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Can critical theory be done online?

Obviously, but how does it look? How do we know what it is? How is it fostered and presented? The LA Review of Books and The New Inquiry seem to be taking a valiant stab at it. From the LA Review of Books’ interview with Rachel Rosenfelt of The New Inquiry:

Do you think there’s a kind of criticism that is more suited to the internet than to print?

It depends on how you define criticism. To my mind, criticism at its core is merely the act of revealing links between objects. The long form essay was once the best (or only) way to reveal social or historical contextualization or demonstrate the relationship between two seemingly unrelated works of art, but new media has created new ways of doing this.

…which reminds me of this whole question. There is so much good and exciting about what TNI is doing. We need more like it, and we need a whole bunch of related things that help foster this kind of writing and thinking.

Not to mention that they’re taking baby steps toward a way to make this whole operation sustainable outside the academic model [which, btw, is clearly not super sustainable anyway]:

Basically, $2 a month is a pretty negligible price to pay for 130 pages of outstanding, illustrated, meticulously labored-over content. And if a lot of people subscribe to it even though they don’t really have to, we can keep making it.