Kornbluh 2015

Notes from UW talk 5.12.17

"We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique"

• Jesse: literature constituting a form in the world, doing things (like architecture or math)
• novel agency: not Latourian but Marxian
• longue duree humanities crisis: "permanent crisis of legitimacy"
• Felski - how can humanists be more affirmative
  • AK's critique: it's not just that humanists practice negative critique, it's a crisis of the precarity of our labor
• literature as critique: a more robust ontology
  • striving for what does not exist
  • Said's sense of secularity
• Marxist aesthetics for understanding the novel
  • a more crisis-proof system
• Novel as a mode of knowing: sociality, language
  • literature as more than evidence or data (though I'd argue it is this too)
  • not subtracting the imaginative: immanent critique: thought on the move, dialecticity itself
  • inseparableness of strata in novel representation: not just the univocal "child labor problem," inseparable from first person narration
    • rootedness of thought in material production (but how does this fit? Materialist in the broadest Marxist sense?)
• Marxism as the sister of the novel
  • they share a utopian impulse in Ernst Bloch's sense - utopia as a space adequate for humans
• Marxism and form
  • Marx's innovation was in thinking of forms, not just labor and critique of capital
• a work of art as helping decipher, not just representing
• "totality is not available as a referent in experience" - Lukacs
  • therefore the novel is a form of abstraction
• Jameson, Political Unconscious: more important for framework than his readings
  • "formal spatiality" of the novel (ties to "Blueprint")
  • interplay/laminating of formal features to work out problems: Jameson's method of seeing a novel thinking
• evaluative judgment, not the "gotcha" of ideological complicity
• reading of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad
• false dichotomy between critiquing literature and loving literature
• Marshall's question: what do you mean by utopia? (I'm with him. It's this part that doesn't land.)
  • mediating critique -> utopia?
  • utopian alternatives vs. other pragmatic alternatives?
  • utopianism the elementary practice of generativity, not focusing on the normativeness of the utopian genre (utopian literature that can't handle real problems)
  • "Felski's book never got past critique"
  • "what is affirmative is making new things out of the shit we're in"
    • the problem isn't Marxism and psychoanalysis to her, but rather Foucauldian historicism