Editorial collectives share features with artistic and political collectives. To compare them is first of all to recall that any collective is inherently, as Andrew Ross reminds us in his essay in this issue, an "adventure in mutuality." At every level, a collective operates not by deference to hierarchy, much less by the fiction of unanimity, but instead by the premise of the "reciprocity of practice," as it is phrased in the collectively authored essay on the aesthetics of Language poetry that appeared in Social Text 19/20 (1988). As is obvious throughout this anniversary issue, collectivism can involve but does not necessitate collaboration, the difficult process of directly making something together. "Reciprocity of practice" implies something broader and harder to define: a mutual attention -- a poetry collective is "a community of writers who read each other's work," as the Language poets put it -- that is taken to be the sign of a set of shared interests or commitments that can only be discovered and recalibrated in the active self­reflexivity of the group. Whether it involves a farm, a protest march, a dance, or a periodical, the recourse to collectivism also involves a conviction that social organization is necessarily itself political. Or, as it is announced in the prospectus in the first issue of Social Text: "the journal's editorial organization is, we believe, an integral part of its theoretical and political project" (ST 1, 1979).