Aboutness

What does it mean to say that a text or artwork is “about” something? Although such a statement normally makes an outwardly simple and minimally interpretive claim—referring broadly to the work’s explicit subject or plot—recent works of criticism have put new pressure on the concept of aboutness itself. In a 2021 essay titled “Aboutness,” T. J. Clark complicates the relation between aboutness and painterly style, noting how Hieronymus Bosch’s technical decisions in The Ascent to Heaven both produce the painting’s conceptual content—“what it ‘wants to say’ about its subject matter”—and exceed it, such that the critical attempt to specify what the painting is about ends up “circling its prey and never striking.”1 In Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch notes how the frequent emphasis that George Orwell places on the word “about,” combined with the strong “topical orientation” of his writing—its explicit concern with weighty subjects like poverty, coal mining, and war—produces a doubling of topical consciousness that makes much of Orwell’s work “(oddly)…‘about’ about-ness.”2 And in the most sustained critical meditation on the word “about” that I know, Kent Puckett explores how the British experience of total war during World War II fundamentally challenged artistic representation, producing films that are “about” war without referring explicitly to it, or films explicitly about war that problematize aboutness in general.3Yet despite this new critical interest in aboutness, little has been written about the historical development within critical discourse that arguably set the stage for it—namely, the transformation of this “quiet, colloquial term” into a universal shorthand for critical interpretation as such.4 The recent conceptual attention to aboutness, in other words, may be part and parcel of the fact that for critics in every discipline, both within and beyond the academy, the word “about” is now widely used to submit any kind of interpretation whatsoever. The formula “x is [a work] about y”—which one will encounter as frequently today in pop-culture podcasts and TV recaps as in academic papers and seminar rooms—has arguably become the signifier of criticism broadly defined, a verbal talisman that both announces the language game of interpretation and highlights its distance from everyday discourse. Thematically flexible as the act of interpretation itself, this formula is equally effective at revealing the institutional and economic systems that underlie works of art (“The Right Stuff is finally as much about the technological, technocratic system of Hollywood as it is about NASA’s early years”), at problematizing a work’s relation to gender (“‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’…is, to put it bluntly, a poem about sexual violence”), at revealing a narrative’s abstract conceptual concerns beyond the literal level of plot (“In many ways, this is a scene about geography, mapping, and geometry”), or at lending thematic weight to a popular medium such as a video game (“Kentucky Route Zero has, among other things, always been about living through the end of history”).5 What I want to stress, however, is not the sheer variety of interpretive frameworks available to critics, but rather the more specific and curious fact that the word “about,” which I earlier called minimally interpretive in its ordinary usage, is now universally employed precisely for interpretation. Although this transformation of aboutness has simply become part of our critical dialect, the original counterintuitive force of the word choice must not be forgotten. If all interpretation suggests on some level that a work means more than it explicitly represents or says, what I will henceforth call the critical “about” concentrates this defamiliarization at the level of critical style by enacting it through a word that ordinarily refers precisely to a work’s most central explicit concerns. Rhetorically, the formula’s popularity derives in no small part from the frisson produced by this by the for a work most to be kind of today is the through as through of a work’s literal (“‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’…is, to put it bluntly, a poem about sexual violence”), the critical “about” the artwork “about” in this Although it be to the in criticism that have this word to its curious such a beyond the of the I want to one relation between aboutness as a of and the aboutness statement as a of critical relation at the of the video game the most the medium of aboutness with and have ordinary aboutness, which is to explicit thematic and plot in the that and the however, the an relation to the may be to be “about” as is the the the of this be about more than the other words, a of that its an of video have that about the one that not have in the a or a but rather is like may be among artistic in of ordinary and an that has the of video game the game about or in the critical of the the level 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