Liner Notes on Variant Vols. 1, 2, 3
You are uninformed, unformed, uncertain. You go anyway. Of course you do, it’s more of an adventure. And that’s the rule you’ve been using for years now, choose the adventure. That sense of ‘adventure’ has nowt to do with where the ‘Forum Meeting’ is happening; this part of Glasgow more familiar to you than most of the city. Twinned memories: a Hibs Away game at Ibrox, bored in your Dad’s van while he’s measuring jobs on Paisley Rd.
You realise, on entering, that this is a space endowed with many rules. We could call these invariants. There’s a set-up which we join, and try to join on to. We’re in the midst of a movement against standardisation and militarism that began centuries before us, so that’s no bad thing. Here, at this Forum, several of these invariants are set out, the structure made explicit. A few of them aren’t, but that’s no bad thing either. Part of an adventure is straining against the rules, figuring them out, feeling their tensile snap.
This sense of structure and play has been absent from almost all (but not all) the other left meetings you’ve been at up to this point. Either the invariants are whispered or texted between a small group or (hard to say which is worse) scribed down with such syllogistic, creedal certainty that the meeting may as well have been a memo. On second thought, you have encountered subtle combinations of the two and they are the worst.
It’s different in other ways, from the left-ish things you’ve been schlepping to since your age ended in -teen. You’ve got so used to acting out of necessity, from defence, against war, impoverishment, toll-snatchers, that it takes time to adjust to this field of open paper, to playing with language again. And that’s how they lay it out, memorably, a little performatively, big sheets of paper rolled over all the tables. Later, while vaguing out, you think you peep a looser taped one shift and wave, but the tall windows looked well drafty. You take it for a sleight of wind.
While those imbalances, distressing, between who speaks and who listens closely persist, more voices sound out than you’re used to. Setting invariants seems to allow more variation. And it becomes evident we’ve all arrived at the meeting with differing relations to Glasgow, to Kinning Park, to each other, to our doubts, certainties, to certain words and their histories. There’s a modesty to it, an awareness of our limits as well as our horizons. You say one or two things, permanent marker down one or two more.
The folk hosting it are friendly, and have a solidity that you lacked back then. They all seem to have read way more books and lived more life than you, especially a smiley northern one, with sandy stubby hair and a sandy stubby beard. He’s dressed like a joiner, black tatty fleece, trousers grey and black patches. He speaks slowly, softly. You can tell this is partly out of a deep, glowing gentleness, and partly because he’s pulling each word down from a vanishing-point large library of books he’s constantly browsing and cross-referencing in his head. He hands you four folded copies of a paper. It’s called Variant.
Was that how it happened? It’s hard to get the story straight. Did you chance on the paper first, powdery newsprint leaving its negative image on some beer-slick bar-top? Or was it an event from its outer rings, this ‘Right To The City’ Forum, that drew you into an elliptical orbit? You’re not sure. One more variant, undecidable. You do remember reading it first in a particular tenement, but that doesn’t narrow down the dates by much.
You let this magazine live in your room for years. Looking around your flat now you realise how lacking you are for new guests like that, how different ‘visiting’ the internet is. The screen works partly as a portal, partly as a decontamination zone; a certain intimacy is lost. Those magazines, you’d touch them, fall asleep holding them, feel them decay. There’s an entire history fading of left documents, their texture, their voices, company in our itinerant world, solace and sign of surrender-deferred in bare workrooms, bunks.
You do know that you read Volume 1 after Volume 2. It seemed artier of course, whatever that means, in content and form. It had a sundering force to it, deffo, and there’s a hefty wodge of individual articles from its ten years that are burned into your back-brain. Still, tracking back its blast pattern now, you realise it was a firecracker, not a steady flare.
