jan grue, that obscure object of embodiment — counter
in one of the most painful to read pieces you will ever encounter, grue tells you how much he loves an equally painful to read book, the argonauts
the style of writing in this piece that grue exhibits reads as if jan is simultaneously very politely observing his own trajectory, but also as if writing from the position of an ominous yet extremely important character having to classify his own trajectory "i won’t cast disability studies as the hero and the sociology of health and illness as the villain in my story. in fact, i am not attempting to tell a story", in a way where all his tiny little inspirations are supposed to make the work meaningful. the disability angle, albeit pulling, does makes it all the less interesting, since the stakes appear to already be exhausted by his own analysis of it "not being able to align my personal memories with the written records that documented my early life.".
grue goes on a bit of a tangent about how he wrote his own version of the argonauts for like six pages straight. the reason to be so blunt about works like this is that they have the audacity to find their entire value in their own self-manifestation rather than than like in pre-modernism, in their potential to make or attain "greater sense". there is no "greater" sense in writing something like this, let alone a teleologically inspiring one. there is an argumentative center and a general sense, the difference between disability studies and the genuine experience of disability, but grue's insistence on conserving his own style and moderating the discourse even when he's inside of it doesn't fare the best. in the past, the readership public for something like this would have been only those few people closest to jan.
his tangent would be extremely interesting if there will still shots of some graphic figure working on elaborate plan. yet, instead of a subject behind it, grue's own argoanuts is a book where these descriptions seemingly take on the exact phenomenological description that was just used as an example. you could very well imagine somewhere along the work, a statement about the said existence of an interesting character taking up the central point of an entire paragraph. as grue himself realizes, there is nothing interesting about hospital record cards, and grue's analysis of them not pertaining to the lived experience of disability is so obvious that it makes you wonder why he thinks its the record cards fault for being an instrumentally functional object for classification rather than a giant autotheoretical note that predicts all of grue's medical experiences. of course, he doesn't literally thinks its their fault, nor does his analysis behave that way, but functionally, grue does behave as if he's speaking to us from a world where record cards do make sense on a nearly cosmological level, and he's reacting to their fall in quality as if he wasn't here the whole time with us. "i felt a profound sense of alienation from the story being told and the language used to tell it in these records, which was nevertheless—indisputably, objectively—about me." reads as an attempt at an existential gateway that could've existed with or without the presence of the
the style of writing almost captures the incessant level of audaciousness, grue writes "i did not, at the time, intend my book to be anything other than a work of literature, which freed me from the need to make an argument / in addition to my own personal records, i drew heavily on the work of erving goffman and the sociological tradition in order to understand the experience of embodied stigma / superimposed on my privately remembered childhood are experiences that are common to children with disabilities, children who are forced to know the workings of medicine, of the clinic, from an early age." grue's work doesnt want to be anything important. on the contrary, grue isn't even technically writing, he's just simply talking to us. grue seems to have invented the music-making equivalent of rapping in the literary context, its as if the entire margin of sophistication has collapsed in front of us. the level of assumed scholarly aura is low enough that it has the same level of semantic weight or lexical intruige as a biography that attempts far less inspirational depth. watching a youtube video where grue is being interviewed would very likely not only be more interesting, but also more actively informative than his written statement, which points to the banality of this writing.
once authotheory decides to strip itself of all methodological constraints, and it only has substance left, and even the substance seems stripped, that's when it entirely fails as a genre. this is one of the types of writing where you wish there in fact were graphics to go along with it, because of the fact that every statement reads like a whataboutism, like a series of polite observations that have no culmination. there is something maddening about his form of writing, it's almost like he's pulling the rest of us in with him, trying to test whether there is anything at all worth preserving about us, or if we, along with him, are stuck in ourselves and our own tediously boring minds forever, having to cycle through incessant life-story not-memoir-memoirs, because all the interesting things have already happened in the world, ideas you'd find in max stirner's notes on pedagogy about aristotle discovering every possible form in the world pre-emptively and desacrating the rest for us. instead of appending it as a supplementary note to an introduction to "i live a life like yours", jan felt that this paper was the right place to let us know that in norweigan the title is also a play on the term "cv", so as to invent something new to say about his authotheoretical conquest.
