Becoming Autotheory Ralph Clare
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 85-107 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2020.0003
For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754798
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Ralph Clare
Becoming Autotheory
he impact of the recent boom in what U.S. critics Tand publishers are increasingly calling autofiction is a notable, if curious, phenomenon. Authors such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk, as well as the wildly success- ful translations of works by Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante, have gained both readerly and critical accolades. In various ways, aut- ofictional works collapse fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography into texts that, as Marjorie Worthington writes, “constantly play with read- erly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both and thereby forcing a recognition that . . . the line is at times rather permeable” (149). While something about these authors’ works seems radically new, however, several critics have put this boom into historical and cultural perspective. Autofiction, it turns out, has a notable literary and historical lineage.1 Yet within this swath of autofiction, something truly new is emerg- ing: autotheory. Autotheory constitutes something related to yet en- tirely distinct from autofiction. Whereas autofiction responds primarily to the post-postmodern literary scene and the rise of the anyperson memoir, autotheory responds more so to the institutionalization and the so-called death of theory. Whether educated or struggling to learn their art during the heyday of theory in the academy, the authors of autotheoretical texts incorporate critical theory’s terminologies and methodologies into their work in order to transform both its form and content. Chris Kraus (b. 1955) and Maggie Nelson (b. 1973), for ex- ample, represent different generations of writers whose autotheoretical texts engage with theory’s rise and supposed fall. Kraus’s I Love Dick (1996) and Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) each employ critical theory to similar and different ends that nevertheless expand upon the possi- bilities of both autofiction and theory itself. Taken together, these texts suggest that in autotheory, theory is not employed merely to deconstruct the self or fragment the “I,” though
Arizona Quarterly Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020 • issn 0004-1610 Copyright © 2020 by Arizona Board of Regents 86 Ralph Clare it may well do so, but to self-consciously and practically construct an ethical or sincere self in a critical manner. If much contemporary Amer- ican autofiction aims to establish an honest or open dialogic with the reader (Sturgeon; Nicol 257), then autotheory’s sincerity lies in the exposure of a vulnerable self that recognizes its contingency and social/ linguistic constructedness while nevertheless insisting upon the “real- ity” and value of lived experience. Thus autotheory avoids the charge of essentialism that haunts identity politics by countering it with a notion of embodied experience that underscores the malleability of identity itself. In autotheory, then, it is not so much that the personal must become political, but that the personal must first become theoretical.
Generation Theory and the Theory of Exhaustion In his mildly polemical “The Theory Generation,” Nicholas Dames attempts to take stock of the effects of High or capital-T Theory on a recent generation of American writers who came of intellectual age in the 1980s or thereabouts, during the “the institutionalization of Theory” when “universities began to house and pay significant European think- ers at the moment their influence in their native lands began to wane” (162).2 According to Dames’ reading of “more or less realist novel[s]” by Teju Cole, Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Lerner, Sam Lip- syte, and Jennifer Egan, Theory Novels are often ambivalent, ironic, or flat-out scathing in assessing the pedagogical and practical value of Theory. For the characters in (and by extension the authors of) such novels, Theory becomes “a seductive phase of education that is finally too cultish and self-enclosed to make sense of the world’s upheavals” (161). The enlightenment that Theory inspires in its questioning of Enlightenment ideals brings, in the end, a disillusionment of its own. At the very least, it is “no longer the key to all the world’s things, but rather just another thing-in-the-world” (163–64). Like Dames, Mitchum Huelhs, in “The Post-Theory Theory Novel,” reflects upon the institutionalization of theory and its implications for thinking about contemporary American literature (284). Yet whereas Dames, like the characters in the novels he reads, remains pessimis- tic about theory’s place in literature or the world, Huehls, exploring not-so “realistic” novels (including works by Jeffrey Eugenides, Salva- dor Plascencia, Ben Marcus, and Percival Everett), is optimistic regard- ing theory’s lasting effects on literature and its potential to transform 87 Becoming Autotheory both words and worlds. Such optimism comes, in part, because Huehls, unlike Dames, does not see the inarguable seduction of theory as merely leading to slavish literary mimicry or mindless devotion to the Mas- ters. For Huehls, this generation of creative writers are always creative readers, and the translated texts that found their way belatedly into the Anglo-American academic scene were responded to in nuanced, not mechanical or fearful, fashion. Huelhs can therefore distinguish what he dubs “the post-theory theory novel” from both Dames’ Theory Novel and Judith Ryan’s version of the theory novel in The Novel After Theory, a book that explores how an earlier generation of mostly postmodern writers responded directly (and positively) to theory.3 It is, for Huehls, the reflexiveness on/of thought itself in the post-theory theory novel that distinguishes it from novels that somehow “do” theory (285–6). Moreover, Huehls points out that a main drawback of Dame’s argument is that it focuses almost exclusively on theory as content (via allusions, jokes, character dialogue, etc.), which might be found in any novel that “simply incorporates theory into a generally realist representational mode” (282). Expanding upon Dames’ ideas, Hue- hls demonstrates the ways in which the “post-theory theory novel” embraces experimentalism and/or metafiction primarily in its form and has thereby seized “the theory novel’s flattened caricature of theory and repurposed it, even revitalized it, for newly aesthetic ends” (306). Authors of such novels “use the well-known tropes of poststructural theory as the tools and building blocks for various forms of unreal real- ism, for speculative fictions that contribute to the composition rather than the deconstruction of the world” (283). Indeed, theory, for Dames, is still spelled with a capital T. It’s imposing, teetering over us, an almost-Cross-to-bear. But Huelhs’ small t theory makes it the mundane and changeable function (use-value) that it has more properly become after much, yet not all, of its hipness (symbolic exchange-value) has worn away. Ultimately, Huelhs contends, “rather than emphasizing the word’s inevitable mediation of the world—a mediation that in theory novels indicates our insuperable alienation from the real—post-theory theory novels incorporate the word into the world, using language to build new, idiosyncratic notions of the real” (288). Thus, “these texts use theory’s concepts to build, rather than undermine, the world” (288). Exploring theory’s effects on the contemporary novel is all well and good, but what does it mean for autotheoretical texts that trouble 88 Ralph Clare the very genre of the novel itself, largely resemble autofictions and/or memoirs, and often employ theory unashamedly in both their form and content (that is, they are also still doing theory)? Indeed, autotheory’s development has less to do with the tradition of the novel so much as it does with that of philosophy and critical theory itself—and particu- larly the kinds of writing that meld personal experience with reflections upon philosophy and theory. