Caterwaul Quarterly and the State of the American Periodical

^{Illustration: Nicholas Callaway}

Welcome to Caterwaul Quarterly. A caterwaul is a shrill, discordant sound evocative of a noisy argument or a cat in heat. And Caterwaul Quarterly is a web-based journal about politics, life, art, society and the physical universe.

I've always been a big fan of periodicals. It started with my first subscription to High Times—yes, that magazine solely dedicated to the culture and politics of marijuana—when I was 14. It arrived dependably every month, tightly enclosed in a nondescript manila envelope. My personal take on the great adolescent pastime of pornography. Over the years my magazine collection expanded (and a few subscriptions lapsed, too) to include magazines like Harper's, The Nation, Clamor, Lip and The Believer. I enjoy being part of a community of readers. I like reading the Letters to the Editor first thing and knowing precisely which articles are under discussion.

Throughout my semi-adult life—in college, working as a community organizer, dabbling in journalism—I have had the privilege of meeting and befriending good thinkers, scientists, artists and writers. The idea of CQ gradually took form in 2007, as I began to mull over the possibilities of harnessing these people’s creative power, much of which was employed in private or well below the public radar.

Through a number of late-night, sometimes whisky-soaked conversations, the idea of CQ began to take shape: a quarterly magazine of politics, art, literature and science, rebellious but thoughtful, serious but not too self-serious. A place for the commingling of critical social analysis and my friend Celeste Broderick’s hilarious comics starring fecal matter and tampons. Our brows swing high, middle, and low.

Conveying oneself is a difficult exercise, often fraught with self-consciousness. Conveying the cacophonous personality of an evolving, collective publication is perhaps impossible. For any worthwhile eclectic publication, its content will bespeak its essence far better than any packaged statement or string of adjectives. But it would nonetheless seem incumbent that our launch of a new critical periodical be accompanied by a critical discussion of our aims. In the following pages I discuss Caterwaul Quarterly apophatically, through a process of analytic triangulation, thinking about the history and contemporary situation of the American periodical, hopefully drawing ever closer to an understanding of what this venture is about through a description of its socio-cultural surroundings. I also address a question that has always bugged me, particularly now as we launch this scriptural enterprise—why write? Why now, when more is being written than ever before and, arguably, there are more important things to do, to, like, ensure the survival of the planet and its people? And how to avert the grandiose implication that anyone cares to read about the answer to this question?

I hope you'll agree that this rather unconventional introduction is borne not from a deficiency of coherent conception, but rather from recognition that magazines only take shape from the world in which they are written and read.

Magazines, or, Cultural Artifacts and Imagined Communities

Historically, periodicals have been at the center of modern political organization—both elite and insurgent. While American history has never been reducible to the history of the “the news,” magazines and the like have certainly occupied what Hillary Clinton—the (once) self-proclaimed candidate of experience—has called history’s “front row seats.” They have chronicled, shaped, hindered, and propelled everything from the American Revolution and the slavery abolition movement to the neoconservative uprising.

In the first half of the twentieth century, periodicals like the political, artistic and literary journal The Masses (1911 to 1917) and the Communist Party USA’s somewhat more didactic Daily Worker (a daily from 1924-1956) played a central role in coalescing art, ideology and literature around a broad movement for social change. Magazines were likewise at the center of pacifist resistance to WWI, and “ethnic” weeklies were crucial for organizing the political aspirations of immigrant communities. In the years before World War I, over 1,300 foreign-language newspapers—including German, Polish, Chinese, Yiddish and Spanish—were published in the United States.

From 1962 to 1975, Ramparts magazine was a central material medium in the articulation of a nation-wide, youth-led New Left. Showcasing thorough investigative work and a high-quality layout, Ramparts was rebellion’s most authoritative voice, reaching a circulation of 400,000 at its peak. Its writers went on to found print heavyweights like Rolling Stone (founded in 1967) and Mother Jones (founded in 1976). Ramparts’ most infamous legacy is without a doubt former editor David Horowitz, who moved on to become a prominent and mean-spirited right-wing activist, fond of labeling the U.S. Left a “fifth column” for Al Qaeda.

In the modern era, periodicals have been an indispensable educational and organizing tool for political formations ranging from Left parties and broad-based social movements to neighborhood groups and marginalized populations. They've represented a physical medium for the translation of analysis into action, and back again.

