Cultural Studies would, could, should, must, will, and does begin queerly in the middle of things.
Queer
Creative
Critical
Compositionism
Practices. Practical research. Artistic research. Political research. Public practice. Interventionist. Engaged processes. Inquiry rather than forms. Thinking, learning through making. Through multimodal practices. Through public multimodal practice.
Practices that pick up in the middle of the remains. The remains of capital. The remains of critical education and the so-called crisis in the academy, and the so-called crisis in the academy, and the so-called crisis in the academy,.
In the remains of human and nonhuman catastrophes, finance swindles, extra-natural climatizations, foreclosures of homes, futures, and political actions, debt-driven labor and consumption, and the bloated corporatization of communications, sociality and media.
In the affections, the affects and controls of instrumental deployments of technologies, always already bio-technologies overgrowth-ing everywhere. And, if we are honest, in the dwindling provocations, the remains of critical studies, meant to unveil, reveal, expose and somehow (but how?) correct the social injustices.
How to expose what is over-exposed, surveilled, documented, and always-already google-able? How might we practice teaching in the big data flood? Should our critical pedagogies bring on more crises in a series of derivative capitalisms that thrive on crises?
What interventions, media and critical, won’t add to the heaped up remains upon which trash capitalism feeds now? We are not at a break, but rather in a pile-up, of remnants, remains, offal, composed as data, trash, connectivity, devastation, so-called “recovery” and debt. We must make something of these heaps. We must tool affect from allure and re-engage aesthetics to the critical materialist and cultural studies projects. We must become literate in the languages, practices and substrates that govern economics, politics and the social.
In this we must become experimental, practical, public, and multimodal in our knowledge-makings. We must make, in critical engagement, and this making necessitates our pedagogies offer, at the least, basic literacies in the making methods and modes of our historical moment: integrated communications technologies, software and hardware, and the languages that move through them, and rhetorical and aesthetic tactics, critical readings made into makings, the affordances of digital media. This I call
Queer Creative Critical Compositionism.
