Notes: A Conversation on Autotheory

Dillon Chapman, Outtakes, 2023, Polaroid diptych

[Image Description: Two Polaroid prints are placed side-by-side. Abstract, organic shapes of coppery brown, cyan, and black occupy the picture frame, bordered by a soft white. Within the cyan space on the Polaroid on the left, the monochromatic head of a man in three-quarter profile is interrupted by the coppery brown, the emulsion damaged. With the cyan space on the Polaroid on the right, the monochromatic head of another man in profile via is interrupted by the same emulsion damage. The faces of both men are partially obscured.]

Elizabeth Rooklidge: Hi friends! I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain what we’re doing here today. To put it simply, we’re all obsessed with this thing called “autotheory,” and we want a chance to explore it together. So we’ve decided to create a project that will allow us to do just that. We’re going to start off with this conversation—about what autotheory is and why it matters to us—and then, over the next year, we’ll publish pieces that engage autotheory. 

First, what is autotheory? The most basic definition is a form of writing or art-marking in which autobiography commingles with critical theory and philosophy. Perhaps the most prominent voice in the field right now is Lauren Fournier, who published the book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism in 2022. It’s really fantastic. She says, “Autotheory points to modes of working that integrate the personal and the conceptual, the theoretical and the autobiographical, the creative and the critical, in ways attuned to interdisciplinary, feminist histories.” This definition, I think, suggests that autotheory is an expansive, generous, excitingly slippery thing. So I’ll start by asking you two, what do you believe is the value in autotheory?

Justin Duyao: Well, I was listening to a podcast earlier this week, and in it the host argued that all the world really needs is empathy—“for people to step outside themselves, walk a day in somebody else’s shoes, and go from there.” As a relatively simplistic counter argument, the guest said: “That is physically impossible.” 

Nothing against empathy, but if you think about it, you can’t force anyone to empathize with people whose experiences they couldn’t possibly understand. If you were born and raised in the U.S., it’s almost impossible to truly empathize with the endlessly infuriating and dehumanizing process of immigration. Or, put simply, if you identify as a man, there is no way you could ever intimately understand what it feels like to be a woman. 

Elizabeth: You sort of technically can’t.

Justin: Right. You can do a lot of work toward acknowledging and beginning to understand other people’s experiences, but actually empathizing with them is a much more complicated process than people assume. With this in mind, while reading your work this week, Elizabeth, I realized that autotheory represents something of a shortcut. As an approach to writing that begins with a writer’s lived experiences (auto-) in order to explore and eventually ground otherwise heady or lofty ideas (-theory), autotheory makes ideas available for a wider audience that academics and critics and authors otherwise over-theorize. 

As it is, a lot of art criticism and theory is filtered through academic jargon and, as a result, kind of gets lost. There are so few times, while I’m reading a book or an essay, that I feel like I’m having a conversation with somebody, like I really understand why a work of art matters to them. Autotheory gives you, as a writer, a really powerful opportunity to think about art through your life, through your body, through your memory. For your reader, autotheory develops something much deeper than empathy. 

Elizabeth: Dillon, what is your current thinking around the value and uses of autotheory?

Dillon Chapman: Well, I think for me, especially when coming to works of art or culture in general, autotheory is about leaning into this idea of a “read” of something. It's not so much that the writer is trying to convince you of some kind of objective truth, but focusing on what can be learned from looking at something from a particular perspective. How leaning into that subjectivity, the personal, allows room for comprehension. I would echo the sentiment that “empathy” is an often misused word that people don't actually know the meaning of. It’s not that autotheory facilitates empathy, but when the writer centers a particular idea or set of ideas in relation to a personal connection, it prevents writing that is radical or critical from feeling prescriptive.

I find when I have my students read texts, those are the kind of works that my students respond to the most positively, even when they are just as, or sometimes even more, theoretically complex than some of the other things that we read. It’s because there's this kind of in and they're not being told what to think. Especially with the complexities of politics today, everybody from every angle is telling you what to think. I think autotheory is a plea for nuance, on a fundamental level, and that’s why it resonates with me, with us, and other people, especially in this contemporary moment.

Elizabeth: I like what you're saying about it not being from a prescriptive stance, that it functions through these different perspectives. When I tell people about the work I’m doing with autotheory, I always feel like I have to say that I’m not doing because I think that my perspective is particularly interesting or important. I don’t think it is! But I find that when other writers extend themselves in that kind of personal matter, their circumstances may not actually be unique in every single way, but just the act of articulating this physical and emotional, experiential knowledge… it always means something enormous to me. I'm not trying to grab at anyone's attention–  it’s more of an offering, I guess. 

