The State of Criticism, Part Three (Part Two)
I swear I'm done after this
Recently the website Public Books, which has a policy of commissioning articles and not paying for them, published a series called “Hacking the Culture Industries.” The attempt was, as far as I can tell, to apply a data-driven and quantitative method to interpret some recent examples of the intersection between “traditional” and online media.
I use scare quotes around the word “traditional” because what media can be described as traditional any longer? Novels, TV shows, and even newspapers limp on in the blasted media landscape like so many stragglers, but the way in which they shape and are shaped by social media and the digital landscape more generally makes them hardly “traditional” in any meaningful sense—or, rather, that sobriquet perfectly demonstrates what the editors of these articles are attempting to do, which is limn the relationship between those “traditional” forms and our brave new online methods of creating and consuming media. It’s interactive, get it?
By some dialectical turn, the very use of “traditional” outlines the shape of the present cultural landscape. Whereas at midcentury critics would often write of the “death” of the novel in the face of the rise of films, radio, television, and so on, time and technological process has moved us from “death” to “traditional” or even “legacy” because the continued existence of the novel in the age of digital media (and for that matter television in the age of streaming), however attenuated, has put paid to those midcentury critics wringing of their anxious hands. That does not mean the anxiety is gone, however. Given time, anxiety scales up; anxiety, as flexible as the novel form, transforms itself.
What caught my attention was how at least a few of the contributors—and I won’t be singling any out, you can read for yourself, if you dare—used that oldest and most vexed of literary interpretive techniques, close reading, to make their case. Close reading, the vestigial organ of the New Criticism, refuses to die no matter how hard the commentariat dismisses or ignores everything else the New Critics did and stood for. This makes a certain amount of sense: the New Critical project, as my previous entry made clear, was at best shot through with racist assumptions. But the technique of close reading innovated by the New Critics became too valuable to dismiss along with the rest of their project, and so the bathwater goes while we hold onto the baby.
Except that’s not quite the case. The New Critics didn’t incidentally develop close reading; it was a core component of their attempt to make criticism both scientific and professionally viable. Close reading, in other words, was a technology partaking of a wholesale project that included a host of cultural assumptions about literature and Western culture more broadly, most of which we have discarded today, with good reason.
But to discard the New Critical project wholesale while keeping the technique of close reading severs the two in such an artificial manner that the technique becomes a pointless shadow of itself. To use close reading while trying to quantitatively account for the reaction of twitter users to a television show (to use one example) results in bad close reading and bad—or, perhaps just pointless—data analysis.
The field-striding scholars who followed the New Critics continued to engage something quite like close reading while deliberately suborning it to their own critical projects. To take just two notable examples, the reader-response criticism of Stanley Fish or the poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida both rely on something akin to close reading, but appropriated to their own ends. The Public Books series does not do this, nor (in fairness) does it claim to—its editors’ stated goals are far too airy to be designated a project, but rather more of a gesture. At the same time, that so many of these contributors nonetheless rely on close reading suggests one of the signal problems with today’s criticism: the lack of a clear object, let alone a project.
What we end up with more often than not in these pieces is shoddy close reading—because it has been severed from a sense of an overall project—and what seems like questionable quantitative analysis. Now, my sense of how numbers work has never been the strongest, but I suspect that if one is going to use large sets of data as evidence in a larger argument, the bulk of explication should be towards making sense of that data. What is needed, in short, is a way of close reading data.
That does not mean that the data just sits there, limp. On the contrary, abundant places in this cluster of articles use data to make a point, but is that what criticism is about? Making points? For that matter, how can one close read data? I suspect it can be done, but only by someone with a firm grounding in both interpreting data and using close reading both creatively and accurately. Statistics about how many hours are spent listening to audiobooks might have a certain amount of inherent interest for those of us who care about literature broadly, but again: is that criticism? Or are we flailing about for ways to make our work as critics—gasp—relevant?
I suspect it is the latter, and I also suspect that these contributors don’t consciously pursue relevance, in part because so much of today’s critical enterprise is adrift and desperately searching for something to cling to. Today’s au courant critic pursues relevance unconsciously, as a function of their position in a field in flux, without a clear object, project, or even antagonist in the critical enterprise.
I am fascinated by how many of these authors recourse to close reading when the data proves insufficient in itself to make an argument. Such recourse results from how critics are trained, in part, but also because we don’t know what we’re doing. The market for criticism, however marginal, is nonetheless a market, so market forces apply: if quant is the thing, then we’ll do quant. After all, we have careers to attend to, and Public Books certainly isn’t paying the bills.
But without a larger consciously grasped project, the use of both older and newer techniques—that is, close reading and data analysis—founders. There has been no definitive account of what the digital humanities is or does. There has been no clear articulation of how and (more importantly) why data has utility and value for criticism. It’s a tool we can use, so we do—but nobody has said why, the efforts of Franco Moretti (distant reading, whatever the hell that is) and Ted Underwood (large data sets, ooh!) aside. Lacking a broad merit for data as a critical tool, the recourse to close reading only stands as a kind of rhetorical gesture—and rhetoric, whatever the good folks at 4Cs maintain, isn’t the stuff of computational analysis. (For one thing, analysis of any type is not a discourse.) My point is that the practitioners of this stuff have offered a justification of their own careers, but no wider path through the morass of culture that we all suffer and that frustrates any attempt to articulate a viable and valuable critical project for the 21st century.
With this post, I am ending this series on the state of criticism in the first quarter of the 21st century. Reading over this draft in preparation to publish, I am struck by how peevish I am getting. Certainly I believe in making broad antagonistic points—our criticism suffers today for lack of it—but I believe I have made the case sufficiently, for now at least. In truth, I could keep doing this forever, but at a certain point the returns become increasingly diminishing, and I am already feeling torpor set in. The time has come to shift from an overview of the field to taking up the literary object as the focal point of my critique. In the weeks ahead, I hope to tackle some discrete, bounded questions that bring the focus back to at most one or two literary texts.