The demise of
criticism as the demise of civilization is a weary trope in criticism and it
will always be with us. It is axiomatic
to observe that when old critics bewail the death of criticism or the death of
the arts it is more probable, in our era that is well past the death of Freud,
to assert that the critic bewailing the death of the arts or of criticism is
simply facing down mortality and is handling it however he, she, they wish by projecting
the mortality of the self onto the state of the art or the critical responses
to the art.
In
other words, guys like Norman Lebrecht can be fairly easily read as lamenting
the relevance of criticism to arts reception because they make a point of
saying so in their own words.
https://slippedisc.com/2018/01/how-criticism-has-shrunk-in-eight-years/
https://www.newstatesman.com/music/2010/02/young-music-critics-arts
When the last critic signs off,
it will be curtains for civilisation.
There’s
no good reason to believe that a critic of any kind, who must pronounce a
verdict or observation about a work after the fact, has ever been in a position
to do more than proclaim the death or rebirth of “society”. The West is doomed in any event or destined
for a new and grander utopian era.
Sometimes postmillennialist visions of a world in which the only final
enemy to be conquered is death, paradoxically, see the death of culture all
around them.
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/modern-art-as-suicide-note.html
The
role the critic, whether a journalist or a pastor or a journalist pronouncing
on the-way-we-live-now is always priestly and prophetic.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/why-we-must-criticize-our-culture
…
By explaining how something ought
to have been, the critic draws attention to alternate paths. I don’t mean to
encourage greater negativity in a world already overflowing with it, but there
is a sense in which all criticism is constructive criticism, because all
criticism implies that there are possibilities other than the present
incarnation of whatever is being criticized. At a time when “capitalist
realist” brain poison is so deep that it’s considered radical to even argue for
a single-payer health insurance system (despite the obvious superiority of such
a system), and when so much bullshit passes for wisdom, we need to encourage a
kind of thinking that truly does question everything. It’s the only way we’ll
get nicer neighborhoods, clearer thoughts, and a better world.
…
The
loss of the artist’s capacity to professionally be an artist is a sign of a
crisis.
https://billderesiewicz.com/books/the-death-of-the-artist/
...
The artist as genius was
displaced not by the emerging entrepreneurial model, but by the artist as
professional, a model born in the culture boom that followed World War II. A
host of new institutions — museums, theaters, orchestras, and universities —
gave the creator a safe and steady perch. No longer a wandering bohemian
seeking inspiration, the artist was now a credentialed professional striving,
over many years, books, films, and albums, to perfect their technique.
Typically, a tenured professor, a staff writer, or a musician attached to a
record label, the creator enjoyed commercial success, but strove for critical
acclaim.
...
And
if the “death of the artist” who can monetize works of art is a crisis how much
more, for critics, is the crisis of the relevance and reach of criticism
itself?
Which
might lead people to ask the question of how it is we got to this point and what
the history of criticism as a literary activity has been? Jacques Ellul contended that the emergence of
criticism in all the arts was a relatively recent invention from the
seventeenth into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; that the critic functioned
as a kind of broker for consumers of the arts; and that it was necessarily tied
to the emergence of the bourgeois. All
that he mentioned somewhat in passing in his book The Empire of Non-Sense.
But
there’s a new book out that I might have to get around to, that proposes that
the history of criticism must deal with the historical reality that literary
criticism was a profession before it became an academic discipline and that the
most basic questions about vetting and credentialing have always been part and
parcel of the challenge of the legitimacy of the discipline. More to the point, literary criticism was
journalism for generations before, in the inter-war period of the twentieth
century, it was transformed into a literally scholastic enterprise.
Thus
we get to Merve Emre discussing Professing Criticism:
...
