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What I have been thinking as someone that likes the work of Rita Felski and that agrees with some (though not all) the critiques raised by Sheila Liming, is how we ultimately construct stuff as mutually exclusive when it actually isn't. 1/x
I think many of my friends would completely disagree with me, but I do not see the aims of critique as exclusionary of the modes of attention highlighted by post-critique. In fact, the social life of works of art and of the fields that surrounding is built on the plurality... 2/x
of modes of attention. I also do not think that attention to aesthetics and enjoyment is contradictory to attention to politics. Nor is the coexistence of professionalized and non-professional readerships in the same social sphere. 3/x
I do think that a lot of these conversations are ultimately framed the institutional erosion (perhaps even collapse) of humanities disciplines due to neoliberal corporatization 4/X
Even if it is not the openly stated purpose of these interventions, it is obvious to me that claiming your opponent is destroying the humanities is a coping mechanism with the untractability of the larger crisis 5/X
and it is also true that any claim that your way of doing humanities is the right one underlies the struggle for increasingly more scarce resources—jobs, fellowships, funding, etc. 6/x
Which is not to say that people do not legitimately stand for their beliefs. Rather, beliefs and institutions generally shape each other. And post-critique is (I agree with Liming of this) a theory of/from austerity that sometimes (not always) aligns with corporativization. 7/x
at the same time, even if I am not by any means a Latourian, I do generally agree with Felski and others that the humanities could do a much better job at theorizing the more complex modes of engagement that audiences have vis-a-vis art 8/x
i.e. enjoyment, at-face-value consumption, etc. as socially existing phenomena. 9/x
The issue here is that the reason why we do not is because our methodological attachments and our sense of the mutually exclusive, as well as the consistent performance of our cultural politics, limit the scope of our reading. 10/x
This is in my previously announced piece on Bloom. But I was remembering that I read The Western Canon next to Bourdieu's The Rules of Art, Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay and René Girard's book on the novel, four theories as mutually exclusive as can be 11/x
And quite frankly they have always made sense to me together, not in their much distinct politics or axioms, but simply as a methodological ecclecticism 12/x
In any case, please keep writing, critique and post-critique friends. I read you all and I admire your work. And it is remarkable to me that we have minds of the caliber of Rita Felski and Sheila Liming even when it would appear that our conditions are adverse to it.
