Hi All,
I am writing to see if anyone is interested in producing a magazine on political theory and practice. It will be attempt to restore the relationship between thought and action and a space to reinvent and re-imagine new ways of applying philosophy in current political movements (Marxist, Neo-Anarchist, Peak Oil/Climate Change, Anti-colonial, Feminist etc). With this intention it will hopefully avoid producing the description of a philosopher as one who is at once ‘The most Marxist and the least revolutionary’ (a description someone recently told me and the exact formula that this magazine should be cautious not to reproduce).
The main reason for this journal is too avoid the frustrations that are felt by those of us who are politically active when we see that philosophy’s potency and implications are left to an inconsequential disagreement amongst academics and thus denied to those outside the academies who are in the position to implement them. In this respect, the magazine will be distributed (if printed) and promoted not just within the university system but in each and every social space - Transition Town initiatives’, Community clubs (Credit Unions), Political groups and associations (Trade Unions), radical bookshops and theatres (Housman, Bookmarks, Arcola, Cardboard theatre), at Protests and Gatherings etc.
With the people I have already spoken to in mind and those I know who want to contribute but are not part of the CREMP, I have written a short self-description of the magazine (taking the liberty of using ‘We’) –
The aim of this publication is to free philosophy from what Immanuel Kant described as the “the ridiculous despotism” of the universities that still remain an enclosure of thought. It is to develop a theory and practice that can be “appropriated by all” in opposition to the political tradition that has been abducted by anemic academics and who in their willful obscurantism have withheld these political ideas from the very people who are mostly like to need them and use them.
It is also to reject the assumption in philosophy that infers the inferiority of experience. In this view, theory should be uncontaminated by practice and philosophy’s implications are always abstracted from there applications. When philosophy becomes so removed from experience it not only does not have anything to say about it, but also does not even have an external world with which it can be consistent (contradictions obviously don’t hold here!). We want to affirm, despite the attempt to direct philosophy away from the people and things of our experience, George Lukac’s claim that it is impossible to exit the world of subjects and objects. We are in agreement with Jean Luc Nancy when he argues that theory and practice are not “separate regimes” and when he makes explicit the need to collapse thought and action into each other to the point where our thought experiences itself as experience.
It is our realization that the nothing that is produced by much of contemporary philosophy – its impotence and inaction, is derived from the nothing from which it comes - either its active resistance to application or the absence of anything to apply. It is still insufficient to have a theory that speaks about practice if it is not directly involved in the situations where it is practiced. It is our attempt, then, to recuperate the relationship between thought and practice where, as Deleuze put it, “life activates thought, and thought affirms life.” In turn, this will realize the indispensable importance of this relationship where “No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall”. This shows the limits of theory when it is not tested and verified practically and it is when “thinking is translated into existence” that the experience of struggle can in return enable us to re-imagine or reinvent our theory and look for new weapons.
Our political approach is best represented in the open hole of a rebel’s flag which had the communist symbol cut out after Ceausescu’s overthrow in Romania. This hole, as Slavoj Zizek argues, is the “open” historical moment where the former master signifier (of communism) was missing and the new one (of ethic-nationalism, liberal capitalism) had still not replaced it. This is the moment that we want to maintain and occupy. It is this position that allows us to reject the question “but what will re-place it?” This is because our common conception of the politics is to induce the very disappearance of this place (of power).
Lastly, our motto is Not in Latin! This is an appeal to abandon the use of specialized language that turns the presumption of equality and its expression of universal emancipation into a Platonic apprenticeship. This specialized language, as Susan Buck Morrs rightly remarks, requires a “priesthood of experts” and fifty years to make it intelligible! Martin Luther translated the Bible into ordinary German where his opponents argued that “even tailors and shoemakers…read it with great eagerness” and which subsequently led to the German Peasant War. In anticipation of the political restlessness that could follow from his scientific research Galileo published in vernacular Italian (which Bertolt Brecht described as “the idiom of fishwives and wool merchants”) instead of the inaccessible Latin of the insular scientific community. We are in agreement with Galileo when he says that “there are people with common sense, but because they are unable to read things that are ‘Greek to them’, they become convinced that the logic and philosophy are over their heads.”
It is our assessment that if the university is going to cease to be a closed community it will need a Lavalas (flood) of thought to overflow it. It is time for philosophy to resume its relationship with practice (as practice) and give up this frigid and timid thought that restricts itself to reflection. In doing this we can return radical philosophy to its place by asserting that it has no ‘proper’ place.
Again, to put it generally:
It will be a non-academic (exoteric) magazine instead of an academic (esoteric) one (for those who find they can’t desist from using specialized language or just find it generally undignified, there are hundreds of academic philosophy journals who accept submissions). However, if the use of a specialized term is unavoidable then it will be accepted with the condition that is economically explicated within the written text itself (if it takes 500 words to adequately explain the term’s meaning, or even another essay, it may be worth finding an alternative). Furthermore, both within and without the university, people in general really don’t like neologisms!
Submissions will be considered that come from both inside and outside the university.
It is not a student magazine in the sense that it should not be viewed as an extension of the course and is definitely not a place to practice essay writing for a future assessment. The idea is to produce an independent magazine that is not regulated or formally approved by a department or university.
If anyone is still interested (even) after reading this, then let me know and we can organize a meeting and set up an all inclusive editorial group to discuss ideas on structure, presentation and possibility of publishing in print. If anybody thinks that the idea for the magazine is not one they could conform to or one that they are disagreement with (I know that it is a particular approach of a certain tradition and understand that many will not adhere to its commitments) then they can, through their own volition, create another magazine reflecting their approach to philosophy. The best result would be many different magazines (online and in print if possible) expressing these different views and interests.
