The neoconservative political philosopher Francis Fukuyama is perhaps best known for his controversial "end of history" thesis, namely, that Western-style liberalized democracy represents the final stage of humanity's civic and ideological evolution.¹ No matter how problematic such a thesis may be, at the turn of the 21st century it's all too easy to conclude similarly about literary history. What seems like an "end," however, is really just a smutty eddy created by two 20th century vulgarities:

(a) the editorial class' wholesale delivery of literary production into the hands of MBA's (or, perhaps, the insatiable latter's wresting of it from the inattentive former's hands);

(b) the branding of "creative writing" as a defined entity and its institutionalization as a state-supported, de facto trade.

The contrails of these two developments are all too evident in the 21st century. And while the first played out on a corporate level, and the second mostly on a governmental-academic one, they're both driven and reinforced by the proliferation of suburban values that have crept, and continue to creep, into almost every aspect of Western life. These values turn all things into commodities and all people into consumers, all gestures into sales pitches and all receptions into purchases, all writers into employees and all readers into profit facilitators, all educators into vocational instructors and all students into aspiring widget-stampers. In such a climate, enduring insight, truth, and beauty -- all happy accidents of raw, courageous art -- become liabilities, and the phrase "literary fiction" operates as little more than a cautionary label. (Most often, this is said of corporate publishing, but it's no less true at the university, for public and private grant committees, in public spaces, in tract home dens, &tc.)²

Even among this commercial fog, though, the first of these two developments might hardly matter were it not for the second.

After all, when haven't businesspeople gravitated toward books and the wider arts? When haven't earnest writers and artists tried to turn a buck on their work? But when else, we might also wonder, haven't there been writers and editors to challenge mercantile and patronage excesses and to deliver bold, subversive texts into the cultural bloodstream? When else have both writers and editors so eagerly raced one another toward corporate servitude? And when else have writers so eagerly mewled over the one-off colostrums, and sustaining lactations, that drip from the institutional teat?

Of the 20th century's great American editors -- Malcom Cowley, Maxwell Perkins, Albert Erskine, and Jason Epstein -- only the fourth has lived long enough to see all this become routine. Using his own experience to illustrate the MBA-takeover of literary production, in a recent New Yorker article Epstein notes:

When I went to work for Random House [in the 1950s], ten editors ran it ... We had a sales manager and sales reps. We had a bookkeeper and a publicist and a president. It was hugely successful. We didn't need eighteen layers of executives.³

In an earlier interview with Charlie Rose, Epstein also describes a systemic shift that took place in the late 20th century publishing industry. For a variety of reasons, publishers like Random House gradually moved away from the sustainable, backlist-driven business model of the early-to-mid 20th century and, in the 1980s, began embracing a riskier "frontlist," bestseller model.⁴ This, of course, is the model we continue living with today, but it's begun crumbling under the weight of its decadence and, as Epstein notes, because of technological advancements that have made traditional publishing houses culturally and economically redundant.

Predicting a radical restructuring of the 1950s Random House climate he experienced first-hand, Epstein tells Rose the literary future belongs to geographically-dispersed, "like-minded" editors who create low-overhead, internet-driven, print-on-demand publishing concerns focused on specialized areas of interest. In his issue 2.1 interview, Michael Jacobson discusses this development in terms of asemic writing, and SCRIPTjr.nl itself, of course, grows out of this trend. Our YouTube account and postSCRIPT -- which, in part, serve as citation-documented, effectively permanent, iPad/iPhone-driven archives of tattoos, graffiti, and other marginal(ized) textual forms -- also help us extend the notion of "publication," and projects released under the "SCRIPT" brand -- via the SCRIPTshop -- allow our particular constituency to participate in the emerging literary reality in even more diverse and constructive ways.

