Drifting through space-time some months ago I found myself Josef K’d by an editorial effort to let a chain of people do as they pleased with continent. I thought this is what we all always did with continent. But these were new people; new people with new… stuff. Berit and April seemed to be the instigators so I asked my questions all-hysterical-like, and their parable-answers did receive.
John Gullick: So you and April have been curating, or at least have launched a project which will become several issues of continent.: the drift project. Well, let me preface this by saying I’m not sure what drift is.
Berit Soli-Holt: Awesome. Exactly.
JG: : How important is the sense of veiling here? We know we’re getting something soon, but we don’t know what. There’s a secret at work, maybe a secret society; how much can you give away now?
April Vannini: I don’t know if there is really a secret. A secret implies that we know something that others don’t, that we are keeping something to ourselves. But we really don’t know what will come from this project since it’s an emergent process. We tossed out a proposition and added some constraints for logistical reasons. What emerges is anyone’s guess.
BSH: In a sense, it remains a secret to us. In research, there’s the idea that you must know what you are aiming for to collect the relevant data. We wanted to discard this mode and to build a net, or a Rube Goldberg contraption, for the selection of articles to be included in a journal. We wanted the peer review to be a part of each step of the way, as well as leaving the shape of the content to be steered by the contributors. In regards to a society, we (as editors) wanted to remain unaware of the process of choosing contributors. Well, not necessarily unaware, but for the growth of contributors to be reliant on an initial set of contributors chosen by ourselves. We only knew the first two participants of each thread, leaving each subsequent contributor to make their own decision about where the material for the journal would continue to accumulate.
AV: I really like the idea of a net, because a net can’t capture everything. Some things remain and others are released. I like to think of drift as that release.
JG: What contributions are you holding captive at the moment? Are we talking text, image, film?
BSH: Yes. All three.
JG: Dance?
BSH: Not that I know of yet.
AV: Going back to this idea of secret and process is very interesting. My own academic background comes from a mixture of the social sciences and humanities. Generally speaking the social sciences draw from a traditional/foundational premise that in order for research to be considered sound, scholars must follow a predetermined process even before the research begins. My own area of scholarship has been focused on the qualitative encounters within a research process. Theory is derived from an emergent process of interaction in the data collection process collecting. This process is contingent on various qualitative encounters or events that occur. Although we are not collecting “data” in a typical social science fashion, we are hoping to generate emergent forces and these forces are always contingent and not determined or fixed. So we have released drift and what emerges is something we can’t predict or confirm but continues to generate. I guess it’s an open secret not contained between two people. Basically research is not something that “is” but something that “becomes” and “does” it is always active and in motion and you can’t systematically determine the path it will take.
JG: The tension between capture and release is a critical one, the crucial axis along which journal publication works, but you seem to be enacting much more gelassenheit.
BSH: We brought this format like this because we wanted to play with the parameters of academic publishing (hence the reaching out to continent. as a midwife to the project). Instead of coming up with a topic, sending out a call for papers, and then curating from the pile—or scraping to find submissions—we wanted to find a way for an edition/journal to grow somewhat organically.
JG: Peer review and journal editorship is supposed to be a kind of community for the betterment of knowledge, except we know today that it is systematically subsumed to the political economy of the university-as-business. How much is a sense of community, or commons coming about here? Is there a tentative reclamation going on?
BSH: When I came to April with this project, I wanted to find a way for a concept, a thread, to find its own way. To create an environment where it could gain its footing, but that would be indicating the process as well as theory. I think this is where April and I really find a home together: we aim for our praxis to be in step with our theory and our theory to be integrated with our practices. I also wanted to give a material sense to the journal, so by sending all of the materials (which initially was just the editor’s contribution and initial parameter-shaping documents) to be added to by each contributor in the mail system(s) – a sensibility is gained by acting as host to the materials and the time-frame. Each contributor will have accepted the invite to be acting caretaker of the accrued journal.
JG: I think humanities journals especially often work through that sense of limitation, trying to canalize that which snowballs into research assessment ratings…
BSH: Assessment is effective in a specific way when it is categorically spread. But to access ‘things’ based on themselves and in relation to one another takes more time, takes a pause in the machinery, and begs questions.
As for what the special issue will look like, we know we will have X amount of submissions, but how the themes/threads were handled, they may be quite different than what we expected (the two themes being published this summer being ‘between space & place” and ‘between intention & attention).
JG: It seems the sense of peer versus editor is being contested.
BSH: In a sense, the material will still be subject to shaping by April, myself, and our guest editor Jeremy Fernando. The creation of where the threads go in between the two concepts, however, is none of our business in the making. But in the bringing to completion.
Editors are people, and I guess we wanted to throw out a certain hubris, or to include our contributors in the process.
