[Nonmember: Nico Baumbach as of 14 April]
All participants are members as of 7 May.
Recent and contemporary critical theory has focused on the uses of description as an alternative to the potentially invasive and/or paranoid tendencies of modes of critique.The interest in notions of ‘surface reading’ propounded by critics such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, and Heather Love, and torqued by recent work in queer theory, has reshaped the direction of much recent critical discourse, while the philosopher Bruno Latour and others have argued that critique is outmoded, due in part to its conspiratorial affinities. In this panel, we will consider the anomalous yet charged relation between description and critique that arises in what might be conceived of as hyper-descriptive texts, in which that relation is simultaneously intensified and reconceived. Hyper-description, we will argue, effectively reveals the aesthetic and political stakes, as well as the scope and assumptions, implicit in the distinction between description and critique. By considering the potential phenomenological, political, and aesthetic implications of this fraught distinction, we hope to reassess and to reconfigure these prevailing modes of critical discourse.
Nico Baumbach’s paper, “Theory as Conspiracy, Conspiracy as Theory,” will examine the recent censure of critique mounted, on one hand, by ‘academic post-critique’ represented by the work of Bruno Latour, and, on the other, by right-wing conspiracy theorists who attack modes of critique they regard as conspiratorial (manifest particularly in critical race theory, theories of gender, and Marxist cultural analysis). Arguing that the latest spread of conspiracy theories can be seen as one response to cultural analyst Chris Anderson’s notion of an “end of theory” that, by virtue of the influx of data and statistical tools, has come to define the behaviorist logic of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” Baumbach will assess the role of networked communication systems in promulgating the latter forms of mistrust, and appraise the peculiar intersection of academic and right-wing suspicions of critique.
Joan Lubin’s paper, “Sex, Itemized,” will explore the aesthetics and politics of inventory in contemporary autofiction, both queer and otherwise, by constellating a series of recent queer narrative experiments in autofictional inventory, including Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends (2021), Morgan Bassicchis’s The Odd Years (2020), Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), LA Warman’s Whore Foods (2019), and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021). Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s recent claim that ‘itemisation’ is crucial to the representational practices of contemporary fiction, as well as on Edmund White’s influential 1995 essay “Today the Artist Is a Saint Who Writes His Own Life,” which traces the genesis of gay autofiction, Lubin will show the hyper-descriptive practice of itemization to be crucially embedded in queer narrative self-accounting.
Heather Love’s paper, “From the Outside Looking In,” will examine intensified descriptive sites of structural estrangement in a representational tradition, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1814) to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), in which an outsider, alienated by birth or circumstance, looks on at a scene of human life from which they are excluded. Love will explore the experience of alienation without disenchantment in rapt, externalized visual attention to a domestic scene, dramatized in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, and in the 1937 melodrama Stella Dallas (dir. King Vidor). In each of these iconic scenes, Love argues, the observers figure a mode of first-order observation rather than experimental investigation or critical judgment; naïve overinvestment, rather than serving as an impediment to understanding, instead gives rise to it. Love’s paper will examine the conditions for a form of aesthetic insight borne of a heightened scrutiny that is at once partial, invested, and crucially uncompromised.
Anita Sokolsky’s paper, “The After-Lives of Sensitive Fibers in Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream” (1769, publ. 1782), will argue that these dialogues, in their hyper-descriptive, obsessional yet antic style, effectively stage a conflict between a seemingly unbiased though proliferating description of the genesis of consciousness, and a persecutory suspicion of its religious and political implications. The dialogues limn a self that requires an effort of fanatical self-concentering in the form of self-estrangement to counter the anarchic potential of consciousness. Drawing on the philosopher Alain Badiou’s recent speculations on the role of an intrinsically fanatical ‘sacrifice’ in the politically and individually transformative ‘Event,’ Sokolsky will trace an aesthetic/ philosophical lineage that mimes and undermines the Enlightenment tradition of anti-fanatical particularity embedded in empirical description and close observation of natural phenomena.
The organizer will introduce the panel for five minutes. Each panelist will speak for thirteen minutes.