What we mean by "Culture beside itself"

We see a contradiction in the utilization of the word "culture".
We recognize culture as an instuting force: it organizes relations logistically by prioritizing certain voices and modes of communication at other explicit focuses' and expressions' expense.

Conversely, culture can be understood as the honest expressions of people.

At the embrace of this contradiction is the situation of "culture beside itself."

Newsletters, as cultural and political expression

If "cultural" things are comprehended as unique objects- singular paintings, dances, books, newsletter- then we wonder how those unique expressions exist as if they had the autonomy that Western thought gives to individual (male, white) humans. We wanted to listen to printed words as though they might vary or fluctuate as though they had thier own own being.

To be situated locally is to relate at a particular scale. Yet the local is but a poetic description; qualifying context, beings and things someone considers to at a be meaningfully scale. For this issue, we allowed collectives to define their 'local' as the scale at which they vibrated. We were interested in hearing practices that resonate in context; for the needs of the context in which practices were situated.

Collectivity and site relate for several reasons-it is between people and other things that any site's meaningfulness can be worked through– in practice or discourse. Without collectivity, there is only individual will that may or may not have progressive import. While collectivity is not equivalent with meaningful discoure, we assume that it serves as a check on individual ambition. Rather, within collectivity, if one benefits, so do the rest.

On Newsletters in site and place

We know that the variation of cultural things, how one day a song might be pleasant but the next day it might be a call to arms, is dependent to the wider changes in context.

But if the practice of concerted and conscious cultural work is to be taken seriously, it insists that considered work does have its own effects on the things it relates to.

The critical problem that this issue of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest hopes to address relates to how sustained and intelligent and considered practice is or is not supported in relation to the very specific and highly individualized contexts that we all live within.

For us, a newsletter represents the sustained efforts of a people within a place to maintain a focused and yet also almost mundane relation to both the community and their habitus. With this issue, we wanted to support weird but meaningful political and cultural activity over time.

Non-fascist or avant garde practice varyingly pushes against power's logistics.

Social constellations that inform their own common life with critical and creative practice can more organically articulate resistance to any violent state cultural and economic system:

Practice and habit-informed critical and creative sociality intertwined with the day's necessities finds relational resonance that exeedes state policing. It organizes for itself, in relation to more than spectacular external instutionionality. As this issue's Out of the Woods and Tools for Action discuss, such practices develop from and can develop towards innately radical ways of being different; because they find no compulsion to explain to authority who and why they are.

Opening Statement

Corona, Fascism, Climate Break-Down. Headlines all, and very real crises felt everywhere– things whose concerns work over situations at every scale of possible experience. We are interested in many things in regard to them, including how their nasty effects demand that we put our home affairs in order. Capacities for solidarity, meaningful mutual aid and actual justice emerge from the most intimate of places - that is, from between people and between people and other meaningful things.

This issue’s aim was to facilitate such work in intimate places, to do so, this issue serves primarily as a compilation of autonomously produced and locally distributed newsletters aimed at situating non-fascist thought and/or avant garde culture. This editorial departure creatively manifests our collective’s critical frustrations with the hegemonic state of normative political affairs that much of the creative and critical left participates in. So much art and politics orients to climb up the scales of power and mediation. Our frustration is not based on a question of motivation to do so. Rather, it reflects our understanding that despite serious critical and creative work occurring from the center to the far left, liberatory and cosmopolitically open enlivening politics are not advancing. While as mediaticaly present as ever, they seem to be on the governing retreat, while institutions and parties, and the need for their success seem to expand. So, while there are so many good critical ideas and creative practices produced through parties, think tanks, academic and cultural institutions, their efforts seem to be to doing little more than producing the grease that just keeps the wheels spinning.

It should be mentioned, for honesty’s sake, that this frustration is possibly bound to the fact that our journal has no real institutional ties. So, our analysis is that that for left desire to be more than just a bunch of good ideas, fun and pretty pictures, we have to seriously work to become meaningful and useful and sensible to a complex society rather than just for leftist (academic, museum, political, curatorial, media-based) forces of distribution.

Overall, our submission call demonstrates how the issue has two theoretical anchors, new municipalist, small “d” democratic praxis and de-colonial thinking. When the submitted newsletters were authored as responses to our call (reprinted on the issue’s back cover), we trusted the author/editors to manage their own work’s content, that they would take their newsletters in the direction they saw fit.  All we asked was that contributions be; 1) collectively edited to make sure each project was more than one person’s ambition 2) locally distributed in hopes that a situation would drive content beside whatever ambition 3) and oriented along avant-garde or anti-fascist ends. Theorist Nick Thoburn’s essay on the newsletter form does a better job than we could in analyzing the contributions towards these and other critical ends.

This issue’s open call for collectively edited/locally distributed newsletters was entitled “Culture beside itself.” We asked for collectively edited, somehow-situated work so that individual ambition might be checked by both site and non-virtual relation– though our main critical impulse was to think about what culturally could be done beside the impulse to make things that could easily connect institutionally. Somehow outside but somehow not in ignorance of what power does; that is what we meant by “Culture beside itself.” “Culture beside itself” is a subtle joke; funny in ways equal to the contradictions inherent to art’s supposed autonomy and the real love that militant anti-fascist black-blocks protect. Meaningful relationality is built across apparent difference rather than by simply accounting for meaningful metrics. As some of our newsletters discuss, fascism functions despite all its explicit nonsense because it systemically insists on its right to dominate under any terms. A culture beside itself, though, takes pause and feels out any demands and insistence to make sure that what is relationally being asked actually vibes.

A culture and solidarity that can vibe is a winning politics, culturally and meaningfully and politically.

Some more thoughts on the project

This issue explores the concept of "culture beside itself".

Newsletters: "Beside and Outside Institutions": The autonomy of "beside and outside institutions" that this issue explores exists in relation to things we and our contributors know... that regardless of what instituion facilitate in our expressions, our potential and desires exceed all this.

Newsletter Design Template

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This logo was on the lower right hand corner of the newsletter template we sent to respondants to our submission call. The teemplate suggested a two-column newsletter topped by a page personalized header.

We told participating collectives that they could utilize, ignore or detourn the logo

Project Timeline: We began working on this issue near the end of 2018, and released the submission call in Spring 2019. For a variety of reasons, For a variety of reasons, but primarily because we had no need to rush it, we continued accepting submissions until the Spring of 2020. To work outside of any funder's needs is to work on one's own timeline against life's other contingencies.

Editorial Research:We utilized and suggested to contributors the following reading list: Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres, The Undercommons by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Wisdom to Make Worlds by Stevphen Shukaitis, A Billion Black Anthropocenes by Kathryn Yusoff, Use, Knowledge, Art and History by Charles Esche & Manuel Borja-Villel, the Third Text issue on Anti-Fascism, edited by Angela Demitrakaki and Harry Weeks, and Optimism of the Will, an anti-fascist report back organized by Gregory Sholette for the Field Journal.

Further editorial work included communicating with contacts in Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey; and also within racialized communitiies organizing and creating within the contexts dominated by authoritarian leadership. Despite efforts, we did not receive submissions from these countries. Nevertheless this research helped us understand the risk and commitment required to articulate, over time, political and cultural modes that run strongly counter to dominant and weaponized state forces.

On Universality and particularity