These are anxious questions
September 8, 2023 4:53 PM Subscribe
The most illuminating way to analyze the function of criticism is, first, to situate its authority, or lack thereof, within the politics of the state; second, to relate it to the institutions of cultural production and distribution; third, to orient it to the intellectual practices by which the genre is produced; and fourth, to credit it as the product of the critic’s idiosyncratic mind. To narrate the authority of criticism in all its richness and variety requires starting from the inside of this arrangement, from the critic’s mind, and working our way outward, to the contexts in which criticism circulates. from The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, by Merve Emre
...or as the recent MeFi topic pointed out, you could just pay $50 to buy positive criticism.
While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review.
posted by fairmettle at 8:08 AM on September 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
While most film-PR companies aim to get the attention of critics from top publications, Bunker 15 takes a more bottom-up approach, recruiting obscure, often self-published critics who are nevertheless part of the pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. In another break from standard practice, several critics say, Bunker 15 pays them $50 or more for each review.
posted by fairmettle at 8:08 AM on September 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
this essay is like a summary of my entire 300-level lit theory course minus the breakdowns of discrete critical theories
an entire decade out and the one biggest takeaway that I had from that course is that everything is in discourse with something else. we are social creatures jabbering at one another about one another's jabbers and and it is within these jabberings that crucially important and powerful decisions are brokered and enacted
that last bit, I think, is the thing that's been made the most salient for me lately - that far-reaching potential-laden effects on huge populations of people now and far into the future are being determined within these discourses. the personal is political and everything one says, does, acts, and brings into the world is occurring within this maelstrom of discourses
it makes me want to figure out how to communicate the idea that the throwaway thought in 'Capitalist Realism' about there being no ethical consumption under capitalism. it is and was intended to be a clarion call - that you are not doing enough by simply criticizing text, corporations, etc. instead of the popular takeaway that you can only be apathetic because, after all, if you can't fuel your savior complex for values-based acts each time you make them then why make values-based decisions at all?
it is important to take part in this conversations. it is important to remain critical, to read criticism in context of a history of popular and critical thought. it is important to do that and then to do more because any sufficient understanding of criticism will allow you to see how fucked it all is and that each tiny act of resistance you take within this fucked reality is one that makes it easier for all those who will come after us to live in a better world
posted by paimapi at 2:45 PM on September 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
an entire decade out and the one biggest takeaway that I had from that course is that everything is in discourse with something else. we are social creatures jabbering at one another about one another's jabbers and and it is within these jabberings that crucially important and powerful decisions are brokered and enacted
that last bit, I think, is the thing that's been made the most salient for me lately - that far-reaching potential-laden effects on huge populations of people now and far into the future are being determined within these discourses. the personal is political and everything one says, does, acts, and brings into the world is occurring within this maelstrom of discourses
it makes me want to figure out how to communicate the idea that the throwaway thought in 'Capitalist Realism' about there being no ethical consumption under capitalism. it is and was intended to be a clarion call - that you are not doing enough by simply criticizing text, corporations, etc. instead of the popular takeaway that you can only be apathetic because, after all, if you can't fuel your savior complex for values-based acts each time you make them then why make values-based decisions at all?
it is important to take part in this conversations. it is important to remain critical, to read criticism in context of a history of popular and critical thought. it is important to do that and then to do more because any sufficient understanding of criticism will allow you to see how fucked it all is and that each tiny act of resistance you take within this fucked reality is one that makes it easier for all those who will come after us to live in a better world
posted by paimapi at 2:45 PM on September 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
I’ve been thinking a lot about this piece since I read it. There’s something missing in it, and it took me a while to figure out what. I went and looked back at it this morning, and a throwaway reference to Pierre Bourdieu finally made me see what Emre elided.
She has a vision of reading as a fundamentally solipsistic pursuit, a human being engaging with a single literary work. But that’s not really how anyone reads. We read as members of our communities, nodes in our social networks, parts of society. Our tastes are formed in our interactions with others, seeing and hearing about what others read, and from existing in a society, which has influences ranging from advertisements to school teachers to family, and many, many others.
The obvious place to slot a critic into is just as another influence, but I think that’s not really accurate, because the desire to read criticism is, in and of itself, a formed taste. For some it’s something that’s picked up from family, or university, or just looking through the books section of your newspaper, or clicking on a link that’s shared by a celebrity you follow on social media.
Until fairly recently, criticism functioned mainly as a kind of recommendation service, you’d read a review, and if it sounded like your kind of thing, you’d seek it out. There’s definitely still some of that, but a lot of the best known critics, for instance Emre, write pieces that borrow from academic criticism, a desire to read against the grain, to situate the book within larger structures, such as history, and bring in other books by the same author. Andrea Long Chu’s review of Zadie Smith’s latest book is a good example of that style.
