Autotheory stems from gigified academic labor and loss of peer audiences

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. … 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: This is the economic-causation thesis stated sharply — the immediacy of theory produced by material labor conditions, squarely the reader’s central argument and the place to test the Jameson debt.
• SEED: The Substack/adjunct juxtaposition is a potent image for an essay on how ‘public intellectualism’ rhetoric masks the collapse of professional theory’s conditions.