EDITORS' NOTE:

or restatement of purpose

pharmaceutical relief

There are four options:

Chew your own tail
Pretend it is not happening
Accede to all evil (seek invite to Thiel adjunct's bunker)
Follow the compulsion to act, thus staving off verdicts on everyone's impotence

A lot of people think they'll pick #2 but then you end up with addictions/acronymic illnesses til you become an adult convert and Believe. Then you're in one of several varieties of an Abrahamic headscarf, pushing a double-digit screentime watching exegesis reels, and you have to do one of the other three anyway. We say pick #4 and mean it.

But why is this, concretely, relevant to an extremely small literary journal? You can imagine one answer: you've heard versions of it in the vernacular of nonprofit organizations. They affirm storytelling's importance to redistributive justice, or maybe low-interest loans to male entrepreneurs. Possibly democracy. It's unclear. It feels unrelated to the increasing frequency of ash. The Biden years were difficult.

But so actually what does it have to do with a journal of no repute, no cash, minimally functional web presence, that might be pointless because someone else is already doing it, or pointless because no one is, or pointless because the underlying concept is flawed? At least half the answer is that we repeatedly find something of this journal's shape missing from the world, and there's nothing else to do.

Nothing else to do. Of course there's something else to do. But what, exactly. Learn Arabic and move to Yemen. Define the most likely path to an independent socialist party then pursue said path with total devotion. Continue repelling ICE in the streets and tend the forms of self-organization that develop from this real motion. Go headlong into the labor movement and rebuild militant unions in strategic sectors. Actually all of these seem good. Let's all pick one and do it.

But there's something else. We have art-making compulsions. And if there's no place to hold art made out of militancy, it's so much easier to be called insane. All art has a propagative function––it carries ideas inside it. Though we often think a propagative function is only useful if tons of people see it, and that tons of people will only see it if it corresponds with the Spirit of the Nation, and that corresponding with the Spirit of the Nation is impossible for true socialists to do. There are counterexamples. There are exceptions. Sure.

But we think we have a plan (delusion). We see that art, or "culture," does do things:
A) At its height, in the best art, it names the previously nameless, and offers its transmission to others. It does this through its aesthetic power, not in spite of it. (See: René Ménil.)
B) It helps creates the common sense. It tacitly forms what's normal, what is legitimate, what is acceptable to talk about or not. It is depressingly relevant to what's considered polite.

But how could we use this? Some of us cringe at the notion of "use" regarding art. Apologies, or grow up. The function is used against us. The choice is whether to use it for ourselves (yes), and if so, whether its aesthetic power should be subordinated to its pragmatic utility (A. no, it can't be; B. not exactly).
Why?
A) because you can't name the nameless with plain language. Art of this caliber is inaugurating new consciousness through the sculpting of feeling which is pre-conscious thought; it is not an appealing repackage of pre-existing concepts.
B) Aesthetic truth is experiential, thus deniable. If I whisper the new proof for Navier-Stokes it does not affect its veracity. The aesthetic does not operate in this fashion. Art's reception is dependent on the emotional-cognitive attachment formed with the receiver, who hates you; and the social environment conditioning its reception, which typically means wealthy pedophiles or the people seeking favors from them. In that case, the question of aesthetic power can't escape the question of rhetoric: does this choice increase the likelihood of emotive attachment? Does it foreclose opportunities to broadly enact itself? If it does, it doesn't automatically follow that I should make work as broadly applaudable as I can––but I should maybe do so to the extent that it doesn't contradict my ends.
If B) sounds more akin to advertising, or docushorts, or maybe what big-P ublishing is, that may be unfortunately true, but it cannot stop us from considering it. You know the sad American truth: if we simply see enough pictures of burgers, we find ourselves lost in McDonald's, asking a kiosk for meat. To some extent, yes, we must simply interrupt those packaged ideologies wherever and whenever we can, but the détourne too is metabolized. This is why we say critique does not suffice; we need the new assertion: the promise of a new reality, one that's impermissible to the current.
Tell me right now what this has to do with your niche literary journal––
Thanks––
First, we need to create a space where works of type A) can exist, and can exist "for," or "in," this general orientation we're describing. Left.
Second, anyone interested in these questions needs a place to talk to each other, to think through these questions in varying degrees of completeness, which hopefully has the benefit of
Third, creating a nucleus of interested parties to interact, therefore solidifying that collective orientation, and hopefully, via luck and adequate delusion, allowing the nucleus to
Fourth, one day act as some type of cultural front, which is to say, do something meaningfully usefu as writers, as artists, etc.

What is useful as artists, writers, etc.? Writing cannot build a union. Paintings don't have hands for rocks. Our question is: what is susceptible to coordinated thought? How, specifically, do we exploit it?

Legitimacy is a place to start. The state gets monopoly on force. But it really needs us to believe that force is legitimate, i.e. necessary; it needs badges to be symbols of safety :), prisons as seclusion for evil. Writing is bound to ideas. But legitimacy is all Ideas. Even better, it's often blind feeling.

I feel Jakhi Isaiah, who lit ten copcars on fire, shouldn't be imprisoned. That's not because he's innocent––he's not––it's because in his case, the laws are illegitimate. Because he was desperate in impotence as he watched the Palestine movement cool, and knew the bombing hadn't stopped, and that even though he lives in a much-touted democracy and the majority of that country now hates Israel, none of us can do anything to change it: your dollars get rolled into Tomahawks and stuffed into refugee tents, because Ben-Gvir needs his nightly quota of dead; your antizionist mayors give $10,000,000,000 to the NYPD, and they use it for outposts in Tel Aviv, or Kfar Saba, or for cops to stalk ex-wives on Flock, for flashbangs only used on students, for SRG to beat anyone who says it's wrong to buy stolen Palestinian homes, even if they're sold from a synagogue.

In its most important instances, prosecution is a product of political will––not written law, not precedent. Cases like Prairieland make it so obvious: the majority of defendants committed no crime, but the state's still giving them min. thirty years.

This happens with our consent.
Burn copcars, go to jail: common sense. It smoothes the state's function.
The "common" notion of course is constructed:
It is not legitimate to imprison Jakhi, for acting like he really believed it, when he heard us all say genocide.
It is not legitimate to imprison Jakhi for acting against his misery, in a city that would let this happen.
It is illegitimate to imprison Jakhi for destroying NYPD cars.
I do not consent to time at Riker's
The prison is yours, on fire if need be
It's polite to hope it explodes
Anyway here's Issue 2