Declaration of Intent

The history of human activity swings like a pendulum between poles of normalization and revolution. All social orders, even the strongest empire, have flimsy seams of cohesion upon which they depend, and upon which subjugation of certain peoples and forms of knowledge is made necessary. Yet, the unceasing flow of history is the slow progress of dissolution at the seams.

We believe that digital media is the future of revolution; blogs and other communal spaces online, accessible throughout the world, are the only possible source of resistance in the fight against the globalized, commoditized de-individualization of human beings in society. The freedom of information the internet represents is our age’s last remaining bastion of radical democracy, even though the heavy trot of media consolidation would see this bastion razed to ruin.

We look skeptically at the trends of popular culture, which blinds us to its hypocrisy. Those who practice the expression of individuality through brand-name conformity lack a sensibility of radical receptivity and engagement. Instead of reifying our accepted notions of the “normal” and the “reasonable” into airtight and dogmatic dictums engaged with the ignominious “other”, we seek to engage “otherness”. We seek to dwell in the borderlands borne from dialogue between different sensibilities and attention towards the voices and visions that come from places not yet illuminated. As the political theorist Coles asserts, “that which emerges in receptive engagements and tensions between different ways of being is the deepening of our sense of suffering, danger and other possibilities for justice and flourishing”; the cultivation of this sensibility is the knowledge that we cannot rule out other modes of existence in advance. We are in pursuit of the ever-changing aesthetic of the un-voiced, the obscure, and the unusual.

And yet, the very medium through which we seek to foment artistic rebellion - these hallowed tubes - is at the same time one of the primary tools used to inundate the masses with conciliatory opiates as it robs us (you) of vitality and creativity. We have heard the metaphor, "you can't use the master's tools to tear down the master's house," but we propose an alternate truth: there is no house, there are no tools, and there may not even be a master.

Everything is fluid, identity itself unstable and dynamic. The "master" whose house we think we inhabit is nothing more than our own shadow, cast large on the wall by a light we've forgotten to look for. The delineation of modes and styles of expression into "tools," artificially constructed and limiting categories prevent us from seeing the whole for what it is, immense, overwhelming, and beautiful.

All this being said, we cannot deny that a coherent “we” does not exist in the formation of this blog. Furthermore, “we” are not radical revolutionaries who seek an outlet for expression; “we” are Creative writing students fulfilling a course requirement. But so what? The Man takes himself seriously so we defy him by refusing to take ourselves seriously - but also refusing to seriously adhere to the act of mocking protest by, on occasion, taking it seriously.

The resultant disagreement on content that will inevitably occur in our “we” is, on the final account, preferable to unanimous agreement. Homogeneity is a tool of the Man, while argument and strife are what fuel creativity—so let the fires burn, and always keep in mind

… We can't stop here. This is bat country!