During the winter term 2024/2025 our research team focused on the genre of autotheory, its definitions, understandings, and uses, and ultimately also on the question how it relates to writing in a diasporic context and what it means for marginalized people to theorize their own subject position. What are the uses of autotheory when writing and thinking with and about the diasporic ordinary?
Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Response to Maggie Nelson. “The Forms Things Want to Come As.” Lecture/ Reading, ICI Berlin, 12 July 2023, video recording, mp4, 51:20: Click here
How did this text help you understand “autotheory”?
In our conversations in the colloquium, we started from the general observation that Nelson’s 2015 The Argonauts is often credited with having shaped how we think of “autotheory” as a literary genre via her borrowing of the term from Paul Preciado. I am deeply troubled with how “white” and narrow this and many academic genealogies of autotheory still are: Nelson herself problematises the dominantly white male canonical “ghostbooks” (by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roland Barthes, for example) that shaped her theoretical engagement with form and yet, by training as a literary scholar, I am also often drawn to many of these texts – so is she an “easy” target for my disdain?
I found neither the literary work of Nelson nor Preciado speaks to an interrogation of the Western subject in the way we are interested in in TODO (their focus on embodiment, sex, transition and pregnancy feels somehow too narrowly confessional). In the writing that comes out of a Black radical tradition and/or queer of colour critique, the displacement of subjectivity is tied to experiences of racialisation that often challenge more fundamentally who is included in the realm of the human to begin with. Many of the authors keep returning to Hortense Spillers (1987) foundational discussion of how enslavement and the reduction of bodies to “flesh” needs to be understood not as a specific racialised experience of gender but as a more fundamental ungendering (see also Anne’s discussion of Che Gossett’s text below). So, is there a way we can more radically decentre the starting premises of the general poststructuralist unsettling of the subject and combine it with more fundamental interrogations of humanity in the wake of the writing by queer/Black/trans authors (without always ending in ontology)? This is both a theoretical and formal question, I believe.
What does this form of critique, the questioning of the autonomous subject, imply for academic writing practices? In relation to this question, Nelson’s interest in the relevance of form in the talk did speak to me. So, I actually found her pondering how she writes more appealing for my own reflections than what she writes in her (auto)fiction. Nelson describes her process as a writer as finding the form things want to come as. This is a struggle that might involve boring yourself – and despite the warning of her writer friend Eileen Myles that if you are boring yourself, you will bore the reader, Nelson maintains that “It can’t always be not boring!” I like this idea that writing is the sometimes quite tedious process of working through and discarding forms, which I weirdly enjoy – I like boring. And maybe this is also connected to our overall project to focus on the “diasporic ordinary” rather than having to spectacularise diasporic stories to garner attention.
Nelson starts from two questions:
- What should I do? and
- What would make it better?
She describes “content as the pulsating fact of your curiosity, the rhythm of your attention” and encourages aspiring writers to not only be excited about the content but reflect on the “shape” things might have/want to take. She mentions the importance of “shape, form, tone, affect, pace and voice” – to make writing literary. And whereas poetry teaches “closed form”, prose has to invent its own structure. I wonder then: Do we need more poetic forms in academic writing (and maybe also a broader understanding of “poetry”)?
Nelson also observes that: “The personal is a strategy but not the only one to convey a self” and that the personal has more ‘heat’ as a literary strategy. Accordingly, including autobiographical elements in academic writing is one strategy – one that many marginalised subjects choose to validate their experiences – but not an end in itself. Do we simply imagine “the personal anecdote” as a way to make academic writing “hot” again? Are specific personal “disclosures” even expected in queer and postcolonial theory? And what would it mean to resist and try out other forms of conveying experiences of marginalisation, of a self, apart from “the personal”?
Nelson discusses “anecdote” versus “proposition” as structuring principle and asks, “Can I be the scientist and the rat?” I find this really helpful when I think about how I want to write: can one combine an analytical sensibility of close reading and an engagement with art and literature without the objectifying urge of the mastery of the material as the critic? What forms would academic writing take that is adjacent to your materials rather than in a metaphorical bird’s eye position from above. Fenja asks if we are allowed to “love” the objects we engage with (see below).
Finally, I looked up the A.R. Ammons poem from which Nelson quotes the lines “I look for the forms/things want to come as”, and fittingly, it is called “Poetics”. Poetics, as the study of literary forms, remains a central concern for me in response to the question: how do we write? And, I guess, in light of AI, this question will have to be addressed even more radically now – MS Word is giving me “text predictions” as I type. As we witness how certain academic vocabularies of addressing inequalities come under ever more scrutiny, we might have to become less formulaic and experiment with less predictable forms.
