Letter from The Editors

For G. (1939–2026)

All nascent projects have a point of departure, of which ours is a deep belief in analogy. In language the rhetorical device relates the seemingly disparate; though, we inherit the mechanism as our editorial maxim, venturing to perceive and draw out continuities where they have otherwise been denied.

Apropos analogy, we can begin with the familiar example of evolution. In medieval Christian and Islamic thought, God organized beings within a rigid hierarchy: scala naturae, or the Great Chain of Being, originates with the divine One and descends through angels, humans, animals, and plants to minerals. Because it places life on a rigid natural hierarchy, scala naturae has been characterized by Arizona State University’s Weaponized Narrative Initiative as a centuries-old strategy for legitimizing political hierarchy and discouraging rebellion. In the pre-Victorian era, even as the tenets of the Enlightenment oriented the public away from biblical creationism, there was no thought of biological overlap across disparate species; why would there have been? Beings like birds and humans exist in vastly different worlds, and on the surface, hardly seem related. But through identifying homologous structures across species—for example, the structural similarities between human and bird femurs—Darwin et al. came to the theory of Universal Common Ancestry, which pictures our whole existence as a tree instead of a line, inviting comparisons across its branches, often revealing some common origin.

History was born from the same mud as the Great Chain of Being: the swamp in which A must have led to B by nature of procession, dropping asynchronies and meanings that don’t serve it on the way. All too familiar with this mud is the beloved Carlo Ginzburg, particularly in his adamant investigation of scale, and his refusal of the antiquated dichotomy of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational.’ At the center of Ginzburg’s work is an investment in common knowledge, pursued through the study of everyday practices, observations, and stories too often set aside by conventional historical methodologies. His scholarship weaves together topics as far-reaching as witchcraft, poor cheese merchants, and wisdom extrapolated from wives’ tales, identifying their interrelations and tracing the common ancestry of strangers across time and space through (nonbiological) homologous structures.

Though Ginzburg worried at times he was hallucinating historical connections by inviting intuition and conjecture into his method, he reminds us that the very distinction between the irrational and the rational as diametrically opposed categories derives from a hierarchical structure inherited from the Scientific Revolution, in which knowledge could be classified as either legitimate (systematized, rule-bound) or illegitimate (embodied, subject to margins of error), even as they often originate from the same place. In a particularly illuminating example, Ginzburg traces modern fingerprinting technology, developed by the colonial British government, to traditions of ancient Bengali palmistry—an evidential paradigm that, while porous, enlarges the historical frame. Our devotion to homology, then, is not simply in the pursuit of the surface-level freedoms of relating dissimilar things; rather, we believe in the value of attaching the negligible and even dangerous—the irrational, populous, lowly things and people that don’t matter—to the “official history” of the world, which maintains its own categories of significance. In turn, enveloping the erratic and irrational doesn’t simply disrupt the hierarchy but fundamentally changes how we render “official history.”

In speech, this mode is analogous to embracing jumps in reasoning or moments of free association embedded in slips of the tongue or trailing thoughts. Terminal Beach finds a mascot in Heinrich von Kleist’s “bumbling friend” who embodies, in his misleading simplicity, a rather understated sentiment; against the long-held aphorism that you must think before you speak, Kleist encourages the opposite. Here, thought is not a finished object waiting to be retrieved but rather partial and unfolding, a mode of discovering something that wasn’t illuminated or evident beforehand. Lacan’s après-coup similarly conceives that speech is “suspended” until we reach the end of a phrase, after which a retroactive snap initiates a backward loop of sudden clarity. In this tradition, we hold that some meanings become clear with time, and what is obscured or misunderstood in its moment of making might acquire not only meaning but also deep urgency later on. In other words, meaning isn’t necessarily available in the temporal order in which things happen. It's only natural, then, that we maintain a taste for old and supposedly anachronistic “dead forms”; that we walk backwards towards an uncertain future whilst an army of the undead reach for our ankles.

Cesar Aira’s Artforum, a drama of these so-called “dead forms,” details an Argentinian man compelled to collect the titular magazine as he encounters a world in which clothespins suddenly fail, resulting in a “veritable downpour” of newly dead things. His cataclysm is set in a laundry room, where his narrator (likely Aira himself) is surrounded by the metal, wood, and plastic remains of clothespins that all spontaneously snap, fall, and crack open on the floor. With no choice but to surrender to the evidence—that no other aberration had occurred, that the cosmic event has only affected the objects at hand—the narrator concludes he is witness to form fatigue: the certain exhaustion of forms over time that causes their inevitable failure. Aira’s exhaustion of forms readily maps onto metaphors for capitalism’s fallouts, though their meaning aggregates against their context of 1983 Buenos Aires, as between Perón’s first regime and the “Dirty War” years, magazines and underground newspapers went from being a vehicle of leftist resistance organizing, connecting a vast Latin American avant-garde, to becoming subject to immense censorship and targeted suppression. It is then easy to imagine that magazines, previously a strong tether to political and artistic movement, felt like his clothespins, representing a sudden experience of shock at a form’s long-held importance becoming suddenly lifeless, drained of any function. In anticipation of more mass extinctions outside the domain of his home, Aira doubts whether man or science can solve form fatigue, asking, in a moment of uneasy optimism: “What to do, for example, with the remnants of forms?”

