http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protests flies in the airs of the present, gathering up words like sticks shaking in the breeze. The journal sits at a discursive juncture between art and (often anarchist) activism with the knowledge that a knowledge and discourse are one tool to change the world.
The Journal, aware of the possibilities of the boundless moment, searches for ways to think through the cultural and political ramifications of representation. In word and aspiration, The Journal dreams toward a world that differs from "a celebration of the choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice." Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York 1994, p 13.
The Baffler sprang into this world back in 1988 from a very simple idea. Thanks to the forces of academic professionalization, it seemed to us, cultural criticism had become specialized and intentionally obscure. The authority of high culture may have collapsed, but the high-culture critics had no intention of allowing their authority to collapse with it. Instead they abandoned the mundane project of enlightenment and aimed for bafflement, for a style that made much of its own radicalism but had astonishingly little to say about the conditions of life in late twentieth-century America. We set out to puncture their pretensions and to beat them at their own game ...
... More importantly, The Baffler was our attempt to restore a sense of outrage and urgency to the literature of the Left and simultaneously to unmask the pretensions of the lifestyle liberals. The cultural crisis of our time cannot be understood without reference to the fact that the modes of cultural dissidence that arose in the sixties are today indistinguishable from management theory. The distance between the new species of business thinkers and the rebel stars who populate our national firmament is almost zero. Our society is blessed with a great profusion of self-proclaimed subversives, few of which have any problem with the terrifying economic-cultural order into which we are blithely stepping on the eve of the millennium.
But to describe The Baffler in terms of the books we read or the records we listened to or the writers we admired overlooks what was, until quite recently, the central, unassuagable fact that dictated the way we did things. To put it simply, we believed in small magazines and in self-publishing because we had to. Until a certain species of cynicism became acceptable in mainstream press a few years ago, almost nobody else would publish us. We have been outsiders to the mainstream of our time not merely as a matter of choice, but because as recently as 1994 the way we thought and wrote about culture was not something encouraged warmly by editors.
It is also important to point out where The Baffler's critique stops. We make no grand claims about what art or culture can do to transform politics. We confess that we admire certain old avant-gardes, that we like the early writing of John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, that we are always looking for a cartoonist like Art Young. But we realize that political change is going to require actual politics. What we are absolutely sure about is that contemporary capitalism has marshalled the forces of culture, whatever they are, to ensconce itself in power and to insulate itself from criticism to an almost entirely unprecedented extent.
Posted by walkinginplace at November 19, 2004 10:34 PM