As these
will be the last days of this writing platform, and potentially my last work as
a critic, I will allow myself a brief interlude of self-analysis.
I find that criticism is, far from the way it’s often perceived,
a position of extreme vulnerability. There is little respect or understanding
for the work, a proliferation of poor critical writing, and critical thought in
general is fading from the public sphere and media - replaced with commodified clickbait
and easy answers based entirely in positivism and rejection of dialectics. “They
don’t read what I write: they buy what I write”, as a friend said to me
recently. It’s a commonly rolled-out
narrative now: far from building communities that are capable of
self-reflection, we are increasingly constructing ones which follow pre-held
beliefs and biases, making it difficult for anyone who sees critical thought as
an integral part of community-building, and making open conflict between
ideologies inevitable. Opinion is the new criticism.