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
Is Autotheory Useful for Diasporic Writing? – Very Cursory and Probably Incoherent Insights and Questions Following from Robyn Wiegman’s “Autotheory Theory” (2020)
A strict separation between diaspora and dominant society, as well as autotheory and diasporic writing, seems artificial. In the following, it serves primarily heuristic purposes.
1) As might seem obvious, the term autotheory consists of two parts – auto: as in the self and autobiography, and theory: as in theorising (thinking and writing) about the self, life, autobiography. Autotheory thus theorises writing about the self, life. It theorises autobiography. The title of Wiegman’s text points to the theorisation of this theorisation …
Autotheory is autobiographical writing that is aware of its own doing.
* Since diasporic writing in the broadest sense is likely to include autobiographical elements, at least in some possibly indirect way, it might be a particularly productive field for autotheory. Wiegman accordingly refers to Lorde, Moraga, Anzaldúa.
2) Autotheory is critical of conventional forms of autobiographical writing. It is still invested in autobiography as counter-narrative to dominant historiography, by “giving detailed accounts of the daily life and historical presence of the socially forgotten or marginalized”. Autotheory solves this conundrum by paying particular attention to form.
* To what extent do experiments with form counter notions of authorial mastery and thus “mastery of the self”? How does diasporic writing negotiate the demands of sentimental and confessional scripts, as well as material and aesthetic challenges of experimental writing?
3) The “I” of conventional autobiography is racialised. To understand the “I” as racialised (i.e. conceptually white, normative) does not contradict, but corresponds to the disembodied, invisible “I” of theory versus the embodied (i.e. female, non-white, etc.) “I” of the everyday.
* The aim is both the embodiment of the “I” and its elimination?
4) The overarching project is to undo the “political and epistemological hegemony of the self-knowing individual”, without ignoring one’s own historical and geopolitical position (think pitfalls of poststructuralism, achieving subjectivity by claiming non-subjectivity).
* The task is still to “know oneself” while being aware of the limits of self-knowledge?
* Just like autotheory, diasporic writing favors expressions of “split subjectivity”, “plural selves”, forms of “self-extinguishment”, intrasubjective fragmentation and dissolution and intersubjective connection (think for example Fanon, Muñoz etc.). Are these necessarily “more ethical” forms of subjectivity?
5) Instead of conventional autobiographical writing in the first person singular, autotheory seeks to replace the authorial “I” with, for example, “idioms of the ordinary” – “everyday life” – “affect” – “tropes and sensibilities of literary writing” – “the personal” in relation with “the impersonality of social forces and modern histories”.
* What does diasporic writing look like that writes from said perspectives? Does writing “without a self” necessarily speak to experiences of dehumanisation? Or does writing from, say, the perspective of the ordinary bring it closer to the (non-)human?
Fenja Akinde-Hummel
How do I prevent myself from Bird’s Eye Viewing a text?
“As you can see from me deleting ‘I would argue’ above, I think you need to shed these qualifying phrases from your work. Phrases like ‘I would argue’ are generally superfluous and unnecessarily modest—you want to convey that you know what you are talking about.” A wise person once deleted all of the “I would argue thats” and “here, I will argues” from a paper I wrote many years ago. The comment goes on for a while about how such statements will eventually undermine my argument, the comments were thorough and meticulous, thoughtful and well explained, in places encouraging and in others frustrating, they were nestled there in the margins, waiting to be opened up, answered, dealt with and they felt close. How did they feel close you ask? Well they felt close because they were attentive to the words, the punctuation, the gaps and the overanxious explanation… they followed my arguments closely and offered a conversation, a provocation, a contradiction. When I wrote my undergraduate dissertation, a friend and I would read each other’s work in thorough detail pouring our thoughts into the margins, quibbling overturns of phrase and searching for words, sat in the sun in Granary Square, we would test out our arguments, it was close because it was a care for the text and a care for one another. With this I propose marginal edits should be classed as the sixth love language.
Another piece of academic writing advice I was given was by a former supervisor of mine who seemed to see little value in anything other than pithy, punchy and muscular argumentation. She said that every sentence had to make a new point. If it didn’t, then take it out. This was a revelation to me, like when I learnt the word procrastination for the first time, it opened doors and also made me understand, with more precision why I was struggling. In fact, upon revising this text I see the link between procrastination and making the point, my inability to do the latter well causes the former!