the zoe/bios distinction near the end captures the general argument that grue is making, which on its own is fair — the gap between the temporality of diagnosis (bios, ahistorical, prognostic) and the temporality of living (zoe, messy, non-narrative). but you don't get there until the last third of the writing, and to get there you have to sit through: a career summary, a summary of the argonauts, a summary of i live a life like yours, a genre taxonomy of autoethnography vs. autotheory, a literature review of biographical disruption, and a disclaimer that he's not trying to make disability studies the villain.
grue writes: "as a social scientist, staying with the trouble has meant attuning myself to the humanities and their interpretive methods, particularly as they engage ambiguities of meaning and reward slow and patient reading. there are no shortcuts. stories need to breathe. this is another way of saying that bodies need to breathe. and in that breath, perhaps, meanings can multiply. an autotheoretical approach to the body, grounded in the tradition of the humanities, allows for multiple interpretations that can be true at the same time." grue would have better luck calling this practice social journalism, or better yet, an social journalism, since he is writing about his own observations about his own writing rather than about society, or even "science".
a small part of this writing almost reads like the first chatgpt-style "prompted externalized guide" in the form of "i must now write about this in a way where i think the reader will find it helpful if i put it this way or that way, but first i must pose the question and also explain all my steps so that i do not make any errors. i also need to remind myself to check on how meanings can be ambigous". notice also how grue is making "pleasant suggestions" about possible speculative modes of meanings, "maybe if something like this happens, meanings could breathe", almost as if he's analyzing the changing enviornments of the amazon forest and random observations about the potential for probabilities themselves need to be noted down, as a greater exercise in how likely is it that certain changes can happen in a field at all. except, grue is not writing about any particular subject, or for anybody in particular, or taking up the standpoint of any totality whatsoever, other than the idea of an identity, of a supposed "social science" that isn't just a loose assemblage of circumstance-aligned readership. instead of discovering the concepts and ideas through which meaning can arise, grue is reiterating his own assumptions about how it could happen if certain steps taken (not by him) could get us there, the exact furthest point from what a "social scientist" would consider to do.
the only end in grue's writing is a cyclical narrative about embodiement and trauma in medical contexts and about how they dont capture phenomenologicality. this writing is an attestment, a decree, a secret confession to the world of media entertainment that maybe, just maybe, seretonin-depleting dumps of heavily recycled thematics should take precedent over writing intended as a style of communication, since the assumption of graphicality itself would offer more phenomenology even in its most virtualized form than pages on pages of grue's writing, when phenomenology should be precisely the standpoint he should desire to reach.
it's almost ironic that the most intimate attempts at declaring somebody's lived experience register as the least intimate if you strip away sentimental viewership and approach it for what it tries so hard not to be - a form of writing that aims at the creative but tries to avoid actually getting there, writing about the process and difficulty of writing, a literal quadruple-meta-report, a report (on the difficulty of writing) disguising itself through the form of a report (a fake beurocratic signature mimicking the real one) in order to report (on the phenomenological failure) of a medicalized context, where a report (a doctor's note) failed to capture grue's imagination. to make matters worse, this quadruple meta report is only aware of itself as a dual meta report, meaning, some parts of it that make it slightly interesting in idea (even if not in execution) arent even aware of themselves!
