BO

I’ve been a big fan of yours since I read The Order of Forms, before Immediacy was released in 2024. I have questions about both books, but I’d also like to think about the through lines across your work. One thing I've been curious about is the trajectory of your research, starting with your earlier books that were focused on Victorian literature in the 19th century. I wonder, in a chicken-and-the-egg way, vis-à-vis Marxism, whether Victorian-era literature was interesting to you because of its historical coincidence with the rise of Marxist thought, or whether it was the other way around. How did these two areas of research come into conversation for you?

AK

That’s an awesome question, and it’s definitely a chicken and the egg problem. I grew up reading a lot of fiction, watching TV, watching movies, and was really fond of realism across the centuries, and loved 19th century novels when I was in high school. But when I went to college, I studied political economy. I studied with some very interesting David Harvey-esque, heterodox political economy thinkers, which came on top of a familial-community background in Marxism as a political paradigm. So, I did a lot of actual studying of Marx and of Marxist cultural studies and Marxist cultural interpretation, partly because the whole question of ideology was really central to things that I wanted to understand about the world and pursue in my studies. I didn’t know why people put up with injustices, basically, and that was a key question to me, trying to figure out how to be a person in the world, how to be an activist, and a degreed professional.

When I graduated from college, my advisors all said, you can’t do political economy and you can’t do political theory within American Political Science departments. If you want to pursue more school as opposed to being a lawyer—which was something else I was thinking about—you have to lean into more humanities and aesthetically-focused disciplines. So, I got my film degree at UCLA, which was in Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy, but I was thinking all along about the question of ideology. I had continued to be a lover of realist fiction and was interested in how to think about questions of ideology across centuries of bourgeois culture. I had studied a whole lot of French in college, including French fiction, and I was constructing, in my mind, doctoral work that would combine Hollywood cinema, 19th century fiction, and other long bourgeois traditions to help me make sense of hegemonic values, mass culture-based values, and the role of aesthetic and of mass cultural meaning in ideology formation.

When I went to my PhD, though, I had to deal with some long and boring things in the administration about how the faculty were configured at UC Irvine—this was around the geopolitical crises of 2001-2002—and it ended up that I found myself not having applied to but being housed in an English department. I then had to take up a more proper literary object that was in the Anglophone tradition, not the French, German, or Hollywood contexts. And so I made a choice that was inspired by J. Hillis Miller, mostly, but also a bunch of 19th century French faculty who are there, like Andrzej Warminski, Ellen Burt, and so on, to choose the Victorian novel as the object that would let me continue to think about Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the role of aesthetic and cultural representation in meaning making within the strange social systems operating under capitalism.

So, the Marxism came first in my training, but I had this enthusiasm for basic culture as a high school and college student. I wrote two books about 19th century fiction, but I also, at the same time as I was writing the second, wrote my book about Marxist film theory, because that's always in my head: how do we rigorously study everyday culture and everyday meaning? Writing that book was really fun for me, and that was a kind of return to my roots, even though it looks like, “Oh, this book is some form of professional deviation.” Then, writing Immediacy was definitely motivated by feeling like fiction and the contemporary scene is so weirdly different from and militantly opposed to the 300 years of fiction that have come before it. That was one of my entry points into the project. I didn’t set out to write a contemporary book, but I was thinking, “Is there a mutation in capitalism that can explain this mutation in the novel?” because it's a really pronounced mutation.

BO

One of the other through lines I saw between The Order of Forms and Immediacy is, what you call in the former, a “particulate ethos” that has governed a lot of later 20th-Century thought. A notion of deconstruction versus formalism’s belief, you might say, in construction. This is something that really struck me, because as someone who has, gradually, in a very piecemeal fashion, tried to absorb “critical theory,” the rush towards deconstruction or particularization is one that it initially feels quite liberating; however, you then find yourself in a postmodern mush, this primordial ooze where you might feel aimless or directionless, which ultimately doesn't feel very empowering. Your writing on this topic really resonated with me in terms of the ambivalences I have toward certain writers. For instance, Foucault—who you call an “anti-formalist”—or Deleuze.

AK

I appreciate that question so much, I’m glad that you noticed that. I mean, there are a lot of traditions that are at stake here, and there are some subtle distinctions that one could make, but I am interested in this big distinction between a kind of “ecstatic formlessness,” which presents formlessness as both aesthetically valuable and politically emancipatory or politically-ethically righteous, and on the other side, more of a constructivist ethos, a commitment to formalization as process and as necessary infrastructure for life. That divide does meaningfully capture some real tensions in theory.