Today, in academe, one looks
around with dismay at what a century of professionalization has wrought—the
mastery, yes, but also the bureaucratic pettiness, the clumsily concealed
resentment, the quickness to take offense, and the piety, oh, the piety! The
contemporary literary scholar, Guillory tells us, is marked by an inflated
sense of the urgency and importance of his work. This professional narcissism
is the flip side of an insecurity about his work’s social value, an anxiety
that scholarly work, no matter how thoughtful, stylish, or genuinely
interesting, has no discernible effect on the political problems that preoccupy
him. On some level, he knows that this “form of political surrogacy,” as
Guillory provocatively describes it, is not enough to achieve the cultural
centrality that great critics of the nineteenth century enjoyed. But that does
not stop him from grasping for it. “The overweening self-regard of the scholar
is the behavioral correlative of an overestimation of the aim of scholarship,
which is in turn an attempt to cope with radical uncertainty about this aim,”
Guillory writes. “If only it were enough to say, with Aristotle, that the
desire to know is all the reason of the scholar’s labors!”
...
Guillory
himself has put it this way in an interview at The Point:
https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/legitimation-crisis/
...
In my book, I make a case for
seeing 21st-century literary criticism as confronted with a “legitimation
crisis.” But this crisis has more to do with our sense of the ultimate aims of
criticism, which have been conceived so universally as political, than with the
actual methods by which we approach works of literature. These methods are much
less different from each other than we think they are. This is why, for me,
it’s rather what scholars have to say about a moment in a novel or a poem that
still has the capacity to surprise; at that scale, interesting things can still
happen.
...
Changes
in journalism have entailed changes in criticism is probably too obvious a
point to even bother making but a professor I studied with once said to “Never
underestimate the obvious”. Andrey Mir’s
book PostJournalism is something I’ve been plodding through and he
repeatedly makes the point that the golden age of journalism was the golden age
of tabloid journalism (in the publishing format, not the more pejorative
definition of “tabloid journalism”)
https://human-as-media.com/the-book-postjournalism/
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/13/news-rage-economy-postjournalism-andrey-mir/
As
tabloid print journalism and magazine journalism declined in the era of internet
advertising new ways to cultivate, court and retain audiences emerged. This has led to a balkanization among readers
looking to mass and broadcast media to re-affirm and confirm their own
confirmation biases across the proverbial right and left and that the problem
is inherent to the nature of the system.
Why
is that relevant to the rise and fall of literary criticism? Guillory’s case is that as the literary criticism
stopped being journalism in the 19th century and became an academic
discipline or “science” in the 20th century literary criticism made
itself irrelevant to mass media and by the late 20th century, I take
it, as mass media changed, the scholarly literary critic became a hothouse
growth. To borrow Paul Hindemith’s acid
remark about music educators producing more music educators ad infinitum,
critics create more critics and that is not necessarily making a world in which
the arts themselves flourish. We come
back around to “the death of the artist”.
Guillory has proposed the canon wars in the early 1990s were wars about
intra-scholastic method and as a purely intra-scholastic set of debates it
further cordoned off academic literary criticism from the mass media
mainstream.
Is
there a “solution”? Guillory seems to
argue that people expect criticism to do what it has never been able to do
rather than to emphasize on critics doing better what critics actually can
do. I admit I am speculating here but
from what I have been reading about the history of critics, criticism, arts
criticism and forms of journalism, a 19th century critic was
probably less a tenured lecturer on literary theory than … well, dare I suggest
Wenatchee The Hatchet as a blog might be closer to what 19th century
critics did than what 21st century literary critics in schools
do? It’s my blog, I suppose, I can so
speculate.
A
critic can’t say much that “changes things”.
Contemporary critics who imagine they have some kind of prophetic role
to play might want to consider that the track record of prophets has rarely
been great. Prophets failed a lot. Jesus’ blessings include a mention that if you
are reviled the actually good prophets were so reviled while the false prophets
were praised. When
Prophecy Failed by Robert Carroll and Prophetic
Conflict by James Crenshaw come to mind as reminders that if an arts
critic or literary critic would self-identify as a prophet challenging society …
expect failure, even abject failure.
But
then literary criticism and arts criticism are not, I hope you’ve worked out by
now, the stuff I think that makes for prophetic activity except by some
providential accident.
No comments:
Post a Comment