Burgeoning Politics and the Janus-Faced Journal Matthew Wolf-Meyer

<1> One of the immediate issues of this project has been the acquisition of a system of apparent politics. By this I simply mean that the editorial decisions behind publishing an article are as much a matter of the interest level of the subject matter being treated by the author as much as a sympathetic alignment on the part of the editors affiliated with this project to the politics of the author -- or the author's own apparent politics. As such, what conspires to occur is a borrowing of borrowed politics: We construct a political face out of the components given to us by others, who, themselves, are borrowing from other writers, who in turn have borrowed their own politics (and by "politics" I mean to imply everything from the matter of language choice to the scholarly interest of the author and his or her methodology). These are careful decisions that need to be made, for in these formative years a relationship between this journal and the world that it lives in must be founded, as well as a reputation among its readership (or potential readership): It simply wouldn't be appropriate to pigeonhole ourselves as a Marxist effort, or a psychoanalytic one, nor with any other possible theoretical concern -- Reconstruction is meant to be, and will continue to be, interdisciplinary, but also inter-methodological, inter-theoretical, and inter-spatial.

<2> It is entirely likely that a reader may encounter one of the works which we have chosen to affiliate ourselves with, entirely at random (such is the nature of this internet endeavor, wherein the work can be disconnected from the journal itself), and upon such an encounter, attempt to extrapolate the nature of the journal itself -- imagine encountering Giorgio Bertellini and C. Paul Sellors' "Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory" without the rubric of the journal and it would be easy to see Reconstruction as a project much different than it indeed is. But this is not to say then that the content of Bertellini and Sellors' work is antithetical to the politics of Reconstruction, but rather only a facet of the superstructure. For the reader, and particularly the interested reader, I recommend reading all of the articles published this issue, as well as the review essays, as time and leisure will allow -- a backward glance at the work published in the Fall of 2001 (available in the archives) may also be considered for the new reader -- to begin to understand the politics of this effort. But even then, the political picture will be amended in four months time, with the publication of the Spring 2002 issue, as its contents add new complexity to the political network that we are working to create. The journal is an experiment in collectivity, of constant building, amendment, and change, and as such it mirrors the life of the mind, the nature of culture, the nature of consciousness.

<3> And this, I fear, is the nature of the Janus-faced journal: the likelihood of a seemingly contradictory political statement being made at some later date is very great, and this is simply because in our inter-spatiality we will work to legitimate as many political stances as seem appropriate -- this may mean publishing an article that works against some earlier published work, but it is through the fusion of these political stances that some truer politics can be ascertained: There is no one method, no one politic, which will solidify all knowledge, and it is in the deliberate confusion of political statements that we may find some newer, more appropriate, truth. No political statement is the standard Reconstruction will adhere to, but rather we subscribe to a deliberate state of schizophrenia, a period of eternal reconstruction.