Autotheory’s trait is argumentless intensity that insulates itself from criticism

Evidence

Often shaped as aphorisms, fragments, elliptical nonnarratives, and momentary illuminations, these texts rebuff systematic elucidation. Fullnesses of charismatic persona, corporeal receptivity, and affective flooding devise an evanescent plenum that preempts criticism. The trademark rhetorical posture of unassailability for the autotheorist, as Andrea Long Chu herself admits, “relies on her own vulnerability to insulate herself from close scrutiny.” Immediacy in theory is this argumentless intensity immured from dissent and devoid of higher-order integration. It goes down smooth. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 260

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Chu’s admission that vulnerability insulates from scrutiny is evidence for the reader’s argument that immediacy’s apparent openness actually forecloses critique — directly useful for her defense of mediation.
• SEED: The reader could hang an essay on the paradox: the most personal, vulnerable genre is also the most unassailable and therefore the least genuinely dialogic.

Related

• Autotheory’s form preempts criticism through vulnerable persona rather than argument (similarity 0.93)
• Autotheory as discourse cannot sustain argument because experience is undisputable. (similarity 0.84)
• Autotheory replaces discursive construction with phenomenological documentation (similarity 0.84)
• Autotheory defines itself by negating theory’s mediating abstractions. (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural theorists themselves have succumbed to the immediacy style (similarity 0.80)
• Autotheory claims the personal against poststructuralism’s reduction of self to textuality (similarity 0.80)
• Contemporary theory has adopted the immediacy style it should critique (similarity 0.80)
• Autotheory’s stated distrust of words and genres constitutes a rejection of linguistic mediation. (similarity 0.79)
• Autotheory converts theoretical claims into bodily sensation at the expense of mediation (similarity 0.78)