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Phew I'm catching up on the critique/postcritique stuff. Tempest teapot etc. But I guess here's what I have to say to the delightful promise of unproblematized white pleasure. Your pleasures are a form of terrorism for everybody else in the world.
Also: Rigorous dialectical argument is a pleasure. To do it well you have to, in Spivak's words say yes to the text before you can so no to the text. You have to read what you don't like to know what you don't like.
Not to self promote but I like my vision of the classroom better: it can and should be deeply unlovely, the unloveliness is the promise of deep learning. http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/13/we-arent-here-to-learn-what-we-know-we-already-know/
I also love @TavNyongo's engagement with Munozian deep minoritarian critique; thinking with and against and through all in the surface of persistence and survival at the same time IS the fabulous/fabulation. Hope everyone is reading this: https://thebaffler.com/latest/jose-munoz-then-and-there-nyongo
From Tav's beautiful essay: "the minoritarian explores the political outside of the representation of formal or aspirational civil subjects"
In short: aesthetic legibility, or a definition of the aesthetic solely conditioned on the possibility of social legibility - repetition without difference, the worst formalisms - constitutes the violence of representation itself, and also art.
Ranciere takes this up as an issue of constituting politicity - Moten also takes this up as an issue of the sonic.
Reading for how a work is constituted BY WHAT IS NOT THERE is what lets you see how the critique of postcritique, much like most of the uber-stupid incel writing on diversity & freedom of speech is constituted by having never actually read the critique they are critiquing.
Post-critique (the Other PC lol) relies on the constituting absence of any real evidence of engaging the movements they are critiquing, or sheer bad straw man argumentation, stand in as an alibi for not saying that they hate being criticized, you know, by THOSE people.
But the criticism that comes from THOSE people is actually so full of shimmering joy in what is & what could be that I am utterly full of pity for anyone who cannot detect it, these so-called "close readers" who clearly can't close read anything that doesn't affirm their worlds.
Quoting a brilliant friend here until she gives me permission to name her: what are you going to do about the fact that the neoliberal material conditions that underlie the nostalgic affect of postcritique is not actually giving you the tools to understand where you are right now
and dare I quote myself: "White sovereign entrepreneurial terror sounds and feels like relief and entertainment to a white population whose very sense of selfhood and power has been seemingly threatened by the work of progressiv- ism and civil government....
....; thus, it is an aesthetic and affective genre that reasserts itself in such a way that feels like fun for whiteness but codes as terror for everyone else."
https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/35/4/53/133563/You-Make-Me-Feel-Right-Quare-Promiscuous-Reading
https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/35/4/53/133563/You-Make-Me-Feel-Right-Quare-Promiscuous-Reading
To put it another way: I'm not sure postcritique exists. Honestly some of it sounds just like how people describe taking MDMA. Personally I like my vigilance; for the most part it has served me well.