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide a more fitting lineage for auto- theory when they identify the works of Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, and Gloria Anzaldúa as examples of what they dub “autocritique,” writ- ing in which “the boundary between criticizing and writing life narra- tive has been deliberately blurred in critical practice” (155–59). Surely, one could establish a through line from Montaigne or even St. Augus- tine to autotheory, but since autotheory as a genre is formed in direct response to the rise, institutionalization, and generational transmission of critical theory, the authors appearing in and under the banner of Theory are more apt to be influential in this case. Thus, certainly the cultural materialist writings of Walter Benjamin, as well as the person- ally reflective analyses of Freud (both authors are standard readings in many theory courses), may provide a better touchstone for autotheo- ry’s forerunners. Benjamin’s ability to mix memoir with philosophy, to turn his ramblings and personal reflections in “A Berlin Chronicle” into critical meditations on time and consciousness that are similar to those in his most famous essays on Proust, Kafka, and Baudelaire, suggest an early model for autotheory. Benjamin’s nuanced version of dialectical materialism always remains grounded in the lived experience of the observer and is never reducible to pure Marxist polemic. Yet even this lineage does not fully account for the specific dilemma of the theory generation and its relation to contemporary American writing. Gloria Anzaldúa, then, stands as a more proper forerunner of the kind of text increasingly taken to be autotheory. The widely read Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), for example, is a pow- erful mélange of memoir, critical theory, and poetry. So too is the criti- cal oeuvre of bell hooks, including such works as Talking Back (1989) or Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000), indicative of work that blends theory with memoir or personal experience. Moreover, Eve Kosof- sky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999), as well as some essays in 89 Becoming Autotheory
Tendencies (1993), both draw from personal experience and transform the genre of the scholarly essay and monograph. Theory in Anzaldúa, hooks, and Sedgwick, however, has explicit pedagogical and activist aims and is most definitely “non-fictional,” unlike autotheory that tends to center a critique on one’s self (it is “auto”theory, even as it consid- ers relations to others and the world, etc.) and blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. Yet we might also think of earlier critical theorists whose work explored subjectivity along theoretical lines, including Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. Kristeva, in works such as Powers of Horror (1989) and Black Sun (1987), often employs literary language to sweep the reader along via an I that is at once the author and not, the reader and not, everyone and no one. In Roland Barthes’ work (a touchstone for both Kraus and Nelson), especially Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), the seemingly per- sonal becomes, through the entry into the materiality of the signifier, somehow impersonal. The effacement of the subject in both Kristeva and Barthes appears in a kind of modernist-inflected impersonality, in which true personal details of lives—that is, the exposure of private lives—are either ironically distanced or pass into a pseudo-universal linguistic I. It is autotheory’s unique triumph to marry the truly personal, pri- vate, and/or confessional (the private details of life that Barthes, Der- rida, and Kristeva shy away from) with critique, to insist against the poststructuralist reduction of self purely to a textuality that produces a distancing kind of impersonality by ultimately maintaining divisions between the public and private.4 If the first wave of French poststruc- turalism was to declare the “death of the subject,” subsequent waves— feminist, gay and lesbian, queer, and critical race studies, etc.—were also exploring the “living” identities of marginalized subjectivities. Suddenly, then, the specificity of personal experience, which does not essentialize experience but positions or locates it in a specific body, can complement (through lived experience and affect) the one-time imper- sonal and “negative” subject of the linguistic I itself. Autotheory, then, is both a response to and a result of critical the- ory’s institutionalization and supposed death. In one sense, this death refers to theory leaving the walls of academe be it through writing (though some writers will return as “creative writing” professors), art, 90 Ralph Clare marketing, or the formation of various political-activist groups or insti- tutions. In kind, autotheory marks the ways in which theory returns to contemporary literature in both its form and content. The results are texts that do not simply blur the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, engage with poststructuralist ideas of language, and decon- struct notions of the self, but, more importantly, that self-consciously attempt to deal with theory in a more practical, affective, and pragmatic manner, particularly by stressing the value of embodied experience. Thus, in autotheoretical texts, theory is not, as it is for Dames, sim- ply a matter of the work’s pessimistic content, nor is it, as for Huehls, primarily a matter of its optimistic formal transformations. Indeed, a major characteristic of autotheory is its very ability to bring together theory in both form and content and to transform theory and fiction, as well as our understanding of each genre. In fact, it is autotheory’s newly established connections to worldliness, its attempt at a critical sin- cerity, and its emphasis on embodied experience that underscores the value of theory in regard to one’s immediate, present, everyday life. For while autofictions emphasize the personal, they do so not in didactic or explicitly activist ways. There is a critical inwardness before there is an outwardness. Autotheory therefore emphasizes exploring and expand- ing notions of the self via theory before, or at times concurrently with, the consideration of a larger, collective politics to which the personal is inextricably linked.