I am writing to see if anyone is interested in producing a magazine on political theory and practice. It will be attempt to restore the relationship between thought and action and a space to reinvent and re-imagine new ways of applying philosophy in current political movements (Marxist, Neo-Anarchist, Peak Oil/Climate Change, Anti-colonial, Feminist etc). With this intention it will hopefully avoid producing the description of a philosopher as one who is at once ‘The most Marxist and the least revolutionary’ (a description someone recently told me and the exact formula that this magazine should be cautious not to reproduce).
The main reason for this journal is too avoid the frustrations that are felt by those of us who are politically active when we see that philosophy’s potency and implications are left to an inconsequential disagreement amongst academics and thus denied to those outside the academies who are in the position to implement them. In this respect, the magazine will be distributed (if printed) and promoted not just within the university system but in each and every social space - Transition Town initiatives’, Community clubs (Credit Unions), Political groups and associations (Trade Unions), radical bookshops and theatres (Housman, Bookmarks, Arcola, Cardboard theatre), at Protests and Gatherings etc.
With the people I have already spoken to in mind and those I know who want to contribute but are not part of the CREMP, I have written a short self-description of the magazine (taking the liberty of using ‘We’) –
The aim of this publication is to free philosophy from what Immanuel Kant described as the “the ridiculous despotism” of the universities that still remain an enclosure of thought. It is to develop a theory and practice that can be “appropriated by all” in opposition to the political tradition that has been abducted by anemic academics and who in their willful obscurantism have withheld these political ideas from the very people who are mostly like to need them and use them.
It is also to reject the assumption in philosophy that infers the inferiority of experience. In this view, theory should be uncontaminated by practice and philosophy’s implications are always abstracted from there applications. When philosophy becomes so removed from experience it not only does not have anything to say about it, but also does not even have an external world with which it can be consistent (contradictions obviously don’t hold here!). We want to affirm, despite the attempt to direct philosophy away from the people and things of our experience, George Lukac’s claim that it is impossible to exit the world of subjects and objects. We are in agreement with Jean Luc Nancy when he argues that theory and practice are not “separate regimes” and when he makes explicit the need to collapse thought and action into each other to the point where our thought experiences itself as experience.
It is our realization that the nothing that is produced by much of contemporary philosophy – its impotence and inaction, is derived from the nothing from which it comes - either its active resistance to application or the absence of anything to apply. It is still insufficient to have a theory that speaks about practice if it is not directly involved in the situations where it is practiced. It is our attempt, then, to recuperate the relationship between thought and practice where, as Deleuze put it, “life activates thought, and thought affirms life.” In turn, this will realize the indispensable importance of this relationship where “No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall”. This shows the limits of theory when it is not tested and verified practically and it is when “thinking is translated into existence” that the experience of struggle can in return enable us to re-imagine or reinvent our theory and look for new weapons.
Our political approach is best represented in the open hole of a rebel’s flag which had the communist symbol cut out after Ceausescu’s overthrow in Romania. This hole, as Slavoj Zizek argues, is the “open” historical moment where the former master signifier (of communism) was missing and the new one (of ethic-nationalism, liberal capitalism) had still not replaced it. This is the moment that we want to maintain and occupy. It is this position that allows us to reject the question “but what will re-place it?” This is because our common conception of the politics is to induce the very disappearance of this place (of power).
Lastly, our motto is Not in Latin! This is an appeal to abandon the use of specialized language that turns the presumption of equality and its expression of universal emancipation into a Platonic apprenticeship. This specialized language, as Susan Buck Morrs rightly remarks, requires a “priesthood of experts” and fifty years to make it intelligible! Martin Luther translated the Bible into ordinary German where his opponents argued that “even tailors and shoemakers…read it with great eagerness” and which subsequently led to the German Peasant War. In anticipation of the political restlessness that could follow from his scientific research Galileo published in vernacular Italian (which Bertolt Brecht described as “the idiom of fishwives and wool merchants”) instead of the inaccessible Latin of the insular scientific community. We are in agreement with Galileo when he says that “there are people with common sense, but because they are unable to read things that are ‘Greek to them’, they become convinced that the logic and philosophy are over their heads.”
It is our assessment that if the university is going to cease to be a closed community it will need a Lavalas (flood) of thought to overflow it. It is time for philosophy to resume its relationship with practice (as practice) and give up this frigid and timid thought that restricts itself to reflection. In doing this we can return radical philosophy to its place by asserting that it has no ‘proper’ place.
Again, to put it generally:
It will be a non-academic (exoteric) magazine instead of an academic (esoteric) one (for those who find they can’t desist from using specialized language or just find it generally undignified, there are hundreds of academic philosophy journals who accept submissions). However, if the use of a specialized term is unavoidable then it will be accepted with the condition that is economically explicated within the written text itself (if it takes 500 words to adequately explain the term’s meaning, or even another essay, it may be worth finding an alternative). Furthermore, both within and without the university, people in general really don’t like neologisms!
Submissions will be considered that come from both inside and outside the university.
It is not a student magazine in the sense that it should not be viewed as an extension of the course and is definitely not a place to practice essay writing for a future assessment. The idea is to produce an independent magazine that is not regulated or formally approved by a department or university.
If anyone is still interested (even) after reading this, then let me know and we can organize a meeting and set up an all inclusive editorial group to discuss ideas on structure, presentation and possibility of publishing in print. If anybody thinks that the idea for the magazine is not one they could conform to or one that they are disagreement with (I know that it is a particular approach of a certain tradition and understand that many will not adhere to its commitments) then they can, through their own volition, create another magazine reflecting their approach to philosophy. The best result would be many different magazines (online and in print if possible) expressing these different views and interests.