ARP Talks: Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton

nonsite.org emerges in part out of interest in a set of theoretical topics – the ontology of the work of art, the question of intentionality, the ongoing appeal of different and sometimes competing materialisms – and in part out of opposition to the dominant accounts of those topics. Today, the various theoretical forms of neoliberalism – from the postmodern to the posthuman, from the new historicism to the new pluralism – have become so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. nonsite.org seeks first to make them visible and then to make them less pervasive. Our goal is to criticize what is and replace it with what we think ought to be. nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the humanities, plus poetry, editorials, reviews, visual art, and more. nonsite.org also features “the Tank,” a forum for comment on provocative new scholarly work.

Walter Benn Michaels teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of books on literature, politics, and art, the most recent of which is The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Economy, Autonomy (Chicago, 2015). He is a member of the editorial collective of the online journal nonsite.org, where much of his recent writing on topics related to art, politics, and the theory of action can be found.

Jennifer Ashton's research interests center on 20th and 21st century American poetry and literary theory. She has published articles on modern and contemporary American poetry, with a particular interest in the history of lyric and the theoretical, aesthetic, and political commitments that have sometimes attached to it. These concerns were in part the subject matter of her first book, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2006).

Artistic Research Practices (ARP) is a program of critical study and of cross-disciplinary practice at ALBA that develops research through a series of roundtables. The program explores contemporary practices by inviting artists, curators, and critics to share their research.