Autotheory’s rise mirrors the precarity and gigification of academic labor

Evidence

As this confluence with autofiction illustrates, the reduction of theory’s mediations down to amiable oozing incorporates the niche of academic knowledge production into the booming personalist genre industry. Moreover, autotheory comports as dexterous academic labor, as we saw Nelson explain of genre bending in “Writing,” projecting a fantasy that courting extra-mural audiences can make up for downsizing in the intellectual professions. Its vulnerability enkindles senior academics bored of theory’s many funerals, imagining eager readerships in a great beyond, and ignites younger academics searching for openings in an economic and professional landscape of foreboding fore-closure; its elasticity bodes a space for young academics to create work and find recognition even though the university as an institution has largely expelled them. Gigification of academic labor crams academic production: manifest your individual take in your individual style with this short-term teaching contract here, this Substack subscriber there. In this way, autotheory must be seen as efflux of a context in which theorists with fair labor conditions like tenure encounter their dire lack of peer audience, and theorists without fair labor conditions hustle for crossover appeal to eke out a living. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 263

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the stated core argument that immediacy has an economic cause in compressed capital circulation; also connects to the Nelson’s autofiction discussion that is this book’s stated subject.