Dialogue Beyond the Chat Room

Through the blurry Italian train window, things seem clearer.

 

This criticism platform is 10 years old - that's 10 years of writing about theatre, mostly shows or people that would otherwise never have been written about. It's not that these shows would be lost to the void: part of theatre's uniqueness is its ephemeral nature, it's elusiveness. If something gets lost, that's ok. Part of the game is letting go. Theatre, by definition, can't be pinned down, can't be commodified, can't be categorised. This is what we love about it.

Yet criticism is the best tool that we have for archiving and preserving some sense of feeling for what a show "was" - and so, the principles by which critical writing is undertaken are incredibly important. Many artist hate critics because they seem to think that the writing defines the show's reception. But it's more that the existence of a critic at a show, and that existence expressed through the written word, signifies and hopefully captures some sense of the show's essence. It communicates this witnessing to a new audience, to be resisted and contested. It's not about offering an authortative view, it's about building a 'forum' of a particular type, understanding that yours is one pair of a sea of eyes, and all you are is a vessel for the functioning of critical thinking inside a given social situation.

In the above paragraph you can already see some of the misconceptions that the critic deals with constantly under neoliberal capitalism. "You think you are an authority? You think you know my work better than I do? You are telling me how to express myself??" The complete lack of "forum" today, and its replacement with the internet chat room of lower-common-denominator commentary - reducing dialogue to a competition for authority and dominance - is one of the reason being a critic seems so antiquated, so romantic. We are trained today to gather information by reading a scatter-gun of opinon, and deciding the truth is somewhere in the middle, ignoring the fact that the entire forum might be completely bogus. This absence of reflection is not new - it's instead a kind of app-driven neo-relativism, that flattens everything out into a meaningleess, banal stream. That's convenient to Big Tech, because it generates a cynicism that's politically manipulable, one that lacks any belief beyond those truths that can be tested through short-term reward and punishment.

What we are NOT trained to do is to engage a perspective on a work and to concretely orient ourselves around that - to agree with it, to oppose it, to love or hate it, to establish our principles. In other words: passionate critical thinking, the type that does not unquestioningly accept reality as it is fed to us, and rather interrogates it with energy and points with enthusiasm to things we love. This is what should always be cultivated - it's imperative in the current context, as well as historically, if any social functioning is to be retained. It is itself an act of resistence.