Upon reflection, this has produced in me, and in my writing, I think (eek), a drive to abandon uncertainty If I take the uncertainty out of my work then am I just masquerading opinions as facts? What is the function of this? My question is that if I remove certain kinds of uncertainty will people really believe that they are not there? In response to these questions, my colleagues generously answer:
“This is really interesting and for me really weird that uncertainty was so frowned upon – I feel like the practice of close reading should indeed include pondering different ways of interpreting/understanding the text: part of critique for me would be to weigh different viewpoints (which is not the same thing as not having a point).”
And
“I also think one of our discipline’s strengths is to navigate uncertainty and ambivalence. A closed argument is also always one that is less interesting to me.”
When I think about Autotheory, I think also about when I was reading Montaigne’s theories about almost anything. I think that the first Montaigne text that I encountered was his essay on friendship, here he writes:
There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us, as to society; and Aristotle, says that the good legislators had more respect to friendship than to justice.
I wonder what platform Montaigne surveys the world from, and what authority he has to write like this (upon reflection, I think I can guess what makes up such a platform). He’s talking about the pleasure that he takes in friendship, but makes the boldest pronouncements on it. I was astonished. There is certainly a kind of heft and power that comes with writing such as this. But I don’t know what it brings. My colleague says that what this brings is “something opposite of the love you talk about next, which here I would say is mastery of the object, sovereignty, which is somewhat ironic as I understand you, when talking about friendship”, I would agree. It is strange to talk about this kind of relationality so single-mindedly. In other words, who does Montaigne think he is? Was it just a stylistic thing to be so bombastic in text? This aphorism which uses such extreme words as ‘nothing’ and also relies upon ‘nature’ as a fundamental basis of an argument is bold, presumptuous and perhaps even reckless, in my own humble opinion. The man then casually paraphrases Aristotle!! Another colleague suggests that “it opens up conversation, exchanging standpoints”. If I understand correctly then, to pronounce something boldly with authority, as if you are God, is in fact, to to invite conversation, rather than to make a challenge to this an implausibility?
When I think about academic writing, as opposed to some kinds of autotheoretical writing, I think of what I am submitting a text to. How do I position myself in relation to a text? In our discussions as a group something that helped to resolve some of the issues I had with submitting an object to academic interrogation was to love it. In that way I find myself closer to the object, less willing to squeeze out its meaning for no reason. A useful input, from another colleague is this:
“I am really reminded of Sedgwick here who asserted the right to make ‘eclectic’ decisions (rather than present an argument for a specific corpus) and a form of reparative approach to reading that still has an ethos of what she calls ‘an accountability to the real’ – that has been quite influential when I think how I want to relate to a text.”
I think that this is why I appreciate annotation, it feels somehow closer to the text, and it is literally closer to the text. but I think it somehow challenges, or perhaps only disguises the relationship between the subject and the object. I guess I can never not speak from my own position, and I wonder if every note is a kind of imposition, or at worst a kind of extraction. For now though, annotation feels better, even if an illusion it seems somehow immediate, conversational, assistive.
Thao Ho
Apple on My Head
What are the intentions of autotheory, or to call one’s work as such? In some articles we read during our colloquium, autotheoretical writing took various forms: autobiographical texts supported by theoretical references, writings that developed a theoretical framework through singular, yet collective experiences of society, others pulled the reader into their life with a hook to reflect about a theoretical framework. I wonder if autotheory is just a contemporary re-iteration that academia is not an ecosystem in itself, a reminder that there is an “outside” world, from which all theory in our disciplines is rooted in life (once) lived. Or a compassionate reinsurance for marginalized scholars in a white classist academic system to write regardless, even if the multitudes of diasporic and postcolonial experiences are still deemed obsolete, singular, and disconnected from social-political operations that reinforce it? In fact, autotheory seems to align with a tradition of feminist, Black, queer and women of color scholars in whose writing the “auto” is not only self-referential but connected to biopolitical discourses that by-pass the inclination to theorize an universal truth. Autotheory is not simply a memoir. Autotheory is not simply didactic or made to be understood the “Other” – rather it is a space that should open up new ways of knowing. Nor is it supposed to lean on literary sentimentalism or destruction of academic language. Rather it is to find a language and form for one – a self that maps out social political entanglements beyond the self, pulled by our own hooks – namely the ways that we are confronted with life individually in connection to others within a faulty system.