Autotheory and Not Knowing Dick In Part 2 of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1996), the narrator Chris writes to Dick, her object of desire, “if the only material we have to work with in America is our own lives, shouldn’t we be making case studies?” (155). Standing as a case study for what a life lived through theory can be, I Love Dick is an early example of autotheory’s practice and potential. The book follows the protagonist Chris (and her husband Sylvère) in her self-consciously obsessive literary and physical pursuit of Dick, to whom she addresses various letters filled with intellectual, the- oretical, and emotional revelations and personal musings. Joan Haw- kins calls the book a “theoretical fiction” in which “theory becomes an intrinsic part of the ‘plot,’ a mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author.” At the same time, ILD “consciously[s] blur[s] the line between art and life, between fiction and theory.” However, 91 Becoming Autotheory while I Love Dick accepts and embraces theory in some ways (Kraus is a Baby Boomer ambivalently riding Theory’s first transatlantic wave), it is also critical of Male High Theory and the institutional structures that support it. Whose theory? asks Kraus, and to what ends? For although much white male theory (often French Theory) reflects upon the role of institutions in social, political, and cultural arenas, its actual institu- tionalization as “Theory” in the US academy is something else entirely. Indeed, ILD’s autofictional blurring of fact, fiction, and theory, as well as its insistence on emotion and feeling as a critical mode of sincerity, reveals the way in which former genres were either lacking or restrictive of what a life or life-writing could be, especially when cast from the perspective of women. Theory is carefully critiqued and deployed throughout ILD, as Kraus responds wryly to Male High Theory and the divorce between theory and lived experience. Chris constantly feels intellectually ignored or overlooked by men due to her gender: “because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her” (21). Moreover, being married to Sylvère, an influential aca- demic literary theorist, presents her both opportunities and frustrations. For instance, at one point “while Sylvère lectured on poststructural- ism, Chris drove out to Hollywood to pick up some publicity photos for her film and shopped for cheese at Trader Joe’s” (25), and during the couple’s visit with some friends, “Betsey and I made pancakes while Sylvère and Bruce talked Marcel Mauss and Durkheim” (101). In one of the couple’s many fights over the subject, Chris exclaims, “‘Who’s Chris Kraus?’. . . . ‘She’s no one! She’s Sylvère Lotringer’s wife! She’s his ‘Plus-One!’” (116). No matter that Sylvère is both emotionally and financially supportive of Chris, the patriarchal structuring of academia, intellectual values, and the hip academic currency of critical Theory all work against Chris is various ways. Indeed, it is the dominant academic mode of poststructuralist the- ory and the way in which it is employed that Kraus critiques by bringing “real life” personal details, emotions, and feelings into her narrative and being frank about her vulnerability. Consider that although it is Sylvère who initiates the game of writing letters to Dick (33–34)—he enjoys “fictionalizing life a bit” and desires to “turn our lives into text” (26, 34)—he balks at actually mailing the letters (36). Perhaps this is no surprise considering that Sylvère once studied with Roland Barthes, a 92 Ralph Clare prime example of a writer/theorist interested in textually deconstructing the self through language (35). Indeed, Sylvère can only deal with the increasing “reality” of adultery by resorting to his own lover’s discourse and writing a story about it (67). He is much more comfortable with the purely “Conceptual Fuck” that he claims Dick performed upon the cou- ple than he is with anything physical (21). In this sense, Sylvère remains trapped within the poststructuralist text/textuality, even as he realizes that “these letters seem to open up a new genre, something between criticism and fiction” (43). Thus Sylvère is all but cut out of Part 2 of the book in terms of his writing (one diary entry of his appears [205–6]). Chris, on the other hand, seeks something beyond this academic textual game that she is barred from playing professionally, a game that is, moreover, mainly premised upon deconstructing, not constructing, (male) subjectivity. For Chris feels trapped by endlessly allusive textu- ality, even though she accepts the fact that “there’s no way of commu- nicating with you [Dick] in writing because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game. The only way left is face to face” (73). It is the extra-textual space of bodily encounter and lived expe- rience that Chris posits as an antidote to the poison of pure textuality that, “as we all know,” feeds upon itself. Chris insists upon a kind of real that underlies or supports her supposed fantasies and ironic game play- ing. She tells Dick, “‘I’ll admit that eighty percent of this was fantasy, projection. But it had to start with something real. Don’t you believe in empathy, in intuition?” (163). Textuality, or “the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done” (153). Tellingly, the potential tryst between Chris and Dick is intentionally left out of the narrative in a move that both puts in doubt that it ever occurred and suggests that this “real” encoun- ter lies, or will remain, outside the realm of language. So how does one claim some kind of reality or sincerity in all the linguistic slip-sliding if text simply begets more text? Gesturing toward or preserving a space outside of signification is one method, though it threatens to appear as a naïve desire to return to “the real.” Instead, expanding the textual game by challenging and changing its rules proves Chris’s most effective strategy, particularly because she desires to write about such hitherto “unrecorded” or silenced spaces (123). The poststructuralist view of language is thus simultaneously challenged and preserved. Chris, for instance, disagrees with Dick’s theory that in art “the frame provides coherence through repression and exclusion,” 93 Becoming Autotheory countering it with the notion that “the trick is to discover Everything within the frame” (133). What, then, has been repressed by the frame or text—particularly if the text is in one sense poststructuralist