Remediations in an Emergency

This essay argues that configurations of what we have been calling "method" will not save the humanities from the compounding disasters of austerity, and that pretending this is not so makes for an especially airless kind of criticism. It tracks the insalubrious persistence of a critical grammar across the terrain of method polemicizing. "Method Wars," it argues, have bequeathed to us nothing so much as an intricate machinery for metabolizing variance in approach as antagonism, the better to produce differing inflections of the fairly standard practice of "reading" as innovations of "method" that, through the rupturing force of their departures, might rescue the declining humanities. But the decimation of the humanities is, paradigmatically, a problem of structural disinvestment proper to the Long Downturn–a problem, that is, of political–economic conditions. Whatever their virtues or liabilities, our methods do not remake those conditions, though pretending that they might imparts a doomed glamour to our conceptual labors. Doing without that pretense, the essay contends, enables a larger purchase on the invigoratingly synthesizing critical projects that have flourished across the discipline–projects that are of more use to us in their fractious noncoincidence than their polemical overcoming.

"Financialization" is Giovanni Arrighi's term for what happens to capitalist systems in the long last moments of their lurch toward collapse. "Method wars," a friend recently suggested, "are the financialization of academic literary criticism."