Permeable Bodies: Autotheory as Material History

“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.