Criticism Thrives?

 Vinduet published Ryan Ruby's A Golden Age? and my skepticism flared. I have read The New York Times Book Review is having trouble with its reviewing - too skimpy? Americans have not applied critical thinking to the propaganda of Donald J. Trump or the MAGA Republicans.

Ruby's argument:

On December 1, 2021, I tweeted: «Earlier this year I argued that we are living in a golden age of popular criticism. To prove my point … here’s the tip of the iceberg: my list of 21 of the best essays, reviews, and criticism published in 2021.»

The thread of 21 essays that followed were warmly received, which came as something of a surprise since any optimism about contemporary cultural production tends to be regarded as suspect, even controversial. If you spend any time in the Anglophone public sphere, you’ll know that a deep pessimism is instead the prevailing mood. Whether the issue is the stagnation of fees for freelance writers at rates first offered by magazines a century ago, the decline of the average book advance, the conglomeration of publishing houses, the endangerment of the species of the midlist author, and the role of Amazon as a distributor and publisher; whether it’s the extremely precarious financial position of little magazines, the collapse of book reviews sections in newspapers, and the oceanic supply of free content (i.e. published writing that is not paid for by the consumer), some of which is no longer even being generated by humans; whether it’s the state of the PhD job market, the casualization of academic labor, the drying up of tenure lines, the downsizing or wholesale closure of humanities departments; or whether it’s the cost of living crises and the collapse of economic protections in the societies in which these workers are embedded, this pessimism is not entirely unjustified.

Yet against the vulgar logic that suggests the quality of economic arrangements determines the possibility of quality work, a great deal of evidence points the other way. Quantitatively and qualitatively, critical production is flourishing, despite – and in some cases because of – the dire economic state in and around the Anglo-American critical field, where criticism is being practiced and received as an artform in its own right.

He then defines his terms, notes the critics he thinks are doing good work, and where they publish. There is a bit of knocking of the book review before reaching this point:

The major genres of the golden age of public criticism typically depart from the form of the standard book review in more noticeable ways. For example, in the Contemporary Themed Review or CTR, to reclaim the somewhat disparaging term given to it by the editorial board of n+1 in the Summer of 2021, the book or books under consideration are used as a pretext to engage in critiques or symptomatic readings of contemporary manners, morals, politics, economics, culture, or other social arrangements. The modifier «contemporary» here is somewhat misleading. It must be taken to refer to the particular themes themselves, because the «themed review», defined in the way I have just done, has been a major feature of English criticism since the age of Matthew Arnold; indeed, much like the novel itself, social critique might be considered its traditional remit. A critical essay which substitutes social critique for literary criticism by commenting on fictional scenarios as though they were real would rightly stand accused of instrumentalizing the critical essay for an extra-literary purpose just as surely as the standard book reviewer does, and is best dismissed as a form of punditry, but the best CTRs being written today focus instead on what the formal choices made by the author reveal about the society in which the book itself has been produced and in which it will be consumed.

The other major form of critical essay is a specific variant on the personal essay, which has filiations with «autotheory» and the «memoir of reading». but which I’ll call simply «personal criticism». These are essays in which the critic narrates the experience of reading a particular literary work in the first person as a means of situating their analysis of it. The degree to which the critic as a narrative persona appears in the essay varies widely across the genre – the use of the first-person alone, which has become increasingly acceptable even in academic writing, is not sufficient to distinguish it – but the best of these essays skillfully balance narrative exposition and critical analysis of the text. Well done, the advantages of this form are many: they provide a surrogate for the reader’s experience of the text and make concrete the stakes of reading as an activity. No less importantly, they merge the kinds of pleasure one receives from the interpretation of a text with those of fiction. While this genre emerged before the period I am describing, its recognition as a standard critical form is in my view one of the more exciting developments in the critical field today.