Though surely reduced in number, the landscape of lefty magazines persists. Indeed there is evidence that demand for these political outlets has actually increased, as Americans grasp for insights to make sense of the Bush nightmare. The Nation (weekly circulation 184,296), founded in 1865, has long been a sounding board for opinions “Liberal” to Left (for a critical analysis of spatial metaphors in politics, take a look at Adam Goldstein’s The Great American Center. Both its readership and “seminar” luxury cruise offerings continue to grow, with circulation more than doubling since 2000. The Progressive (founded 1909) has also seen significant subscription growth recently.

Less traditional publications like Extra! do important political work from more narrowly specified angles, focusing exclusively on documenting the systematic biases and factual failures of the “we report, you decide” mainstream media. Left Turn, on the other hand, is a left-wing magazine documenting American social movements for a movement activist readership. Likewise, Adbusters publishes creative if sometimes superficial subversions of mass consumerism, thereby showcasing new forms of image-based politics.

Harper’s, another long-standing monthly brimming with wide-ranging intellect and dissent, has a circulation of more than 220,000. The ideas propagated by the likes of Harper’s, unfortunately, have not reached the heights of political power in the United States that their wide circulations might suggest.

Recently the Right has arguably made more potent political usage of magazines. The New Republic (bi-weekly circulation of 60,000), once a lead purveyor of lefty thinking, is now a neoliberal flagship, giving definition to the pro-war and big business wing of the Democratic Party. Everything changed for TNR in 1974, when Harvard professor Marty Peretz bought the magazine with his wife’s inheritance. Peretz is a committed supporter of U.S. and Israeli military power, a purveyor of vulgar anti-Arab invective, and has endorsed decades of imperial policy—from the contra rebels in Nicaragua to business-friendly trade policies, and the invasion of Iraq. One might find it hard to believe that TNR and The Nation were at one point so politically aligned that they were negotiating a potential merger in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Foreign Affairs offers another influential “centrist” outlet for various proposals aimed at reproducing American power globally.

Yet farther to the Right, Commentary Magazine has played an unparalleled role in shaping the (once) ascendant neoconservative movement—all with a circulation of just 27,000.

I guess that five thousand progressive intellectual types don’t necessarily equal one Paul Wolfowitz. From an explosion of right-wing think tanks to Fox News, conservatives’ greatest achievement over the past few decades has been a lesson in the master translation of knowledge into power.

The very fact that the ideas presented in Harper’s and The Nation have not, as of late, been able to stop a war that Commentary played such a large role in starting, reveals the irreducibly complex relationship between periodicals and political power.

This brief survey ignores a number of important publications, from the (neo)conservative staples The Weekly Standard and The National Review, to Left magazines like New Left Review, to big-media corporate stalwarts like Time and Newsweek, which for millions of Americans represents their weekly dose of “in-depth” analysis. But I hope to have drawn a rough functional map of the media terrain that we propose to engage, even if I have yet to answer the question as to why...

E-News and the Long-Since Announced Crisis of Print Media

While the ideological content and political force of particular publications is very real, it would be misleading to simply apply labels and treat them as a neatly arrayed coordinates on an ideological map. Even a publication as politically complacent and capitulant as The New Yorker publishes the occasional incendiary from Seymour Hersh.

Magazines are socially constructed artifacts, loaded with the symbolic content of often divergent social forces: reflections and representations of multiple social realities, writers’ desires, moneyed interests and editorial decisions. They are a snapshot, and sometimes a shotgun, of complex times. German cultural critic Walter Benjamin characterizes history as the place from whence all possibility springs: “The same leap into the open sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the revolution” (1).

And yet, with the rise of the internet and its blogs, one could be forgiven for concluding that technological change has cast print's political power into obsolescence, a cadaver for explorations by Susan Sontag acolytes.

This is the diagnosis of (among others) the insightful French radical and writer Regis Debray. In his recently published Socialism: A Life-Cycle (2), Debray argues that from the 19th century onward, newspapers and journals served as the key means of educating and organizing people around political and ideological programs. But Debray argues that a shift from the “graphosphere” to the “videosphere” has undercut print and, along with it, the Left’s capacity for critical, collective thought—and thus the Left itself:

And, I might add, consumer preferences in place of workers’ rights.

Is Debray’s thesis true? Is the newspaper now only relevant to such undynamic causes as perennial presidential candidate and self-declared messiah Lyndon LaRouche and obscure sectarian socialist parties? And what does the advent of the videosphere tell us about the fate of art and literature?

In the United States, the media echo chamber regularly pulsates with stories about the demise of the print media and the rise of internet-based news forms. Blogs, in particular, are the frequent object of “legitimate” journalists’ professional anxieties.