When I think of the infamous (yet never proven) story of Isaac Newton and the apple falling on his head, I don’t only think of gravity, but also (bodily) impact. Of how knowledge arrives not as a clean equation, but as a force that lands on the body, often uninvited and experienced in different ways. Autotheory, for me, begins in a similar place: not in abstraction, but in collision with the world I live in that might be affectively complex at first. A moment where something hits me hard enough that I have no choice but to write through it. How I write about it has to include constant reflection about the present auto, ethos of writing about the other and biopolitics, all belonging to a history of scholarly work that contemplates the social otherwise despite constant dehumanization. In many ways I think it entails experimentation of how we approach our research and put it on paper.
I want to close by coming back the “hook”. Anzaldúa contends: “[I] give you contexts for the theories I attempt to put forth. People can hook specifically into these snippets of lived experience, can hook into the pain. Thus the reader gets hooked” (Anzaldúa 190). While I still need to reflect on one’s own “pain as a hook”, it made me think of the connection of any grand narrative and all the life stories connecting or disrupting it. Can a hook be more than diasporic melancholia and despair? A hook that goes beyond the usual tragedy and strives towards imagination.
Anne Potjans
Thoughts and Questions on Che Gossett’s “The Ends of Autotheory” (2021)
One of the things that struck me most about our discussion this semester was how my understanding of autotheory has shifted, from something that I thought encompasses so many forms of writing, to a very limited assortment of texts: One of the insights that most surprised me: Relaying personal experience and deriving theoretical insights from it does not necessarily make a text autotheoretical. Rather, autotheory seems to refer to the theorizing of the self or the theorization of one’s own subjecthood vis-á-vis a specific situation or constellation. Thinking about it in this way raises many questions. For me, I first and foremost think about the ways this changes and challenges how we approach our material. What is my subject position when researching, writing? How does the way in which we have learned to do scholarship objectify the materials we work with? What can be gained from thinking about and theorizing my subject position as a scholar, an academic, a writer? Does it maybe also allow for a new understanding of care to enter our scholarly practice, especially when working with texts that mean a lot to us personally, or that deal with marginalized people and stories?
I would like to go back to, and reflect more on the question, or relationship rather, between auto-theory and race, as raised by Che Gossett. Especially in the context of our research project, I wonder what writing autotheory from a racialized perspective could look like (for me and for all of us), and how does an awareness of its mechanisms also inform queer Black literary and cultural criticism? I am here especially thinking about the idea of Blackness as antithetical to the idea of personhood and how the concept of auto-theory interacts with this premise. Gossett establishes blackness as antithetical to identity, as “identity’s critique.” They write, “By identity’s critique, I mean the way in which blackness explodes what Frank Wilderson so aptly calls the ‘assumptive logic’ undergirding the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and ontological edifice of the human and the predicates of personhood.” (577) So, what does it mean to theorize the self from a Black position? In a Black context? In Black Studies? Is this “I” in auto-theory even an “I” that we would want to assume or write from? How can we make the “I” analytically useful in Black and diasporic writing and what kinds of “Is” are there?
Gossett writes, “What then is the self? How to explain a self without the backdrop of the unique as the condition of possibility and referent? What is the self without recourse to singularity?” (580) If we take seriously this critique of the self as singularity, as uniqueness, while also considering the communality that is produced by the sign “Blackness,” what does a Black auto-theoretical project look like?
Is this rejection of singularity maybe a way to combine the auto-theoretical and the ordinary, as in ‘the ordinariness of violence’ or ‘the ordinariness of existing while Black’ and thus exposing and re-emphasizing the structural character of racism, or, as Christina Sharpe would have it, anti-Blackness as all-encompassing “climate” (Sharpe 104)? In my view, Gossett’s intervention is pivotal in dislodging the centrality of the singularity in autobiographical modes of writing. In turn, they urge us to find ways of conceptualizing a self that signifies beyond the “I.”
Bibliography
Anzaldúa, Gloria, et al. “On the Process of Writing Borderlands / La Frontera.” Duke University Press EBooks, 1 Jan. 2009, pp. 187–197.
Gossett, Che. “The Ends of Autotheory.” ASAP Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 577–582.
Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Friendship.” The Essays, translated by Charles Cotton, Ktoczyta.pl, 2019, pp. 263-77. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huberlin-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6154733.
Nelson, Maggie. “The Forms Things Want to Come As.” Lecture/Reading, ICI Berlin, 12 July 2023. Video recording, mp4, 51:20. https://doi.org/10.25620/e230712.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” Novel Gazing. Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997. 1-37.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
Wiegman, Robyn. “Introduction: Autotheory Theory.” The Arizona Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-14.