As you were describing, you start with this capital T “Theory,” and you want it all, right? Sometimes intro to theory classes give these menus where it's assumed you can choose every theoretical option, but there are profound contradictions between these different ways of making sense of the world. I like to keep sight of those differences and distinctions and those oppositions and contradictions. It is true that to me a lot of theory does come down to a sense of nihilism or undialectical negativity that embraces the indeterminate and the irresolute and the coming undone as ethical and emancipatory and humble and complex. That seems to me very opposed to a position that would affirm we need synthetic integrations, we need intervening institutions, we need tenable meaning, not just indeterminacy as the only paradigm for art, for instance, or politics. That opposition is very much alive in both of those books. I'm so glad you noticed it.

BO

I originally came to The Order of Forms—and this is related in terms of the idea about construction—because I have been really interested in the idea of the model as a heuristic. I'm in an art history program, so that probably has led me toward your work and the idea of a model from a certain, more physicalized angle. The idea of the model has been really interesting to me because I work on a lot of installation art in the late 20th century and I was attracted to how, in the beginning of The Order of Forms, you talk about mathematical formalism, the mathematical model, and how those relate to architecture and ideas of spatial projection, the idea of producing a social space. These are questions that are closely related, I believe, to the construction of an aesthetic environment like an installation.

One thing I’m curious about, and which I guess is present in my own thinking, is where the model becomes the mirror, and what that distinction is, because to merely mirror society is perhaps not very useful, whereas to model society might be useful in pushing a dose of otherness or possibility to the fore. So, I wanted to ask where you see that distinction.

AK

I definitely think that the problems of scale and of abstraction that a model suggests—and also the precedent quality of a model, that you come up with the thing before it is actualized—speak to how models are not mirrors. One of the things I'm doing in The Order of Forms is saying that we think about realism as a mirror, but really, we should think about it as a model, that even things that might aesthetically look like they're fairly proximate to, say, phenomenal reality, or to what's already here, have projective qualities. They demonstrate the pursuit of abstraction. I mean, third person omniscience is pretty crazy, right? There's nothing like that in phenomenal reality.

In mathematics, it is a kind of idealist gesture. We cannot encounter infinity. We cannot count it up. We don’t have enough fingers. We don’t have enough time. But we can write it. We can have a symbol for it. We can have a concept of it. We can have a construct of it, which, by having that abstraction that is sundered from experience and is not a mirror of experience, helps us, nonetheless, to then conceptualize new things or make new relations or organize experience differently. I would really want to embrace the model as a break with a mirror.

The other thing to say is that, in a Lacanian schema, which is germane to all of the work that I do, the mirror is in the register of the imaginary with one-to-one correlations, whereas the model belongs to the domain of the symbolic where there is a gap, there is the third, there is differentiation, there is a kind of cut where the one-to-one doesn’t happen. That gap shows the futuristic or predictive or generative quality of the model, an unrealist and abstract quality of the model.

BO

The modular as a way of grasping infinity is also potentially where the idea of utopia comes into the work. This was actually something I was surprised by in re-reading The Order of Forms. Immediacy has been talked about as a book that is reinvigorating critique, that offers a negativity we have maybe lost in recent years. I think that's true. It's interesting that, at the same time, utopia is still an important category for you. It’s articulated in The Order of Forms in relation to Ernst Bloch, whose idea of utopia I feel like I initially read about in the work of José Esteban Muñoz, a writer I wouldn’t initially associate your writing with. So, I wanted to ask about that, about holding onto utopia.

AK

It is just one of the fundamental lessons of Marxism that people have always struggled to make things better and to help each other. If you have a dissolutionist, denialist, indeterminate paradigm, you often are overlooking that history of human struggle to get free and to collaborate—in favor of what seems like a monad of domination, or ontologizations of violence. People deserve to flourish. Human beings are curious and creative and deserve a space that is adequate for them, and that is what Bloch’s definition of utopia is. I don’t know how I would go about my work as a unionist or a parent or a resident of a city or a teacher, let alone researcher, if I didn’t think that most people wanted things to be better than they are. That is an unshakable baseline for me, almost a credo, and it’s one that is integral to Marxism and distinguishes Marxism as different from historicisms or contemporary anti-theoretical nihilisms.

