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.