That connects to this idea Lauren Fournier talks about in her book, about the issue of narcissism. Historically, women and people of color— especially women of color— have been criticized for writing in personal modes and then labeled as narcissists. But Karl Ove Knausgård can write six volumes about his life, which I refuse to read, on principle, even though everyone says they’re amazing. Fournier talks about how there’s a great deal of sexism and racism at the heart of the “narcissism” critique and how autotheory is an inherently feminist practice. It makes me realize that I’m actually not very interested in “feminism” in the very flat sense with which it is generally thrown around at this point in time, because it feels like literally the bare minimum. I really liked the ways in which Fournier brings race, class, gender, and sexuality into her discussion. One thing I felt was missing is disability, which I would love to see writers explore. I want to see autotheory used in a radically expansive way.

Dillon: I was reading this essay by Barbara Christian a year or two ago called “The Race for Theory”, and in it she talks about the shift in focus on embodied experience to a sort of immaterial post-structuralism, specifically when women of color were beginning to be recognized for their writing around theory in academia. There’s this kind of backlash that happens and the white male majority in academia wanted to shift theory away from conversations about the body and positionality, and she’s saying that it was very intentional the way that conventional theory has evolved and left out women of color writers. 

I would also echo your sentiments on feeling complicated about feminism because it often feels the bare minimum. It's very rarely, from what I've seen, practiced from an intersectional lens, centering the groups of people that I think would help us better understand and work against the systems that we're all plagued by. But it becomes very much this sort of single axis issue and a solution to these problems that doesn't address the whole structure doesn't actually solve anything. 

Elizabeth: What was your entry point to autotheory, would you say?

Justin: I think, for a long time, I have been attracted to writing that is autotheoretical without knowing what that was. To be honest, that term is pretty new to me. But writers that excavate meaning from their lives with graceful and earnest incision—like Maggie Nelson, bell hooks, James Baldwin, etc.—these people dig into me in ways other writers don’t seem to access. 

One of my favorite writers who comes to mind, at this moment, that works in autotheory perhaps unwittingly is Jay Ponteri. He wrote an essay called “In Defense of Navel-Gazing,” which pushed against the tradition that considers vulnerable and emotionally complex writing “selfish, self-indulgent, and masturbatory.” On the contrary, Ponteri makes this incredible argument that writing from and to the emotional self, the feeling self, even the traumatized self, acts as a radically political tool by opening up a space in which anyone can participate. Like you said, writing about yourself doesn’t make the art about you—it allows art to be about anyone and anything. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. The stuff that makes me want to write is almost always the autotheoretical stuff. I’ve always been very into good memoirs and in grad school I really struggled with critical theory. I always felt like I was so dumb at it and I just couldn't understand how my classmates seemed to take to it and use it so easily. I did a lot of self-flagellating about that. 

I felt like I was never able to grasp it in any kind of satisfying way. But then I read this book by Havi Carel on the phenomenology of illness. I had studied phenomenology in grad school and liked it, but it always felt out of my reach. And then reading Carel, I didn’t even have to try so hard because it was describing my life as a person with chronic illness. All of a sudden, it’s not something I have to chase after. It’s something that has come to me to describe my lived experience and it makes all the sense in the world now.

Justin: I love that! I’m just thinking back to the classroom in grad school where I took several courses in critical theory. The students who excelled in those classes were the ones who could fully engage their left brain, who could diligently follow logical arguments and make connections between different scholars. It was this very neatly organized, formulaic space, even when talking about fundamentally disruptive ideas like afrofuturism. It’s this incredibly theoretically dense, very left-brain space where very specific kinds of students thrive. So I think it’s appropriate that autotheory makes white men uncomfortable [laughs] because, not only does it introduce the wildly untamable right brain—to oversimplify, a bit—but it also represents a fully embodied, fully integrated embrace of art (and otherwise). I think writers who belong to this practice are as generative as they are because they excite so much more of the person reading.

Elizabeth: Dillon, you’re good at critical theory in general, though, aren’t you?

Dillon: I don't know about that! [Laughs]

Elizabeth: Ha! Sorry.

Dillon: Well, I suppose I'm good at theorizing, I guess. 

