Dilettante Army

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Dilettante Army

Dilettante Army is a website for short-form cultural and creative writing from a community dedicated to creating a communal discussion and body of work.

Dilettante Army is a coalition of thinkers who dabble passionately in a litany of disciplines. Our army consists of writers, artists, and critics who privilege everything from the fanciful to the cerebral with a healthy dose of snark. In 18th century Italy, a ‘dilettante’ was a passionate lover and supporter of music. Since then, it’s become a derogatory term for people who aren’t dedicated or ser

ious. We’d like to reclaim this word as a badge of honor. Dilettantes are freelancers, interns, students, adjuncts, and anyone else who doesn’t work in the culture industry full-time but still pursues their projects with hapless fervor. This website features short-form cultural and creative writing from our dilettante contributors. DA aims to underscore the free-floating status of cultural texts, letting them link together rhizome-style to acknowledge and inform their neighbors. As the site grows, you should be able to search the database and find a group of voices chiming in any given subject. Posts are short and to-the-point in order to allow readers to interject; you can submit your response at the bottom of the page. If it’s relevant, your response will be posted on its own instead of being lost in the bowels of a comments thread. It’ll help keep the dialogue front and center. The more people who use the site, the bigger it’ll grow and the sooner we can take over the world.

10/06/2025

Call for Submissions! Fall 2025, “Ekphrasis”

How do you know when you’ve really seen something? Beleaguered by the 24-hour news cycle and endless scrolling, we are overwhelmed with images, so many that we see each one only for a moment, flashing by but never captured. The latest AI nightmare, the sketchily provenanced war photograph, the doctored image of “gang tattoos” that seem to prove someone’s allegiances—we’ve all seen these things, but only some of us (or perhaps none of us) have understood them.

A lack of time and space to interpret images factors into our vulnerability to misinformation and a decline in media literacy, conditions with profound social consequences. If we see the same things but cannot agree on a shared reality, where has the visual mechanism failed?

We believe that ekphrasis can mitigate this crisis. Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly contributions about ekphrasis. Topics might include: words after pictures, words in pictures, words instead of pictures, Ways of Seeing, the Shield of Achilles, AI, disruption, the grindset, imagination, distraction, misreading, (historic) revisionism, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” displays of academic prowess, media literacy, performative yearning, lost originals, fashion do’s and dont’s, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the long now, immediacy, the death of painting, the death of photography, visibility mandates, Glissant’s “opacity,” abstraction, platform capitalism, common sense, mediation.

Pitches are due Monday, June 23. For more information on how and what to submit, please see the full call for submissions (link in bio).

Image: Sir James Thornhill, “Thetis Accepting the Shield of Achilles from Vulcan,” c. 1710.

06/05/2025

Spring 2025, “Rebuilding Year,” is out now!

After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild.

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change.

Picking our way across the damp sand, we are looking for flotsam and jetsam we can use.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Dania Rajendra learns from American football and coaches the Left on updating its playbook.

• Kate Thomas celebrates gay soup and community building at .

• peers into a supremely evil object, the Trump-Netanyahu handbuzzer joke, and its fallout.

• Sam Thompson recuperates the radical potential of EXTREME cleaning videos on YouTube and foments the social strike.

• excavates layers of glitter and imperialism in the Itaewon, the “international neighborhood” that Seoul rebuilt.

The physics-defying constructions in “Rebuilding Year” illustrations have been salvaged and remade by

28/01/2025

Call for Submissions for Spring 2025: “Rebuilding Year.” Pitches due Feb. 10! Link to full call in bio.

After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild.

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly writing on rest, reorientation, and Rettung. Topics might include: tanking, resting your starters, grassroots organizing, Syria, the future of Gaza, disaster recovery, mutual aid, collective projects, the ground game, strategy vs. tactics, media cycles, buying time, incremental gains, post-revolutionary fervor, obstructionism, left-wing melancholia, messages in bottles, the Vasa, flotsam and jetsam, quiet quitting, reinvention, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Donne’s “The Storm,” radical roots, building blocks, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

06/12/2024

This holiday party season, Dilettante Army and PRAKSIS: Presents () are pleased to present a joint special issue, “Party as Form.”

