Abstract:

"What, if anything, retains your engagement with theory or your optimism about what writing can do?"

This talk has been conceived as a response to this question posed by Lauren Berlant to the participants of the June 2018 conference on experiments in critical practice held at the University of Chicago to launch Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's The Hundreds, a compilation of their experiments in practices of "generative worlding." Berlant's question is an iteration of a contemporary preoccupation suggesting a crisis in research in the humanities, increasingly shaped by the conflictual forces of historical-political progressivism and the pressures of neoliberal productivity imperatives. This crisis is especially exigent in the seemingly unrelated contexts of the present mental health epidemic and the emergence of LLMs and derivative AI tools offering accessible and ultrafast production of text through the interpassive automatization of academic labour. My response considers the implied adverbial modifier in Berlant's question: What retains your engagement with theory or your optimism about what writing can do in a neoliberal economy?

This talk proceeds by "worlding" academic writing, as not merely a mediated re-textualization of the social but rather a complex site of subjective labour and productivity within the historical singularity of the present. Writing, therefore, is an act that not only articulates but also inhabits the complexities of the present. The talk proceeds along two coordinates. It draws from my own experience of proceeding heuristically in my research: an embodied, materially grounded approach where scholarly reflection may draw on established forms but also explore emergent and potential forms of articulation that might discover the imaginative richness of their objects of study as understood through the particularities of one's lived – and reading – experience.

The second trajectory of the talk converges on the pain and pleasure of my situation as an academic in a technical institute, an experience which has underscored for me a key distinction between method and practice. Our methods hold up the fantasy that reading-critique-writing are anterior to materiality, situation and practice. Practice, on the other hand, is ordinary, idiosyncratic, contingent, resistant to discipline and generalization. Concepts of the neoliberal ordinary – incoherence, indirection, informality, lateral agency, non-sovereignty – are the idioms that guide this aspect of my talk. Through these metaphor-signifiers we might begin to reimagine scholarly subjectivity and academic labour in the present, inching towards a political response to the felt urgency of a common condition.