Circulation pressures push academic theory to erase its medium’s distinctness

Evidence

Unsurprisingly, the institutional contraction of the waged production of theory pressurizes the circulability of theory, including its disseminations and vernacularizations, and its refresh as “relatable.” Autotheory is equally at home as personal essay in open-access culture magazines as it is in university-press monographs as it is in memes and performances, poetry and reddits, or the bourgeoning fast-casual university press pamphlets like University of Minnesota’s Forerunners and Stanford’s Briefs. Those accelerated university-press short books, along with open access journals, overnight cultural criticism, and administrative imperatives for “public humanities,” comprise new highways for circulable scholarship, while circulation pressures issue from anti-academic ideology and defunding of higher education, from “culture wars” and populist rhetoric, and from university mission creep. Innovations in the circulation of theory betoken many good developments. At the same time, they propel the tendency of academic theory to empty out its own medium, to undo its own medial differences from commercial writing. It is good to make theory for the people. It is bad to portray the historical erosion of theory’s conditions of production, including the reproduction of the class of professional intellectuals, as an endogenous style evolution of self-proclaimed “weak theory” and “amateur criticism.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Core of the stated reading goal: media/publication forms pressurizing theory aligns with her defense of mediation against immediacy; the fast-casual press pamphlet is a concrete symptom worth citing in the ‘Antitheory’ fight.