Critical empiricism treats artworks as irreducible phenomena rather than effects of deeper causes

Evidence

These enthusiasms and pressures for the immanent and empirical, the real emancipated from the cumbersome thickets of mediation and interpretation, stem from the thing-in-itself instant access of disintermediated circulation—and, while they rhyme with epistemology in the domain of the sciences, they strike a strange note in the arts. A recent luminary of literary and cultural studies smartly enacts an enterprise of empirical enumeration that evinces this dissonance. The decorated critic Rita Felski argues, in Hooked, on behalf of the complexity of aesthetic attachment and for complexity as the best conclusion at which theoretical inquiry can arrive. Her commitment is to “the irreducible nature of phenomena,” her prescription for criticism is to attend to the complexity and variability of aesthetic experience: of “attachments to artworks … considered for their own sake rather than as effects of a more fundamental reality,” thereby “combatting the intellectualism of recent theory.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Felski’s ‘combatting the intellectualism of recent theory’ and anti-hermeneutic stance rhymes with the ‘antitheory’ impulse the reader plans to fight in her own chapter.