I think everything that Emre says in her piece is true, but I think what gets left unsaid is that it takes place within a specific subset of the reading community, the people who seek out long-form criticism. That’s not to say it’s a niche concern, because the people who are influenced by long-form criticism include those who go on to select books for syllabuses, ensuring that those books keep being read for years, and sometimes decades, and in extremely rare cases centuries.
All that said, probably the most important function of a critic to individual, readers is simply to be interesting, to function as a substitute for a conversation about books, to let readers feel like parts of a wider book community. Readers can have favorite critics who function as parasocial acquaintances, in the manner of podcast hosts. A good critic makes reading a social joy.
posted by Kattullus at 1:40 AM on September 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
She has a vision of reading as a fundamentally solipsistic pursuit, a human being engaging with a single literary work. But that’s not really how anyone reads. We read as members of our communities, nodes in our social networks, parts of society. Our tastes are formed in our interactions with others, seeing and hearing about what others read, and from existing in a society, which has influences ranging from advertisements to school teachers to family, and many, many others.
The obvious place to slot a critic into is just as another influence, but I think that’s not really accurate, because the desire to read criticism is, in and of itself, a formed taste. For some it’s something that’s picked up from family, or university, or just looking through the books section of your newspaper, or clicking on a link that’s shared by a celebrity you follow on social media.
Until fairly recently, criticism functioned mainly as a kind of recommendation service, you’d read a review, and if it sounded like your kind of thing, you’d seek it out. There’s definitely still some of that, but a lot of the best known critics, for instance Emre, write pieces that borrow from academic criticism, a desire to read against the grain, to situate the book within larger structures, such as history, and bring in other books by the same author. Andrea Long Chu’s review of Zadie Smith’s latest book is a good example of that style.
I think everything that Emre says in her piece is true, but I think what gets left unsaid is that it takes place within a specific subset of the reading community, the people who seek out long-form criticism. That’s not to say it’s a niche concern, because the people who are influenced by long-form criticism include those who go on to select books for syllabuses, ensuring that those books keep being read for years, and sometimes decades, and in extremely rare cases centuries.
All that said, probably the most important function of a critic to individual, readers is simply to be interesting, to function as a substitute for a conversation about books, to let readers feel like parts of a wider book community. Readers can have favorite critics who function as parasocial acquaintances, in the manner of podcast hosts. A good critic makes reading a social joy.
posted by Kattullus at 1:40 AM on September 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
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I've been thinking about a little earlier part of the process lately, the editor (rather than critic) as tastemaker and gatekeeper, thanks to diving headlong into 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories which, in addition to being a fun anthology of stories, also has a lot of biographical material about the two primary editors of the Best American Short Stories series, Edward O'Brien and Martha Foley, material which forces you to think about how someone's personality, taste, and, well, personal life, can influence what stories are considered worthy--just a first step in the long process of something becoming canon, something becoming capital-l Literature. Just as one quick example, Foley has a series of family, financial and personal struggles, and her publisher begins to question her taste: "Not only are the stories of mediocre quality, but there is an overwhelming preoccupation with death, old age, senility, disease, alcoholism in the aged." But I think this falls under the category of wit, in terms of the FPP, because when you read their breezy comments on What Ought To Count, you really do find that "charismatic authority" Emre refers to. When O'Brien says, in 1936, "What I do object to is the short story that exists for the sake of the plot [...] merely a grinning and repulsive skeleton without flesh and blood." And that line cracks me up because it turns out a lot of readers really really like and need plots, but it's so strident, and states so clearly a particular viewpoint, that you find yourself agreeing with it a little.
(And of course advocacy is a central part of the editor's job--it's hard to imagine what the first few decades of the twentieth century would have looked like, without Maxwell Perkins propping up his writers.)
But I keep circling this line from the lecture: "Repetition stabilizes discrimination’s claims about what is like and unlike. In turn, the capacity to discriminate trains writers to write themselves into specific traditions and trains critics to apprehend both the tradition and the variations from it." Writers and critics are using the same tools here--writers to figure out what they want to try to do, what they want to continue, or react against; while critics are there to examine it and explain what's going on. Just as an example, Zola said the writer should be "the photographer of phenomena, his observation should be an exact representation of nature," which is the kind of statement you make when you're trying to disentangle yourself from a web of antiquated rhetoric and emerge into the bright light of science, while the next generation will work hard to untangle themselves from that unpleasant surgical clarity; for a writer I think it must be more or less instinctual (or as Bloom would have it, oedipal), while the critic at least has the luxury of looking at the history and thinking it through.
This comment is already long enough, so I won't go into what she says about the democratization of opinions if not, like, criticism per se (and of course calling it "democratization" when you're really talking about feudal social media raises problems of its own), but this piece was so worth reading, and I am really glad to have her brought to my attention!
posted by mittens at 6:44 PM on September 8, 2023 [8 favorites]