this catalogue is an independent critical project by andrej synkar and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any publisher or imprint listed. it serves as one of the only curated and reliable entry points to theory, being the first continental/critical-theory publishing cartography on the internet*. it also guarantees genuinely conceptual texts by publisher, filtering out academic and cultural noise. for context on the institutional divisions, see the bottom of the page or my book kill. to see my publisher rankings, click here.
*◎ - exclusively theory-first | ☐ - theory-oriented but cultural | △ - cultural studies w/ theory backbone | ◇ - non-theory but has a theory series | ▽ - non-theory w/ accidental overlap
press
forge
◇ mit
☐ sequence
◎ re:press
◎ becoming
◎ meson
☐ punctum
◎ nero
crypt
◇ duke
☐ zone
△ spector
◎ time spiral press
erratum
lattice
△ cloak
▽ valiz
△ jap sam
☐ zer0
◇ wiley
▽ rollo
△ spiral
inside the castle
bastion
◇ cornell
▽ brill
▽ angelico
◇ fordham
▽ duquesne
cathedral
◎ verso
◇ polity
▽ oxford
☐ repeater
☐ seagull
detritus
categorical guideline for institutions
periodical
forge
◎ ill-will
◎ krisis
◎ collapse
n+1
catastrop(h)ic
splinter
crypt
◎ hostis
barricade
expat
lattice
△ e-flux
▽ cabinet
☐ šum
◇ chôra
▽ frieze
▽ artforum
bastion
△ telos
△ compact
cathedral
△ ak press
△ pm press
selvedge zone
platform
selected
chaosmotics
catalogue
forge
▽ snav
generative ink
crypt
◎ vergil
lattice
▽ crysta
bastion
cathedral
every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication, but the press is archetypally spearheaded by the cathedral, the historical form of the academy-church-postal, the global large-scale legitimating institution which combines scholastic bureaucracy with cultural hegemony and ecclestical authority, perpetuated by state funding and media. in my philosophy, crypts gave way too academies, which turned into cathedrals, morally paranoid institutions that constantly revise history in order to create discourses and disciplines which are supposed to give legitimacy to non-existent entities, in order for the cathedral to control resources over knowledge. originally moldbug’s term, ironically the cathedral itself is a paranoically perpetuated concept, however, its accurate precisely because cathedrals create generic discourse that has no value other than perpetuation. the cathedral is currently threated by all other social forms in contemporary society due to late modernity’s fragmentation of power. the paradigmatic cathedralist was probably aquinas himself, or, more recently, mbembe, chomsky and so on. cathedralists are primarily oriented around justice, such as marxists, jews, christians and so on. as it also happens however, presses are the most valid forms of publishing books due to the fact that a majority of books get sent to piracy networks and can actually be used and read, unlike a majority of periodicals, which are gatekept by bastions, a majority of preserves, which are gatekept by cathedrals, and a majority of platforms, which are gatekept by algorithms superimposed on top of the internet by corporations.
faq
every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication, but periodicals are currently legitimized by forgeries, who were previously cryptological societies. crypts are subterranean proto-institutions which cultivate esoteric or marginal theory before institutional capture, usually cults or ritualistic organizations, but they can also be on the fringes of para-academia. crypts occur rarely because the more contained, consistent and lame forms of power contain talent away from its potential, usually by the promise of practical pleasures or goals, killing unique conceptual philosophy. there are fringe crypts at every point in time, but most of them rarely develop in the common consciousness, the last famous one being french poststructuralist or irrationalist circles some fourty years ago, who turned into celebrities that preserved collectives and movements over institutional legitimacy, or more recently the ccru. a lot of crypts cement into cathedrals later. forgeries on the other hand construct new operational epistemes through technical work, theyre transitionary stages between the formation of new cathedrals by a cryptological elite that sustains their work into infrastructural necessity. forgeries are rare because they require the fall of cathedrals, since they cant directly compete with established cathedralical zones. a recent paradigmatic cryptologist is someone like fisher, a recent paradigmatic forgerist is someone like bratton. cryptologists are primarily mystics, forgerists are primarily constructivists or scientologicalists.
