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Publisher's Note
Aesthetics & Protest co-editors
When Kuba approached us to see if the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest could get behind and publish this Patainstitutional Inquiries project you are now looking at, that he'd initially conceptualized for the Journal for Research Cultures, we had just finished our 11th issue. Like Kuba's patainstitutional interrogation, our issues take several years from inception to publication; and though his project was not initially intended for us, we are quite happy to publish it. We know or are familiar with many of the authors or the situations of his issue , so it really was a natural fit.
Moreover, his project reverberates with questions related to our 11th issue entitled "Culture Beside Itself". Formally, our issue was a compilation of locally circulated, collectively authored newsletters. It's conceptual aspects mirror of Kuba's inquiry: our issue asked the contributing collectives to consider what it is they as a group compose among themselves and in relation to their local social, natural, economic or political ecologies– rather than in relation to mediating institutional forces. Our questions about activity and research for itself, not for abstracting force, related to the apparent rise in fascist and authoritarian governance. We were alarmed by the right's ever-more dreadful appearances. We were critical and curious of the extent to which this alarm obscured the capacities and potential of grassroots left cultural and political activity. Our critical apprehension had to do with how we understood that leftist and liberatory activity might unwittingly leave grassroots' sensible relations to wither while massifying to attend to the Fascist beast.
With his focus on ways that institutions self-institute in relation to immediate insistencies and produce self-organized research, we found this project to be an excellent mirror to our issue. We'd always understood the idea of "culture beside itself" to be a bit of a theoretical joke- culture can only be itself, it is definitionally not-not itself; it is what it is or it is something else. At the beginning of our issue's editing, we recognized that we could not be purists about the definitions for grassroots and the non-institutional– that though nouns, they are indefinite and only appear on a gradient. In the end, we ended up working with collectives that were formed for this project, with neighborhood anarchist and grassroots initiatives working with the church to run a covid food pantry, collectives formed at the margins of academic conferences, and initiatives within definitionally political groups (the Democratic Party) trying to influence institutional focus in relation to less recognized contingencies.
So the mirror that the Kuba's Patainstitutional Inquiries hold up for us here is theoretical, it thinks through that mushy area where institutions become from the acts and research of interested individuals. Its interesting that while our issue looks from personal and collective activity toward institutional being, his reflective focus embraces the sense of instituting for itself. While a traditional top-down inquiry might trace relations down a managerial chain, this patainstitutional inquiry ideologically explore the theory of an institutions own becoming in economic and institutional relation- towards its own becoming's ends and for itself.
On a related note- we were also basically interested in Kuba's project because it overlaps so directly with the core of our Journal's interests– in very particular ways. Kuba and the issue's contributor's seem to greatly appreciate the radical and political potential of self-determined avant garde creativity; this sensibility directly overlaps with ours. Kuba understood it when I said that the project seemed to be from from a different dimension for critical cultural inquiry- one seemingly left aside as these ever more evident facts of authoritarianism, fascism, ethno-nationism, and climate catastrophe emerge. The articles and projects the Patainstitutional Inquiries project describe have a can-do sensibility about them, they understand without a doubt that creatives can make a difference on the weirdly institutional level. They know the ways that weird institution can defines its own stabilities and terms for their open and public orientation. While the date between when this special issue's articles were commissioned and now has provided ever more evidence that truly anti-racist and gender-inclusive institutions are necessary for the radical transformations we need to convivially live through the violence times, the sensibility of the importance for open cultural self-determination also only grows louder.
We should never be drunk by the power that asks us to recognize only the size of our dreams, to the exclusion of the ver real actual capacities of our communities. Thank you Kuba for asking us to publish this meaningful collection, that has been caught in time. All power to the pataphysical commune, revolutionary love to those stuck in-between and out of time. Your time is now and forever.