphlet form as communist object, but I wonder if a better figure for the newsletter form, given its institutional associations, might be what Guattari calls a “third object.” This concept was developed at the clinic La Borde, established by Jean Oury, where Guattari was based. It was part of the clinic’s “institutional psychiatry,” where a key institutional role was taken by the collective production and self-publication of journals. These journals served as means of assembling diverse elements – semiotic, affective, imaginary, practical, organizational, technological – in an entity that was at once product and catalyst of institutional practice, self-reflection, and therapy. As Gary Genosko puts it, here “the institution is in part a product of a journal’s collective elaboration and refinement over time.” If we approach the form of the newsletter from the perspective of a “third object,” it is a product of the multiple voices and practices that compose it, but it takes on a life of its own, not determined by any one person or even by the institution. It reacts back upon the institution to become a cause – drawing out or inducing associations, affects, ideas, and critical orientations from the group.

Editors: So we wonder how the seriality suggested by a newsletter might distinguish itself from a journal. In terms of making plans OR exploring ongoing issues. What are the qualitative differences – are they only differences in scale and ambition? How might the newsletters of this issue swerve differently in relation to all that might be philosophically knowable/expressible through direct experience rather than the entire knowledge set of this or any other conceptual journal?

Nick: Both journals and newsletters are serial forms, typically indicated by the convention of numbering each issue, but I think you’re right that their mode of seriality differs. The seriality of a journal, especially if it becomes an established commercial entity, is indexed to the linear progression and command of time, capitalism as time. The complexities and swerves of social experience are thus subsumed into “the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time,” as Benedict Anderson writes of the temporality of the daily newspaper. The seriality of a newsletter, on the other hand, is loosened from the conditioning constraint of homogenous time, and is instead indexed to group-determined practices, which have their own temporality, a temporality of swells, lulls, crises, and rushes. Each issue results from these complex conditions, or is cast forward in time to induce emergent practices or events. Seriality here is something like a promise or desire that there is more to come, a socio-psychic investment in the endurance and development of the institution, but where there are no guarantees, least of all a guarantee provided by the march of linear time.

As you point out, journals carry an accumulated knowledge set, in a stack of back issues, which is less a feature of the newsletter, indexed and oriented to practice. This can be a deadening, conservative weight for journals. But if the archive of a journal is treated in inventive and critical ways, lightening and loosening it up, it can also take a radical form. I’ve approach this problem in terms of Henri Bergson’s notion of the “zone of indetermination,” in considering the way that Mute magazine reactualized its back-issue archive – their two fold strategy of collating a dense, refractory anthology of text, stripped of all design features, and a tag-access digital archive.

For Bergson, unlike simple forms of life that react to perception with immediate action, in complex nervous systems a pause or “rift” – a “zone of indetermination” – is inserted between perception and reaction, as perception forces a recall of memory, of past perceptions, which combine with the current perception to modulate action. Thought and action hence no longer react automatically to stimulation, so reproducing the past, but combine with these past perceptions so as to act differently, to open up new dimensions in the future. I hope it’s not an overly metaphorical reading of this formulation to suggest that a political journal can operate in much the same way. The journal is a forum, a zone of indetermination, where perception of the world is channeled through political memory – memory of the contributing author, of the reader, of the magazine’s archive – in writing that critically shapes that perception and wrenches it from the narrow frameworks and automatic responses of the immediate present. In this way, the magazine’s politicizing content and archive can carry and impart a polytemporality, and one with an orientation toward the new. It is a temporality that operates in the midst of, and in opposition to, the flattened temporal structure of contemporary capitalism, with its obsession with immediacy and the “now” – a structure that, for all its apparent modernity, actually impedes the truly new, for it isolates the present from the resources necessary to open it to anything other than a reproduction of the same.

Editors: In your essay “Twitter, Book, Riot: Post-Digital Publishing against Race,” you point towards the non-commodity nature of the small-press book The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. In our submission call, we were interested in submissions that wrestled with the commodity form; though with the fact that the submissions would engage in wider digital and paper distribution we understood that their wrestling might also make their situated discourse translatable across difference in utilitarian ways. We understood that to be an contradictory task- concurrently accepting and rejecting terms for their creation. Nevertheless, in that the notion of an autonomous aesthetic avant garde might be a useful fiction, we thought too that this might be a worthwhile fiction to ask localities to somehow explore.

Nick: The article you mention considers the techniques by which an extraordinary small-press book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary,carries an uprising against police murder and anti-Black racism into its material forms. These techniques wreck the conventional forms of the political book. They wreak havoc on the book form’s tendency to impose uplifting narratives and world-consolidating routes to redress; its reader-consolidating effects of empathy; its clean and untroubled visual clarity; its efforts to contain and corral radical events by an author or publisher external to their tumult; and, as you say, its commodity forms. Part of the commodity form of a book is its generic appeal to the reader. As Adorno put it, the book as commodity “sidles up to the reader.” Through marketing mechanisms and format and design features, commodity books come to exist not for themselves in their expressive uniqueness, but “for something other” in their generality, units of exchange always “ready to serve the customer.” It is of course difficult to maintain that a political book should repel the reader, should ward-off the possibility of expansive circulation. But Adorno poses here an important question. If our political books function as obedient commodities, and their forms of production and consumption reproduce capitalist ways of being, is it enough that their textual content is radical, or is that content just the juicy piece of meat that distracts us from their commodity effects?