there is something simultaneously so decadent about this style of writing. in a time when people have on average the least possibly interesting lives, thats when something called autotheory decides to start. there is something degenerating about that. the degeneration is about how the stakes are inverted, how experience is trying to justify itself through theory, to make itself seem improtant, rather than experience (like in preciado) genuienly trying to collapse theoretical foundations. here's how any single line of preciado's sounds like, at any given point during the "testogel" chapter: "when i decide to take my first dose of testosterone, i don’t talk about it to anyone. as if it were a hard drug, i wait until i’m alone in my home to try it. i wait for nightfall." preciado sounds like he's stalking his prey, as if he's comitting the most revolutionary act, even when he's at his most vulnerable. meanwhile, grue in this work is telling us about how through the argonauts he discovered something as simple as coming to understand how you can imbed notations into the text-form itself rather than in margined indexes. the audacity to base concepts not of life experiences, but of the types of life experiences these authors want to make seem adventurous or immanent leads to an enshittification of lived experience. as opposed to knausguard, who elevates the phenomenology of lived experience into a post-immanent complexification, anti-academic academic auto-theorists like grue arent even writing autotheory, theyre just writing a few things about their lives in first person inbetween notes.
take as an example the way that knausgard writes his autofictional pieces: "a bat flittered through the air. except for the low music in the bar, the hotel was silent. everyone was asleep. down by the water a duck quacked a few times. from the other side of the channel, where a forest grew all the way down to the water’s edge, another bird emitted a long, hissing noise. then everything became quiet again. i turned my head and looked towards the little town where we had just been. its lights shone and glittered, surrounded by darkness beneath the light sky. it was a magical night." a natural sense of suspense exists, a natural driver to continue reading along with it, and enough lexical variety to make reading feel useful, even if in a totally different discipline.
knausgard's subject is always slightly ahead of the writing, pulling it forward, whereas grue's subject is always slightly behind it, being explained. now take henley's hospice poems as a thematically similar example to grue's writings: "you are carried in a basket, like a carcase from the shambles, to the theatre, a cockpit where they stretch you on a table. then they bid you close your eyelids, and they mask you with a napkin, and the anæsthetic reaches hot and subtle through your being." even though grue lives in an arguably less inspired and therefore less aesthetically visualizable time period, even getting one step in the general direction of henley and one step in the general direction away from maggie nelson would elevate his writings comparatively to a near shakespearian degree of difference in quality.
maggie's own argonauts may be seen as one of the first works of "theoretical aphorism" because unlike nietzsche's more philosophical aphorisms or sellar's more "theoretical prose" in urbanomics' "applied ballardianism", the argonauts quite literally has no point, it's just a bunch of barely if at all connected quotable tangents in nelson's experience interpreting art and daily life through philosophy. in that sense, its like the la rochefoucauld of modern theory, the aphorisms literally sit apart from their own stakes. jan copies nelson's style, but in a even more bleak way, because this very writing is a copy of what he already wrote in his own copy of the argonauts. in this work he writes: "i spent a long time reading through these records, which filled three feet worth of bookshelves, and had in them a mixture of clinical, technical, and bureaucratic language—ostensibly centered on events in my life, but events that i could only vaguely recall, and which seemed to describe the life of a person very different from myself, a person i did not embody and could not remember having embodied. that person, constituted in discourse, was someone i could only partly identify with. and yet it was me, or some version of me."
in "i live a life like yours", similarly, he writes: "the stack of papers that i took over from my parents is made up of doctors’ notes, clinical descriptions, case histories from hospitalizations, copies of letters sent to municipal and state agencies, travel agencies, and living-aids suppliers. reading through these records, as trivial and brittle as they are, nevertheless feels like jumping into a pool of icy water. it doesn’t lessen the shock to know that the pond is there, to glimpse it out of the corner of your eye before suddenly one day ripping off your clothes and plunging in. the papers follow a different time line than the one i remember following. it is a different life from the one i remember having lived." jan seems to be recycling his own life-story narrative in a work that, supposedly about autotheory, is actually about him auto-biographizing his own book. grue's own insight about his life didn't survive the transfer from literary context to academic context, which means the academic form wasn't neutral, it actively drained the decadent material he was working off of.