TO START A NEW criticism magazine today means first to admit failure. This is beyond the simple truth that to begin anything is to pronounce the death of something else. (Often, it is an old self, a predecessor, or a status quo disguised as some terminus)—Realistically speaking, the genre of cultural criticism has just not been very triumphant in the past two decades. We are forced into a "grassrooted-ness". There is no institution. No establishment. No idol.

Who even is the audience for a new magazine? Who is going to hear the falconer? Some of the most respectable literary quarterlies and biennials can barely hold on to their few thousand subscribers. It is not a surprise when sometimes the amount of submissions even surpasses the total readership. (A certain very popular literary journal for poetry, for instance, has a print size of just above 20,000 and publishes around 300 poems annually from approximately 100,000 submissions). While more and more young people read only within their academic requirements, enrollments in college language and literature classes continue to drop. In these classrooms that are already out of favor, contemporary publications are often not incorporated into the syllabus—because, in these times of undersupply, the English departments see their duty as more to preserve, not to proselytize.

Around 2004, the year when I was born, there was a short-lived boom of the so-called little magazines—these are socially concerned independent publications perceived with an aura of the avant-garde. Many of these magazines, like N+1 and Guernica, quickly stood out and became extremely popular with a specific demographic for breaking the stagnant convention of established publications ranked in quasi-institutional hierarchies. When N+1 started, The New Republic was the gatekeeper, whom they called, "a Major League culture magazine supporting a farm team political bureau," as its chief writer James Wood (who might as well be the Shohei Ohtani of this matter) was seen as the establishment's designated penman. His views were too easy, too self-contented; his writings were "always a hit-piece;" his style almost too prominent that it evoked an anxiety of influence. 

Yet honestly who still reads The New Republic today? Even most of the Humanities majors in college can't name three critics or two column writers they follow. There is no circulation. Poets are read by only other poets. What was The Partisan Review again? Who were the New York Intellectuals? It feels funny nowadays calling any piece of media in text a "hit-piece". This model of creating a contrarian identity for a magazine by asserting its difference and negativity against its self-identified fathers (we watched this recently done by The Drift, in the Editors' Note for their debut issue back in 2020) is losing its validity. Attacking a stramineus homo, or more likely now an already exclusive bunch of loosely connected magazines all based in New York, charging them with a hundred synonyms of petite bourgeoisie simply doesn't do anything anymore. Accusing others of navel-gazing has become in itself the highest form of navel-gazing. 

With the status quo being over, there is somehow still so much bureaucracy and pretension in the organizations. How absurd. The industry itself remains Boring. Detached. Corporate. Nonsensical. In a field that has been pronounced the sentence of death countless times on national news (where "The Death of…" and "The End of…" have become parts of the house style for commenting on any happenings with the literary world), we still experience so much force of friction mostly from within—from the dictators that will decide who goes tenured and who gets a job and the taxonomy of industry that determines one to be a poet or a novelist or a memoirist (the MFAs) or a post-doc or a professor (the universities) an editor or a critic (through magazine beginning level internships that pays the lucky few $50k a year in New York). We are truly a bunch of raw materials, whereas the masters of habituation tell you that its cause is liberal and its cause is radical—it leads you to a better world of the beyond and the total, they say, and in fact, it is a place not so dissimilar to La Boétie's "voluntary servitude."

The reasons we have become disappointed are manifold. These liberal arts were thought to be the way the consciousness of a culture or a societal spirit expressed and externalized itself, to borrow that Hegelian conception. Today, young people simply no longer believe so.

In that sense, the answer to the canon war is an oddly bitter and laughable one. The existence or the non-existence of a canon doesn't matter anymore, the real issue is if the younger people will still read anything at all. (To remind us, Lionel Trilling was a firm believer that the most important texts should never even be taught—only read—that teaching degrades them).

The nihilistic disenchantment toward culture, the great potential that cultural change possesses, and the ultimate role of agency that values (dare I speak of that word) and language play in our society—which seems to be a complete breakdown from the rather academic, literary and high theoretical optimism established within the ivory tower through the works of scholars like Jurgen Habermas (Communicative Action), Homi Bhabha (Cultural Space), and Fredric Jameson (Political Unconscious), or more explicit ones like Hélène Cixous (Écriture Féminine) and Donna Haraway (Speculative Fabulation) across the pre-and-post-war years and later reaching a bizarre mirageous height in the early 90s (moving from an educated elite public class to the "critical academia"). Understanding and doing culture (literature, music, films, art!), we thought, could help to transform our world for the better.

Despite the fact that these scholars' vision was a bit romantic, the schism of culture and institution isn't ever so clean-cut. There exists among young people a fetishism about institutions that has ties to a myth that culture is somehow arbitrary and soft and institutions more tangible and hard, where the former is merely determined by the latter. Of course, culture as a specter haunts us. Every once in a while an event of unexpected crisis or emergency reminds us that we have always secretly lived a life of the mind.

Culture has become a secondary issue. We want to restate culture as one of the first priorities.

