Immersion Criticism/Syncromysticism/Schizoanalysis

version

Well-known member
This is one of the reasons Pynchon's valuable. You can't really read him any other way.

The technique consists of the artist invoking a paranoid state (fear that the self is being manipulated, targeted or controlled by others). The result is a deconstruction of the psychological concept of identity, such that subjectivity becomes the primary aspect of the artwork.
 
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version

Well-known member
One's a creative technique coined by an artist, the other's a disparaging label imposed by a critic.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
And when I think of schizoanalytic criticism, I think of issuing several theses at the text from different ideological positions. I'm only familiar with how Deleuze and Guattari describe it in the first section of A Thousand Plateaus, where they distinguish it from the traditional/orthodox psychoanalytic approach. They say that the tradition approach works toward identifying a single, underlying root cause, or making a central diagnosis, whereas schizoanalysis works toward expanding/pushing the various branches of the complex, preserving its many-headedness and contradictions rather than reconciling them all together. Maybe I'm bringing stuff to the table that wasn't ordered, but in any case I find it all fascinating.

One's a creative technique coined by an artist, the other's a disparaging label imposed by a critic.

Good to know, I don't think I would have come to that conclusion. I've only read Wallace's The Broom of the System, which seems to be aptly described by hysterical realism, but it could very well not extend to his other works. Don't know anything about DeLillo, though.
 

version

Well-known member
It's not the term itself that's negative. It's that Wood coined it in a negative review where he attacked those writers for being obsessed with things and ideas and having no interest in how they make people feel. Taken out of context, Hysterical Realism sounds about right. The problem is it's attached to this fallacy of Wood's that there's no feeling in the work of those authors.
 

version

Well-known member
The paranoiac-critical method's a technique you can apply to anything. Hysterical realism's just a description of a certain kind of fiction.
 

version

Well-known member
Here's the initial piece,
Here's the one he did post-9/11,
And here's Smith's response,
 

version

Well-known member
This stuff can be quite liberating when you're in the right spot, but I find it exhausting/suffocating atm. The lack of stability that comes with it's a double-edged sword and the fact it's escaped literary criticism, psychoanalysis and whatever else and made contact with 'the real' means it's a struggle to get away from. Once it's in your head, it's more or less there for good.

I'm curious where this leads. The previous step was to move from art and the internal world to the external world, but where do you go from there? Do we have anything beyond that? How can you build something out of what's left once you're aware whatever you come up with is constructed and arbitrary?
 

luka

Well-known member
the fact its not contained is the whole point it leaks into your daily life and turns you mad
 
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