Today, it’s been said that the very form of a magazine is nearing total obsolescence; some proclaim the publishing landscape is more inert than ever, bearing greater resemblance to a graveyard for ad-sales (often operating undercover as ‘reviews’) than a romantically-imagined site of earnest discourse. And yet despite its purported uselessness, so many of us are compulsively committed to the magazine’s renewal, playing pick-up sticks with surrendered clothes-pins. As for our own construction, we’ve already revealed our allegiance to analogy, by which we mean homology, and our belief in the potentialities of free association, or après-coup, through which we initially attribute allegiance to old, “dead” things. By “dead forms,” we mean the form of the magazine in and of itself, but even more so, the purportedly negligible: that which does not appear to serve a purpose in the present moment, either by virtue of its outlier status, its anachronistic nature, as well as that which has been all “used up” or retired. It is here, within the categorically negligible, that there lies an important distinction to be made between historical homology and the homology we enact.

With attention towards History, Ginzburg resolved disparities in the valuations of ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture, aiming primarily to resurrect stories of the under-class. But within the arts, an integration of low and high culture is now more than commonplace (see the 2019 Met Gala, Notes on Camp, attended by Jeff Bezos in an oversized bow tie). Our own investment in this methodology is more so directed at the unique dilemmas of contemporary publishing, specifically the persisting allergy towards the perceivably irrelevant, or that which does not serve a politics of urgency on the surface. In an increasingly urgent moment, a limited preoccupation with the present is perhaps natural, but in our eyes, deceiving in its allure of immediate fulfillment. Frederic Jameson reminisces about the embarrassing nature of the so-called conservative habit of periodization, of which many on the Left fear feeding academia’s “closed and terrifying machine.” Nonetheless, he maintains that if we do not at least attempt genuine self-taxonomy, we risk “fall[ing] back into the view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.” Our approach is homological in that it finds structural analogy far beyond (sur-) our current era, and in turn, refreshing the present with a new (old) light.

Amidst our many threads and apparent contradictions lies a simple undercurrent, previously illustrated by Annette Michelson in her defense of Surrealism in the 1966 issue of Artforum memorializing the project twenty years after its declared death. From its onset, Surrealism has been ever-dedicated to its formula, which has all to do with chance, history, desire, and, on the surface, not so much to do with current events. As such, certain critics have accused Surrealism of being tone-deaf, navel-gazing, tiresome, and bankrupt, a charge owed in part to its obsession with the past, which, according to those same critics, necessarily precluded any serious political commitment that might have been demanded of it. For Michelson, metaphor is a lightning rod in mounting her defense against Surrealism’s death: knowing full well that embracing a device “exiled to the expressive peripheries of language” rendered the project anachronistic in a world dedicated to the urgency and concrete action of the 1960s, she posits that it is precisely this device that guarantees the movement’s continued relevance.

From the very beginning, the Surrealists imagined poetic language to hold magical properties with the unique capacity to disrupt hegemonic systems of signification that plague our everyday lives. In other words, Surrealist ontology is built on Metaphor: that through comparing two things not commonly associated, metaphor offers a rearrangement of parts, generating new relationships, and hence new poetic “realities.” The stakes of this for the Surrealists rests within the potential for world-altering, perspective changes, bringing together what may otherwise be conceived as irreconcilable opposites (imagine whole epistemological divides mended). It is precisely through this foundational commitment to a “gallant acrobatics of reconciliation” that Surrealism forever maintained a dual ability to harmonize its foundational belief in timelessness with the ever-evolving demands of history. Surrealism’s striving to negate time, in search of the Beyond, paradoxically coexists with its continual adaptation to historical forces, a quality that, in Michelson’s view, ensures its relevance and enduring contemporaneity. In other words, it's exactly through Surrealism’s Metaphor—its foundational commitment to reconciliation—that it continually refreshes itself, advancing forward towards an uncharted future with each new “revision and rehearsal.”

Terminal Beach holds firm a doubled orientation towards the past and the present, tracing a “repertory of events…a spiral.” Our stakes emerge not from simply turning to the outmoded to resurrect that which has been deemed dead. Rather, by rejecting a contemporary politics that invests in the past only for present returns, we turn toward history for its own sake, a sake that may, paradoxically, raise more impactful political missions than those consciously sought out. In turning towards the purportedly negligible, whether by virtue of expiration, cultural pertinence, or otherwise, we encourage these objects to emerge into re-life on their own terms.

Sincerely,

Macaella Gray and Zoe Roden