Journal of Neoreactionary Scholarship
A while back, James Goulding suggested that some of the conversations taking place in the reacto-sphere can lead or already have led to essays able to be re-packaged in the form of articles as rigorous and interesting as academic articles published by scholarly presses. I think he’s absolutely right. However, as we all know, 75% of things we publish on our blogs (75% of anything anyone publishes) is not worth saving. But it’s the 25% that we need to capture and publish in a more stable format.
To that end, I’m building an online journal for neoreactionary scholarship. I already have the basic CSS in place. I’ve been inspired by the launch of Theden, but I know that a web magazine is a lot of time and energy—content must be updated regularly. I imagine this online journal to be more academic, which updates once every three or four months with the best content written on blogs or submitted for original publication in the journal. A bit like La Griffe du Lion, but with a broader range of content (philosophy, linguistics, evo psych, alternative political structures, art and literature, religion, et cetera) and a much more aesthetic design. I’ll also ask submitters to provide at least some biographical information; they can remain anonymous, but a certain level of ethos needs to be built, and it can only be built by signalling credentials and experience. And honestly, the journal should consist of content that needn’t be anonymous. Screeds and real-talk have their place, but this journal will not be it. Rather, this will be the place for building a case for Dark Enlightenment that can be touted in the Cathedral without getting shouted down as blatantly ___________. The universities are incredibly powerful in shaping discourse and worldview; I think this would be one more strategy for setting up an antiversity.
I haven’t registered a domain yet because I don’t know what to call the journal. Consider this a call for suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments, along with other recommendations for such a project.
habitableworlds.wordpress.com 
Will you be calling people retards in this space? Or will it be limited to one of your pseudo intellectual personalities? Will you be screening out comments that expose your flawed logic? Btw, How did you get to be so self absorbed to think that 25% of what you write is worth saving? One day, a close friend(if any) whose opinion you trust, is going to lay some honesty on you, about you. It might shock you out of your delusions! LOL
August 22, 2013 at 3:44 am
To be honest, you wouldn’t be going amiss by just giving it the title: ‘The Journal of Neoreactionary Studies’. Or just reactionary. You could pick a Latin name and sound fancier, but I don’t know if that’d catch on. They can get away with that for the titles of philosophical journals because they’re just one philosophy journal out of many, so they don’t have to communicate anything particularly significant in the title.
I think we do, however, need to be straightforward about our ideology–and the name of that ideology.
August 22, 2013 at 3:49 am
Yes, I agree. Lots of journals have a sub-title. I was thinking that “A Journal of Neoreactionary Studies” would be the sub-title here, but not necessarily the title itself.
August 22, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Screeds and real-talk have their place, but this journal will not be it. Rather, this will be the place for building a case for Dark Enlightenment that can be touted in the Cathedral without getting shouted down as blatantly ___________.
Bad idea. If it is Cathedral tolerable, it is lies, ignorance, hatred, and stupidity.
If you do not agree with Cathedral premises, you will be shouted down as blatantly ______________
Conversely, any post that is not going to be shouted down as blatantly ____________ is not actually a post that has any connection to reality.
August 22, 2013 at 3:49 am
I think there is room for real scholarship within the movement. After all, the precursors of neoreaction (e.g. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Hoppe) were academics, and they wrote scholarly texts and articles. I don’t think this needs to be done as a way of trying to gain favor with the Cathedral, but there are and will be many more (young) intellectuals involved, and they will want a more scholarly consensus to form. At this point, we’re all spitballing, but that doesn’t mean some of it isn’t worth deeper exploration. In fact, some of the essays and blog series could with only little modification become scholarly articles.
August 22, 2013 at 4:02 am
I don’t think this needs to be done as a way of trying to gain favor with the Cathedral, but there are and will be many more (young) intellectuals involved, and they will want a more scholarly consensus to form.
Yes, exactly. Or they’ll want, I think, to see that academic-level work is being done amidst the screeds. Almost all movements in the past had journals. Our blogs come close, but they’re almost more like discussion meetings, especially with the comments. Polishing up the best of these discussions and putting them into a final form is what can go in the journal.
August 22, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Depending on what kind of academic journal we’d like to do a riff on, titles could be:
“Journal of Reaction”
“Reactionary Social Studies”
“Studies in Neoreaction”
“Deconstructing Politics”
“Endarken”
I’m failing to come up with any names that are really sexy, though.
August 22, 2013 at 3:52 am
Don’t put the outlook in the name. Rawls was never published in a Journal of Liberalism.
Proceedings of the Froude Society? Dunno. Could just pick a buzzword, call it Patchwork or Accelerate or (probably preferably) something jacked from Carlyle that isn’t Resartus.