We believe in that spirit of suspicion and self-reflection across so many of the intellectual movements in the 20th century, that anything truly transformative starts from the transformation of a collective mind or consciousness. The question to ask really is: why did literary criticism have (or seem to have had) so much power in the mid to late twentieth century? How about the studies of the Humanities in general? I will leave this question to the readers. I will not try to diminish the power of this question by attempting to give it an answer.

We believe that everyone is a critic. The right to engage in criticism is the manifestation of one's agency and humanity. Reading and literary analysis (including when applied to films and music, as we will see done in this issue) is the way one accesses and learns from the constant movement of culture. Happening concurrently with the breaking down of the old order of how criticism is to be practiced is the great democratization of that act.  

Another related thesis of this essay is to say that with the diminished power of culture today, the modality of the so-called cultural capital is completely over too. For the longest time, the critics have viewed the middle class as their biggest enemy.

To reduce their argument: it is a common hatred toward the trashy, the repetitive, the fake, and the boring—epitomized in the middle class. Now, the middle class has been disappearing everywhere (replaced by a professional managerial one); these subjects of kitsch, repetition, simulacra, and conformity still dominate the world, if not more than ever. A plague of "aesthetics" and placeholder magazines took over a non-place that the internet jokingly calls "Dimes Square" (Heavy Traffic, Forever, and the like). What was happening there, a neighborhood willed into existence collectively by social media fantasy and mimetic wantings, bears resemblance to the attitude toward literature and culture held by a mass of young people today. 

A dream is produced, then sustained through rituals and spectacles, despite it always being on the verge of reality. A dream of being a certain type of writer, living a life of celebrated chaotic clarity and also celebrated self-inspection, a follower of George Miles or Tao Lin type. The voice of this writer is always a man or a girl, or worse, a man dating a literal girl. The necessary images of this type are Soho gallery openings and Tribeca launch parties, where nepotism and ostentation fuel the scene. Those who maintain a certain status by distancing themselves from others find themselves, at the end of the day, bound up by the very structures they claim to be against; everything is, indeed, for sale. (Greta Gerwig's Mistress America from a decade ago remains one of the funniest and most piercing investigations of this coastal culture).  

This is a fanaticism for nothing exciting. A desiring machine for everything cool and ironic—that is in other words insincere and detached. It is like the rest of us have vacated our own capacity for beauty and creation and have passively given them to a group of people who are supposed to do that for us but only pretend to do so.

It is time to restate the importance of a long tradition of an aestheticism that comes with being a critic—and get rid of the jargon and references and see what is at its heart—that is the capacity to care for each other, for friends, for strangers, in the deepest way possible. The faculty I am describing is a radical sincerity facing the world and the self, a kind of attention and receptivity of the Real—which is simply sensibility. A common human desire to know, and to know "the way other persons become visible to us, or cease to be visible to us", for example, in the words of the writer Elaine Scarry. Or consider the standard that Henry James views as the ideal for a piece of art—"the present palpable-intimate"—which the critic James Wood quotes as his own personal north star. Reading literature, or broadly speaking, engaging in our culture, offers not only pleasure but also a means of grounding our ideas and abstractions (often dangerous ones) on real experiences and persons through caring with a certain intimacy with the world.

"Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience…"—Susan Sontag's prophecy from the 1960s seems truer than ever today—"What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more…Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all". What we need is to recover our senses. What we need through criticism is a revival of care.

The Critic's job today is to Notice and to Care. To ask questions and dig into the lives we have been living. What did I miss out on? What did I continue living in my life bypassing, lying to myself as if it never happened? What did I follow and think it must be so and there is no alternative while caught in between the flocks of false urgencies and exceptions? What did I accept as the answer, the norm, the truth without reviewing?

This is why we at House House Magazine believe in reviving a longer format of critical writing among the youth. The types of writing we see being favored in the ecosystem lean more and more toward short and easily consumable content, such as short journalistic reports and op-eds. These flattened news pieces have long been attacked for their hidden biases, while their limited length and style make it impossible for them to address the places they come from. These tides of opinions create endless discussion and quarrels but never elucidation, where a debate is reduced to an exchange or economy of "talking points." The game becomes just fabricating certain rhetoric to restate these preexisting "talking points," and the conversation sinks into what James Baldwin brilliantly termed "a labyrinth of attitudes" and doesn't go anywhere.

We don't preempt oppositions; we don't stage overly simplified positionalities. (Think positionalities of the Left, or the Right). For an essay in the magazine, we want you to draw out a full form of consciousness of your thinking by showing the genealogy or historicity of where that way of thinking comes from and how your way of thinking is different from the past. This practice will also enable genuine entries to engage with your writing. An essay is not merely the manifestation of an a priori take or a belief. We want you to give the full depth of the idea by contextualizing it and disentangling the truths about how the idea developed in the world and within you. The essays in this debut issue are our first attempts (our first tryings and testings and weighings, indicated in the French root of "essayer" of that usage) at this philosophy. To read these essays is to care about the whole persons behind the flow of their arguments and to know their tastes, their preferences, and their minds. To read the poems and stories in this issue is to notice the echoes they make on the soundscapes of the literary forerunners they follow after, along with the social realities and the local scenes they draw inspiration from. In this sense, we practice criticism as community-building. We see criticism as a way of living—a proposal to refuse to live the unexamined life. And we invite you to take on that proposal—with us.