What question did this study set out to answer?

To examine autotheory as a practice that reflects on the relationship between bodies and their textual representations in the Anthropocene.

June 18, 2026

Permeable Bodies: Autotheory as Material History

Key Points

To examine autotheory as a practice that reflects on the relationship between bodies and their textual representations in the Anthropocene.
Analysis of Adam Dickinson’s collection 'Anatomic' and its exploration of autotheory.
Theoretical critique contrasting prevalent viewpoints on autotheory's immediacy with a nuanced understanding of mediated bodies.
Mapping the interactions of macro, meso, and microhistories that shape bodily experiences.
Proposes autotheory as a sensitive recognition of mediation in texts and bodies.
Highlights autocritical gestures as technologies that facilitate embodied reorientation in complex synthetic environments.

Abstract

“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.

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