He comes to what seems to two factors improving the critical field:

The overall effect of both the sticks and the carrots has been to drive academics into the critical field in droves, which has been enriched by the methodological sophistication and specialist knowledge accumulated by these scholar-critics. Liberated from the stultifying stylistic protocols and citational practices of the academic paper, the taboos against aesthetic judgment, the need to explicitly foreground rather than simply apply methods of interpretation, and the narrowness of period and other specializations, these scholar-critics are flourishing, especially as they command a much broader audience for their expertise as well as fees for their work, however small. In short, the university’s loss has been the public sphere’s gain. If criticism is indeed returning to a late-19th or early-20th century formation, as a kind of belletristic art aimed at a non-academic reader, it appears to be doing so with as much energy exiting the academy as it did when it was absorbed into the institution in the first place.

The second factor is Twitter. Much maligned by nearly everyone who uses it for other purposes, the platform is indispensable for the transmission of criticism today. Twitter, of course, was founded over a decade before the period I have been discussing, but just as the pandemic accelerated existing conditions in the Anglo-American university, it also drove people across the world online in 2020 to a degree not seen before. On the production or supply side, this had the effect of levelling out certain geographical disparities in industries which are still largely centered out of New York and London, diminishing the value of in-person networking, and opening the available talent pool to critics based elsewhere. On the transmission or demand side, it has facilitated the dissemination of popular criticism to an expanded audience.

I wonder if this is true with the Twitter of Musk. 

Of the first paragraph, I see the sense of what he wrote. I have a passing acquaintance with academic writing, with prose meant to impress a circle of professionals and tied down to citations. Gore Vidal excoriated academic writers thirty, forty years ago for the very bonds Mr. Rudy more fully describes.

Oh, he does write about the Musk Twitter.

The loss of a venue, no matter how storied, is a huge setback to the critical field, but is not one that cannot be remedied by the entrance of other venues into the field. Of more potential consequence to the field as a whole is what occurred a few months earlier, in April 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, since Twitter is the means which connects all of the points of the rectangle, is indeed one of its structural features. As with the owners of the aforementioned magazines, Musk’s incompetence as a businessman and his disruptiveness as a media personality have injured the long-term financial viability of the site in what can only be described as an irrationally expensive act of vandalism. Users and advertisers fled and layoffs of engineers compromised the ability of the algorithm to function, leaving those who remained to find at random the accounts and posts that were once easily accessible to them. While the inner workings of Twitter are always opaque, since its users get the vast majority of information about it from Twitter itself, things seem to have begun to return to status quo ante over the last few months. However, new features and changes to user policy that have been announced erode confidence that it will continue to function in the future as an indispensable feature of the critical field, as it has done in the very recent past. What the effects will be on the maintenance of the connoisseurship I described above is unclear, but I cannot see how it would be good for it.

But his real conclusion is worth considering, that it might survive any turnover of particular forums since the Internet is rather good at replacing places fostering communication.

What distinguishes this group from previous connoisseurships is that they are able to provide feedback, expressions of approval or disapproval, differences of perspective, further context or information. In other words, it enables the connoisseurs of critical artwork to in turn act as critics of it. The bi-directionality and speed of critical discourse inevitably affects – and in my view, improves – critical writing itself, as parasocial acquaintance with the audience and its standards enables critics to anticipate responses to their work and incorporate this feedback into it, increasing complexity. Whereas the crisis of a form like the novel, both as an artform and as an object of study, has much to do with its receding place in the media system as a whole, the critical essay flourishes on a platform like Twitter: it is swiftly consumed and, as its basis is fundamentally discursive judgment, it fits comfortably in a medium that rewards position-taking, epigrammatic writing, and further elaboration in the form of an online «conversation» of potentially global reach. Such audiences are not a given in literary history and their formation as connoisseurships are both products of cultivation and fortuitousness, which is why, no less than the work itself, it is their appearance that is the tell-tale sign of a golden age.

 This bi-directionality seems to me the very best use of the Internet, its purpose of being. I am now rather convinced that the crisis I have read elsewhere about criticism overlooks what is being described in that last paragraph.

My only question - considering what we see in political matters and other cultural matters - will this golden age of criticism become information siloed off from a mass audience?

sch 4/29