Link : The Politics of Criticism

An interesting piece here by Mark Bauerline.

Bauerline considers the kinds of books that are generally used in the education of English students.  Not the primary texts mind you, but the secondary sources and the anthologies of articles that are frequently included on reading lists on the basis of their managing to include a number of influential pieces all in one place.

Bauerline is surprised by how many of these secondary sources are not only left-leaning but actually tend to push a very narrow conception of the nature of society (mostly the idea that the society is all about communities and personal identity).  Bauerline then goes on to propose a syllabus that does not come at criticism from a leftist stand-point but rather from a right-wing stand-point.  Telling he cites a work by Leo Stauss, pater familias and guru of the neoconservative movement as well as the teacher of Allan Bloom, writer of the great anti-relativist polemic against higher education The Closing of the American Mind.

In many ways, Bauerline's complaints are the stuff you'll hear from any disgruntled right-winger; blah blah liberal conspiracy, blah blah indoctrination.  However, while the article is undeniably calling for the insertion of right-wing critical idioms to rival left-wing ones, there is an interesting germ of truth here and the critical toolbox.

In attempting to write a critical review, it is absolutely unavoidable that you'll be imposing upon someone else's work a set of ideas and assumptions that are largely your own.  For example, in judging a writer's skill at characterisation you are comparing his characters to your model of folk psychology and how people might realistically act in certain situations.  Indeed, in extreme cases you might even dislike a book's moral tone simply because it fails to sit well with your own theoretical assumptions about how the world ought to work.

In order to get away from all criticism devolving into rather tiresome and jargon-heavy essays that boil down to "I disagree with the ideas in this book" postmodernism and critical theory has taken to being quite forth-right in which theories they use to look at particular works.  In general this tends to result in people giving Marxist or Freudian interpretations of books and films.  My favourite example of this was Nigel Kneale's introduction to a collection of M.R. James short stories that interpreted the Victorian ghost stories in terms of the authors own repressed homosexuality, the most obvious example of which being "Whistle and I'll come to you my lad".

What is interesting is that Psychoanalysis and, to a lesser extent, Marxism are theories that are totally past their sell-by date in terms of what they set out to do.  The works of Marx are hopeless as works of sociology or political economy and the works of Freud are hopeless as works of psychology.  What remains of these works have been so added to and modified by generations of disciples and students that the original Marxian and Freudian ideas are almost undetectable in the modern incarnations of the theory... and yet critics are quick to talk of the Id and everyone likes to talk about people being latent homosexuals despite the fact that human sexuality does not fit into the simplistic acceptance/denial dichotomy of the Freudian model.

In essence, what I am saying is that certain narratives have stuck around because they make for good stories and these narratives tend to be more left-wing than anything else.  Indeed, when you think about it the right has two main social narratives; firstly that certain people are better disposed to ruling the nation and that everyone else should just accept this and be happy.  Secondly, everyone has an equal chance of becoming rich and if you're not rich it's because you're not trying hard enough.  there are variations on both of these themes but ultimately, these are the stories the right has to tell.

The left, on the other hand, has stories of great revolutions, of moral superiority being connected to hardship and of people coming together to make a better world.  The British Conservative party have been looking for a narrative for the best part of 15 years now and after toying with the idea of family values ("some people know better than you, you should listen to them") and crude nationalism ("Everyone has an equal chance of being rich but our society cheats to make it easier for foreigners") before settling on a bastardised version of a left wing environmentalist one.

This leads me to make a few conclusions about the politics of criticism :

1. It's vital for people to be honest about what perspective they're coming from - the best reviewers show their work and allow you to follow a train of thought and disembark whenever you feel that your opinions and those of the reviewer are too far apart for the review to be helpful to you.
2. The right doesn't have thinkers capable of operating in the layers between talk radio and high academia - The right speaks to the mob and the elite but everyone in the middle is left uninspired and contemptuous.  Criticism occupies this intellectual middle-ground.
3. Truth does not enter into criticism as much as it should - Most criticism operates in terms of whether or not something is interesting or easily explained, the factual basis of the theory fueling the criticism has little to do with anything.  This is true even in the world of SF criticism despite science fiction arguably having a pro-science and pro-truth standpoint.

An interesting article.

Comments

[Serdar]

When it comes to criticism, the best critics seem to be the ones who are also the best observers of human behavior -- not folks who simply fall back in theorizing that isn't connected with or supported by anything in real life.

A favorite example of this for me was Roger Ebert's rejection of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet". Ebert was deeply upset with the film because it contained scenes of great and stark emotional power, and surrounded that material was what amounted to a jokey satire on small-town American life. It wasn't the juxtaposition that offended him, but what to Ebert felt like the sneaky excuses used to justify it all: "I didn't need the director prancing on in top hat and tails every ten minutes, whispering that it was all in fun." He was also alarmed that while everyone else in the critical world was turning cartwheels over the film, they were avoiding any discussion of what it was really about, or whether it was a bad idea and in bad taste, plain and simple, for Lynch to make the movie the way he did.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Lynch is kind of the critic's acid test. It's not as willfully obscure as some of Lynch's other films and it is probably as close as Lynch's films come to having a coherent subtext.

Ebert's an interesting critic as despite being able to mix it up with even the most complex of art house films, he's a guy who keeps his feet planted firmly on the ground. Popular without populism.

[Serdar]

Exactly why I always liked him -- he's comfortable with just about any kind of movie, and it's open attitude towards those things that helped allow me to be a bit more like that.