the- ory itself? How does working the edges of the frame and re-establishing (con)text open up the possibility of discovering more or “Everything” within the frame? For Chris, it is the artist Hannah Wilke (as well as the artist R.B. Kitaj [201]), whose work provides a way out of a poststructuralist fram- ing that feels increasingly like it condemns women to the prison house of patriarchal language. Chris writes that Wilke, whose art centers upon the explicit use of her own body and the personal, “is the model of every- thing I hope to do” because her “tremendous will to turn the things that bothered her into subjects for her art seemed so embarrassing in her life- time” (172). Wilke’s art succeeds by “using the impossibility of her life, her artwork, and career as material,” even though most critics immedi- ately condemned “her body of work as an act of ‘narcissism’” (214). The question that Chris draws from Wilke’s life and art—which conflates the corporeal body with a “body” of work— becomes a guiding principle for her own writing: “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (211). “Incorporating” the body into (the) text, then—especially in its most vulnerable or abject states, with all of the mucky personal details, feelings, and emotions that come with it—disrupts the textual frame or border (or, in writing, generic constraints) that for Dick must by neces- sity repress and exclude. As Kraus remarks in a 2006 interview, “female intellectuals of the more professional sort have always been quite cir- cumspect, never bringing any sign of their physical being into the text” (“Chris Kraus in Conversation”). Thus, even if the body inevitably becomes a sign or text here as it does in Wilke’s art, it is one that dis- rupts the “objectivity” of (male) writing in part by insisting, contradic- tory though it may seem, on referencing/signifying an actual (female) body.5 Eileen Myles puts it aptly in ILD’s introduction when she writes that Kraus’s “living is the subject” (15) and that “when I Love Dick came into existence a new kind of female life did too” (15). Kraus’s autothe- oretical blurring between textuality and some notion of the real, means that theory doesn’t remain on High in an ivory tower but slips the lock and Rapunzels out into the everyday world. 94 Ralph Clare
In ILD, Chris Kraus therefore translates herself into the narrator Chris via transferring many of the personal and private details of her “real life” onto the character of Chris. The purposeful blurring of Chris/ Kraus, however, is no mere form of autobiographical writing. ILD plays upon such a truth-effect performatively, resembles more a roman-á-clef with an intentionally busted lock. More specifically, the performative element in Kraus’s autotheoretical fictions collapses the divide between the real and the false in a way that calls attention to the body and its affects. The result is not a cynical or fake performance but a performa- tive one in Judith Butler’s sense of the term: that one performatively “does” gender through an embodied series of stylized acts (191–93). As Chris writes to Dick, “I think our story is Performative Philosophy” (211), a story that shares the performative element of Wilke’s art and also that of Simone Weil, who Chris, in Aliens & Anorexia (2000), hails as “a performative philosopher. Her body was material” (49). To be sure, such compelling performativity lies in faithfully record- ing a shifting I (Chris) via feelings and emotions, those very intangi- ble things that make a body embody. These sorts of private details are immaterial, messy, and liable to shift from moment to moment—their reality is not stable—but they are intensely experienced in particular bodies. Feelings matter, as if matter here were a verb, a point that Chris makes after detailing the life and career of the artist Paul Thek who died of AIDS in 1988: “there was all this academic shit out there about The Body as if it were a thing apart” (136). Indeed, Kraus’s work evinces a Deleuzian inspired take on the body, affect, and intensity that is often set against other purely textual or language-based theories (235).6 Chris, for example, endorses Gilles Deleuze’s claim in Chaosophy that “lived experience . . . does not mean sensible qualities. It means intensifica- tion. ‘I feel that’ means that something is happening inside me” (235). Kraus similarly depersonalizes the personal by pointing out, in Deleuzian fashion, that feelings and affects are impersonal in the sense that the I is the ever-changing construct floating through a wel- ter of experience we might call reality. Amorphous affects, intuitions, feelings, and empathic moments—in their bodily felt, non-textual, non-codified, and pre-linguistic forms—are thus as real as real can get for Chris, and they are what Kraus is invested in evoking in her work: the lived experience of a nevertheless impersonal I. In fact, these affects are even realer than real in their potential for nth degrees of intensity 95 Becoming Autotheory
(for they are formless and can be actualized on/through the creation of planes, plateaus, lines of flight, the body-without-organs, S&M, a genre-shuffling and shattering text, etc.). Yet Kraus ultimately bends Deleuzean thought to the question of not just any minor literature but toward the “body” of women’s “minor” literature in her insistence on women’s lived experience. Her notion of the I, for example, is also heavily inspired by the second generation New York Poets Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and Bernadette Mayer, as well as novelist Kathy Acker, all of whose works often portray the self-as-process and mix autobiographical material into the flux. And Kraus’s own editorial hand in Semiotext(e) indicates her investment in publishing autofiction and autotheory, particularly by women, which emphasizes a lived reality, as well as formal and generic play. By remaining true to recording an embodied, changing emotional experience of the personal I, Kraus thus achieves what we might call a kind of critical sincerity. If “it’s too defining and permanent to be really ‘true’—things are constantly shifting” (“Chris Kraus in Conversa- tion”), then recording truths, even fleeting or free-floating ones, is still a possibility. The sincerity that I Love Dick advocates for is therefore a complex one. It is not a simple sincerity that entails a return to the real or one based upon a rejection of theory.7 In ILD the game of sincerity (and the unavoidable irony