Post(ing as)critique

I restrict myself here to exfoliating

In an attempt to catch up with the literature on aesthetics, I was reading this morning Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick, and noticed a (to me) surprising reference in the footnote to a 2017 dissertation. Less surprisingly, that dissertation’s author, Dalglish Chew, turned out to have been an advisee of Ngai. The (good! interesting! [although studiedly not, per Ngai, zany or cute]) thesis is a sort of adventure in post-post-critique, thinking about what sort of feelings and pleasures attach themselves to both the actions of critique (problematizing, contextualizing, etc) and to the disavowals of critique in ‘post-critique.’

It’s a way of persisting in something like the mode of (Marxist) ‘critique’-type criticism that Ngai and behind her Jameson practice, while framing that persistence in Berlantian terms as a bad attachment (like Chu’s attachment to feminity—I know it’s bad for me but… As the psychoanalysts used to say, that ‘I know but…’ is the shape of a neurosis, ie, something one is supposed to cure not indulge) that therefore doesn’t have to be justified in the sense of being philosophically (ideologically) grounded.

Now, Roland Barthes was doing what you could call ‘post-critique’ in his late work, moving on from Marxism and structuralism while still using some of their methods, and asking how his own pleasure, body, and subjectivity were engaged in his interpretations (for which he drew on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—a point I make here—so it wasn’t even ‘avant-garde’ or ‘post-’ in the 70s!). And he did that in the name of having a good time (and with some vague political gestures towards the elaboration of what he called a ‘second liberalism’ and never got around to figuring out) rather than as a sad attachment or as an academic contribution to the self-development of a discipline, of Criticism, or of Theory. But for whatever reason twenty-first century tenderqueers seem committed to reinventing the early days of postmodernism, but now with an air of uptight melancholy.

For those with no time to read a dissertation (which is smart and full of interesting things!*), there’s a blogpost version from 2015 with a title, “We Have Never Been Critical” that Anna Kornbluh seems to have lifted a few years later (ofc, there’s nothing lamer than a title riffing on Latour, or any other author’s title, “What We Talk About When We Talk About [How] We Have Never Been Against Interpretation”—except I guess stealing such a title from a grad student!).

The dissertation, and even the blog post, are of course tragically routed through a vocabulary that combines the register of drily Latinate and unnecessarily high-falutin’ with that of hysterically overcharged pseudo-poetical (“The implications of this periodizing perspective being too several to elucidate in a single essay, I restrict myself here to exfoliating Best and Marcus’ suggestion that generational differences mediate our access to postcritical knowledge practices”). Even more tragically, he is now a life coach in Silicon Valley focusing on a clientele of ‘founders’.

You might wonder how training with Ngai—a sharp but it seems from her work rather mirthless critic for whom all enjoyments under capitalism are either beguilements or invitations to the clever few to reveal (what they already know before looking!) the global labor-commodity-capital system—would teach you about being a life coach to capitalists, but:

It’s natural to wonder about your coach’s qualifications. You’ll find mine on the tabs to the right. But my most important qualification isn’t in my CV. Because the main way I help you outgrow your problems is not with my professional experience or accumulated knowledge — but space. Space where daunting possibilities, “ugly” feelings, and vulnerable wishes can be met with kind awareness.

Remember ugly feelings? This is them now.

It’s astounding how one can have learned the very artificial language of contemporary literary studies (such that one can say ‘I exfoliate’ and not mean using an apricot facial scrub) and then throw it away to acquire the totally new vocabulary of breezy, falsely personal corporate self-help—which, in theory (!) the former exists to see through and thereby thwart.

However powerless and annoying it can be, I certainly don’t want to get rid of Marxo-Freudian critique, and I made fun of Sedgwick for trying to do so (fatly)—even as I don’t want to let Marxist or psychoanalytic ideologues stifle genuine reading. In practice most critics, however, do manage to let themselves get caught up enough in the enjoyment of reading, thinking, and writing that while remaining informed by the old ‘masters of suspicion’ they don’t lose sight of what is particular, sensuous and thrilling in either their objects of study or their own experience studying. I think most humanities scholars, the good ones anyway, really are still having fun deep down and loving their weird little objects even if they have to pretend otherwise in introductions and conclusions and in their self-talk.

The real danger, in my short experience teaching Marx and Freud at UChicago (2018-22), is that a whiff of ‘critique’ justifies students in the exit into Capital they were going to make anyway. A bright STEM major once told me during office hours, as we were working through some passage of The German Ideology, “I guess Marx is right—it’s hopeless! I should just become a consultant like my cousin.” Which is how Ngai’s undergrad students at Chicago now mostly do end up—to be, during their inevitable quarter and midlife crises, lifecoached back to productivity perhaps by her former grad students.

Given how predetermined, amid the collapse of the humanities, the path to becoming a consultant or para-consultant lifecoach seems to be (and do not be fooled, humanist Substacker—if we are charging readers some amount of money in exchange for a helpful feeling of orientation, meaning, and other priestcraftly horseshit, we are lifecoaches, no less than Merve Emre or Garth Greenwell selling their courses online like Mark Wahlberg’s prayer app for the Muji notebooks set) it’s perhaps obviously pointless to be worrying too much about what critique (or post-critique, or post-post-critique) does or doesn’t do, let alone whether Ngai or the late Barthes is the star to follow. And yet, I worry!

*for instance, wise words to the left: the affective bargain that demystification strikes, in which political disappointments get remediated into experiences of utopian hope, cannot persist in perpetuity because its effectiveness is limited to a temporal span in which total social transformation still appears to be imminent. Once we enter a period of an extended political impasse, however, in which the possibility of political revolution has almost completely receded, to persist in the same strategy of recoding of failure as the promise of a success that is just around the corner is apt to provoke cynicism rather than hope…

… if problematization disrupts others' pleasures as a means of provoking an attunement of feeling that would provide the basis of a renegotiation of contested norms, the time in which this intimate accord remains possible is circumscribed by the provisionality of a problematizing judgment's suspension of conceptual determination. Put simply, if what we judge as problematic has not yet been definitively evaluated as racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and so forth, the gap in which this benefit of the doubt has been extended is necessarily ephemeral. If, over time, the practice of problematization fails to induce its interlocutors to undertake the desired attunement of feeling, any further provocation via the disruption of others' pleasures is apt to polarize normative conflict rather than lead to its resolution, as problematizers and problematized alike double down on conflicting normative positions, rendering the prospect of any accord of aesthetic feeling even more unlikely.