The poisonous commercial legacy of late 20th century literary production will, it seems, take care of itself. In many ways, it's already being retired. Self-publication is experiencing a grand renaissance and grassroots, internet-/social media-driven publishing collectives like SCRIPTjr.nl are emerging to fill the intellectual/commercial market vacuum left by legacy houses. However, this new literary generation must also purge readers of the barbaric MBA values they've internalized over the past three decades and inspire them to join those of us already exploring the literary frontier. (Re)inspiring readers to take their own adventures in the aesthetic margins isn't going to be easy, though. The traditional aesthetic ecosystem has been profoundly damaged, and companies like Bertelsmann and Pearson have trained two generations of readers to think of themselves as entitled consumers of commodities rather than as curious consumers of ideas.

Moreover, the Western middle class -- especially the American form it, which has essentially franchised all the others -- exhibits an extraordinary narcissism and never seems to tire of representations of itself or of reaffirmations of its experiences and values. Granted, any lifestyle as miserable as the average commuter's needs a constant stream of propaganda and reinforcement to survive, and this perhaps helps explain why people who work in offices, and who spend their weekends in the 'burbs and at shopping malls, consume so many representations of those exact same experiences (via shows like The Office, movies like Revolutionary Road, and their endless textual equivalents). Engaging in a sort of trauma-dulling repetition compulsion, demand for this type of narrative therapy -- in a phrase, "bourgeois realism" -- has exploded to the exclusion of almost anything else save, in the bookstore, political and financial nonfiction, adult adventure stories, and "childult" fantasy fiction.

But these, of course, are inconsequential mass readers. The other, jury-awarded instances of Creative Writing™ are high art, and in case we somehow miss this, they even say so, right on the cover, next to the discount sticker, the movie tie-in announcement, and the ubiquitous orange "O" that Jonathan Franzen -- a reluctant but illustrious bard of literary suburbia -- got so worked up about.

Desperate to eke out an identity somewhere between the ownership-commercial and the proletarian-artistic, the American middle class has always preferred separating "high art" from popular culture so it can serve as the arbiter of difference.⁵ But during the late 20th century, something changed. Dissatisfied with refereeing a contest they themselves invented, the educated (that is, "degreed") middle class tossed their blacks and whites to the sidelines and orchestrated a remarkable touchdown of their own.

Lacking the generative capital resources of the executive class or the organic genius of the artist, the American bourgeoisie had only one grand resource at its disposal: tax dollars. And since their bosses are too rich to pay taxes, and the artists too poor, this tremendous pot of gold -- dispersed at the both university level in the form of "creative writing" programs and at the government level in the form of grants -- fueled the creation of middle class "high art." Ever pragmatic, polite, and working within the system, the American middle class deftly created a system in which their Caesar-rendered hard currency supports an MFA-mill and arts-funding infrastructure that fills warehouses and bookstores with textual soma.

For the better part of two decades now, self-satisfied, insular creative writing programs have trained their graduates to create this homogenized mediocrity, this self-replicating, ecophagic grey goo that manifests itself most prominently in the solipsistic, frequently mendacious, memoir and in poetry and fiction obsessed with the excruciating minutiae of bourgeois life.⁶ As such, canonical instances of contemporary American literature radiate a soporific, particularly Midwestern form of unimaginative politeness effectively trademarked by the Iowa Writers' Workshop.⁷

These works avoid pushing people beyond their average suburban educations, offer little in the way of formal or thematic subversion, and usually trace the benignly transgressive acts of generic everymen ...

A beer with lunch? For shame!

... that lead to some sort of uninteresting epiphany ...

There, standing in the wrench aisle of the big box hardware store, I realized why my father could never love me.

... and/or middling catharsis ...

And that's how a social networking site helped me make peace with my old high school bully.