Editors: To varying degrees, our issue’s contributors’ visual and expressed poetics demonstrate this wrestling to us, through either stream of consciousness or note-like writing or a flow of graphic design. Do you recognize other strategies?

Nick: The way these newsletters have explored the visual and graphic capacities of this form and its page space is especially appealing. We don’t usually pay enough attention to how meaning and sensation are constructed out of the graphic arrangement of page and screen, the arrangement of text, lines, images, spaces – what Johanna Drucker calls the “diagrammatic” quality of writing. But your invitation to produce a newsletter, distinct from another form, has prompted engagement with the diagrammatic features of the page. Many of these newsletters have utilized a conventional newsletter format – a title block across the top, followed by two-column text – but in a way that feels fresh rather than retro, visually validating this newsletter format for our times. In others, the invitation of this form to convey information about the group’s project has produced an overload of words, crammed in with tiny typeface, leaving the reader with a sense of urgency, of intense engagement with a problem – such as the newsletter by Five Years, or, more so, the newsletter by the Field, Around the Table: Reflections on Collective Working.

@.ac’s newsletter on the UK university strike is particularly appealing for how it constructs meaning and affect from the visual qualities of text. Two pages comprise a run of two different slogans in caps (the slogans I quoted earlier), where repetition and the solid text blocks forcefully impress their meaning upon the reader. And the other two pages over-write a management email – in one, the email is subject to a devastating peer review, with hand-written script unpicking its claims and subtexts, while in the other, the email is reduced to a collection of clichés by blocking out most of the text, in a manner reminiscent of Tom Phillips’s A Humument.

Most enticingly, some of the newsletters have sought to model their group’s organizational forms and practices through the use of visual diagrams. Diagrams are rare enough in political publishing that it’s worth reflecting on what they actually are. A diagram can be defined as a schematic ordering of lines, images, and words that seeks to describe, model, and provoke dynamic relationships. Gilles Châtelet, in his book Figuring Space, argues that they are particularly suited to experimental projects that break with the certainties of self-identity and proceed instead through problematics, blind spots, and fogs – a groping process that I imagine many of the groups who submitted newsletters to you would recognize. For Châtelet, diagrams share features with the form of metaphor. Both work to describe, evoke, and encourage relations – they “leap out” to figure space – but metaphors risk becoming clichés, with passifying effect, as they dissolve the “cold” technical specificity of a particular operation with the “warm confusion” of relations of resemblance. Diagrams, on the other hand, with their modest plotting and sketching – as they struggle in uncertainty to grasp elusive relations and make connections across disparate realms – are extended or prolonged through contact with the world that they map. True, diagrams still arrest movement, abstracting a figure from the complexity of socio-material relations, but they do so in a manner that remains open to those relations, soliciting their “virtual” potential to take other forms.

If part of what we’ve been doing in this conversation is plotting the specificities of newsletter form, I would want to hold on to the range of features that we’ve discussed – weaves of the global and local, confrontation with structural oppressions, institutional self-critique, groping problematization, third objects, self-differing media, practice-indexed seriality. But I’m tempted to understand these as potential features or tendencies in a form that is diagrammatic above all – the newsletter as diagram.

Two of the newsletters take an especially pronounced diagrammatic form, The newsletter by We, TBD is entirely comprised of a diagram. A winding line with branches connects project activities running over four pages, constituting a dynamic association of meeting and planning, spatial construction and design, facilitation of children’s play and poetry readings, physical labor, intra-group emotions and tensions, the fraught constraints of social structures. And it ends with a dense, root or tuber of text about racializing micro-aggressions in other contexts, a text that, in its root-like relation to the diagram’s line, also perhaps inflects what has gone before, partially reversing the flow of the line. There’s a small but important diagrammatic touch here: the title of the newsletter/diagram, the group’s name, is diminished in font-size relative to the titles of the group activities, thus emphasizing process over group identity.

Another newsletter takes the unusual form of being the work of two distinct groups, and uses diagrams as means of introduction. La Foresta and Evening Class ask each other a series of questions, including a most beautiful one: “Can you make a drawing of your organizational form?” La Foresta’s response combines a readily readable hand-drawn sketch of institutions, funding bodies, networks, and their project space, with a curious expanse of geometric lines, lending it a tectonic mood. The diagram takes over the newsletter’s whole front page, pressing readers into a diagrammatic experience without the prior guidance of even a title.