The Absence of Criticism
The blessings of the internet are many, the accompanying curses greater still. As I often repeat, somewhat hyperbolically, the internet was a mistake and has made us worse people.
A phenomenon I have witnessed in increasing frequency is an attempted critic who does not critique, but instead simply fantasizes about alternative forms of whatever thing they are attempting to critique. I believe this phenomenon is exacerbated by the internet’s egalitarian structure which tends to make us all think we have something worth saying at any given time (yes, I am aware of the irony, and I trust you all to tell me in the comments when I stop having things worth saying).
I noticed this most recently regarding an excellent article by my friend John Ehrett, criticizing both the embrace of “vitalism” on the New Right and those who have attempted to critique that embrace. The critics of vitalism, Ehrett argues, have simply not understood its appeal, and have thus failed to wrestle with it appropriately, in the literary form it demands. His essay is compelling and skillfully interweaves arguments from literature and politics, and has sparked many responses. It’s well worth a read if you’ve missed it thus far.
Unfortunately, many of Ehrett’s own critics repeated these named errors in responding to his piece. Many of the responses I saw simply missed the point of his argument, and chose to posit alternative articles that Ehrett could have written and questions he could have addressed, had he been so inclined. Now, these questions might be worthy of consideration, but that Ehrett did not directly grapple with them in this specific piece is not necessarily a mark against him, unless the critic can carefully show how the article and the argument could be improved by considering them.
This swing-and-a-miss sort of approach is common in both casual discourse and published writing. I see many examples of attempted criticisms of scholarship, arguments, art, and literature that fail to grapple with the thing on its own terms. Instead, the author merely engages in a sort of fan-fiction: I don’t like how it is, and wouldn’t it be nice if it were this way instead? Or at times, the attempted critic will state something as if it stands as a condemnation on its own, without telling me why I should be concerned, upset, bothered, etc. Simple statements take the place of arguments, gestures and shrugs and hints take the place of persuasion.
In my mind, this comes from a strong failure of imagination. The attempted critic is so fixated on how the thing under consideration could have been better, according to whatever standard they adopted before they consumed the thing under consideration, that the merits of the thing itself are cast aside. But this seems to me to miss the point of the practice of critique; it does me little good to criticize Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy for failing to provide the moral heft of a philosophical treatise, or to criticize a treatise for failing to have sufficiently compelling characters and plot points. It doesn’t help anyone if I criticize Aristotle’s Ethics for failing to outline a systematic politics, or Rawls’ Theory of Justice for failing to present a thorough aesthetic theory. To complain on these grounds is to have missed the point.
Another recent example of this: Martin McDonagh’s multi-Oscar-nominated film Banshees of Inisherin was a hit with me and some people like me, but drew some criticism of McDonagh’s “appropriation” of “Irishness” without an accompanying seriousness in his efforts to make art with serious things to say about Ireland and Irishness. But what if “making art with serious things to say about Ireland and Irishness” wasn’t the point? What if McDonagh wanted to tell a story about friendship, banal breakups, delusions of grandeur, and the heartbreak of forsaken potential, and decided a fictional Irish island provided a good setting for such a story? What if McDonagh is under no obligation to grapple with his place in the Irish literary tradition, or serious questions about Irish culture and history? What if he just wants to write good stories?
McDonagh’s critic in Slate quotes from an older review of one of McDonagh’s stage plays that commits a similar error:
“When The Lieutenant of Inishmore, an ultraviolent black farce about a republican terrorist avenging his dead cat, opened in London’s Royal Court in 2001, a critic for the Irish Times wrote that the play’s anger about paramilitary violence had ‘blinded its author so that the caricatures he has created in place of characters do not have even the semblance of a resemblance either to Aran islanders or to the members of the INLA—or even most other paramilitaries. Every caricature is dim-witted to the point of retardation, and violence seems endemic in all souls.’”
When I read the line “violence seems endemic in all souls,” I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of my university, and I loudly yelled to myself “THAT’S THE POINT!” Or, at least, that’s the point of McDonagh’s writing as I take it. Put simply, McDonagh and Ehrett and writers and artists of all types need better critics.
I have had the opportunity to teach a course called “Western Culture: Political, Economic, and Social Thought” several times in the past years (we sometimes affectionately refer to it by the acronym “PEST”). In a university setting, having a course specifically on “western culture” is sure to attract attention. Because of this, I make an effort to begin each semester with a reflection on why studying the west is so useful and important. We work through the standard beats, that we are products of a tradition whether we recognize it or not, that as westerners or people living in the west that studying the west will aid in our own self-understanding, etc.
But one of the primary reasons I think this sort of study is useful is so that students may become better critics. A true critic is someone who understands the thing under consideration on its own terms and is able to carefully and seriously assess both its merits and its failings. A good art critic ought to be able to tell me where a particular artist excels, and perhaps also where she falls short. A good movie critic ought to be able to understand the work the director and writer/s were attempting and assess it for what it is, not what the critic hopes it would be.
In this light, the study of “Western Culture” can certainly aid students in being better critics. Rather than hand-waving away an entire tradition as outdated, bigoted, X-Phobic, and more, the students will hopefully be equipped to fairly assess the merits and the failings within the tradition, within specific authors, and within specific texts. I hope that students leaving that course will be better equipped to assess these texts on their own terms, rather than criticizing Plato for failing to be Judith Butler, or Augustine for failing to be Foucault. Rather than complaining that a certain essay fails to make a different argument than it makes, assess the strength of the argument. Rather than complaining that a film fails to communicate the message you hoped it would, assess the message it does communicate. Doing so effectively is an essential step on the road to explaining how, if at all, the thing you are attempting to critique could be improved.