Elizabeth: What does that mean to you?

Dillon: To me, it’s a process of trying to understand my relationship to something. I think that's how I've always approached writing. As a writer, I'm not interested in positing an objective truth, rather, I focus on certain ideas as a kind of analytical framework to examine art, culture, writing, etc. I think I can “do” theory, whatever that is, but I also always felt incredibly stupid in my studies when we would be reading things like Foucault, Derrida, and the like- I had a really difficult time with conventional theory. 

I think there's something magical about photography, in that really all of its foundational theory, whether you agree with it or not, is essentially autotheory. Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag’s On Photography  and Regarding the Pain of Others. My favorite is Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image. He was a contemporary of Barthes, but I think I was really drawn to his work because he was a photographer and a writer. There’s this way he takes us through how he understands his relationship to images and that really became the blueprint for how I started writing. It made me want to write, because my background, my schooling, was as a classically trained darkroom/digital photographer. I branched out, and this kind of autotheory became the foundation of my entire art practice. 

Elizabeth: A big question I have is whether or not the “theory” part of autotheory has to be explicit. Do you have to reference these theorists outright, in a citational way, like Maggie Nelson and Paul Preciado do? Or can it be kind of, like, performing autotheory without saying it?

Justin: The best way I’ve had theory simplified for me is that it introduces new ways to see the world. Studying theory is about opening our eyes to things that are already in the world, in order to reach out and change them. It’s about learning how to see and learning how to think about the world in a different way. 

If that’s what theory is, at its most basic, I think you can do it without citation. Believe me, I love the kind of writing practice that cites other theorists, stepping into and engaging with this incredibly expansive conversation; but I think it can be just as powerful either way. 

Dillon: I think they're really just different modalities. I would agree with what you were saying: I think it's more like a desire to be in conversation with these other people in a particular kind of way. I think that is generative sometimes and for certain kinds of writing, but I don't think it's always necessary. Sometimes it can even be detrimental to the writing. 

Citations are a particular kind of desire. They’re, obviously, very contextual, but I think sometimes citations can be cumbersome to a reader, though they may either ground the reader or serve as a grounding point for the writer. For me, it's a way of orienting myself, so sometimes I think that citations are more for their writers than they are for the readers. 

Justin: And like you said, it puts on the page the fact that autotheory is a conversation between you and every theorist that you’ve read, every artist that you’ve fallen in and out of love with. Really, everything is a conversation.

Elizabeth: And, like, that's just what thinking is.

Justin: Yeah. [Laughs]

Elizabeth: In Fournier’s book, there’s one part where she says autotheory “focuses primarily on engendering theory from the artist and writers’s lived, experiential perspective.”  And I thought engender was a really interesting word to use there because it means to cause or give rise to. So if you think about autotheory causing theory or giving rise to theory, to me that feels like a nice way to describe the writing I love. 

It seems like in academia, the construct is that if you’re going to write about your life, you need to use it to elucidate this or that theory. It’s like, well, theory is supposed to be describing life. I think, at least. It’s a new way to describe what, to a certain degree, some of us already know. It gives us language to communicate about it. So I really appreciate autotheory’s insistence on lived, experiential perspective. 

Dillon: I also think a key reason why autotheory has been a tool, whether named or unnamed, used by people from marginalized subject positions is because we don't all have the luxury of looking at pre-existing examples and making commentary. So for some of us, we quite literally have to understand our relationship to the world through our own lived experience. That’s part of why I started writing, because there’s not a lot of writing or representation of trans women’s experiences. It's self-theorizing, not because I am striving to be an intellectual, but because I'm trying to understand how I exist in the world and how I exist in relation to other people. Other people's writing and art have really been foundational in how I look at and understand the world. So I think this engendering is a women of color and/or trans feminist kind of theoretical practice, whether it’s explicitly stated or not. 

Elizabeth: Illness was my big entry point into this and I think that so much of disability theory is inherently autotheoretical. I want to see more, more, more. Particularly with a focus on illness, because that’s not necessarily the same as disability. They sometimes overlap, but they’re not always the same thing. I hope I can contribute some of this kind of work to the larger conversation we’re having through this project. 

And speaking of, what do we want this project to look like?

Justin: I hope that everything we publish looks different every time. [Dillon and Elizabeth nod in agreement.] I hope that no part of this project settles into a routine formula. I hope it’s weird, I hope it’s squishy and personal and deep, and I hope those qualities are really exciting for people.