Abstract: This article offers some tentative reflections on the question of what mode of theorizing might be particularly productive for the critical humanities in the face of the multiple urgencies of the present. Building on the methodology of conjunctural analysis inherited from British cultural studies, and taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s notion of “tentacular thinking,” the contribution outlines a syncretic and pragmatically oriented “Kraken theory,” which thinks the contemporary moment along radically relational and processual lines, in terms of a cultural logic of impurity, whose many tentacles reach in numerous different directions, and which hence bridges or mediates between oppositions such as high vs. low, strong vs. weak, or paranoid vs. reparative theorizing.
Florian Cord (Thu,) studied this question.