“Autotheory” has come to speak for an ever-growing body of texts seeking the theoretical in the personal. If that is by now a cultural commonplace, in Adam Dickinson’s prose poem collection Anatomic, autotheory curiously emerges as the preferred theoretical practice of autographic creatures, ceaselessly co- and rewritten by their own traces, a preoccupation with what it is to be a body in the informatic Anthropocene, and a mapping of the macro-, meso- and microhistories that make lives, bodies and senses. Against accounts that argue for autotheory as a domain of “immediacy” (Kornbluh, Anna. 2024. Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism. London, UK: Verso) and following Dickinson, I aim to argue for the autotheoretical as an abode of bodies and texts sensitive to their own mediation, and of autocritical gestures as technologies of embodied reorientation in synthetic landscapes.
Mary Fotinakopoulou (Tue,) studied this question.