Impossibly Tangled and on Fire, or Reparative Reading for Administrators, w. Ika Willis

Tuesday 13 May, 3:30pm-5pm
John Medley 4th floor Linkway, University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

I found [university] admin to be the absolute best place to do lasting, systemic, and impactful anticolonial work… As a researcher with academic freedom, I still get to pick through the problems I deal with, even if I opt for hard ones and important ones. As an administrator, things are hurled at you that are impossibly tangled and on fire, and you are accountable to them whether you would choose to deal with them or not.  
Max Liboiron, ‘Q&A With Max Liboiron’ (2021)

The desire of a reparative impulse…is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.
Eve Sedgwick ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (2002)

As a middle manager in a university, I am trying to work out what the place of (critical) theory is in my work. Part of what I’m wrestling with is an enduring commitment to theory as a way of thinking and a way of acting in the world, but some reservations or blocks in relation to theory as a style. There are two parts to those reservations: the relationship of the theory style to difficulty, and the relationship of the theory style to critique. Is it possible to continue the critical-theoretical project in a post-critical mode?

​In this paper I will talk about what this looks like in the specific context of university management, drawing on Shannon Jackson’s ‘infrastructure aesthetic’ as well as various theorists of the postcritical (notably Rita Felski). At all times I keep Max Liboiron’s term ‘impossibly tangled and on fire’ in view – literally! – to remind me that we always arrive in the middle of ‘impossibly tangled’ histories; that there is no way to act as urgently as we must while simultaneously thinking as deeply as we must; and that that is no excuse to give up.

Ika Willis is a literary theorist and middle manager at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Now and Rome (2011) and Reception (2018) and the co-editor of the journal Reception.

This talk is presented as part of the CRAM 'Critical Management Studies Seminar'.