The State of Criticism, Part Two
The deracinated public square, the little magazine, and giving up (it's fun!)
The great virtue of polemic—its lack of precision—can also be its undoing. In order to take on the mantle of a prophet who lacks the sanction of a god (a fair description of the polemicist), one must eschew nuance and even, at times, citation in favor of an argument so broad that it threatens to break apart even as its strength shines forth in its diagnostic potency.
Handled poorly, a polemic adds up to nothing more than screed. This was the road I found myself going down as I turned to the second part of my consideration of the state of criticism: finding myself admiring of and annoyed by a great deal of what comes out of today’s little magazines, I lined up my critical barbs like so many toy soldiers, ready to do battle on the basement carpet.
Abandoning that approach might be, in a bit of self-flattery, evidence of maturity and critical acumen, but the truth is I was bored by the approach I was taking. What was the purpose of finding examples of writing that missed the mark in n+1, The Drift, The Baffler, Dissent, LARB, and so forth, as though that proved something? Peruse old issues of Partisan Review or the early years of the NYRB, and undoubtedly you’ll find plenty of weak arguments and precious posturing. Suggesting that something particularly insipid was afoot in the criticism found in the pages of today’s little mags smacked of historical exceptionalism. I couldn’t do it. Kids these days vs. it was better back then; it doesn’t matter, it’s a mug’s game.
But, in a sense, I am trading one form of polemic for another: instead of marshaling a host of examples of “bad” writing from latter-day critical organs, I am opting to achieve something similar through a wholly citation-less approach. I will not be pointing out a sole example or quoting from anyone else; I will, instead, trust that I am capturing the tenor of the times sufficiently enough that the reader of these publications will instantly recognize, if not necessarily agree with, my contention.
And that contention is this: if our current criticism beyond academia is pale and bloodless, it is because we live in a moment where the public square is particularly deracinated.
On the face of it, this assertion is preposterous. There are more channels and outlets than ever before for subjecting an audience to one’s ideas: little mags, blogs, social media, YouTube, podcasts, probably more I’m unaware of. (And if you don’t like what you see, start your own. It’s easier than ever!) Content is being pumped out at a rate and in a variety that would make the average 1950s intellectual seize up in sublime astonishment. But this very variety is what leaves me cold, and not because the quality of criticism has gone down. No, I will give the champions of this moment their due when they call it “the new golden age of criticism” and suchlike: there probably is more quality work out there right now than ever before. Quality is not the issue, but rather that the sheer volume of content is so ungraspable that the increase in critical quality functionally doesn’t matter; it renders that which is quality virtually pointless.
If the public square of the 1950s, with its handful of television networks and far fewer small magazines, was deracinated by the narrowness of acceptable avenues of inquiry and a deeply anti-intellectual postwar climate, then our public square is deracinated by the sheer overwhelming amount of bullshit piled up day in, day out. The internet’s responsibility for radically reshaping the media landscape explains this, in part—but also consider the total disembowelment of local media engendered by the rise of (ugh) Facebook.
The disinfo activists have spilled virtual ink like virtual blood in decrying the rise of fake news before, and after, Trump seized on the term for his own amusingly pernicious ends. But that is not what I’m talking about—it’s a kind of facet of what I’m pointing towards, but almost immaterially so, because I’m talking about criticism, which has never really been the stuff of popular concern.
What none of the emergent little mags have figured out is how to effectively separate themselves from this onslaught of discourse. Partisan Review could do it in the 1950s because they operated in a different media landscape. Today’s little mags can’t, because they’re powerless against the onslaught while remaining hopelessly dependent on it. That’s an impossible situation, in a world-historical sense, and that so much quality work comes out regardless is a kind of triumph. But it does not change the reality of the deracinated public square. In fact, despite its higher aims, all this work participates in that deracination. It cannot do anything but participate, and yet, I maintain, criticism must go on all the same. (More about that in later installments.)
My original approach was to frame this reality in terms of authority—without authority, the critic’s pronouncements are meaningless, at least within the economy of publication. (Yes, logically, that means that this very project is meaningless, and I accept that gladly.) I intended to shape my account of the contemporary flourishing of the little magazine in terms of the loss of academic authority, a byproduct of the hollowing out of the university, a Quixotic attempt to establish a separate system of authority. Countless examples of this maneuvering abound, and I will not point to a single one, because the truth is that something we all know: it does not matter. A new publication emerges proclaiming itself different than the last five like it, yet the bylines are familiar. Despite my naysaying, I am truly glad that these publications exist, if for no other reason than it gives me something to read on Sunday afternoons.
That seems a deadeningly pessimistic way to conclude this installment, and yet I maintain that criticism must go on all the same for the simple reason that we are in a crisis of authority. There is no way around it. No number of new little magazines will change that reality, but I would never suggest that we should look around, admit it, and give up the game. The best advice I would give to a new little magazine would be this: you will fail to keep yourself apart from the crowd, but you need to pretend nonetheless that you are doing something different, and then you need to try to do something different even though you will likely achieve only partial success at best. Contemporary criticism will fail, it cannot not fail, but it doesn’t have to be boring. Liveliness won’t save us, but we should never sacrifice it, even when all the odds are against us.