As your correspondent sits at his beat-up wooden desk, looking out at the autumn leaves beginning to fall, trying to make sense of things while simultaneously being flooded with various demands, it seems a tricky time to really think.
This writing platform is a chance to make sense of something - to try, through the seemingly modest act of performance criticism, to bring some sense of meaning to the mess of today's existence. One way to exist, of course, is to retreat completely from trying to make sense of anything (and there are a lot of options for us to do this today). It is much harder, I claim, to really engage the dilemmas and issues facing us but outside our individual sphere of concern, which might be ethical, social, and collective.
It is also less comfortable. Engage such questions and you quickly find yourself punished in unexpected ways: like the one who takes the time to check on someone lying on a street corner only to be attacked, we are often disciplined for our attempts to share precarity and act in collaboration. The world, especially 'The West', is set up to favour self-interest, under a guise that this is something 'essential' and inevitable about humanity. But any close observer of people - writer, poet, painter, actor - normally finds something much more optimistic, which is why there is not much art about Adam Smith.
"Goodbye Mummy" - advertising poster for Milk on Rosenthaler Platz Berlin, marking both the retirement of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a new comic high-point for psychoanalysis.
It has been commented before that this writing platform is weirdly not self-interested, but instead is unashamedly engaged with social and collective questions. "How does it make profit?" I am sometimes asked. This is obviously not the point, and profit can't be the purpose of everything - although there are also personal benefits to me that come from developing critical thinking publicly and in collaboration with others, and yes sometimes these are material (although less and less). The project here is always to generate something that is of social and collective benefit - to create a 'critic', and perhaps, 'critics'.
I acknowledge that this might be futile in some contexts, or misunderstood. For example, the principles of criticism are weird to many of today's artists, who are often deeply involved in self-promotion, the struggle for maximum exposure, and intertwined with systems of exploitation. It is also a small act of resistance in a context where self-interest is viewed as almost the only legitimate grounds for any action - today, for example, we view generosity with suspicion, as though there must be some ulterior motive. 'Charity', and the Latin carus: 'to value highly', seems the opposite of today's thinking. Instead, we undervalue both ourselves and the other, investing in the share market instead of our community.
The limitations of this thinking have been exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as it has punished and continues to punish those who act in authentic solidarity. Being 'open' at the moment means your resources are quickly drained - and I have witnessed the disastrous results of this in friends and colleagues, just as in previous crises. As governments have withdrawn from public life since 1990, the burdens for creating the social 'safety net' fall increasingly on individuals, to help each other get through. To say that there is no future in this is simply to observe the huge fatigue and superhuman personal sacrifice born by certain people today, while those who can keep themselves 'out of trouble' reap the supposed benefits of their lack of entanglement. The limitations of the twin prongs of small government + big tech is that, over time, governments get really bad at intervening in the automated algorithms that are increasingly left to govern. Meanwhile, these algorithms increasingly address us based on criteria that generates banal, culture-less versions of the human being.
If I have not been writing much, it is probably because, like the above, any formulation feels like a divisive accusation, and there is little way to avoid cynicism. 'Making Sense' today seems therefore as much about forgiving (yourself, the other) as it is about putting forward any specific solution that can acknowledge anyone. Like the critic has to step back sometimes and compromise their demand in order to preserve something higher, reading the context today involves engaging deeply on a human level, trying things out, and to avoid punishing each other for a perceived faux pas. In today's world of D.I.Y reality-making, where you can read the stories that fit your identity, seeing the 'other side' is a prerequisite for making sense of anything. It is also harder and harder work.
Lately I have been considering again the famous 70s feminist slogan "The personal is political". On the surface, this has been adopted ad nauseum by broadcasters - where each political sphere is marked by a cast of identities that offer their 1st person narrative accounts and commentary on a given issue. Yet it's worth revisiting the demands of second-wave feminism, which were much more about putting things into the public sphere (as it existed then) previously thought of as 'personal' - domestic labour, for example.
Today, the shift is a subtle one, into "The political is personal": in the age of increasingly-sophisticated content targeting, we are trained not to conceive a politics unless it fulfills the individual demands of the identity to which we feel connected and which affirm us. Far from the demand that affairs deemed 'personal' enter the public sphere, today, something is disqualified from being political unless it touches us emotionally, individually, personally, and addresses us based on our version of who we think we are.
This is a problem that criticism - with its principles of addressing that which is outside our own knowledge and experience - is specifically set up to deal with. If you were ever wondering why I bother writing criticism or advocating it so constantly and so heavily here, it is for the reason that I acknowledge the situation above, I see its endpoint, I 'disagree' with its direction, and I find it also dangerous in the context of similar historical events.
Support your local critic - and enjoy regretting it later!
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