Variant was ideal as its title. The constant was churn, divergence blazed. Could we risk claiming that the one invariant was intensity? This was the eighties-nineties crossfade after all. Read now, it has a combustive narrative energy. A sense of surety too, of the crafting of master theoreticians and ‘serious cultural workers’ and ‘the most important and most significant art movement[s] in the world today’ that seems, risk it, retro. And, not dismissively but with curiosity, you wonder now who wasn’t able to be heard amid the crackle. And what variations, uncertainties, unsettled positions within those who did were similarly dimmed. A part of you, it’s true, longs for its brashness, its verve, its grand narrative scale, its sense of who we were and who they are. For a frontline to culture.
Volume 2. What you liked was the doubt. Well, the balance of doubt with determination. Reading it now you’re struck by how often strands are carried between issues. The doggedness with which its investigations are pursued. But the Purcell-as-poster-boy cover of the double whammy from 2010 is hard evidence this was no dour bloodhounding. Like the Forum, the word that comes to your mind, oddly, is ‘game’, provided we remove any sense of paltriness from those four letters. Your move, the cover seems to say. It’s funny, as well as forceful. You love its grasp of contradictions. That city planners, cultural funders, council functionaries and its readers are caught up in structures, make decisions but not to their ends: invariants. That they could and should choose to do otherwise and here’s how: variant. And though the particular cases come and go, there is continuity, but not certainty. Its invariant aim: to bring a ‘contested past’ into a ‘critical relationship’ with our present; its motto: ‘Language is never neutral’. Invariants and variation.
You’re writing this fifteen years after that Forum. You’re tempted to type platitudes, list horrors, ‘Aye, a lot’s been lost’. You feel some of those losses run through you; you are pierced by them. But this framing of time in neat columns, losses and wins, has never aided the movement against the standardisation of time that began centuries before us. And in any case, there’s something else you’ve noticed. There are more varied, sometimes also just more more, folk at tenants' union meetings, discussion events, weirdo gigs than there used to be. There’s more dissonance, counterpoint and diaphony too, but that’s supporting things happening, not stifling it. It’s fragile, but somehow people more courageous than you are finding ways to organise together without an overarching order or shared book.
You know that as is inevitable, these shifts become more ambivalent as soon as we consider them in terms of that word most open to many valencies: class. It comes from the word ‘to call’, and immanently embeds the ambiguity of that short phrase into itself. To call, as in to categorise and sort: the genre of statistics. To call, the felt, lived, endured snag of a plea or tendency (depending on the phraser) generated within the misery of capital that cries out for redress: the genre of history, in a Marxist mode or mood. The former is a call that brings together, organises; the latter generously lets dissonance bloom. More than either of those, it seems to you that class names a ‘collision’: Marx’s word. Collisions in society, in groups and inside whatever each of us thinks we are. As with all types of collisions, the scale we view from skews our sense of them. In these small groups, in individuals they can become hard to see, but they’re there; the question for every meeting isn’t just who came and what did they say, but also who wasn’t there, excluded. But even as elisions persist, these collisions are also more to the fore, there’s more reflective judgement around them, more open modes for coming to comprehend our internal-social scatterings and gatherings: our debris.
And alongside this, in fiction, music, films, mathematics, video games, dancing, innumerable other media and modes of thought you see signs of subtle and momentous new grammars forming, which make the leaden politicking we’re often caught in look ridiculous, sterile. You see those modes less as escapes now, and more as ways of resituating problems, as shifts of the strands that snag and insuperable knots so that they may one day be sliced, rewoven; as ways of fantasising together. This makes you feel a bit silly sometimes. Course it does. Adventure has, by default, been denied to almost all for all of metered time.
Despite this denial, and the tearing up of minimal or absent stability that the pursuit of adventure implies, and the mangling of the last few safety nets, working class folk evidently risk pursuing it. Capital, terrified and reactive, frantically tries to punish those who do so. Those who, defiant, still do so frantically, failingly try to support each other to continue venturing into thoughts, ways of being together, ways of lending capacity to each other that are not figurable within capital’s frame. You return then to ‘the call’. Beneath these gatherings is this call to find ways of being together not judged from above by the blunt metric of capital, of the most expeditious exchange possible between two economic actors. A call from within class, better a collision of calls, to capacitate each other outwith those rote schematics, to venture sideways from that frame. Who wants to be in a Temu advert, anyway?
