But What About Love?

The first line of Andrea Long Chu's new book, Females, is: "Everyone is female" (2019, 1). Two pages later, Chu is discussing "a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas called Up Your Ass" which reads, she says, "like a very enjoyable undergraduate one-act—rough, raunchy, highly narcissistic, and so blatantly irreverent that its tone can feel impossible to parse. 'I dedicate this play to ME,' Valerie writes on the first page, 'a continuous source of strength and guidance and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion, and faith this play would never have been written'….This is vintage Valerie: impossibly serious, seriously impossible. It's one of the reasons I love her" (3-4).

Valerie Solanas is (or was) mainly remembered for the SCUM manifesto (which called for the destruction of men) and for shooting and almost killing Andy Warhol—an act of violence motivated it seems by Warhol not reading or committing to stage her play—a play that remains unpublished, which is to say that no one else has seen fit to circulate it either. Since it is "Valerie" herself, first-named, and not her writings, that Chu announces she loves, the implication is that there is nothing in the violence, committed or proposed, that would interfere with Chu's love. So what about this love?

The word love comes up again when Chu describes the trans woman and Internet personality Gigi Gorgeous as (I quote) "a self-created dumb blonde" (2019, 30). Gigi, she goes on, "is a TERF's worst nightmare: a shameless cosmetic miracle, assembled by a team of plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, agents, and marketers—a walking, talking advertisement. I love this about her."

Some of you will remember Rita Felski's appeal in The Limits of Critique for us to change the subject of criticism to what we love: "Anyone who attends academic talks has learned to expect the inevitable question, 'But what about power?' Perhaps it is time to start asking different questions: 'But what about love?'" (2015, 17). "What about love?" looks like the question that is being asked here. Chu's looks like "love" criticism—criticism from which critique has been subtracted: critique of commodification, say—thinking of Gigi Gorgeous—of capitalism, of the power of gender stereotypes, of submission to the domination of that power. Or more precisely, it looks like Chu has followed this formula: these are things for which I know X might be criticized, but I love her anyway.

If this very of-the-moment book is representative, then, it looks like critique is dead, and postcritique now reigns.

But that can't be right. One reason why it can't be right is that critique in the "mere faultfinding" sense that I too despise is obviously flourishing, for example in academic versions of so-called "cancel culture." It seems entirely acceptable and even mainstream for a feminist critic these days to announce that she will no longer read David Foster Wallace, not because of the putatively repulsive treatment of women in Wallace's fiction, fiction which is barely mentioned in the essay (Hungerford 2016), but because of his (to the essay's author) morally reprehensible personal life. For what it's worth, nothing of which Wallace has been accused in his personal life comes anywhere near Valerie Solanas' shooting and almost killing of Andy Warhol for not getting back to her more promptly with a positive opinion of her play and plans to stage it.

A second reason why it can't be right is that postcritique has not cancelled the self-righteousness of cancel culture.

Consider Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory, a major inspiration for Felski's polemic. To simplify radically, Actor-Network Theory is about the attribution of agency to non-human actors. Forget about the new set of actors being non-human, and you realize you've seen this gesture before. Nothing could be more characteristic of literary study and the humanities generally over the past half century than the attribution of greater agency to a previously under-represented constituency. One of the most basic and successful moves has been to discover, with...