every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication, but platforms are currently ran by lattices, which are post-cathedral dispersions enabled by network media, or in older times the post office; lattices are unconscious, fragmented and most of the time useless forms of knowledge, made up of decentralized liberal arts ecology, essentially, the philosophy of unconscious formation and regurgitation. lattices are simply a more decadent form of already decadent cathedrals, supported by various cathedral grants or brief cryptological remissions. lattices cant be forgeries, since forgeries usually see lattices with disdain due to their non infrastructural, uneventful and deweaponized paradigm. lattices often exist solely to give credibility to cathedrals, but sometimes its also made up of collectives who are attempting to establish themselves into lattices but are far too defocused to do so. lattices are also so fragmented that they no longer encompass simply the aim of knowledge formation, but are often times made up of genuine practitioners, clueless wanderers of the world that have no radical aim beyond tooting the horn of the various multiplicites the world presents before us. the lattice has no representative, its quite literally everywhere. but an example would be somebody like, say, mcluhan or butler. anyone in the world who doesn’t know where they are, or dont really have a name made for themselves are usually a part of the lattice by default. the lattice is a fringe made up of historical accidents, with no real teleological direction, only cope.
every single one of synkar’s sociological forms can be located in every form of publication, but preserves are archetypally gatekept by bastions, the historical form of the castle-library-fortress, which maintains inherited epistemic orders; legitimizes through tradition rather than novelty. however, what you’ll see on this website are mostly platformic and therefore lattice bastions, because actual bastions such as gutenberg, perseus or actual libraries and so fourth are simply far too large and concentrated to even matter for my project. the reason the bastion appears second chronologically after the cathedral is because the bastion was originally split off from the cathedral, itself being a brainchild of the aristocratic monarchy, who split off from the cathedral in order to create secret societies and esoteric cults that maintain power dynamics rather than rupturing them the way crypts would. the bastion is primarily revelatory and negative in nature, found today in snobby and salty conservative think-tanks, historically legitimized by figures close to the monarchy that reacted to various periods of dialectical progress with doubt, be it reactions against enlightenment rationalism, reactions against fascist ideology, fascist ideology itself which was a reaction to modernity, and so on. the paradigmatic bastionist is probably somewhere between a spengler and fourier, at any point in society. preservationalists are primarily fascistic in nature due to their authoritarian support-groups, but either way they are either the elite themselves, or supremacists of any kind.
*one of the only reliable entry points to theory on the internet?
i know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. academia has quantified databases like the muse and doaj, but those are full of unfiltered nonsense no one cares about. actual important publishers like urbanomic, meson and semiotext, have no infrastructural metadata synchronicity. para-academic journals write with entirely different languages than anything in academia. you might be just like me, someone who’s tired of wasting their time accidentally browsing the “post-oriental literary green people studies” category tag at “grumbenberg press” hoping to find something that isn’t anthropology or media studies. philosophy content creation is forcing redundancy and thinning us out even more, making it more important than ever to connect and intertwine our existing infrastructure. philosophy is primarily about private languages, and private languages dont get to evolve or even spread unless we put the work in to merge, reconsider and map influences in a synchronous manner. synkar, serving as a bridge between the old and new world of theory.
*what’s the point of bastions and lattices if they’re largely undertheoretical compared to other institutions?
the reason that forgeries and crypts overlap with theory-exclusive publishers more than the other institutional forms is because ancient models like bastions and contemporary models like lattices struggle to maintain a theoretical balance, cathedrals had philosophical inquiry, lattices have referential inquiry, neither of them overlap with conceptual or speculative thinking in a way that makes use of the methods required in theory, where bastions struggle with the non-philosophical aspect of theory (creative generation, aesthetic coherence, reinterpollation of concepts attained from natural sciences back into humanistic use), lattices struggle with the philosophical backbone (speculation, concept, narrative, commentary) that older models were used to or had already developed. this creates an unproductive but necessary categorical divide.
*why are verso, ak press, autonomedia, radical philosophy, repeater and so on part of the cathedral instead of forge or crypt, and why are they not considered exclusively theoreitcal, this seems very political?
i will leave the deeper historical analysis to my works, but, the distinctions are objective and dont highlight my thematic theoretical preferences, only my analytical observations over what is exclusively theoretical in structure, not in substance. strict partisanship has a tendency to become overwhelmingly sensical, cultural or practical once it reaches a certain stage. this is not due to strict preferences or intentional decisions by the institution, it may not mean it wants to align with the cathedral specifically, sometimes it reaches a stage of oversaturation where it curatively becomes more aligned around political agitation and loses some of its philosophical underpinnings. this is the risk of running these networks, theoretical mastery is a very elite and exclusively line to walk, it takes a severe amount of concentrated energies that even the most philosophically ambitious writer isnt always able to attain. for example, even with ill-will’s cultural backdrop and strict partisanship rhetoric, i have marked it exclusively theoretical due to the way it manages to continously perform both subversivity and conceptuality in its rhetoric, something rare for its alignment. would i say its as exclusively theoretical as semiotexte’s intervention series, urbanomic mono or polity’s theory redux? no, but it’s far more conceptually palpable than a lot of say, repeater’s more culturally oriented catalogue.