Managing a grand cultural Skinner box, arts funding institutions and prize juries reinforce these values by rewarding representations of quotidian heroism, narrow vision, and other celebrations of the banal. While "MacFound" deserves a nod for their recent, progressively-minded recognition of David Simon, such entities almost always serve as lagging indicators of the status quo.⁸ The one that missed Mark Twain, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce is certainly no exception, but Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, got this much right about contemporary American literature:

Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States ... The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ... That ignorance is restraining.⁹

While a cosmopolitan world of writers may quarrel with the myopic, 19th-century idea that Europe, somehow, is still "the center of the literary world," Engdahl's systemic observation scales down to the atomic level nicely. The insular whole he sees is composed of a thousands of isolated textual whines: the introverted memoir, lyrics focused on life in the 'burbs, and the "academic novels" of Gen X and the Millennials. America's crimes against literature go even deeper, though. These textual artifacts represent more than just uninteresting literary expressions: they, in fact, represent the unfortunate triumph of the absolute lyric, the monologic, and the pure subjective over heterogolssia, dialogism, and the third-person.

As the saying goes, it made no difference to the people on the trains to Auschwitz if mother drank or father was cold.¹⁰ One must situate his/her experiences in a historical moment and braid them together with the larger cultural zeitgeist to wrest meaning from inane personal mumblings.

These complementary, reinforcing forms of middle class realism have become so common in American literary life that they seem like a natural status quo. Formally, their vehicles -- the novel, the memoir, the lyric -- are so overwhelmingly grounded and venerated in literary history as to seem beyond reproach. This certainly insulates them from casual "groundling" critique, and an emperor-has-no-clothes groupthink achieves the same within the literary establishment. As such, when we see the great literary forms recast as carriers of nonsense, it's easy to despair and conclude we've reached the end of literary history. But just as the emergence of China's "commucapitalist" hive-mind dates Fukuyama's trademark idea, the emerging, heretofore marginalized textual forms SCRIPTjr.nl concerns itself with suggest literature will indeed live on but in new, dynamic arrays and via much altered forms.

Like its previous two issues, SCRIPTjr.nl 2.1 offers readers a diverse array of work from the literary frontier that suggests literary history is far from over. And just as the literary movements of the past disposed of proceeding ones, middle class realism will eventually collapse in on itself and, likely, be entirely forgotten as the localized expressions of a decadent, self-obsessed moment in time. Moreover, just as we speak of philosophy's early 20th century "linguistic turn," and early 20th century literature's "psychological turn," we will one day speak of literature's 21st century "visual turn" toward the sorts of literary forms SCRIPTjr.nl explores.

Issue 2.1's afore mentioned interview with New Post-literate curator and asemic novelist Michael Jacobson furthers our goal of offering discursive, conversational interviews that have a filmscript's fluency and tone. Tom Bradley and Aaliyah Miller's script excerpts further expose audiences to the readerly possibilities of script forms while Milcho Manchevski's generous script sample from his new film Mothers illustrates the fascinating on-page expression potential of the same. (Especially noteworthy and unique is Manchevski's third section).

Andrew Horton's review of Mothers bears witness to SCRIPTjr.nl's belief in the co-equality of criticism and art, and the evolving critical constellation accompanying Tim Ely's work reflects our desire to experiment with innovative analytical forms. Issue 2.1's cryptotexts special section -- with essays on Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus by Kane X. Faucher and Peter Schwenger -- tries to bring attention to overlooked literary texts like the Codex and Voynich manuscript and introduce new ways of discussing them. Finally, Mauro Césari's SPAMTEXT challenges readers to experience newspapers in new ways.

Echoing a line from Barton Fink, in SCRIPTjr.nl 1.1, I asked (screen)writer Caitlin McCarthy if writers of her professional persuasion are "undomesticated." She declined to identify herself as such, and everyone within and without these (web)pages is free to pick and chose his/her alliances and identity, of course. (This power informs the untamed essence of liberated actualization, that is, of "undomesticity.") But SCRIPTjr.nl will always be a place for writers like those featured in issue 2.1: the wilderness criers, the samizdat inkers, the wild ones, the gonzos, the roughs, the crazy outliers, the bat-shit crazies, and those, most of all, who want to breathe aesthetic fire and piss whiskey on the ashes of Random House with the ghost of Bill Faulkner.

In short, SCRIPTjr.nl will always be a place for undomesticated writers, and the future belongs to us.