that must accompany any self-aware game playing) is irreducibly performative but not dishonest. Thus, as Chris writes to Dick,“‘no matter what I do you think it’s a game but I was trying to be honest’” (164) and “my personal goal here . . . is to express myself as clearly and honestly as I can. So in a sense love is just like writing: living in such a heightened state that accuracy and awareness are vital” (130). Irony and self-aware textuality do not, therefore, automatically negate the move toward emotional honesty or sincerity. Chris, for instance, finds in a Ramones song, “Needles & Pins,” the model for this type of sincerity. The song contains “the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true” (30). What Chris calls Kierkagaard’s “Third Remove” pro- vides a critical distance without emotional coldness, so that “the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier” (152). True to her word, Chris hopes that Dick will “know these things are true. You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality” (28).8 96 Ralph Clare
Kraus’s reconstructed poststructuralist theory also involves assert- ing the importance of once shunned modes of reading. Kraus, for exam- ple, makes the case for an affective or intuitive form of reading that upsets New Critical understandings of the autonomous text that appear to still persist when it comes to poststructuralist theorists’ real lives— not the textual I they may be intellectually deconstructing.9 “I am your ideal reader,” Chris writes Dick, and “(Through love I am teaching myself how to think)—Looking at the text as the way in” (132). Such an anathema way of reading (classic affective fallacy) makes a bold claim for the emotional and affective aspects of reading that blur the notion of inside/outside, affect/intellect. Chris’s relationship with one friend works on similar grounds. Their “conversations are not so much about the theories of love & desire, as its manifestations in our favorite books & poems,” yet “there’s an implicit understanding between us that we can accept it (love, extremity, desire) & we can share some personal information/vision best by swapping favorite epigrams and poems” (135). This model of sharing is textually based but aims at communicating and transmitting personal facts, feelings, and intensities in a way that upsets the academic interpretation and circulation of texts. “You don’t even know me” (236), Dick tells Chris several times, yet his very silence and withdrawal is precisely what makes him so legible for Chris. After all, it isn’t Chris who doesn’t know d/Dick; it’s Dick who doesn’t know d/Dick. Such a de-academicized, personalized used of theory is often anti- thetical or incomprehensible to the male theorist whose intellectual cyn- icism can lead to isolation and mistrust (Dick) and/or periodic retreats into sentimentalism or naïve sincerity (Sylvère) as the erstwhile giddily embraced fragmented subject suddenly turns out to be truly fragile in troubling ways.10 Ironically, Dick, who escapes into existential desert-life and accuses Chris of being insincere, is the truly naïve one on Chris’s view: “you’re skeptical of irony. You are trying to find some way of living you believe in. I envy this” (181). If Dick’s kind of non-ironic, emotional stoicism represents the false kind of sincerity—“just the denial of com- plexity” (181)—then the nuanced kind of honesty Kraus and the book insist upon is something altogether different—a mix of irony and sincer- ity and an intensification of, not an escape from, emotion and feeling. Thus, Kraus stresses the emotional, the affective, and the empathic in her autotheoretical works—though not in an uncritical fashion— which enables her to create a new genre of writing and form of life. For 97 Becoming Autotheory even, as Chris reveals of Dick, the affectless white male existentialist is itself an affective pose. Kraus can then call out the hypocrisy of gen- dered autobiographical or autofictional writing, such as the fact that “because most ‘serious’ fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expres- sion of a single person’s subjectivity, it’s considered crass and amateur- ish not to ‘fictionalize’ the supporting cast” (71) and that “the ‘serious’ contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy” (72). And, Chris goes on, “when women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our ‘I’s’ are changing as we meet other ‘I’s,’ we’re called bitches, libelers, pornographers and amateurs” (72). Indeed, for Rachel Sykes the very boldness of Kraus’s so-called confessional mode is a way of resisting and challenging patriarchy (167). Of course, Chris’s 1990s protest—“why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability with philosophy, at some remove?” (208)—doubles as a protest for the history of the reception of much women’s writing and art, but it also stands as a kind of manifesto for what autotheory is and might be in future iterations—a writing that can be emotional, personal, intellectual, and deal with complex modes of irony. Kraus’s answer to women’s auto-writing being shunted aside is both to intensify affective “personal” states and to embrace the lived frag- mented subject. As Chris writes to Dick, “what I’m going through with you is real and happening for the first time” (138), and her acceptance of the flow of feeling, affect, and experience in her pursuit of Dick leads her to understand that “there’s no fixed point of self but it exists & by writing you can somehow chart that movement. That maybe 1st Person writing’s just as fragmentary as more a-personal collage, it’s just more serious: bringing change and fragmentation closer, bringing it down where you really are” (139). Here one’s self isn’t deconstructed or dis- seminated away textually and abstractly (as male theorists often had it) but paradoxically gestures to something real and experienced. What this entails is exposing oneself and becoming vulnerable: “the risk is that these feelings will be ridiculed or rejected” (130). All in all, the- ory is literally brought “down to where you really are” (139). Kraus’s autotheory thus offers potential models, morphed genres, or forms of life (Eileen Myles again, “when I Love Dick came into existence a new kind of female life did too” [15]), not only by collapsing fiction and fact but by exposing the materially existing conditions and intellectual 98 Ralph Clare assumptions grounding the initial jubilant reception and practice of White Male High Theory.
