EXCERPT Like blind men squishing a stuffed shark in the dark, many disciplinary discourses have attempted to feel out Cute, but the ulterior Thing remains obscure. All transcendent explanation positions itself—‘critically’—outside of its object, and by the same token expects that object to fall within a preestablished, coordinated, and controlled field of meaning. Cute means nothing. Zero. For us, Cute arrived as a problem, an immanent encounter, a compulsion buffeting us up close to phenomena that made no sense and whose vectors pointed outside of all known coordinates. Cute is an Idea that can be known only through participation, a problematic object = XOXO.…