Reza Negarestani: Why create a new philosophy journal?
Robin Mackay: The shortcoming of academic journals is that they tend towards extremely cautious articles, taking tiny, circumspect steps in a very narrow field of study. This tends to breed a sort of resigned attitude amongst those working in philosophy that they’re not really doing philosophy, they’re doing secondary commentary. Which cuts them off from people outside that world who nevertheless already are thinking philosophically and want to access what’s going on in contemporary thought.
Then on the other hand you have publications that try to straddle the fashion or style press and trendy intellectualism; they present a simplified version of whatever happens to be the ‘latest theory’ end ‘apply it’ to popular culture (the deconstruction of candy wrappers, etc.). Here you get a thrill of radicality, the excitement of what philosophy could be, but it’s kind of empty, vapid, it’s ultimately intellectually unsatisfying.
It’s an unfortunate dichotomy: philosophy as academic discipline, or a trendy hybrid that claims to ‘go beyond traditional philosophy’. But why can’t philosophy be both rigorous and radical, both conceptually incisive and thrilling? The trouble is, a lot of the people who are producing such work find it difficult to be published by either camp: they don’t particularly want their work to be vapidly ‘relevant’, or to submit themselves to a year-long academic peer-review process that ‘irons out’ anything remotely speculative.
Add to this that the major publishers haven’t even made it into the last century yet: their processes are incredibly slow and laboured, considering that anyone can write, typeset and printed book at home on their PC now.
So that was part of the programme for Collapse: to publish pieces that otherwise just wouldn’t find a home. It was conceived as a sort of pre-emptive salon des réfuses for people I knew who were doing exciting philosophical work that they, and I, knew was unlikely to appear in any ‘proper’ philosophy journal except on condition that it was stripped of everything that made it challenging and exciting—and even then, only to be seen by a very narrow readership as part of a sort of professional chore.
Pieces of writing that represent thought in progress, that show you that you can still do philosophy without it being just a desolate reshuffling of references and making baby steps forward. A part of this is to bring in people from the sciences and the arts to ‘nourish’ philosophy from outside. Because part of the malaise of professional philosophy is that it’s become very self-enclosed, rather autistic. Imagine an alien arriving on earth after World War Four has destroyed all life, and finding some digital archive. Surely they’ll look at the scientists who taught me about superstrings, about cell ontology, about dark matter, or artists who are investigating the nature of objecthood, of representation, of space and time, and they’ll say ‘ah, these are the philosophers…as for these other people, endlessly poring over Hegel and Kant, well they must have been some kind of strange order of monks or something…’. What’s needed is some fresh air from outside the academic philosophy community; but at the same time it’s important to affirm, and to demonstrate, that philosophy itself is still living and—if you look in the right places—as compelling as philosophy ought to be.
In future I would like to bring in more and more people from other disciplines. For example in Collapse vol. IV, a volume whose subtitle is ‘Concept Horror’, we have included work by [US and UK weird fiction authors] Thomas Ligotti and China Miéville, [Russian contemporary artist] Oleg Kulik, [UK artists] Jake and Dinos Chapman, [French novelist] Michel Houellebecq, and other writers and artists, alongside philosophers. It’s not a matter of bringing in someone to talk about the ‘philosophy of science’ or ‘of art’, or to apply some other philosopher’s system to their work, but rather to show how, within their practices, they spontaneously develop their own ontologies, their own philosophical propositions, and their own ways of looking at the world, at ideas, and at objects. Collapse vol. I featured mathematics, theology, numerology, computer science, and more. In Collapse vol. II we had contributions from neuroscientists, astrophysicists, filmmakers and artists as well as philosophers. Although centred around a particular philosopher (Deleuze), vol. III contains contributions from sound artists Haswell and Hecker, Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian, and even a ‘contribution’ from a 19th-century science fiction writer [J.H. Rosny]…!
RN: Does Collapse represent your individual vision?