“Deflation Without Dismissal”: Practically Painless Autotheory While I Love Dick represents an autotheoretical intervention into first generation (male) theory, Maggie Nelson’sThe Argonauts (2015), published nearly twenty years later, represents a post-theory genera- tional perspective on the contemporary uses and abuses of theory. In fact, the very institutionalization and normalization of theory in con- temporary times allows the book to be actually billed on the back cover as an autotheoretical text. The Argonauts, like ILD and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie (a direct autotheoretical influence on Nelson’s book, which Nelson quotes from), not only treats theory as inseparable from life/ praxis but also speaks back to theory and resists various literary con- ventions and essentialist notions of subjectivity. The story is relatively simple (though it is plotted in a fragmented and modal fashion) and recounts Nelson’s and her trans-partner Harry Dodge’s day-do-day life as a queer couple surrounding the birth of their son Iggy. In between scenes of family life, Nelson considers the ideas of child psychologists on raising children, and muses on issues of identity, sexuality, gender, motherhood, and desire via critical theorists, philosophers and the like—even noting many of them in the margins. Monica B. Pearl pin- points one of the book’s major aspects: “it combines high theory and the everyday,” especially in its refusal of form and generic shuffling (199). Just as the memoir genre is “queered” and the familiar everyday is made strange, so too is everyday domestic life queered in the book yet made to seem mundane. Theory is a main theme and plot device, as the book begins with Nelson recounting an ongoing argument about language. Harry’s view of language is that “words are not good enough” and are “corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow,” while Nelson agrees with “Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpress- ibly!—in the expressed” and that “words are good enough,” although she worries about this (4, 3, 46). Here we find essentially a poststructur- alist view of language’s violence (Harry) versus a belief, more properly post-postmodern, in the efficacy of communicative language, regardless of its snags and drawbacks (Nelson). For Harry, language is primarily 99 Becoming Autotheory destructive and reductive, for Nelson language can communicate and even exceeds its potential to do so. This disagreement even frames the book, as the title is a reference to a passage in Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, in which Barthes compares the subject who says “I love you” to an Argonaut who must continually remake the Argo during its long journey. Just as the Argo’s name remains the same as its body changes piece-by-piece, so must the lover forever repeat and renew the utterance “I love you” (5). Nelson sends the Barthes passage to Harry after a heated discussion about language because “I thought the passage was romantic. You read it as a possible retraction. In retro- spect, I guess it was both” (5). The couple’s argument, however, is no mere intellectual game. As we have seen, even Chris and Sylvère’s theory-led arguments in ILD may begin as a conceptual game but become, particularly for Chris, something much more than that, though in epistolary-dramatic fash- ion through the trope of obsession. Further, the arguments in the book are often mean to be humorous, a satirical play on an academic couple (Chris’s role as outside academia not withstanding). But there is no sense of that kind of play for either Nelson or Harry in The Argonauts. Instead, the question becomes how can autotheory lay claim to a prac- tical, everyday usefulness of theory, including in the most private and domestic of arrangements and intersubjective moments. So it is that the true force of Harry and Nelson’s argument hits home when Nel- son and others struggle, both in private and public spaces, with the inability of words or language to “name” Harry without some kind of symbolic violence (7, 53). Thus, Nelson feels the way in which “words are not good enough” (7). Here, the lived experience of language’s structuring of reality complements the theoretical argument and vice versa. Surely, language constructs the world in particular, often vio- lent, ways, yet Nelson will insist—in both the form and content of The Argonauts—that language can also be brought to bear on the world in useful and creative ways, ones that create communities and worlds anew. Citing Michael Snediker’s Queer Optimism on D.W. Winnicott’s use of plain language, for instance, Nelson lauds Winnicott’s ability to avoid irony and practice “deflation-without-dismissal,” a notion that Nelson picks up and employs throughout the book (56, 141). Nelson’s own prose style and philosophy—based upon a kind of informed sin- cerity (as in Kraus)—seeks to say what it means but also to domesticate 100 Ralph Clare academic-theoretical thought by bringing it to bear upon the minutiae of everyday lived experience. Such a “glorious deflation without dis- missal” best explains Nelson’s view of how to appreciate and employ theory in everyday life. If ILD responds to the birth and initial reception of theory in the United States, then The Argonauts-as-autotheory reflects upon and his- toricizes theory’s role and its transmission in the contemporary academy through three generations of scholars and students that have subse- quently come to know theory. Nelson relates the story of her friend and one-time professor, Christina, who tells Nelson how a recent class “frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, . . . of dis- mantling identities” walked out of class, invited her to their own class, and asked her to fill out a nametag with “‘how she identified’” (59). Christina’s experience stands as a figure for the divide between a first generation theorist (which is Kraus’s generation too), the post-theory generation (Nelson), and millennials who are now taking up theory’s mantle. Never a fan of “the personal made public,” Christina neverthe- less became more openly queer over the years and now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies (60). Ironically, the millennial generation appears upset not only that private life isn’t made more public (Nelson’s work, of course, intentionally blurs this divide, yet she too, as a member of Generation X, is skeptical of social media’s brand of transparency and openness [60–61]). Christina’s experience is similar to that of other first-wave theorists, including Eve Kosof- sky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, both of whom, Nelson shows, have been criticized by millennial theorist-activists, which leads to Nelson defending some of these theorist’s views and the politics surrounding, well, theory and praxis. Nelson, as part of the post-theory generation positioned between first wave theory and its emerging millennial articulations, has the lux- ury of being able to dismiss the likes of Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and similar theorists—“yet another white man pontificating from the podium” (54)—in a way that Kraus could not. Nevertheless, theory still has aporias and pitfalls that must be negotiated. Nelson is thus intensely concerned with how contemporary queer and gender activist- practitioners and theorists might