You know others more shrewd than you are digging hundreds of passages between these modes and finding new articulations of that movement which began long before us that learn from them. They are reweaving the broken web between us, at the same time as they fissure capital’s framing of our days. You see the risible distinction between pulp and proper culture corroding. You know many people are denied what is dismissively called this side of life, and that many of those same people pursue access to it with a determination that draws deep from that dismissal. You wonder why we, whoever the we is that is held here, want to make this title ‘Variant’ speak again at this moment. You know it will need, and will aim, to have as many of these voices as possible within it, to sound out our strange world.
And, in all complicity, you say that while ‘Variant Volume 2’ names for you an affinity that only, dunno, three other proper-names that aren’t people can approach, perhaps any reactivation of that name would benefit from opening the passage wider between writing about culture and writing-cultures. For a touch more variation in how its investigations are pursued. Terrifying, but necessary if we’re to shun a ‘left-discourse’ which, as Châtelet notes, can sometimes risk becoming ‘boring as shite’, to find a hint of adventure, play in all this; an advent, thing-to-come, apart from desperate defence and the passing of the reins of a world run hot from nation-state to nation-state. And you feel increasingly that, to shun a variance-without-end or for-its-own-sake, we need to sit for a while with these two sentences side-by-side, to connect them up: ‘style is a discipline of breaking language out of itself’, ‘language is never neutral’.
So when you hear about a crisis in criticism, you think it is exactly that, a split. A heightened point reached in the existence, side-by-side, of two developed and necessary languages for speaking about these mediated objects. You call this a ‘paranomy’, the presence of two laws for judging, and do not rue it. For you know, at a distance, from mathematics that this grasping-from-many-approaches can be enabling, rather than confounding. You canny name these critical languages (nor should you) but they become legible when side-by-side. That these objects are made and, by our spieling with them, constantly remade within a context of capital and conflict; that they have fuzzy underbellies. That whatever they are speaks to whatever it is you are; that this isn’t separable from class, our colonial world, scads of disparities. Invariant seeming laws, the mesh of our struggles-at-the-membrane, are imprinted on them; they err and vary away from these laws. Only a few publications seemed to reckon with this awkwardness. And that the real crisis was still, simply, funding scarcity produced by structural vulturism. Example: Variant Volume 2.
Volume 2. You still recall that first night, when you let it cross the threshold. It was late. After the Forum, you’d been drinking at the old Old Toll, the £2-for-any-drink Old Toll, you were fast by the ingle with the crap electric heater. Then home, and bed, the journal cast on the floor beneath the gas meter, but still a darkening hung above the door, and blue tinted beams broke through stronger than before, past notched edge of chimney flu and wood framed pane. And the white-washed moon sopped light suds again on the mirror behind Variant’s folded sheets and so you wereny all that surprised when, inside the looking glass, you saw it rise, chippy-fold itself into the shape of a detective’s hat, and speak.
Variant said ‘this is not a gossip column, culture must be protected from commerce, sites for the questioning of how historical narratives are constructed’. It said ‘that history is not a fair arbiter’. Variant said it is in the position of having to suspend Utopia, available at selected sites throughout Scotland. That a large number of people were convinced that something underhand took place and our general culture is permeated with ideas about the individual nature of creativity and that these myths are produced; that this might raise the fear of a digital Tower of Babel. Variant said passing the responsibility from people onto ‘the people’ is history's oldest trick. That culture is formed by the tensions between what people do and what they aspire to. That the truth is that we don't quite know. It said stop the war, stop the killing. It said a metaphor. It said while you don’t have to think of yourself as queer to be playful, there is something outside the normative about adults playing in streets or on the picketline. It said Louis attempts to live his dreams and draw grown ups and children alike into a scary-cute world. It said the writing in this magazine is critical and that it saw this as meaning it should function as a forum.
Thinking back on it now though, I remember that Variant said something else before drifting to the floor … ‘that readers familiar with Anderson's article in Variant … will have noticed … he just blabs away’ ...
Eoin Anderson © 2025