RM: I’m doing research in philosophy, attached to a UK university, and I’m lucky enough to come into contact with some extremely smart people, and feel like I’m listening in to some key debates in contemporary philosophy. But Collapse has no direct institutional links or obligations, it’s got no responsibilities to any agency. Therefore, you could say that Collapse is a product of my own vision. But various other people have been and are indispensable to the process, even though I’ve also had to stick to my guns and ignore a lot of ‘sound advice’ in order to produce it (you should include book reviews, you should have an editorial committee, etc.)
As I say in the introduction to vol. I, I saw it all along more as being a strange collection—a compendium or a ‘necronomicon’—where each reader would buy it to read one or two of the pieces but become interested in the others, so it would produce the kind of connectivity that you never get with the strictly themed, niche-marketed collections that major publishers, by financial necessity, have to deal in. That vision of ‘stealth connectivity’ was central. Also, I tried to reproduce something like the sensation one has as a child when presented with a book that is so thick and full of words and diagrams and pictures that it exerts a sort of sublime fascination, becomes a kind of a cult object: a book of spells or a giant instruction book which has lost its referent.
RN: Do non specialists have any hope of understanding Collapse?
RM: Well, in line with what I just said, what is necessary, I think, is that every reader finds themselves ‘stretched’ in some sense or another or in multiple senses. The greatest disaster would be if a reader found only what they expected. Then it would be time to give up! But it is important (even if we haven’t perfected this art yet) that there’s a variety of material, not all high-level incomprehensible jargon. Each volume includes materials that any reasonably intelligent reader could pick up and read—not ‘dumbed down’ or simplified features, but challenging and intriguing, accessible but otherworldly, enticing to the outsider who perhaps doesn’t quite understand but feels a kind of compelling fascination. That compelling fascination and that not-quite-understanding are constitutive of the practise of philosophy, as far as I’m concerned, that feeling is philosophy-in-progress-as-emotion. This is a good reason for including interviews: Collapse vol. I has an interview with a mathematician, vol. II with an astrophysicist, and vol. III contains a complete transcription of a wide-ranging discussion between four important young philosophers, which kind of demystifies what goes on in philosophy—a sort of informal ‘live philosophy’. The interview form seems to me to be hugely undervalued. Most interviews we read today are so shamefully superficial. A huge amount of work went into the interviews featured in Collapse, they were real collaborations and labours of love for all parties involved.
RN: A lot of thought seems to have gone into the look of Collapse.
RM: Although I can’t call myself an artist, I approached the project in that spirit, starting with an obscure idea of something that didn’t exist and that I wanted to create (as authors say, ‘you write the book you want to read’), and then letting it slowly develop, all the time thinking of the whole product: design, content, type-style, who will be interested in it, how they might react, even the way it will be packaged and sent out, everything. It goes so far that each of the 1000 copies is numbered by hand, for instance! So it’s a conceptual-aesthetic-commercial object, a sort of manifesto but also an experiment, a text but also a thing still in the process of being invented.
With a journal that’s put together by a committee, and peer-reviewed, and edited, designed, printed, and distributed by different parties, I don’t think this can ever happen. It’s like a camera without a lens, you produce something, but it’s unfocused, generic. It’s not that I think my point of view is special—anyone could (and should!) do the same, make their own publication—but I believe the sheer fact that everything goes through an individual provides a focus which makes Collapse singular, it gives it character and coherence. Models for this would be periodicals like Verve, Minotaure, Documents, Acephale, etc. Obviously, one wouldn’t want it to be personal, totally idiosyncratic—but the feedback I’ve had from readers shows that they do ‘get it’, and that they appreciate the care that’s being put into it. In fact perhaps this personal process of selection and arrangement, this thoughtfulness in creating a very particular thing and having the commitment to materialise it, is rarer and thus more appreciated in the ‘digital age’.
RN: What has been involved in the process of editing Collapse?
