This is an important piece by @seeshespeak -- I am particularly irked by Felski's characterisations of what work is isn't somehow the academic humanities, and feel almost entirely opposed to her critiques of criticism as form: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fighting-words

Also Felski, working from an English department, is simply not engaging with a greta deal of the *art historical* historiography of talking about say, painting, in this book. And then on top of that to blow off the LARB/Point/lit mags as somehow not substantial humanities?

This is when we should be asking: whose criticism? Especially for those of us who aren't coming from Felski's position in a particular discipline and in the university at large.

To use Latour this way also feels strange to me but I haven't had a chance to closely read this publication enough to think through that.

Ekphrasis IS a kind of doing, historically speaking, for many art critics and art historians. Anyone have say, a citation for Felski on Philostratus or Wincklemann or Riegl and attachment in this way?

ALSO: I don't think I or indeed most practicing critics I know-- whether academics or not-- do indeed use aloofness or lack of attachment as a default position. I did just finish an entire book about criticism as queer desire, so I'm obviously biased here, but still.

apologies for the typos earlier, thinking aloud on Twitter is very messy...

If we as art historians talked about the objects of English or Comp Lit as disciplines they way those disciplines tlak about our specialist objects--- oooooh boy we would NEVER get a book out on them.

There's a bias that English departments get to think about everything, but poke say, the form of the novel, with a critic stick from another part of the humanities and you'd better watch out!

This has to do with art history's position as originating int he German research university and as a relatively new discipline in the Anglophone world, but it's crazy to me.

Finally, hands down, some of the best writing on criticism I've read, particularly in the past few years, is in ancillary sources to academic journals, in lit mags and blogs and substacks, and I like it! It's freeing! I don't the old status quo and I currently AM in the academy.

Criticism, especially criticism that is felt in a way I think Felski implies should be the case, actually suits many of these other places *better* than an academic journal article. Without these places, I'd be impoverished as a critic.

Also the lens of Latour/ANT is a really frame for *all* criticism as practice toward the visual arts or anything else really. And doing rather than explaining suggests again, that explaining isn't a sort of doing...

There is a way to argue for an affective criticism without doing this. It puzzles me.

What if the places for writing that Felski dismisses as "[ara academic" or "hobby" are really the frontlines of criticism that cuts across both academy and humanities in society? Who can be a purist, especially now when it can take 2 years to get a major journal article out?

para* academic there. Actually curious, does she herself have any bylines? Is this a weird literary jealously thing?

Anyway thanks again to @seeshespeak who took one for the team and got a thoughtful, strident piece out there to shape the conversation on this early and to think with.

To clarify: I have a pretty sweet long term research postdoc. I'm solidly in Felski's class of 'full' aka not 'para' academics for now. But I still think the writing she thinks of as 'hobby' or aside from academic is just as important to my own humanities.

Not only does writing criticism outside academia (usually) pay me a decent amount, it sometimes reacts much more quickly and coherently to debates at hand without the long lead times of traditional academic publications. Criticism without the LARB et al would be out of touch.

Nor does this excerpt highlight that some of the best things I've read in terms of criticism as form and challenges to that form have been in sources Felski calls 'para' to the subject of our discipline(s) within the university.

Finally, if the precariat and people who have been forced to leave the field can't publish in academic journals, isn't dismissing the "para" as form just exiling these people to a land on not-colleague-dom forever?

I find myself citing stuff like Public Books or The Point in academic journal articles now too. If these ecosystems that salvage the cruelty of the neoliberal university were better recognised by people securely placed within it, the humanities would be stronger overall.

I put my "para" academic work right next to my other peer reviewed writing on my own CV. I genuinely believe the way forward for the humanities both within and without the university is going to depend on these ecosystems. Benjamin, after all, is "para-academic" on these terms.

This is a spectrum, not an either/or distinction. The use of affect and the affective in my criticism in say, the TLS, seeps into my writing in art history that is for different publications that are university-facing. The need to draw a line is, to me, strange.

Also: this phenomenon isn't just recent-- it goes on in German language fine arts publications going back 20+ years, in the US you have Sontag at al, and in France you have feuilletons -- you could make an argument that this form goes back the the 19thC or earlier!

Also the uses of παρά in Greek make the term 'para' in English an especially bad choice because it's an exclusionary beside-ness-- παρά can even be used as "contrary to x"!

Thing-other-than-academic? Not a greta way to characterise colleagues in other positions of (less) power.

once again, the great/greta typo has come for me, apologies.

Anyway, as someone whose survival in academia is made possible by a lot of generosity of thought, a large chunk of which comes from the literary-critical new outlets in print and online, I don't like the phrase 'para-academic'.

Also for the record, women/POC/queer ppl get FAR FAR more space in the lit-critical sphere online than they do in academia, which isn't actually saying much (the stats are still shockingly bad in both places), but still.