1) This is a key point in all of this. It has some implications worth clarifying and drawing out, so a .... .... thread. ... https://twitter.com/kevin_modestino/status/1339398267268947970

2) *If* you believe that the only point of doing literary criticism is as a radical political project, and *if* you believe that the study of literature amounts to doing literary criticism, it makes sense that you'd intensely oppose 'post-critique.' ...

3) Likewise I take it as a premise that one should act as a moral person in the world in pursuit what we think is politically just (as Kevin notes, Marxist commitments, abolitionist commitments, and so on), and that identity and action is more important than doing lit crit ...

4) Furthermore, *if* you understand lit crit foremost as a way of exercising one's commitments toward the production of meaning (as opposed to producing knowledge that can be countenanced by those outside of your circle of commitment or your discipline), then ...

5) ...likewise 'post-critique' presents a threat to your raison d'etre. For my part, among items (1) - (4) above, it's only (3)--that we should act morally in the world foremost--that I subscribe to. Nevertheless ...

6) I think there are some serious problems with equating lit crit (let alone the study of literature) with any given political project. The most obvious of which is (a) everyone does critique, most of it more effective than lit crit. ...

7) IMO, e.g., the most powerful anti-racist book out lately, with the most devastating critique, is Angela Saini's _Superior: The Return of Race Science_. You don't have to agree with the superlative, but it's an example of what I mean. ...

8) Another problem with equating lit crit and political activism is (b) the credibility problem it introduces. As Steven Shapin demonstrated in 'Cordelia's Love' (via a reading of King Lear, as it happens), all knowledge work is credibility work as well. ...

9) The implications of this for lit crit are (at the very least) as follows: knowledge produced out of commitment to one's conclusion struggles for credibility. Perhaps activism--particularly radical politics--doesn't need the credibility of university epistemic communities...

10) If so, that's just another way of saying it doesn't need academic literary criticism. So in effect equating criticism with activism is a declaration of the obsolescence or superfluousness of the very activity we're asking our institutions to fund, sustain, and expand. ...

11) That aside, every single academic discipline, plus law, medicine, clergy, etc. has both epistemically driven (or mission-driven) methods and practitioners with radical political commitments. It seems to me unnecessary to make an exception of literary studies in this regard...

12) But there's another issue here related to the flame wars over this on Twitter recently. When we conflate a mode of reading based in a political commitment with a way of making claims on actual people--not their method ideas or readings but their values, politics, etc...

13) ...ie when we assume you can close-read a person like you close-read a text, we're enacting a category error that can be (has been) really pernicious & morally fucked up. Unlike a text one can write over or into (speaking of figurative violence) in the act of critique...

14) A person is not just one 'particularly complex action' (as @TorilMoi calls a text), but a sum of them within & beyond their written work. A person can also clarify and explain in response. So I think everyone who in effect takes to suspiciously reading persons as if texts...

15) ...has a difficult question to answer: If you can take a close-reading of small passage or series of tweets as justification to write on someone (to say their motives, politics, ideas are not simply x but really y), at what point are you doing epistemic injustice? ...

16) I'm borrowing that concept from Miranda Fricker, who means it primarily for situations in which a power imbalance results in a prejudice against someone who is then discounted as a knower or a giver of testimony. So this obviously doesn't work the same way if ...

17) ...we're talking about e.g. a graduate student suspiciously reading a tenured prof. But I think there remains a justice question here, which is whether it's right to ignore the sum of a person's contributions to enable a broad, personal critique from a narrow text. ...

18) For me at least, the fact that this is where we are suggests there are ways our commitments are actually getting in the way of knowledge *and* of just social relations in the discipline. /end

Addendum: One caveat to save us all time, I hope: I don't think critique or post-critique are methods, so I'm not actually arguing for post-critique. I don't think post-critique means 'apolitical,' and I don't think critique means 'radical' either.

Addendum II: I.e. 'critique' is as co-opted by institutions as anything in the discipline. Doing critique at a university doesn't make anyone radical. It's been built into the neoliberal university for decades.