Critical criticism’s critique: 13 theses, or, it is all rubbish

Book synopsis: Well this is it: the end, last gasp, final straw; in short, the concluding dark volume in a series of books some idiot called ‘critical inventions.’ Let us be like wry Oscar Wilde, said the idiot, and dream of the critic as artist, or at least as someone else, as someone other than who we had thought he was, or been taught he was. Let us, continued the idiot, set the critical dogs off the leash and see what they come back with. And here they are: no less than twenty-four press-ganged souls all huddled together for warmth; some are critics, some are poets, and some are critic-poets; among them such as Steven Connor, Jonathan Dollimore, Ewan Fernie, Mark Ford, Kevin Hart, Geoffrey Hartman, Esther Leslie, Willy Maley, and Michael Simmons Roberts. … So, twenty-four voices, twenty-four shots in the dark, or maybe shots at the dark, or possibly the head, or even the foot. But whatever, each is a shot at pushing the battered perambulator of dear old criticism so far and so fast that someone somewhere – whether in anger, derision, or pain – might just cry ‘Crritic!,’ that curse of all curses, the best of all possible anathema. But maybe, just maybe, the exclamation ‘Crritic!’ will here double as a cri de coeur, or howl of self-loathing, or scream of delight, or laugh in the night, or just a smashed-up and beaten old prayer. We shall see

Touch screen

A history and aesthetics of the touch scree

Playspaces of anthropological materialist pedagogy: film, radio, toys

Throughout his life, Benjamin returned to questions of pedagogy and the ways in which children and adults come to know and learn. This essay explores his notion of Spielraum, or “playspace,” in relation to pedagogy. A pedagogy based on play is here explored in relation to three objects of Benjamin’s thinking: (1) film and cinema, where, through the actions of technology, time, and space are exploded and realigned in ways that provoke reflection and action in modernity; (2) radio, a developing form into which Benjamin intervenes with educational lectures and playful learning models; and (3) toys, the primary material of children’s learning through play, types of tools, which Benjamin interprets in their relation to waste, debris, and destruction. Out of all these a revolutionary pedagogy of creative destruction emerges, one which proposes rebuilding the broken self and the alienated world

These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times

Gas, made in the factories of future conglomerates IG Farben (Germany) and Imperial Chemical Industries (Britain), diffused from the battlefields of the First World War and seeped into dreams and thought. In Walter Benjamin’s concept, this gas of modern life re-synthesized, in retrospect, the apparent innocence of a photographic gaseous haze – which, in truth was a deposit of economic structure, political fantasy, a damp fog of imperial history that threatened to linger on – into a killing atmosphere on the Front, which in its way also threatened to persist, permeate, and poison the lamley declared after-war. What gases and deadly historical fogs surround people today in turbulent days of war and competition, of street control and protection of private property? What protections might a human adopt and adapt to see into and through the opaque atmospheric screens? Are new gases needed to neutralise the old ones or is the climate too much corrupted? Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and imbrications of politics and technologies, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and Deeper in the Pyramid (2018) and The Inextinguishable (2021), both with Melanie Jackson.Esther Leslie, ‘These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times’, lecture presented at the symposium Heavier Than Air: Resisting the Military State, ICI Berlin, 15 June 2022, video recording, mp4, 45:11 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220615-1