August 23, 2013 at 8:36 pm
On “less wrong” there were several people who attempted to argue reactionary ideas without a bunch of howler monkeys in the trees screaming in rage and hurling shit at them. To the extent that they avoided the howler monkey effect, they only did so by arguing crippled garbage.
August 22, 2013 at 3:56 am
Point taken, Jim. I wasn’t trying to say that the journal should be “Cathedral tolerable” in the sense of being watered-down half-truth. And I don’t mean that we should ingratiate ourselves with the Cathedral, as Bryan suggested. I simply mean that packaging the best of what the DE has to offer in a more academic space and with a more academic format might appeal to people on the fence, who would, if they just stumbled across, say, my posts about retarded Australians and violent blacks, would just click on by.
Take Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” or “Lure of the Void” series. Or Peter Frost’s series on “white privilege” throughout history. Or certain Moldbug posts. It’s those sorts of essays that will appeal to people secretly thinking right-wing crime thoughts but who won’t join our side via nationalist or WN sympathies. Hell, in my non-anonymous blog, read by academic colleagues, I’ve linked to Urban Future, Frost, Khan, hbdChick, and a few others without worrying too much. One colleague even commented on Land’s Urban Future stuff, not positively, but certainly without sounding like a howler monkey. And yet it’s as reactionary and real as anything on Those Who Can See.
I suppose I want to collect stuff that won’t be shouted down automatically as _______ not by dyed-in-the-wool clerics but by those who are having doubts.
August 22, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Right. The idea that the Cathedral would recognize this as a threat and work against it is missing the trees for the forest. The Cathedral is an abstraction, a convenient shorthand used to refer to a very large collection of very many parts, each of which does its own thing; it’s an emergent property of thousands of separate-but-still-connected institutions. In many cases the atheocracy is explicit; not so much in academia. I’ve run across analytic philosophers who were very much into evolutionary psychology.
August 23, 2013 at 8:39 pm
If someone disagrees with official truth, then all respectable opinion deems him at best ignorant, at worst ignorant and hostile.
And there is a lot of official truth.
August 24, 2013 at 2:19 am
Essentially this. The great thing about the DE is it’s now more than Moldbug+commenters; it’a an actual community with discussions and ideas and schisms and streams of thought. The bad thing about the DE is that because we talk and write for eachother, we can be inflammatory and crude and imprecise and get a free pass on it. You can write for the edification of those not yet part of the DE, without fellating the cathedral.
1. Make it Kindle-friendly (e.g. each ‘issue’ can be exported as a mobi). I hate reading long-form stuff on an LCD.
2. Disable comments. Comments are for blogs. If you disagree with someone, write a careful rebuttal, and get that published in a later issue.
3. No peer-review, or you are just asking for Conquest’s Law. I’ve already seen some strands of thinking in the DE along the lines of ‘more reactionary than thou’. Learn from the success of Bruce Charlton’s old stomping ground: Medical Hypotheses.
4. I would be really interested in contributing, as the journal-style suits me far more than the bloggy-style.
August 23, 2013 at 10:30 pm
radishmag.wordpress.com seems to approach this already. His previous blog (Unamusement Park) has absolutely stellar reference material.
August 22, 2013 at 2:16 pm
lets hope this will be more serious than radish who is quite amusing but not something you want to refer a professor journalist or teenage daughter to, let alone break into the academic conversation through
August 30, 2013 at 4:07 am
Who is the target audience, and what do you want to do to them? Is this an “Information Operation”?
I think a decent mission is trying to open the minds the the mind-openable to different ways of thinking than those propagated by the smothering and suffocating Cathedral informational miasma.
What the Reaction has is an epistemology, a social critique, predictions of decadence, and proposals for improvement. The whole chain links together in a journal in a “Progressive” sounding way.
Maybe more of a perpetual symposium with periodic themes. Something along the lines of “New Solutions”, or “Pathfinder”, or “Razor” (as in Occam’s).
August 22, 2013 at 6:52 pm
I love the suggestion in your last paragraph. I also love the language in your penultimate paragraph: it makes the point I’m trying to make to Jim, which is that one can make reactionary points in such a way that you don’t scare off the uninitiated. An “information operation” is precisely what I think the journal will be good for.
August 22, 2013 at 8:08 pm
Good luck with this. It will be hard to beat Radish Mag, though. Or Unqualified Reservations. Having said that, we can’t have too many reactionary journals.
August 23, 2013 at 12:48 am
If one reads old scientific papers, for example “The electrodynamics of moving bodies”, it is quite noticeable that they are not in the style that is now high status, not in the the style that academia now demands of scholars.