RM: The website for Collapse existed for almost a year before the journal finally appeared, and the idea had been developing for at least a year before that. This process is fascinating to me: having a vague idea, giving it a name, talking to people about it, and its suddenly beginning to seem like a real entity, which then starts to surprise you. Some people involved with books affect disinterest in these material or commercial elements of the process, but I’m fascinated by them. The best thing is, after all the work put into the first volume, the subsequent volumes have come together almost spontaneously, through other people being excited by the possibilities, getting in touch, and sending me their contributions. So in the end it becomes a collective process: after reading vol. I, contributors selected themselves on the basis of understanding what the ‘vision’ is and how it might adapt to include them—and so the vision continues and evolves.
RN: Does Collapse represent the vanguard of a new movement in philosophy, and if so how influential do you think it is?
RM: Collapse isn’t advocating any particular philosophical position; you could say it was more about attitude. Those philosophers who contributed under the rubric of ‘Speculative Realism’ in Collapse vols. II and III, for instance, come from different philosophical traditions, have different aims, and use different conceptual tools. There are points of convergence, but the really important thing is that they all believe that philosophy itself is still alive, and need not be subordinated to politics, aesthetics, or whatever else. And I’m sure there are plenty of young students of philosophy to whom that will come as a real breath of fresh air. But as far as I know Collapse doesn’t exert any great influence within philosophy yet! A first few books are beginning to come out now which reference Collapse, and I really believe that some of the articles we published so far will become essentials in the future. But what’s also rewarding is that people are inspired by the ideas and that leads to other productions: the piece by [sound artists] Haswell and Hecker in Collapse vol. III came about because Florian Hecker composed a piece called ‘Dark Energy’ after reading the interview with theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta in Collapse vol. II—fantastic! [Australian artist] Helen Johnson included a copy of Collapse in a painting recently. Jake and Dinos Chapman did their drawings for vol. IV based on reading some of the other contributions. These sort of transversal connections are the most exciting for me. But certainly I believe that thinkers we have featured such as Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Grant, and Graham Harman are the most interesting and most promising philosophers of this generation and their fate, at least in the Anglo-American world, depends to a certain extent upon transforming the institutional context, within which original thinkers are increasingly embattled and under pressure to conform, to ‘identify’ themselves through a set of pre-set conceptual coordinates, and to publish continually. I hope that introducing para-academic channels of communication like Collapse is a part of the solution, letting people know where to look, highlighting the exceptions to the rules. But a more radical transformation is necessary in the long run. I’d hope for Collapse to inspire a new generation of philosophers able to think outside affiliations to this or that philosopher or school, ready to employ resources from music, the sciences, the arts, unafraid to make bold forays into the outer edges of speculation, and ready to devise new ways for thought to survive, whether inside or outside the university. Philosophy needs to realise that it can stop policing itself so tightly, stop demanding mediocrity, without everything falling apart: thinking isn’t the enemy…!
RN: How is Collapse disseminated, since you have no institutional support or commercial distribution?
RM: Well, first of all, through the web, of course—in that way, despite being a defiantly physical product, Collapse is totally rooted in the virtual world. Blogs have been a great aid in getting word out. But I’m pretty confident that if you really put some love and care into something, if you maintain its integrity and its singularity, then the people who need to know will find out somehow, and absolutely everything that’s happened so far has proved that to be the case—the Collapse tentacles reach all sorts of unexpected places, and are always surprising me with what they bring back! But practically, it does help us immensely if people spread the word by mentioning Collapse on their blog and downloading the posters and flyers from the website and post them up wherever they are. Reviews are hard to come by, since most journals refused to review other journals, even though that’s just a terminological matter—Collapse is really more like a book series than a conventional journal. So essentially it’s a conspiracy, that we ask each reader to join—help spread the virus. Collapse is something that’s born purely of passion, there’s no cynical aspect to it at all, and readers connect with that, and want to help it survive and flourish.