Dear Josephine and list,

Thanks for your mail...

I wasn't imagining you didn't want any kind of politics in art  or
art reviewing at all :). I was just  - probably rather defensively -
reacting to the suggestion that we'd got swamped down with a kind of
collective guilt, or sense of responsibility vis a vis the democratic
promise of new media.

This echoes things I've heard before, for example when Mute did the
Technoscience week at the Documenta Hybrid Workspace (for those who
haven't come across this, it was one of seven sessions in which
groups were invited to explore a theme; ours was science, access to
knowledge, democracy), that all English-based publications are mired
in their debt to cultural studies, and that they haven't learnt how
to think along lines that take the network, rather than
deconstruction, as their model... Similarly, that what publications
like ours are doing is ultimately straight sociology. You're right
though: I do find balancing all these subject areas so that they
inform each other productively very tricky.

Perhaps we should return to the practical issues Beryl was keen to
discuss: you see, I really do see the generation of editorial as
quite a collaborative and distributed effort. The gulf that's been
described as existing between the online and print world is, in this,
not so big as it would seem. I think they massively influence, lead,
divert, and reflect each other, even if that process is hard to be
very transparent about in print.

For example, certain debates build up momentum on email lists:
potential contributors, editors, artists, may read those lists, or
have a diet that includes one and/or a whole load of others that
hardly anyone else on the 'popular' list may read. I subscribe to
many, some of which I only read intermittently, but all of which
mutually question each other... that then helps me see what might be
an interesting topic to commission on. You might have a comparably
positive relation with certain other print publications, or a
negative with others. And so on with books, though this is perhaps
less about a range of different positions in a discursive field, and
in relation to journals and then email lists, of an entirely
different editorial tempo. All of these things are very
interconnected and create a kind of push and pull between those who
produce, those who consume, and those who - on some level - mediate.
The interesting thing about the situation we're to a greater or
lesser extent in is that I think those three categories are now
manifestly and acceptedly interchangeable.

Another thing I wanted to add, and that Grant referred to vis a vis
something else, is that the economics of things can have effects that
only become clear over a long time. What I often think about is how,
when publications have no commissioning budget, the power to lead a
debate in the way that has been described here (in the sense of
feeling a responsibility to cover things in particular ways and then
commissioning accordingly) isn't so great. When Mute started and had
no commissioning budget, it was far more dependent on things that
people wanted to write about, were already working on, or presented
to us as near-finished; this led to a more chaotic, but perhaps also
dialogic editorial process. Although I obviously think contributors
should be remunerated and don't regret we now have a commissioning
budget, it's important to realise that there can be a shift in power
to the core editorial group when they have the funds to go: do this,
ask that, can you explore such-and-such. This isn't exactly how it
goes here :) but it's a danger. CAE have written interestingly about
no-money economies vis a vis Nettime, calling it a potlach one - but
not in a simplistically laudatory sense; rather by describing those
who possess an embarrassment of riches (in the sense that they
develop a surplus of cultural capital due to relatively privileged
positions in intellectual economies) as burning this off somehow in a
communal rite of exhaustion, or public capital burning. (This text is
in the archive of Variant.)

With the Eshun thing: I haven't actually read that text about the
female voice. I've only read More Brilliant than the Sun, which
inspired and infuriated me in equal measure, but whose central ideas
I found fascinating. To discuss the politics of it is a whole other
chapter altogether. Here, I cited that example not because his
writing offers the ultimate solution, but because it offered an
interesting instance of something sensuous and technologically
mediated.

Bests,

Pauline.

PS My apologies my mails keep on getting so long... It's a congenital disease.