A veritable onslaught of digital accessibility has pushed down readership in daily newspapers across the country. In the world of progressive publishing, the financial-mismanagement caused demise of the Independent Press Association (IPA) has been particularly damaging. The IPA was responsible for, among other things, distributing a number of independent magazines like Bitch, Mother Jones, Punk Planet and a panoply of DIY endeavors. For reasons unknown to the author, Clamor and Lip magazines have also closed up shop in the past year. Further complicating the situation, the United States Postal Service recently pushed forward a sweetheart deal privileging major publishers, handing small magazines postal rate increases of 15-50%.

And, as if things weren’t bad enough, a tidal wave of consolidation has recently hit the world of independent weeklies. Big companies like Village Voice Media and Creative Loafing have wreaked havoc on the journalistic quality of papers like The Village Voice and Chicago Reader.

Yet this is certainly not the first time that the independent media have faced institutional hurdles.

In 1917, the Postal Service refused to mail The Masses in retaliation for their opposition to World War I, the first step in a series of actions that soon forced the journal to cease publication.

But should we mourn or celebrate the alleged demise of print media? Is a media system owned by the likes of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch in much of a position to cast aspersions?

The internet has certainly opened up spaces, even as it has shuttered others.

Even so, I think the print world's mounting hysteria is not completely misplaced. Internet news has increasingly shifted political discourse to the realms of rumor, gossip and shallow irony. But it is hard to label one media form good and the other bad. Both have different sets of limitations and possibilities. The possibilities of any given medium will always be determined as much by its institutional context as its inherent technological properties. Print was once the new kid on the block, threatening to undercut the priestly class's monopoly on access to the scriptures. The internet is our generation’s media upstart. Yet a few FCC decisions could instantly undercut the much-heralded “democratic” features of the internet.

Despite much hype from all sides, many of the distinctions between these two technological media may be overblown. Many print articles spur vital debate and discussion that reach a level of substantive communication beyond much of what passes for interactivity on the web. Likewise, while a great deal of e-publishing amounts to little more than stream-of-consciousness, many outlets do publish high-quality work on the internet, freely accessible and unencumbered by the editorial and economic limitations often imposed by advertiser-dependent print publications.

It is in this light that I see little contradiction in conceiving of Caterwaul Quarterly as an e-Magazine. We are drawn to the tradition of the print periodical. We are interested in well-researched, well-written and well-edited articles. And there is no reason why these practices must be sacrificed for the sake of the accessibility afforded by the internet. CQ is not a blog. CQ is published online, but we offer it as a printable download for those who understandably wish to read off of felled trees rather than eye-straining screens. Either way, you're reading the same magazine.

To what extent should a periodical, or some periodicals, be “disinterested”? No doubt the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. But what does that practically mean for a magazine like CQ? Many things. Just as we seek to address an eclectic array of subjects, we will do so in a variety of forms. Certain issues we may engage with sharp and unapologetically interested polemics. Other works may carry powerful implications while exhibiting greater subtlety of form or authorial detachment, such as photos of everyday life in Palestine or the apartment of a Jewish grandmother in Brooklyn. Meanwhile a poem about life and lunch boxes or a set of moiré patterns, might engage the reader in relative purposelessness. As Adorno put it “Total purposelessness denies the totality of what is purposeful in the world of domination...The bliss of contemplation consists of disenchanted magic” (3). The opposite of a society bent on reducing everything to a purpose, we endorse a rebellion against instrumental rationality.

While this isn't a "movement magazine" per se, I am under no illusion that a magazine can be "apolitical." As our Politics & Society Editor Adam Goldstein wrote for our submission guidelines, “We are less interested in channeling a particular style or political viewpoint than in critical engagement expressed through thoughtful prose. We especially appreciate articles on topics and issues which are undercovered by mainstream media sources, those that were highly covered and subsequently forgotten, and those which are deeply misunderstood because they receive so much mainstream coverage.”

This begs, again, the classic question: why write? And especially, why spend time writing now? In a state of war, potential self-annihilation through ecocide, with the trumpets calling forth the death of print?

Since most of us are writing from the United States—a country exercising historically unprecedented political, military and economic power across the globe—we firmly believe that a better understanding of the world is a prerequisite for changing it. The deeply misleading political conversation on Iraq—coming from The New York Times, Fox News and both major parties—has weakened the anti-war movement and brought the more indecisive segments of the populace back into the this-war-can-be-won camp. I hope that our sobering analyses of the “surge” and the impending presidential election and the political dynamics behind Turkey’s incursions into Northern Iraq help to complicate the dominant narrative.