“Party” is an emulsion of feelings whipped up in the air between bodies in motion: intoxicating (even if technically sober), disorderly, fun. Time moves slower in revelry, or seems to pass in a moment of exaltation. But when a group of individuals fails to emulsify, hell is once again other people. The party as a one-night event is a microcosm of what we risk in coming together in community, in movements or political parties. Walking into a party means committing yourself to be a part of a project that exceeds you.

This issue comes out of the 2024 “Party as Form” residency at , which considered parties as an artistic medium. It is jointly edited by PRAKSIS, Dilettante Army, and guest editor Matilda Moors. Glamorous party images (tempting, intimate, with a hint of risk) by Jen Monroe.

At Dilettante Army—

• Shannon Stratton historicizes “Party as Form” through the hospitality work of arts administrators
• Sara Clugage, Matilda Moors, and Maike Statz stake a claim for shifting relationality in the architecture of vampire clubs , , and
• A translated excerpt from Leo Felipe’s
“A Universal History of the Afterparty” calls up Brazil’s vibrant, ketamine-soaked heterotopias
• Kelly Lloyd presents a new scientific study on holi-delay, “a condition where people only get excited about holidays after they happen”
• Banu Çiçek Tülü’s video essay explores the marked and unmarked spaces of Kına gecesi (henna night)

At PRAKSIS: Presents—

• McKenzie Wark deserts the world for the rave, for enlustment and xeno-euphoria
• Brandon LaBelle on the party as the wrecked body, an impossible community, and erotic knowledge
• Lexie Owen lives the grammatical rhythms of a Year in Party City, where parties serve as punctuation
• Tor Lukasik-Foss with four party scenarios: a steam jacket agitated kettle, a sequence of t-shirts, a coalescing storm, and a wellness app

17/06/2024

A call to poets and the poetry-affiliated! Submissions are open for our Fall 2024 issue, “Critical Constellations.”

A critical constellation is a made-up term for an artistic phenomenon that’s happening all the time: poets talking to each other intimately and specifically about each other’s works outside of the public eye. These constellations form between living poets, but they also form between the living and the dead and even versions of the same person (à la “Borges and I”). They are letters to young poets and words in air. They are scribblings on submissions passed back across a workshop table that sometimes—often—grow into lifelong friendships.

If we are lucky, we receive these constellations through edited correspondences, but these treatments are reserved only for those luminaries whose works were already widely celebrated. Instead, what we see of these constellations are usually made for the market: through authors’ blurbs or judges’ citations and forewords that endorse a winner’s manuscript.

A poet may win a manuscript contest. Yet, along with publication, the real prize is a close reader who, perhaps, may have given their work a chance to be understood. But what if those readers are already among us? Who have we already won? More importantly, who already might understand, whether they like it or not?

Critical Constellations is guest edited by .docx. Pitches and submissions are due July 1. You can find the full call through the link in our profile.

Image: Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (National Book Company, 1898).

01/06/2024

You might think I’m crazy but I’m serious: Janet Jackson’s “The Pleasure Principle” is really about the reality principle. New podcast from the brilliant with DA editor Rebecca Ariel Porte!

• 🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 We’re joined by the brilliant Rebecca Ariel Porte to tackle a much-asked question: what’s the deal with the pleasure principle, and the reality principle too? We talk paradises lost, utopias, fantasies, daydreams, and much more!

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Hail, Dilettantes!

Dilettante Army is a coalition of thinkers who dabble between disciplines: critical theory, visual culture, and history. In 18th century Italy, a ‘dilettante’ was a passionate lover and supporter of music. Since then, it’s become a derogatory term for people who aren’t dedicated or serious. We’d like to reclaim this word as an apt description for many art workers. As academia and the art world march hand-in-hand through late capitalism, making work on those fields more and more precarious, we find ourselves in need of new models of professional practice. Dilettantes are freelancers, interns, students, adjuncts, and anyone else who pursues their practice outside the white cube or ivory tower.