Stop Writing Criticism!
This website is often mistaken for a blog, but I never think about it that way. To me (and the Oxford dictionary) a ‘blog’ offers personal perspectives on interesting subjects. Criticism – which this platform is dedicated to – offers something neither personal nor ‘interesting’, at least not in any entertaining way. It contributes to the development of critical writing and thinking, in a situation where this is becoming increasingly difficult. Occasionally people fail to understand why that is a problem, and why criticism today is equally necessary and impossible.
Criticism grew up in the 19th century alongside the philosophical strands of positivism and empiricism, as an (I think undeniably) Eurocentric practice that aimed to offer an alternative to the former’s claims to objectivity. Criticism, even when it is authoritative, suggests that there is no one single way to read a play – that assertions do not exist in a space of consensus/dissent, but are ‘contestable’ in argument. Unlike positivism, criticism does not aim to create an understandable and describable reality, but attempts instead to show its contradictions and hidden sides, and ask questions about it. In this, criticism is more like empiricism's continental sister, dialectics, which proposes these contradictions as in-built to the composition of any assertion, and attempts to demonstrate them.
Why is this distinction important? If we look at the phenomenon of ‘cancel culture’ – a term I will use but disagree with – we can see a specific type of dialogue play out: Person A commits an offence, Person B attacks that offence, the mob joins person B and Person A is ‘cancelled’, supposedly a win for the majority. But what is occurring here is only assertion and counter-assertion: there is no ‘contest’ of ideas, there is no argument or examination of any principles, or the difference between them. This becomes more complicated when Person A’s assertion is unambiguously violent – consider a self-identified white supremacist or sexual predator – and in that case, the argument exists that they should be removed from public space (a la the Nuremburg trials). But, inside a critical culture, that would be the case only as an exception.
Criticism is therefore opposed to a generalised cancel culture (even if
this is, for me, a ‘straw-man’ idea). I don’t think this is anything to do with protecting
a ‘nuanced’ view, to use an idea that is commonly proposed, for example by the open
letter circulated in 2020. It is because criticism is exactly the opposite
of the situation described above – it is exactly an examination of founding principle,
through argument. Why was a work made? Upon what principles was it founded? Are
its assertions valid in the context of its presentation (culture)? Exhausted by
the perceived contest on the internet, we are becoming worse at asking these necessary
questions, and making these demands of ourselves and others.
The problem today is that this gesture is becoming increasingly powerful among an audience that is incresingly insecure and unable to contest it. A typical social media statement like ‘just chillin in my kitchen :)’ contains a variety of contestable assumptions: that I will be interested as a reader, that I speak English, that I know what ‘chillin’ is, that I have time to do that or wish I could do that, that I can relate to the activity… maybe I don’t speak English. Maybe I don’t even have a kitchen.
We can kill the joy of culture by overthinking these things, and an artwork is always an act of expression (self- or collective) inside a specific frame, which should be fundamentally nurtured. But at the moment the contradictions are dramatically under-thought: white supremacy exists happily alongside anti-racism, narratives condemning sexual assault co-inhabit front pages of newspapers alongside sexist and misogynist advertising. ‘Cancelling’ exactly fits the model of this marketplace of supposedly equivalent competing assertions – it asks for the removal of one specific manifestation, but leaves the principle that created it untouched and un-interrogated.
What is resistant is to develop and build a critical culture: one that is able to see itself well, to reflect on itself well. For this reason, criticism is just as important inside ‘affirmative’ spaces and communities, attempting to create social progress through asserting an alternative, as it is among those that simply deploy pre-existing structures and ‘self-evident’ truths in defence of their principles (conservatism). Both of these have a dark side, both of them create exclusions, and both contain embedded contradictions. This does not make them equal. It asserts that developing societies actually dedicated to progress will always contain an element of criticism: one that hesitates, pulls back, and asks: why? instead of existing purely to recruit. Although criticism today is in a moment of forced conviviality where there is no personal advantage in it – don’t get me started on the difficulties of getting anything critical published today – this makes it even more vital to nurture, support, and cultivate.
For this reason, yes, you don’t even have to read my
writing. It is here as a marker or document, to resist against this direction
of cultures, and to develop and ‘stand back’ from an increasingly emotive and
destructive contest. I admit that criticism today is a hard sell, with from my
experience almost no personal advantage. But it is a necessary one in
overcoming the ‘hotness’ of our present moment, which tries to push panic buttons and
pull strings rather than sit back and deeply think about what we are doing. For
this reason, I don’t apologise for pushing back against the ever-present,
silent demand to stop writing criticism.
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