For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.

Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.

In a reference to Gayatri Spivak’s field-defining essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” meant to highlight its complicity with the demise of reason in the academy, Boghossian et al. write, “A central claim of post-colonial theory is that hegemonic powers have employed the rhetoric of objective history and social science to suppress subaltern voices.” This is an undergraduate-level misunderstanding of the argument, which elaborates almost the exact opposite thesis on its very first page: that Western philosophers, famous for their so-called relativism, nevertheless locate subalternity as the site of unmediated, “objective” truth. Ironically, what Spivak diagnoses here as the fantastical desire to bypass the problem of interpretation—the desire to see reality “as it is” without the mediators of language, culture, and figuration—is exactly what Boghossian and company hope to achieve in their contextless block-quoting, what the online summarizers seek to make of Butler’s prose, as well as what many humanists today advocate for in turning away from the technical vocabulary of “theory” toward personal experience and memoir. The assumption that language obscures our access to the real, rather than constitutes it, haunts each of these accounts. What they share, in other words, is the desire to capture the discrete kernel of singular meaning in all its ahistoric immediacy without the work of reading. This is a bad thing, and in capitulating to the assumption that it’s desirable, we’re ceding too much to our enemies and abdicating our own vocation.

The truth is that every purportedly obvious problem with humanities writing—every bogeyman of bias, difficulty, obscurity, and irrelevance—dissolves into something else, something much more interesting, as soon as we wade into the spaces where the scholarship exists

come at my critique of obscure theoretical writing from another perspective. I struggled with Derrida and Butler in grad school (25-30 years ago). I was assigned Derrida in French (which I am fluent in) and it made me think I was NOT fluent–but I didn’t understand the English translation any better. After many rereadings and readings about what others say about Derrida, I get it now (kinda), and I do not ever deny its importance.

My critique of affect theory and autotheory (i.e. critique/writing from personal experience and memoir), though, is a little different. I haven’t read Kornbluh’s book–I just ordered it though (I have a book collecting problem). I want to see how her argument meshes with mine. I go back to bell hooks’ essay “Theory as Liberatory Practice” (1991) which argues that any theory that is incomprehensible to the people it is supposed to help should be rethought. I look at the writings of BIPOC feminist theorists from the 1980s and 1990s, and they were writing from this position. They were writing from a place of lived experience and turning it into theories as complex and promising as what the largely white post-structuralists were writing.

My problem with autotheory (writing from lived experience) is that it appropriates what the BIPOC feminist theorists were doing 30-40 years ago and does not give them enough credit for it and does not lean into the emancipatory possibilities of their writings. My read of Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory as Feminist Practice (assigned in my university’s grad level lit theory course) is that it is a naval-gazing book dripping with privilege that does not (adequately) acknowledge the work of the BIPOC women who came before her. Sadly, though, my university cut our English grad program last year despite overwhelming opposition from students, faculty, community and despite the fact that it was a money-maker. We were told that it was because “that’s the direction US universities are going.” My response to that was “boy, isn’t it funny that we are cutting one of the programs that does the some of the MOST critical thinking on campus.”

My Ph.D. is in medieval French literature, so you don’t get much more humanist than me, but I teach in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. One of the things I love about Butler’s newest book Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024) is that they offer both incredibly complex critiques of right-wing attacks on gender around the world AND offer solutions that call for multinational coalitions that highlight marginalized voices.

So my academic argument back is that if humanists have done something wrong, it is ignoring marginalized voices and not incorporating the perspectives of BIPOC theorists enough. I’m not saying that’s true across the board, but boy do the textbooks I’ve been looking at recently still put BIPOC voices in their own sections, separate from the white authors as multi-cultural or global. And the corrective, as this article so cogently argues, is not to embrace the current iterations of autotheory. I’m looking forward to reading Kornbluh’s book.