Post-critique & theory fatigue

Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women has announced the topic for its 2019-2020 Research Seminar, "The Question of Critique". Here's a paragraph:

Post-critique, for one, does not describe a unified field; it does however share a set of metaphors that underpin its project of “critiquing critique.” The idea of fatigue, in particular of theory fatigue, has functioned as an important component. A second term important to the project has been the critique of suspicion, which has taken place by the recuperation of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the latter used by the French philosopher to describe the critical projects of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The hermeneutics of suspicion has become the blanket term for what post-critical thinkers believe to be – in Rita Felski’s words – the limits of critique, this because dominated by what she claims is a misplaced paranoia. Post-critical thought and the reading practices it propounds rely on spatial metaphors in order to advocate a return to description: if the hermeneutics of suspicion digs deep under ground, post-critique advocates “surface reading” or “distant reading,” among other practices. Finally, and this returns us also to the idea of fatigue, post-critique proposes a move away from the prefix “de-“ (deconstruction, for example, or demystification or destabilization), which is viewed as destructive and exhausting, to the prefix “re.” The latter instead is perceived as an act of reparation and recuperation, whence we gain reparative reading practices that care for their objects of study. In this move, post-critical thinking also embraces a new form of ecological materialism.

This whole business of intellectual exhaustion ("fatigue") interests me as a phenomenon. Why have ideas stopped coming? Are ideas a limited resource?

I like a metaphor of geographical exploration.  It's one thing to explore and chart the territory and another thing to settle there in frontier outposts. And there's a difference between precarious outposts and fully domesticated settlements with families, churches, and schools, etc. I figure fatigue sets in sometime between the creation of outposts in all regions and territories, where as far as anyone can tell all the different kinds of geography have been discovered, and the process where the last outposts start settling down into secure settlements. That seems to have happened in the mid-to-late 1990s in literary and cultural criticism.

The trick, of course, would be to move from this metaphor to an account of the cognitive-cultural phenomena in play. The theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I have sketched out might be of use here. Ideas don't come out of thin air. They are constructed. There are only so many things one can construct from a given repertoire of available materials. When all the basic construction types have been identified, the territory has been sampled. Now we transition to elaborating on those types.