Personal writing is having a moment. The recent attention to autotheory has enlivened longstanding debates about the politics of the personal as a critical scholarly mode, opening out new lines of inquiry into genre, method, and argument specifically around minoritarian aesthetics and the potential of scholarly work to elaborate forms of social justice. [1] Across what Robyn Wiegman has called “identity knowledges,” the institutionalized fields of study that focus on gender, race, ethnicity...

Lyotard’s question is mostly rhetorical and yet shines a light on an issue that haunts the fraught space between theory and fiction. The issue is particularly salient when it comes to science fiction, a genre that is characterized by figuration, fabulation, and the production of concepts. The copula “science fiction” itself is oxymoronic: if theory offers us cognitive tools to process philosophical conundrums about the state, personhood, etc., then surely the fictional, at best, plays a minimal role in this process, perhaps as a kind of space of simulation, narrativity, and poesis.

Here presented, the latest dollop of responses and provocations; we plan to run at least one more grouping, as well as rejoinders from issue contributors. If you’re interested in joining the conversation, do let me know! — Debra Rae Cohen

Several of this latest batch of responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory engage not only the original issue, but also the first set of responses that we ran last month—and we plan on keeping this conversation going. Would you like to be part of it?

Are digital methods weak or strong? How should we understand the conjunction of digital tools and methods with modernist studies? In some accounts of the rise of weak theories in literary studies, weak theory and digital methods like distant reading are taken as correlative terms, with associative logic and epistemological modesty common to both. Yet a nearly opposite set of arguments is as familiar: digital literary methods are too “strong,” so goes the claim, because they conceal naïvely positivist notions of evidence and proof, reductively quantify cultural production, or advance a neoliberal agenda within the academy. Digital methods appear both too weak and too strong for use on literary objects, particularly objects so delicately rebarbative as those of modernism. Generalized glosses such as these call out for more particular accounts of digital practice from within modernist studies itself, and indeed these have begun to appear. Work by Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Jessica Pressman, Shawna Ross, and James O’Sullivan supports the contention of Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers that there are “special affinities” between modernism and digital approaches, and that digital methods “afford some of the most promising lines of development for the ongoing expansion of the ‘new modernist studies.’” Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan’s edited volume Reading Modernism with Machines (2016) marks a turn from debating the advantages and deficits of digital methodology and towards embedding new methods and interpretive procedures within the specificity of modernist studies as a field.

Weakness: not a word that would seem, at first blush, to have anything to say to modernism. Modernism doesn’t blush; it blasts. Its reputation is for strength in extremis—for steep critiques of modernity, energetic convention busting, the breaking of vessels. In the words of its early theorists, modernism is “rebellion against authority,” a “revolution of the word,” “kicking over old walls” and “breaking of ‘Do Nots.’” Nothing small-bore about revolt, nothing weak about making it new. Surely weakness is modernism’s obverse—injured, low-energy, and acquiescent—all the cloying orthodoxy that modernism would shock its way out of. Modernism is the production of aesthetic strength through iconoclasm and strenuous innovation. It is strong people exhibiting strength.