BO

Right. The reason why I like how you hold onto utopia is that it remains a notion that is integrally related to constraint. For you to propose utopia as something we’re working towards is not to pretend as though there are no parameters constraining that process.

AK

And also not to propose that you can’t have proposals, and not to pretend that there won’t be structure in the future, right? You need constraints; they are enabling. Having a plan or a model, a utopian model, as it were, is capacitating. Movements work when they have visions and representations and mediations that hold them together and sustain them over time. Movements are not just mobilizations; they’re organizations. Slogans, visions, narratives—all the symbolic work—sustain them and project what might be better if we didn’t live this way.

Even in the inferno that we're living in, there is still abundance. There is enough. Things can be better and you need to spell that out. There's a commercial that AOC made in her first re-election campaign that's on YouTube. It's called “A Message From the Future.” It's this animated illustration of what life would be like if the Green New Deal were implemented. It’s back from around 2019 and it's great, it explains how and shows that we have all this to win. I see that as a utopian use of representation.

BO

In thinking about terms that persist across these two books—and I know I'm using these two examples as an imperfect summary of your work, but it's the writing of yours I know the best—another interesting aspect of going back and rereading The Order of Forms is that the term “immediacy” is already there. When did the notions of immediation or immediacy first become important ideas for you? I've seen other interviews where you talk about immediacy as an important idea within Marxism, specifically, so I was hoping you could give a bit of background there.

AK

Mediation is a funny word. It’s in Aristotle, it’s in Hegel. It is—in ways that are not really acknowledged, he also didn't claim it—in Raymond Williams, who really systematizes what mediation means. He has various little essays on it in Keywords and in Marxism and Literature, but he talks about it all the time. I wrote an essay for a special collection made around his 100th birthday where I claim that mediation, for him, is a systematic thing to be theorized. I also included mediation as one of three key words for understanding the Marxist tradition in Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club. As somebody whose formal education is in the Marxist tradition, both in political economy and historiography and in the interpretation of cultural aesthetics, it's always been foremost in my mind. Even in my first book, for instance, I'm very concerned with paradigms that try to elide the mediations that literary works, even when they're in the style of realism, are still producing.

There is also a quasi-Lacanian conviction that if one believes that they are free when they are without form, if one believes that they can be in some realm of true experience that is ecstatically liberated from the impositions of the symbolic, that that is a kind of nightmarish, verging on psychotic, position, even though it often sells itself as sexy. If your theories and your art, or especially your criticism of representation, is always in proposing a condemnation of or having an allergy toward representation—that it’s this bad scrim that’s getting in the way of the real stuff—I find that that’s a totally ideological position.

BO

You brought up realism, which is, obviously, such a huge part of The Order of Forms. For me, realism is often understood as a genre that's about reference and didacticism and not form. In my reading, you're trying to open up a new definition of realism or circle back to pre-existing definitions and explain what realism actually means and has meant. My sense is that what that new definition looks like for you is a bridging of the particular and the total. So, if realism, on some level, proposes a very discrete, specific experience, or discrete, specific world, that fictional world always stands in relation to the structuration of the book itself—or the situation the reader finds themselves in—and so there's this dialectical negotiation of the literary and the social.

AK

That’s definitely an intervention. It has to do with how we’ve so internalized modernist protocols that we usually have these knee jerk dismissals of things that are not modernist as naive and ideological and totalizing—in a bad way. We think that the only way to defend something is to find out that it was secretly already modernism. Realism has a set of principles that guide it: it’s basically committed to the laws of time and space and to a kind of contemporary time-scene. I mean, you can have the historical novel, but there’s a limit to how far back that’s supposed to go before it becomes too much of a fantasy or an epic. Within those constraints, those principles as constraints, there is a kind of investigation of what kinds of relationships are possible. What kinds of institutions should we have? What kind of family should we have? What are our values? That social deliberation is, again, projective, it’s critical, it’s utopian. It enables us to do the kind of exploration and negotiation of how social life should be.

