For this space to be useful and sustainable we must want to keep it alive for reasons besides professionalization and conventional success.
In winter of 2023, a small group of graduate students in the humanities who mostly met on Twitter several years prior decided to organize a panel for ASAP/14 on the question of “mid.” The idea was born out of an ongoing conversation they were having about the “wasted promises of contemporary culture,” which is increasingly algorithmic, formulaic, flattening, even as it insists upon its novelty and prestige. Accompanying these frustrations was also the desire for its robust theorization. What would a theory of mid—mid as in mediocrity but also as in media, mediation, milieu—look like, in medias res? The organizers put out an open call, but also reached out to their early-career colleagues and friends to submit to the seminar—this model/method would become important later. This is how “Mid Theory,” the ASAP/14 seminar, came into being, a two-part session that took up “mid” as an invitation to engage with the workings of contemporary culture and its shifting aesthetic categories from BookTok and “prestige television,” to puppets and disappointing sex, to the present status of feminist thought and cultural criticism, and so much more. A subset of that discussion appears in this eponymous forum.
It was also the case that because it was cheaper than a hotel, most of the seminar participants rented a house together near the University of Washington. Little did we know that this house would become an unauthorized off-shoot of the conference, a place for graduate students, postdocs, and other early career folks to gather and connect. Together, we debated ideas, ate meals, watched movies, hosted parties, made plans for future collaboration. And the ethos was always the same: invite people even if you did not know them well or at all, ask them to invite others, keep the door unlocked. It was the first time most of us met each other, some of us were strangers to everyone, many knew one or two other people in the room, all of us met someone we did not know before. And it quickly became clear that we were hungry for a particular kind of space, for a place to exchange ideas, have critical disagreements, bond over our pop-culture obsessions, share advice on campus organizing, have frank conversation about the crippling precarity of graduate school and the shrinking of our profession. And for four glorious sleep-deprived days, that sterile house in Seattle (whose Airbnb décor was mid aesthetic par excellence) became a sanctuary.
As the conference concluded, and we each returned home to our day jobs and to our militarized and corporatized universities, the conversation continued. We shared teaching materials, workshopped dissertation chapters, crashed on each other’s couches, served as first and second readers for each other, commiserated over the bleakness of the job market, celebrated each other’s achievements, read books together, and yes, collectively bemoaned the increasingly homogenous and homogenizing state of contemporary public criticism. What emerged was a growing open-ended intellectually rigorous politically committed community with eclectic taste and shared values, who understood that thinking is not only more meaningful but also more enjoyable when it is in dialogue with others, when it accounts for the conditions of its possibility. So, when in spring of 2024 I half-jokingly proposed the idea of a collective, I should not have been surprised by the instantaneous and enthusiastic support I received from these folks, not all of whom are listed on the masthead. This is how Mid Theory, the collective, came into being.
The essays in this forum are an incomplete record of our inaugural meeting; they also collectively evince our shared critical investment in the kinds of questions we ought to be asking in and about contemporary culture. In “The Problem of Mid for Contemporary Criticism,” Mitch Therieau historicizes the term “mid,” and the ways it calls forth yet critically differs from the rise of the middlebrow and the masscult in the second half of the twentieth century. Challenging contemporary mid culture’s desire to be seen as a good political object that seeks to preempt and subsume its own critical reception, Therieau asks, “What would it mean to refuse to meet the mid work on its own terrain?” What is the appropriate attitude that a critic should adopt in relation to the mid object? One of the conclusions that Therieau draws is that “we can afford to get much more formalist about mid media.” This is precisely the charge taken up by the essays in this forum.
Bekah Waalkes attends to the aesthetic logic and the algorithmic structure of BookTok’s canon formations. She shows how for BookTok consumers and creators, books do not primarily function as a form of intellectual activity or even as an opportunity of encountering difference, but as technologies of community building, a confirmation of identity, and an occasion for exhibiting the literariness of one’s own taste often through the singular and innocuous referencing of mediocre classics. BookTalk canons, Waalkes suggests, invite us to consider what becomes of novels “when their readers don’t want to read at all”? Continuing to interrogate the political and aesthetic virtuosity insisted upon by the mid object, Olivia Stowell turns to the righteous, lukewarm waters of post-network television. In particular, she considers how the “departure episode” whose distinctive extravagance stands in contradistinction to the cost-saving ethos of the traditional “bottle episode,” becomes a site for mid television’s bid for political seriousness and formal achievement. For Stowell, what is at stake when the critic falls for this gimmick is “our ability to name the mid as such—and perhaps, more importantly, the good.” Likewise, considering the failure of 2019 Met Gala to be on theme, Martha Henzy showcases how mid aesthetic often stems from a failure of interpretation which itself is a consequence of a certain rampant ahistoricism that plagues the present. Finally, Anna Krauthamer explores how contemporary literary representations of “mid sex” indexes the inadequacy of consent discourse to properly reckon with the ubiquitous experience of not being able to name the precise meeting ground between intimate and structural scales of violence.
In each of these essays, there is a commitment to thinking not only about but amid contemporary culture, to take seriously our strange aesthetic attachments without losing sight of their political economy. This is what MTC seeks to achieve: cultivate an intellectual space where people can strike out and be experimental, where judgment does not have to be predetermined, where thinking doesn’t have to be lonely, where we can get back to the curiosity and delight that brought us to our objects of study in the first place.
MTC is an entirely volunteer-run experiment: we have no institutional affiliation, no advisory board, no money. The author of this introduction spent long summer evenings teaching herself HTML and website design to build our digital infrastructure. Our editors, all of whom are overworked and underpaid graduate students, adjunct instructors, and postdocs, poured countless hours into this project. We are grateful for the goodwill and trust of our writers who took an enormous risk on us without proof of concept. In short, this is a labor of love, one that is invested in forms of ambition that exceed the individual. For this space to be useful and sustainable we must want to keep it alive for reasons besides professionalization and conventional success. We must understand that at stake is our ability to wrest joy and community from the logics of scarcity and manufactured austerity that have captured the university. This is one reason why we encourage collaboration because we believe that if we are not diligent, our tastes, much like our circles, can get small and stale. As Olivia Stowell has said to me recently, and many more times in the years I have had the fortune of knowing her, “Instead of wanting things to be different, how about we just make them different.” This is the terrain of our ambition, and you are invited.
Farah Bakaari is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University where, with some reluctance, she works on African literature. She wishes she were not a slow writer so she can bake more for friends.