Postcriticism

Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of
contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our
intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.

This essay reflects on the postcritical turn in the humanities, focusing in particular on the claim that theory (or "Theory") mortifies students, ruining their passion for the literary. It argues that death has been  and continues to be constitutive of theoretical labors, and that far from hindering its pedagogical value, death gives new life to theory. In particular, there is a conversion experience, or a renewal through death, that is inextricable from critical thought in the humanities.

The essay touches on work by Rita Felski, Jacques Derrida, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Michel Foucault, and Catherine Malabou, among others. It will appear as part of a collection of essays on "Antitheory," published by Palgrave in conjunction with the journal symploke.

"This paper argues for a pre-theoretical and pro-theatrical understanding of theory. To begin, it considers the Greek tradition of theōria as practiced around the fifth century BCE in the period just before Plato appropriated the cultural practice of theōria as a model for philosophical inquiry. As will be shown, this proto-philosophical practice of theōria was profoundly theatrical, which is to say, spectacular and dramatic in social, situational, and symbolic ways. Such events of theōria involved diverse citizens participating as active witnesses in recurring festivals that had both intimate and far-reaching political, religious, and aesthetic significance. Reflecting on some present-day settings and occasions for practicing theory, this paper concludes with a disciplinary provocation: the re-engagement of theōria’s fundamental theatricality can reanimate the social, situational, and symbolic dimensions of architectural theory, without sacrificing either its relative independence or its capacity for heuristic wonder.
      Before theory was a thing, it was a practice. In ancient Greece theōria was a spatiotemporal practice thoroughly intertwined with socio-political experiences and endeavors. The cultural practice of theōria involved traveling to a foreign place, primarily for the sake of witnessing a spectacular festival and/or consulting an oracle, then returning home to share with others an account of events seen and understandings gained. All three stages of theōria – traveling, spectating, and returning with a report – were vitally important. Individuals would temporarily leave behind the familiarity of their local conditions, assumptions, and problems to immerse themselves in intensely social, synesthetic, and metaphysical encounters at a Panhellenic festival. They would then return home with the obligatory challenge of communicating the truth of what was witnessed to those who stayed behind...." — Lisa Landrum

This chapter argues that a methodological shift from critical enquiry driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion towards more affective modes of reading can make literature a useful technology for cultivating a sensibility to the affective experiences of other corporealities. In contrast to sceptical approaches to “fellow-feeling” and “compassionate emotions” exhibited by prominent feminist figures like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, this chapter adopts the ideas of affect theory and new materialism to the study of literature by means of what Rita Felski has termed a “postcritical attitude”. Turning to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015), the chapter shows how such an adaptation makes literature available as a useful technology for – using Bruno Latours phrase – “learning to be affected” by the lives of others.

Modern materialism distinguishes itself from metaphysical materialism of XVIII century by the constitutive relation with the dialectical process. This article claims to rethink radically the concepts of matter and processes of materialization through the analisys of two different theoretical perspectives. These are arisen from the critic to the determinate negation and from the crisis of the classical and dialectical model of reason: first, Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectic; second, the new materialisms inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article ends with a brief tentative to elaborate the political implication of these two materialistic approaches.

On reading Pynchon's Bleeding Edge without presuming that its treatment of Paranoia is continuous with Pynchon's earlier versions of the paranoid mode. Makes the case, by contrasting with earlier Pynchon, for seeing a newer "paranoiadigm" at work in Bleeding Edge, which treats paranoia as warranted but not especially worthwhile.