So, that’s the thing that I want to defend in realism, the processes that emerge through specific formal elements that, again, we under-read when we maintain the modernist regard for realism. Omniscience or free indirect discourse help construct abstract and impossible or inaccessible points of view that nonetheless help conjure collectivity or help us think, what are general values? What is the ideological position? What is the gap there? Often realism is very dialectically oriented. I think of it as an aestheticization of dialectics, whereas modernism doesn’t like that bothness, that particular relation to contradiction. But realism is balancing inner and outer, description and characterization and plot, and there’s often a kind of social breadth, right? Maybe it’s an ensemble cast, maybe it’s multi-plottedness, maybe it’s multiple settings, but with psychic depth. Using these technologies of narration to cultivate deep focalization and interiority and the kind of study of both individual and society, or what is particular enough that we should tell a story about it but general enough that people can relate to the story is a principle that seems to me to be all about dialectical thinking. Realism is really good at that vehiculation of dialectics, but I don’t think that modernism necessarily works that way as a mode, nor post-modernism. They may have their own logics.

BO

Within an art historical context, the thing that comes up most immediately here is social and socialist realism, and social realist painting in particular. There are of course arguments about the formal machinations at work within realism but the style is conventionally castigated within a modernist framework as a kind of brainless propaganda. This makes me curious about what role propaganda, or more self-evidently political material, plays in your work? It might be that it’s an apples and oranges sort of question, that manifesto writing, for instance, is just fundamentally very different from and accomplishes a different mission than fiction so it’s not worth comparing the two.

In reading Immediacy, I began to think that propaganda might embody a notion of anti-formal immediation, where information is communicated quickly and urgently, but, at the same time, with Trump about to be inaugurated, the genocide in Gaza, environmental collapse, among other catastrophes, one does feel this impulse for immediacy.

AK

There is really interesting work on and ways of thinking about the connection between social realism in the 19th century novel and social change, social transformation, and social problems. There are whole ways of theorizing how novels are invested in a kind of reformism that relates to various kinds of social struggle. What is the high realist novel’s role in disseminating that energy or propagandistically channeling it: into better laws, into arguing that we need to pay more attention to the people and have better institutions, and have labor laws and good schools? All the people who are writing those novels are all also journalists and they’re involved in these reform movements. So, you could say that there are propagandistic functions to realist literature. I might think of them as propositional functions, or as working through some of those exploratory—and even utopian—questions about how we should live.

But, getting a policy program or a social movement position out of a 900-page novel is something different than getting it out of a Rupi Kaur poem that's one Instagram screen long, so the function of propaganda changes in our media ecology, one that is antipathetic to length, antipathetic to thickness, right? With constant images, rather than long narratives, we develop a different way of processing. I lament a lot and try to analyze in Immediacy things like the reduction of art to propaganda, the intolerance for representation.

That means that the demand from the art consumer, the demand from the art critic, the demand that artists make of themselves, is that the work directly expresses a message, a correct one, which anybody can instantly get. There is something to the felt urgency of these horrors that we live in and the impulse to clamp down on thickness and interpretation. I’m very sympathetic to that clamp, but what I elaborate in the book is that this is a trap. It is okay to have urgencies and to need propaganda and to need plans for projects, but those only sustain themselves with more integrated, synthetic, processual meaning making over time—and that’s not really a good job for art.

BO

The artwork, or aesthetics, has another role to play?

AK

And it might not be able to fill that role until there are better conditions for culture making, right? Things are very degraded: the kind of hustle to just get by for people who would be creatives, how poor the access to education is for people who would be creatives. A lot of immediacy style comes out of people having no access to studying the history of art or the history of literature or the history of architecture, and just being told that their job is nonetheless to manifest content, to be charismatic, and that focusing on themselves is the way.

BO

Right, to be “iconic.” One thing I loved in reading Immediacy was that you pick out all of these vernacular phrasings as a way of ending chapters or sections. This really brings home and condenses what can perhaps otherwise be seen as a very diffuse notion of immediacy. You pin it down into our everyday speech and grammar, our ingestion of its logic. “Iconic,” and its mind-numbing use in everyday life, is one word I thought of a lot when reading.

AK

Right, exactly. But somehow what they mean is that the icon is the perfect thing unto itself and that it evinces itself imminently, not symbolically, or requiring some translation.

BO

Changing gears, I also wanted to ask about test cases. In reading Immediacy, I was surprised how it started out with the immersive van Gogh exhibit. In a way I shouldn't have been, since I was coming from The Order of Forms where you discuss realist fiction, itself a pop cultural form. But, in Immediacy, you select a lot of examples like the van Gogh exhibit or Fleabag and it made me wonder about your process of choosing things that might not have, in more strictly disciplinary environments, been seen as objects of scrutiny.