themselves fall into essentialisms— the identity nametags that horrified Christina. Take Nelson’s graduate school witnessing of Jane Gallop (another first generation theorist) 101 Becoming Autotheory being taken down at a conference by Rosalind Krauss. Nelson, notably, is a fan of Gallop’s books because “they evidenced a deep investment in Lacanian thought without seeming to have drunk the Kool Aid. She was having a fling with philosophers” (39). Gallop, however, is put down by Krauss for including personal and domestic photos of her with her newborn son in a presentation. In response, Nelson writes, “I was enough of a feminist to refuse any kneejerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity” (42). Nelson, like Kraus, balks at any kind of essentializing feminisms, still accepts “feminine” experience as legitimate territory for intellecutalizing, and espouses a properly anti-essentialist politics (12). Thus Nelson’s passing critique of Kaja Silverman’s Lacanian take on love as trying to fill a primal lack (120). Instead, Nelson promotes a more Deleuze-inflected argument (as does Kraus) in which desire is productive and excessive, as well as the notion of becoming—“a becoming in which one never becomes” (53)—that triumphs over any sort of essentialism (53). Nelson, in addition to bristling against any kind of essentialist identity politics of the neoliberal variety, must also confront the results of critical theory’s influence in-and-outside of the academy. Today, crit- ical theory’s terms and concepts free-float through common parlance (“cultural capital,” “intersectionality,” “deconstruction,” “narrative/ discourse,” etc.) regardless of their correct use, and have subsequently often been misread, normalized, and/or commodified. Even her own work, miscast as identitarian, leads her to believe that “the commodifi- cation of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write . . . gets taken up by that machinery” (53–54). On the one hand there is the problem of normalizing queerness: “if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us” (26). Yet, on the other, are queer assumptions of what constitutes heteronormativity, such as motherhood and family, which can lead to proscriptions of and for both queer and heterosexual lives (13). Responding to queer cri- tiques of Butler as essentialist and Sedgwick as too heterosexual, Nelson shows how various repressive structures still go a long way in producing subjectivities. To make bold claims to agency and identities without considering the structural conditions involved in their production plays into the capitalist system both by expanding the choice of free-mar- ket(ed) subjectivities and by reifying/essentializing the inherent flux of any potential subjectivity into an identity-product. 102 Ralph Clare
If even the imagining and constructing of queer subjectivity must remain careful of essentializing and commodification, then how can the writerly subject—one of endless becoming—write honestly or sin- cerely? Poststructuralist textuality threatens, as it did for Chris in ILD, to simply beget more text, to invalidate lived experience and “truth” as so much play in a purely textual game. Similar to how Kraus contests certain aspects of postructuralist textuality, Nelson also both challenges and brings theory to bear on her writing. For instance, she disagrees with Barthes’ belief in the absurdity of continually pointing to uncer- tainty in writing, admitting, “my writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the trem- blings, then go back in later and slash them out” (98). Indeed, Barthes, for all his philosophical subtlety and stylistic flourish, writes about the subject in a way that feels, at times, rather impersonal—but impersonal in a more modernist fashion (Eliotean expungement of the artist, the never-present Barthes of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) than the personal-impersonality evinced in Kraus’s and Nelson’s autotheoretical texts, which work with and through the truly personal to seize upon the impersonal coiled in the very heart of the personal.11 The former might be seen as regress, the latter egress, from the I. Nelson’s tics are personal and painful moments and become admissions of vulnerability that the consummate stylist Barthes studiously avoids. While Barthes stresses the death of the author, Nelson heralds the author’s rebirth. Even so, Nelson does not endorse a naïve belief that she’s writing her true self. The welter of consciousness and sensation is a “snowball [we eventually call] a self (Argo)” (95). Nelson, like Kraus, recognizes the performative aspect of her writing, and she too doesn’t “mean the word performance in opposition to ‘the real’” (60). Thus “if I insist that there is a persona or performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me” (60). And despite Nelson’s understanding of the constructed nature of the self and world, she nonetheless makes a claim for a “real” that is not reduc- ible to text or language. Her reading of D.W. Winnicott, for instance, leads her to claim that “one can aspire to feel real, and one can one- self feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness.” Such realness “is a sensation—a sensation that spreads” (14). Similar to Kraus, Nelson’s emphasis on sensation, empa- thy, and feeling—on the affective—demands that it is as real, because of its embodiment, as anything else. 103 Becoming Autotheory
Nelson’s performative writing reveals the personal and moves toward a critical openness and critical empathy. Nelson aspires to “writ- ing that dramatizes the ways in which we are we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always” (60). For Kaye Mitchell, The Argonauts’ emphasizes (via Judith Butler) vulnerability as a kind of “openness” and works toward a “primal vul- nerability” (197). Thus, as Nelson, who is “feral with vulnerability” (5), writes about the personal details of her daily life, her pregnant body, and even the “sodomitical mother,” she remains “ashamed but undaunted” (75). As Mitchell writes, The Argonauts “presents vulnerability as a nec- essary condition of both recognition and relationship—any relation- ship—but particularly as a necessary condition of love” (194). Like many a post-postmodern writer, then, Nelson’s work evinces a critical sincerity and recognition of otherness—a reader “outside” the text who is actually a real person, not simply a textual game-player. The risk of such vulnerability includes making oneself a target for misogyny, homophobia, and pronouncements on the value of personal or con- fessional art and writing (and Kraus too remains vulnerable to being labelled confessional, narcissistic, or hysterical). Moreover, the other to whom one writes must be ethically considered, as Nelson does when she chooses not to write a letter to her in utero child, Iggy (although, of course, the book both is and isn’t that). To do so would be to employ the violence of language, constitute “an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation” (141). Instead, she pledges to raise Iggy as a “human animal,” which “is a deflation, but not a dis- missal. It is also a new possibility” (141). Along with the new possibil- ities for the subject Iggy come the new possibilities for autotheory as Nelson brings theory down to earth, into her self, and in and between self and other.
