Tim Lanzendörfer was flying the flag for the Academic Forms project at the London Conference in Critical Thought last week. As part of a stream on “Critical Thought Maintenance: How to mediate intellectual and organisational form (and get away with it!)” organised by the brilliant Dr Toby Bennett (University of Westminster), he gave a paper on “Affording Criticism: Form and the Dialectics of Academic Critical Thought”.
Abstract below and full paper here: Affording Criticism LCCT Lanzendörfer.
My paper will address itself to difficult dialects of the critical affordances of forms. With reference to Adorno’s arguments about the utility of the essay, but also contemporary economic thinking around the very pairable ideas of enshittification and sludge, it will try to outline a minor theory of why it’s so hard to make things better. It will suggest that it is difficult to imagine the possibility of critical academic thought outside of recognized forms even as the necessity of forms constrains the possibility of criticality—especially of radical critical thought. Form enables the consensual far more than the critical, especially so when we consider the various institutional and professional pressures which are reified in it. But at the same time, we potentially rightfully discount criticism which does not take form, in the very literal sense of being recognizably a form and thus a credentialed intervention into the discourse, an artifact which it is possible not just to take seriously but in fact to even see amongst all the other things we encounter every day. We might go so far so to say: formless thought is not critical thought. Form, here, is not mediated, but is inevitably the mediator, of all critical thought—alas, to the detriment of criticality; and this view of academic forms (potentially illustrated by work on the book review) has wider applications in critical thought elsewhere.