AK

There’s a couple of things. One is, of course, Dickens and Eliot were the immersive van Gogh of their time, in the sense of popular and widely consumed, sensational events, right? So, popular culture is an abiding interest in all of my books. Immersive Van Gogh is such a mega phenomenon that, it seems to me, it requires explanation. When something surges like that and it's so profitable and so replicated and is so fundamentally bizarre, it's an incitement to the critic. It's calling your name. I didn't pick it, it picked me. Also, Fredric Jameson begins his post-modernism essay by discussing van Gogh's shoes and the difference between them and Warhol’s, right? So, I also make that move because I'm borrowing a lot from his structure in terms of how the argument progresses. The third thing is that I set up the study of the art world not by what the art world would say it is doing, right, but by these other avenues that are not at all what it would say it was doing: immersive art or NFTs. I then try to reveal that in the low and even in the high, there is this strained convergence around the rejection of mediation. I thought that it was important to have examples that span all the levels of the art world.

I go to see a lot of art and even in The Order of Forms I write about the history of photography and architecture. I've written a lot of things about architecture. I'm suffering this week because I'm writing something about architectural installation art in Los Angeles and it’s a terrible week to be doing that with the fires going on. I can barely put the sentences out. So, I think about those things, but I am not primarily an art critic. Sometimes I do talks in galleries, sometimes people ask me to make sense of somebody's work for an event, but what’s been really, really fun is that so many art people want to take up Immediacy. I have gone to speak at the Goldsmiths MFA program and all these other studio art programs—as well as writing MFAs—and I am thrilled about that because people want other ways to do their work. Immediacy is such a trap, and that's what makes it hegemonic. So, it's not that I thought, “Let me make a highly coherent study of the contemporary art world, starting with its most revered people,” like, I did not go to the Biennale to write that section or anything like that. There are some scholarly works I find interesting about contemporary art, and I cite some of those. Claire Bishop and Peter Osborne, for instance, and obviously Hal Foster, are people who make sense of the art world in more rigorous ways than I do because that's not my primary domain.

BO

This brings me to the definition of style, or cultural style, that you use throughout the book, something that seems to be almost akin to Zeitgeist. In saying that, I wanted to ask about the idea of exceptions to immediacy style. Not that I necessarily have a list of exceptions to offer; rather, I am curious about how you dealt with the inevitability of exceptions when you were writing a book about something as diffuse as cultural style.

AK

I handle that a little bit in the conclusion where I showcase objects that are definitely successful—they’re not marginal—and are showing a counter logic to immediacy style. I say these can be residual, or they can be emergent. They can come from authors who are still interested in the third person novel. They can come from people who are interested in large format photography. They can be highly scripted, production-intensive, well-produced, well-acted ensemble shows that have big ideas at their core. These can be popular because they’re good and maybe because they deviate from what’s dominant. Having a monoculture or having a hegemonic style doesn’t mean that there aren’t great exceptions.

You can imagine somebody who would have written a book structured around exceptions, and maybe they even look similar to each other: here is a bad kind of one-woman theater, and here is a good one, right? That would have been a way to write Immediacy. That would have been harder though, because I do think that there's something strange about how few good examples there are in a lot of these formats, because immediacy style is so committed to vitiating representation, to emptying it out, to authenticating and manifesting, that it really collapses the imminently critical faculties of art. What's cool about art is its estrangements or its dissonances, its counter ideas and its counter formations. I didn’t feel like there were enough good counter examples to structure the book around, but that doesn't mean that people don't object to the book on that basis.

Certainly, I do feel like the book is helping people who want to be partisans of those forms and hopefully make them better, rather than just keep producing the same flatness. There was a panel at the MLA conference yesterday where somebody who had given some critique of the book said something like, “Well, I’m just going to keep doing auto-theory because it’s the right thing to do.” And it’s like, okay, you can double down—that’s a form of defensiveness—but if you have a way of strengthening what you’re up to and actually breaking out of the genre because a critique has enabled you to do something better – then good, that’s the point of writing critical arguments. So, yes, the book incorporates exceptions in the conclusion but I remain worried that immediacy style makes it hard to operate within its bounds and have a purpose other than coinciding with the fluid emissions and logic of circulation-forward capitalism.

