Engl507

Seminar Notes: Meeting 2 (Digging + Distancing)

Here are some ways to approach the entanglements of mediation and critique:

• Through the choice of media we study: for a given topic, what media (e.g., text, audio, images, or video) are relevant? How are media also objects of inquiry in literary and cultural criticism? To what effects on our methods (including methods that rely on computation)?
• Through how we perceive and attend to media (as objects of inquiry): in many ways, critique is embedded in questions of perception and attention (e.g., close reading, scanning, pattern analysis, re-reading, deep listening/watching).
• By rendering mediation our object of inquiry: rather than assuming that perception and attention are constants (or givens) across time and space, we can historicize or contextualize how they are structured and organized, even if we cannot perceive media like they did back then.

You might argue that Galloway gives us at least five types of communication/mediation that are intricately linked to specific forms of critique:

• Exegesis as a "clear communication" (or that which is naturalized, largely agreed upon, or not questioned by critics or audiences)
• Hermeneutics as "deep communication" (or that which is privileged esptimelogically, denaturalizes, resists the superficial, often relies on an external rubric, highlights ambivalence, understands texts as problems, digs into the unconscious or history, and constructs a narrative)
• Symptomatics as "stresspoint communication" (or that which complicates exegesis and hermeneutics, resists the depth model of communication, questions expedience, underscores absence, highlights what is not said, renders normative models obsolete, and yet is also already hermeneutic)
• Immanence as "iridescent communication" (or that which is privileged metaphysically, invested in aesthetics, close at hand, illuminating, and ostensibly unmotivated, immediate, and immersive)
• The network as "furious communication" (or that which bypasses deep reading and aesthetic appreciation and instead enumerates, scans, diagrams, and transforms/deforms, often through computation and machines)

Is critique mediation all the way down? Is criticism ever immediate? Why or why not?

Has critique run out of steam?

What motivates claims for "post-critical" scholarship?

How do we think about mediation and critique together? Or how do we understand the histories of technology and literary/cultural criticism as entangled phenomena?

Can mediation even be historicized? Wouldn't such a history require some significant interpretive leaps?