And why write something that may not be read by anyone besides one’s pitying family and close friends? These are rather good questions. Writing is, on the one hand, a solitary and self-reflective act, incubating the author in a page-brain dialogue. Writing, especially for a periodical, on the other hand, can be community constructing and a bridge of private thought to collective analysis. I envision CQ to be both an opportunity for quiet reading and thinking and, hopefully, a provocateur of reckless actions.

An aspect of the failure—and sometimes boringness—of certain publications on the radical Left is an exclusive focus on capital-p Politics and the subjugation of arts, music and literary content to a strict test of political utility. As Debray notes in his article, certain authoritarian tendencies can disfigure rebellious Leftist criticism into dry, didactic “encyclopædism”:

Not that most Left publications are authoritarian. Some are just boring, either overly serious or overly academic. There is a place for these publications (like the bookshelves of activists like me), but I think the niche that CQ is pursuing remains largely unexplored.

Our work will look at the intersections of people's lives and the larger political, cultural and economic orders that shape them—and which they in return, of course, shape. We do not want to overly-segment reality. Before the rise of the modern disciplines, all intellectuals were just philosophers. And philosophers thought about everything. We don’t think that understanding the role of fungi in bioremediation on the one hand, and 1980s Spanish pop music on the other, require exclusive readerships or radically different approaches.

I hope that we find readers who are engaged in life and desire a multidisciplinary understanding of things, who see the beauty in using a variety of methods and mediums to investigate and find meaning in the world around and within us.

Where We Fit In

The media, of course, is central to maintaining the status quo, reinforcing norms and naturalizing the dominant social order. If The New York Times says that there are only two parties, and that only a handful of each parties primary candidates are worth considering then, well, that’s the way it is. John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and definitely Ralph Nader need not apply.

There are, of course, legions of media that are both system-supporting and subtly subversive. It would be dogmatic, after all, to suggest that Cosmo can’t at times be a redoubt of conspiracy and rebellion, or that even The New York Times doesn't on rare occasion live up to its inflated self-conception as a stalwart of objective journalism.

While I am skeptical of CQ’s mass appeal, I do embrace a call for public intellectualism and a deprivatization of serious thinking.

The end of the 1950s witnessed a sharp decline in the number of independent and critical intellectual publications. According to Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (5), the 1950s witnessed a mass expansion of the university system and, along with it, an academicization of intellectual society, inviting freethinkers into the comfortable robes of tenure and subordinating their labor to the maxim of publish or perish.

While the expansion of academic jobs signaled the inclusion of a number of formerly excluded people—namely women and people of color—it also led to the cooptation of the sort of intellectualism that thrives at the margins. In Debray´s analysis of socialist intellectuals, he notes that “as long as there was repression, there was hope.” Rebel opinion has tended to ossify in the seats of power.

As the site of intellectual production moved from cheap Greenwhich Village apartments to the halls of academia, there was an increasing insularity among the intellectual Left, and within their publications. Independent magazines shut down or were essentially transformed into scholarly journals that rarely escaped the ivory tower.

Contrary to the conservative thesis of a mass leftist infiltration of higher education, Jacoby argues that

Deprivatizing intellectualism is no easy task, but I hope that we can make a modest contribution toward building a society tending towards critical analysis and social action.

The dominant media play a key role in defining what is imagined to be possible. A subversive media outlet should then inch forward within the current horizon of feasibility while relentlessly pushing to expand the parameters of the possible. Snip at conventional wisdom but also explore and create new ideas.

Despite Debray’s negative prognosis, new forms of media have emerged to play key roles in transformative political processes the world over. In Venezuela, editorially independent community radio stations have been at the forefront of organizing their communities for social rights and were instrumental in turning back the short-lived coup against President Hugo Chavez. And the internet has been, of course, one of the central terrains for education and organization in the anti-corporate globalization movement that in 1999 reached from the streets of Seattle into the American living room.

We hope that Caterwaul Quarterly will be one small piece in a larger media fabric that makes the world a more intelligible, and malleable, place.

Daniel Denvir is an independent journalist in Quito, Ecuador and Caterwaul Quarterly’s Editor-in-Chief.

(1) Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken, 1969

(2) Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle”, New Left Review, no. 46, 5-28, London, 2007.

(3) Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, Verso, 2006

(4) Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle”, New Left Review, no. 46, 5-28, London, 2007.

(5) Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, Basic Books, 2000