2. In the Future

we [sic.] will be different: on the cover of this issue of The Alternative Orange, you read titles (in red) of several essays which are not “actually” published in this issue.

For some time we have been considering publishing The Alternative Orange in a form more available to a larger audience and also more flexible for responding to the unfolding of contemporary events and issues. Although at the present time, The Alternative Orange is distributed internationally to a large number of readers, we think there are more readers interested in the kind of analyses we publish than we can reach in our current format.

This issue of The Alternative Orange, is therefore a transitional issue. Beginning with our Fall 1997 issue, we will publish The Alternative Orange under a new title and as a cyberbiannual. The new journal will be called:

RED CRITIQUE;

A MARXIST CYBERBIANNUAL

The RED CRITIQUE will be published twice annually and will have, in addition to theoretical essays—that at the present have formed the majority of essays in The Alternative Orange—essays analyzing the “daily”: Marxist interpretation of major events, films, exhibitions of paintings and photography, trends in popular culture, music and fashion as well as discussion of television and emerging forms of communications and identities on the “web”.

The essays which are not “actually” published in this issue of The Alternative Orange, will then constitute the founding essays of our new theoreticopolitical intervention into the “virtual” sites of late capitalism.

Our inaugural issue of RED CRITIQUE will continue the critique of the issues that we have raised here. "Transforming Theory: Cultural Studies and the Public Humanities” will re-open the argument that with the rise of global capitalism, the university as a site of educating critique-al citizens is being displaced by the university in which stories of desire are deployed to resist such modes of public knowledge as “cultural studies”. “Cultural Studies”, itself, however, is not beyond commodification and “privatization," therefore “Cultural Studies and the Public Sphere” argues one should be vigilant of the politics of the argument of such contemporary thinkers as Habermas and Foucault whose theories have been used to justify a reactionary experiential form of making sense of citizens “experiences” in the culture of late capitalism. The question of Citizenship is inextricably tied to matters of “production” and “consumption”: is “class” (production) no longer the space of collectivity of citizens? In “Performative Left: A Red Critique of the Theatre called 'Between Capitalism and Democracy'" these issues are raised in connection with the practices that represent “consumption” as a marker of singularity, identity and the “agency” of subjectivity. The matter of subjectivity and its relation with “race” has become the topos of bourgeois race theories practiced by such writers as Stuart Hall. "Transforming Race Matters” places "race" in a materialist space and offers a sustained “red critique” of post-Fanonian race theories, postcolonial discourse and transnationality.

One of the threads that runs through most of the texts in our inaugural issue is the matter of the imaginary, the question of desire and the problematic of critique-al citizenship. “Post-al Theories of Ideology: A Contribution to a Materialist Critique of Capitalism Now” provides a transformative space for opening up these questions.

The questions raised in these and other analyses in the forthcoming issue are all aimed at an act of clarification: what is the space of transformation and what are the transformative practices now. Such a clarification, we believe, is necessary more than ever before, because given the almost complete monopoly of the publishing practices by the ruling class and their agents, what is represented as the space of transformation is no longer clearly distinguishable from the pragmatic compromises. The RED CRITIQUE is an intervention into the “pragmatic”...