Key Essays: Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture

141 Pages·2021·4.642 MB·English

by  Johnny Rodger

Key Essays
Any level of study within literature and culture requires an engagement with a
wider scope of themes, issues and discourses, and these debates are often
centred around key ‘essays’. This book examines a wide range of these essays on
topics such as posthumanism, racism, feminism, necropolitics, the Anthropocene,
gender, Global North/South, neo- and de-colonialism, universals, borders and
limits, interspeciesrelations,blackness, cosmopolitics, epistemology, andaddiction.
The essays selected represent scholars from a range of disciplines, ethnicities,
nationalities and genders, and offer readings relevant across the arts and
humanities. Each chapter explains why the essay is of vital importance in our
contemporary era, introduces and explains the key themes and theories with
which it engages, demystifies any complex content and positions it within
wider current debates.
Coveringalloftheessentialdebatesthatstudentsandacademicsmustengage
with, alongside a close analysis and critique of contemporary seminal essays in
the debate, this book will be an essential read for students of literature and
culture across the arts and humanities.
Johnny Rodger is Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of
Art, Scotland. He publishes both fiction and criticism. He is the author of Hero
Building: An Architecture of Scottish National Identity (Routledge, 2015).

Key Essays
Mapping the Contemporary in Literature
and Culture
Johnny Rodger
Firstpublished2022
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Keytexts – the contemporary essay 1
1 Junkspace: On ‘Junkspace’ by Rem Koolhaas (2002) 25
2 Blackness matters: On ‘1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = 1 − 1 or 1 /
1’ by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017) 31
3 The superpositioning of cuteness: On ‘The Cuteness of the Avant
Garde’ by Sianne Ngai (2005) 37
4 How matter matters: On ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ by
Karen Barad (2003) 43
5 Posthumanism: On ‘Posthuman Humanism’ by Rosi Braidotti
(2013) 49
6 Companion species: On ‘Unruly Edges’ by Anna Tsing (2012) 55
7 Feminism and happiness: On ‘Killing Joy’ by Sara Ahmed (2010) 61
8 The pharmacopornographic pandemic: On ‘Learning from the
Virus’ by Paul B. Preciado (2020) 66
9 Epistemologies of the Global South: On ‘Public Sphere and
Epistemologies of the South’ by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
(2012) 72
10 Counter-forensics: On ‘Open Verification’, Eyal Weizman (2019) 78
11 Necropolitics: On ‘Necropolitics’ by Achille Mbembe (2003) 83
vi Contents
12 The undercommons: On ‘The University and the
Undercommons’ by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004) 89
13 Cosmopolitics: On ‘Cosmopolitics’ by Emily Apter (2018) 95
14 Comrades of time: On ‘Comrades of Time’ by Boris Groys (2009) 100
15 The mentality of the Anthropocene: On ‘The Brain of History,
or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene’ by Cathérine Malabou
(2017) 105
Afterword 111
Bibliography 122
Index 127
Preface
The last two or three decades have seen a massive shift in the range and scope
of the humanities. The question of what it is to be human has perforce moved
to centre stage, and thus forced an interrogation of the very existence of the
‘Humanities’ in our globalised, multi-ethnic, post-feminist, digital era of climate
change.
This book provides background interdisciplinary reading which is essential
across the Arts and Humanities – especially so in this intersectional age – in topics
of which no one working in this field can afford not to be up to date whatever
their speciality (e.g. posthumanism, racism, feminism, necropolitics, the Anthro-
pocene, gender, neo- and de-colonialism, universals, borders and limits, inter-
species relations, blackness, cosmopolitics, epistemology, and addiction).
The argument of the work is that in its very particular versatility the essay
form has undergone a revival and been the most effective vehicle driving,
formulating, capturing, exposing, deconstructing and analysing the con-
temporary shiftinthe terrainofthe post-humanities. The intentionhere isthat
via discussion and critique of a selection of topical and highly engaging texts
from prominent thinkers and writers the reader can gain fairly quick orienta-
tion to where we are in the field of art and humanities thinking. Publishing in
the centenary year of Raymond Williams’s birth, it acknowledges the influ-
ential work of his Keywords – a ‘compendium of political and aesthetic
terms … informed by British Marxism of the 1960s and 70s’, as Emily Apter calls
it. It also recognises that the authoritative and definitional approach of
Keywords has limited critical purchase on the fragmented nature of con-
temporary culture. Through examination of the prose form of the con-
temporary essay this work seeks to map the topographical articulations of the
political and aesthetic world through the post-Foucault focus not on the word
but on the enunciation. Its concerns are with discursive conditions, the posi-
tioning from which utterance is made, its relations, proportions and move-
ments with respect to a field rather than simply its grammatical or
propositional sense.
The form of this work is relatively straightforward and easy to comprehend.
An introduction examines the context in terms of the birth of the ‘modern’
viii Preface
essay as a form, its uses and its significance, its position culturally, politically
and morally, the most remarkable practitioners and most useful critics and
critiques.Thecontemporaryrevivaloftheformissubsequentlyexaminedboth
with respect to its historically ‘modern’ sources and to its current day context.
The main body of the text follows, with fifteen chapters each consisting in an
essay which mounts a discussion by way of introduction to, and criticism of
onecontemporaryessay(writtensince2000)byaparticularwriter(orwritersin
the case of collaborators Fred Moten and Stefano Harney). These writers come
from all around the globe and operate in various different disciplines; they are
all prominent intellectuals and writers in that particular discipline (be it archi-
tecture in the case of Rem Koolhaas and Eyal Weizman, anthropology with
Anna Tsing, philosophy with Catherine Malabou, and so on …), and they are all
well known across the humanities in general – often because of the effective
interdisciplinary applicability of their work in general and as featured in the
chosen essay subjected to critique here.
The book is intended not just as an introduction to these vital texts but also
as a provocative and original intervention in the field itself. Thus, while
making an argument for the stature and poignancy of the essay as the key form
for the era, the most challenging part of the task here has been to maintain a
balance between sustaining a polemical edge, embodying the fullest character-
isation and summation on the one hand, and explication, questioning and cri-
tical insight on the other. Most important of all is inciting those students,
academics and whoever else is intrigued to pick up this book, to go to the
primary texts themselves prepared to engage, equipped for sustained study and
for thoughtful interrogation.
Acknowledgements
A debt of gratitude is owed to many friends and colleagues for their help,
advice, suggestions, expertise and, not least, their forbearance in the concep-
tion, writing and publishing of this book. Among many others, those most
especially to be thanked are Gerard Carruthers, Lucia Cola, Jolanta Dolewska,
Owen Dudley Edwards, Benjamin Greenman, Jakob Lund, Robert Mantho,
Sara O’Brien, Margarita Palacios, Lionel Ruffel and Adam Sharr.