What makes the current style high status is that it is the style and the belief system of those who rule.
Thus, imitating that style to communicate low status ideas, to contradict those who rule, is unlikely to achieve status.
What makes academic journals high status is not the style, but the power.
August 23, 2013 at 5:02 am
I agree.
Instead the neoreaction should forge its own style.
Status hierarchies can be cracked by alternative hierarchies.
This is how fashion works. And Cathedral is nothing if not adept
at crafting moral fashion. The reaction can be the new counter culture.
August 23, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Again, I refer you back to Land’s or Moldbug’s essays. They are certainly not written in the academic style of the Cathedral’s universities, but that doesn’t make them any less scholarly. If we end up sounding like old-school academics, that’s fine too. The idea of a collecting scholarship is as old as the Royal Societies of London and Paris. I think it’s a perfectly reactionary thing to do to carry on this tradition among ourselves, especially given that the tradition as currently practiced in the universities is, as you say, absolutely bastardized.
August 23, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Referring to the essays written by Land and Moldbug has worked pretty well for me when discussing these matters with friends who are either sympathetic to the neoreaction, or don’t fully understand its basis.
It’d be great to read and/or contribute to those longer sorts of writings. Reactionary writers consistently output superb commentary, but a place specifically dedicated to longer, more extensive analysis and theory certainly sounds like something that can only add to it.
August 23, 2013 at 5:31 pm
One of the standard tropes of the early Royal society was to name some ordinary working class Joe, an acquaintance, assistant, or employee of the scientist, as a witness to the experimental outcome, to imply that scientific truth was visible to everyone, not just a clerical elite.
I have not noticed anyone in the Dark Enlightenment, except myself, pointing out that George Zimmerman’s instincts and intuition were in fact correct. Martin Trayvon was a drug addled burglar.
Similarly, the passengers realized that the underpants bomber was a terrorist just by looking at him. “Prejudice” of ordinary people is in fact wisdom.
August 23, 2013 at 7:32 pm
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Isn’t this Resartus?
August 23, 2013 at 8:02 pm
Mm. I thought of Resartus as being more an encylopedia, a Wiki, of DE ideas rather than a journal for long essays.
August 23, 2013 at 8:13 pm
@Sconzey.
Thanks for the excellent suggestions. I hadn’t thought about making it Kindle friendly. I’ll look into it.
August 24, 2013 at 1:01 pm
the criterion
August 30, 2013 at 4:00 am
the dark criterion
August 30, 2013 at 4:01 am
Yes! The Dark Criterion.
August 30, 2013 at 9:05 am
I must admit, that sounds pretty bad-ass.
August 30, 2013 at 4:22 pm
So where do we submit articles?
August 30, 2013 at 6:17 pm
I’ve been meaning to write something simply outlining my limited understanding of NR in the short period since I discovered that moldbuggery had started to expand exponentially after UR began to sputter when he became a father. (I only have the title so far – “It Usually Begins with Moldbug”). I had been quite startled to randomly discover an unexplained reference to the Cathedral and realize that it had actually escaped to the wild and had begun to grow and mutate and seemingly mingle DNA with WN and alt-right. I think the biological equivalent is called a chimera [Journal of Chimerical Theory – recall most mutations do not survive, but I don’t think it’s too early to say “It lives!”]
I’ve been quite happy swinging casually from link to link but have been looking for a more structured or formal collection of sources as the chrome bookmark system seems to be very rudimentary. I had come across your graphic representation of the antiversity previously, but typically lost the URL to the void, but was fortunate to blunder back to find you are contemplating just such a structure. It is exciting to watch this develop and I hope that it gains sufficient strength before the townspeople (how I hate them) gather with the torches and pitchforks. Usually by the time I find out about something it’s already passed, but since it’s not really something new but more rediscovered, I’m pitching something crypto-lovecraftian along the lines of “Arkham Antiversity Journal of Unicameral Theory and Applied Practice with Syllabus of Archaic and Obscure Political Knowledge”. Or if that’s too long, “The New Necronomichronical Review”.
August 31, 2013 at 1:37 am
How do we get write-access to Resartus?
August 31, 2013 at 1:38 pm
You could just call it Realism, or Realism Studies.
September 3, 2013 at 6:01 pm
Among the elite, “reality” and “realism” refers to official reality, not the reality of the senses.
September 3, 2013 at 10:56 pm
Indeed. I was thinking about a way to work ’empiricism’ into the title.
September 3, 2013 at 11:41 pm
neoRhome
March 19, 2014 at 11:28 pm