BO

Yeah, the point is not that there are exceptions—that’s inevitable. What is so valuable about the book is that we now have this term, “immediacy,” that’s been explicated in a new way that people can position their work in relation to. It’s a means of diagnosing problems in cultural production as well as those forms—whether they’re books, art installations, films, or whatever—that do not feel immediate but instead thicken the medium, that rebuild the fourth wall rather than tear it down. Immediacy is, in other words, also a hinge point for thinking about the positive features of certain contributions.

At the end of Immediacy, you talk about “categorical thinking” in terms of some other theorists that you respect, like Caroline Levine, Sianne Ngai, and Fredric Jameson. I definitely consider Sianne Ngai someone who also thinks terminologically, we might say, as someone who considers the positivity and negativity of terms and how practices have been categorized accordingly.

AK

Yes. That’s one of the jobs of criticism: to compose categories, make terms, give names to things, have heuristics that other people can then do their work with.

BO

I also wanted to touch on the “auto” as a point of critique. Your book is one of the best articulations that I’ve read about how the self has become a site for capital accumulation. I was curious about how this relates to the horror we’re witnessing right now with the attack on free speech and DEI and if you foresee this idea of “personalism” continuing to be a hegemonic problem, or whether that is now changing again.

AK

I don’t think so. First of all, the only effective redress against authoritarian measures like this are to insist that what is at stake is our collective right to learn, our freedom to be thinkers, to be curious, and to know about the past, envision the present, and deliberate it together. That is not a project that one engages in by a lot of self-expression. The attack on DEI is a wish for segregation but the answer about how to fight those kinds of impositions is to be organized in our institutions and civic spaces and workplaces, to be integrated and to refuse those kinds of segregationist imperatives through a collective deliberation about resources. There are demands to be made about how to allocate resources and structure institutions or structure society on behalf of justice, and those projects are not well undertaken by thinking of DEI as a framework for valuing everybody’s individual story.

Authoritarianism wears the trappings of immediacy all the time, both in its commitment to institutional demolition and to cutting down all forms of civic integration, cutting the intercessionist function of the state on behalf of the people: providing public schools, providing public transit, providing disability access, public libraries. Instead, authoritarianism wants there to be this seamless appropriation of the public goods for the oligarchic, inflationary benefit of the private grifter and their endless upward accumulation. The immediacy logic has to be fought with a reassertion of the values of a democratic society and of the common good and our well-being, one that requires that everybody contribute taxes, for instance—and that’s not a revolutionary agenda, right? These billionaire monsters have been made by very regressive social policies that are part of a very recent history, and they can be changed, but they’re not going to be changed by a bunch of people writing Instagram auto-theory, right?

BO

Someone who you brought up as a counter-example to immediacy style—whose work I really like—is Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. I was thinking about how, maybe in his book Elite Capture but certainly in the article that preceded it, he begins with a first-person anecdote about his experience of deference politics and the ways that it wasn't productive. So, one more concrete question is about a boundary line in your schema, about how much personalism is acceptable?

AK

The book is not making a critique that everything personal is bad. It really is not that. It is a historicizing, contextualizing, periodizing, argument about how forms work differently in different times. We can’t blindly assume forms of personal evanescence work the same way or have the same political purchase or epistemic purchase in 2025 that they did in the 1970s. You just simply cannot. That’s what the argument is about, understanding what those differences are.

There is a place for the anecdote and a place for personal experience in everything, but there has to be a dialectical and higher order integration of that into social salience, social meaning, something commonly holdable, whether it's artistic or political. Forces of accumulation and our forces of domination and exploitation right now are wholly committed to the logic of self-manifestation. So, if you want to have any gap from that logic, any possible critical distance from that pervasive totalizing system of “hashtag manifest,” you need to think about working in other forms and making sure that your opening anecdote in the first person, for instance, becomes an illuminating piece on ideology and power relations. It does that by way of institutional history. It does that by way of intellectual history. It does that by way of the other theoretical traditions it engages in. It does that by way of material power analysis. Those are all discourses that require research and not just testimony.

BO

Self-reflexiveness is such a crucial term in the history of progressive aesthetics. Art is good and righteous when it is aware of itself, when it acknowledges its object status and the lure of commodification, etc. One thing that is opened up by your book is that self-reflexiveness might actually no longer be a good enough position when selfhood itself is such a primary form of the commodity. It's more about how one reflects, how one is self-reflexive.

AK

And how you get critical distance. You have to draw upon the mediations of others. You have to step away. That’s what the movement of theory is, it’s a kind of abstraction—and abstraction isn’t a bad word.