Becoming Autotheory Chris Kraus’s and Maggie Nelson’s autotheoretical texts not only continue in the traditions of American autofiction—with its emphasis on a new or critical kind of sincerity to balance the blurring of fact and fiction—but respond to the dilemmas of the theory generation and the so-called death of theory. Autotheory, then, is becoming its own thing—and perhaps becoming is what it always shall be. It would, of course, be easy simply to call autotheory a subgenre of that occasionally subgenred autofiction, or even to subsume it therein. Yet surely in this 104 Ralph Clare overcrowded field of dom-and-sub-genres, that would suggest that aut- ofiction—or even autotheory—has grown large enough to deserve its own space and taxonomy. But who wants to stake claims, build fences? As Nelson asks of queer politics, “whatever happened to horizontal- ity? What ever happened to the difference is spreading?” (63). Maybe the field is really a forest, each genre a tree sharing an underground root system with its closest kin. To be rhizomatic about it, maybe it’s this very decentralized root system, with its ever off-shooting, networked lines of flight, which we are really mapping here. If there’s nothing new, including genre, under the sun, then perhaps we’ll find it by tunneling into richer soils, more promising loam. All genres are subgenres in this sense. Genre, then, is a system of resemblances, not representations, composed of what we arrange and assemble, not what can be measured up and classified. In its in-between-ness, autotheory is a strange, hybrid thing. It is something endlessly blooming, and beautifully so. For if any- thing, autotheory, which both is and isn’t, is most definitely becoming. Boise State University
Notes 1. The term “autofiction” was coined in 1977 when Serge Doubrovsky, a French writer, sought to distinguish his writing, which intentionally blurs autobi- ographical fact and fiction, from traditional autobiography. Literary critics, how- ever, have not been entirely convinced by Dubrovsky’s distinction. For more on the debate surrounding Doubrovsky’s formulation of autofiction, see Dix 3; Schmitt 126; Jones 176–77; and Ferreira-Meyers (who offers the best outright summary of the complex debate, as well as the history of autofiction worldwide) 28–31. 2. For more on theory’s effect on American intellectual thought and fiction, see Francois Cusset and also Mark McGurl. 3. In other words, Ryan’s work is indicative of the “theory novel” that, writes Heulhs, keeps “its adherence to the mandate that texts reflexively think their own conditions of possibility and then perform the results of that thinking in and through the text itself” (285–86). 4. How amusing, then, to find Derrida, in the “documentary” Derrida (2002)—a seemingly intimate look at Derrida’s life that winkingly tells us nothing (personal) about him (similar to Barthes’ Barthes by Barthes)—claim that what he’d most like to see in documentaries of past philosophers would be the dish on their private sex lives. Even the full frontal Derrida who appears naked in front of his cat at the start of The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), however, is hardly revealing. 5. Hence, Kraus’s chafing against ILD being called “confessional,” as well as against the kinds of memoirs that make uncritical claims to truth and are based on 105 Becoming Autotheory a stable sense of self and reality (“Chris Kraus in Conversation”). It is not as ironic as it may seem, then, that Kraus feels that Torpor (which I would argue is more an autofictional novel than an example of autotheory) is a more personal book than ILD that required her to write in the third-person to achieve a more critical and emotional distance from the story—which borrowed heavily, once again, from her life (“Chris Kraus in Conversation”). 6. Affect Theory, one aspect of which has been inspired by Deleuzean thought, is quite relevant to understanding Kraus’s work via Deleuze. See the intro- ductions to The Affect Theory Reader (2010) and The Affective Turn (2007). 7. See Adam Kelly’s “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in Amer- ican Fiction,” for an account of post-postmodern authors critical attempts at a non- naïve sincerity. 8. Joan Hawkins sees Chris as using “Baudrillard’s notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of intensification” and which offers “best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerial- ization of experience.” 9. Consider Kraus’s affective reading strategies and those of Rita Felski (sur- face reading) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (reparative reading) that seek to counter- act “paranoid” or hermeneutical readings of texts. 10. Ferreira-Meyers intriguingly suggests that “the burgeoning trend of white male autofictions could be read as a reaction to the past decades’ broadening of the literary canon to include more women and writers of ethnic diversity” (32). 11. See also Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty (2011) in which Nelson commends artists and writers who can achieve such a balance of the impersonal without being cruel to viewers.
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