AV: So what’s interesting about the process is that we had three threads that we proposed to be published in June. However, as it turns out one thread has taken a life of its own. The third thread will return at a later time and will continue to generate contributions. The ebb and flow of the process is very unpredictable, as are most relationships, which I think adds to your comment on peer versus editor.
BSH: The thread which will continue past the original expected “due date” is “between mischief & disobedience” and in noticing that it has a bit of a different life than the other threads, we decided to let what was unfurling in the practice dictate our expectations. It will go on to gather five more (than the original five contributors) and develop its own issue.
JG: This sounds like anti-Ariadne here—your threads don’t guarantee you find your way, but instead are the gravitational field pulling things towards them. Heidegger at one point translates ‘subject’ as “That which gathers onto itself”: I think in his contestation of the subject he’s aiming at a passive activity, akin to gravity. These threads seem to be gathering onto themselves. Snowballing.
BSH: We had no way of knowing this in our setting up of the “experiment”, but in following a true experiment, are letting ourselves interact with its course.
We are very curious about the gravitational fields that effect drifting.
BSH: And to comment on the sense of the common you brought up earlier, I think there is something to be said about letting something commonly shared find its own articulation instead of imposing a common set of limitations.
In the gathering, it may be of interest that the “between intention & attention” thread moved the most quickly from contributor to contributor and the “between mischief & disobedience” thread became apparent that it needed more time.
AV: There is a common destination; however, we must account for the fact that we all find our own direction/pull. These directions become forces that generate new forms. So, yes a common, but we have to remember the individual in the common.
BSH: To piggy-back on April’s statement, to do this, we wanted to attempt to remember this by means of hospitality. To extend an invitation to a person to contribute who then accepts the responsibility of maintain the materials and in so doing enacts a hospitality in the making in order to ensure the next contributor gets the materials in a timely way. And also a somewhat carteblanche on what they can add to the accruing journal.
JG: The editorship you’re describing sound very custodial (rather than proprietary) and in creating these threads common zones emerge. But the individuality seems porous to me, it doesn’t sound like atoms running into one another, contractually dealing with one another, but rather more amorphous individuals who are effected in the process of their contribution – I suppose I’m thinking of this as an articulation of a being together, Aristotle’s definition of politics in fact.
AV: I would be cautious of a stating a being together and propose a more emergent tangent of becoming.
BSH: Yeah, as I’ve worked on this project I have had many discussions with contributors and with my other editors and I’m not necessarily feeling a being together amongst the threads, but…
JG: I was thinking a being together of the contributors!
BSH: What I have been experiencing is that those involved so far have taken their ownership in the project in particular to where they find themselves… there is a sense of belonging in the threads, I think, but more so with a belonging of one’s environment in relationship to the contribution. If that makes sense.
JG: Certainly.
BSH: And the belonging, I think, has more to do with the belonging to the concept, and then choosing a further contributor for the manifest who already belong to the concept. For instance in considering “between mischief & disobedience” I chose the first contributor, or she came up in editorial meetings and it became clear that Barb Fornssler would be excellent to get the thread off to a good start – and then who she chooses will belong more to the conceptual nature of the theme/thread as well. When “between space and place” was first generated, it went to Laura Dean, who – due to the nature of the thread, included her partner – a human geographer to complete their contributions.
JG: Yeah, I mean, April, you bring up the tangent, which is the intersecting line, so this seems like a project in which “threads” are set up to garner intersection/crossroads.
AV: Yes! But I’m also thinking of inflection points in relation to retention and release.
JG: So I get the sense the threads have been pretty free-ranging over those [bourgeois] breaks between art, science and whatever humanities are? Is science being deflected through/into this project?
BSH: If not science directly, the methods involved certainly.
JG: And inflected/infected?
AV: I’m not too sure. Perhaps, through the experiment but without the desire to find some universal law or to adhere to some linear formalities.
BSH: We originally didn’t want to direct the content of the issues, but in realizing that to create something quickly (our contributors are notified by a previous contributor ahead of time that they will be included, but only have two weeks with the accrued materials) that limits help to engender more directed work.
JG: This goes back to capture and release I suppose, science often sees itself as capturing; it is an open problematic, but one out to get its object.
You’re out getting objects which beget objects.
BSH: What is between space and place? While the directive is there, it is to search out what is possibly there – how it is seen from different viewpoints and what topics are engaged with in light of this positioning. I mentioned “capture” in the piece April, Jeremy and I worked out in conjunction with our Statement of Intent. And I hold by what I said about how it is more about how the sand captures the ripples in the waving water on a beach. A photographic capture of time and place the materials capture moments in the threads. Which points to the secret of movement?
AV: And remembering that waves are ephemeral as is all movement.
BSH: But, we can get a sense of that movement by its record on the sand which is itself ephemeral.
JG: Drift is movement and soon we’ll get to see the record of it
BSH: Truly.
