Mar 23, 2021 09:21 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 24, 2021 04:27 PM by C C.)
Cynical Sindee: The old template is still here: In that age when the standards of religious-grounded traditionalism still held sway, art could be contingently praised or condemned according to the former's preconceptions, morals, and cognitive filters (dogmas and beliefs).
Secular leftist politics (romping alongside generic, elitist value assessment) has simply replaced that with its own pseudoscience background theories and conspiracies of "what's going on" (leftangelicalism). As we see here, even the advocate of "postcritique" -- in the course of waxing about the joy of being liberated from snobbery, moralitis, and agenda -- then switches to desiring postcritique to be respected as either being sympathetic to or advancing the fashionable nonsense it is accused of divorcing itself from.
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https://thepointmag.com/criticism/practi...wledgment/
EXCERPTS: . . . Some of them associated their affinity for street art [...] with accessibility ... What kind of community does this type of art foster, they wondered, as opposed to art behind security checkpoints, glass doors and admission fees? An inclusive one, somebody suggested. For one student, a woman of color from a lower-middle-class family who often felt that the theater and the ballet had not been designed (or priced) with her in mind, the mural of linked hands offset by a rainbow of colors told her, you are welcome; you contribute.
[...] The modus operandi of my class was what has become known as “postcritique.” Understanding postcritique begins with understanding what has been the dominant mode of interpretation in literary studies for many decades: critique. Critique involves giving an account of a text that is not the account the text would give of itself. The novel or story or poem, from this perspective, is never really about what it says it’s about. Nor is it, often, about what a non-academic reader would think it’s about. Only the critic, trained in theoretical inquiry, can unmask the social hierarchies latent in the artwork. That female character, a practitioner of critique might argue, can’t see that she is imprisoned within, not breaking free from, patriarchal structures. In turn, the reader can’t see that by identifying with this character, he is reinforcing rather than opposing these structures.
Critique has always been seen as more than a method of interpretation. It is also, for many, an important political project that is responsible for the advancement of feminism, anticapitalism, posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical race studies, among much else. Scholars attached to critique are often suspicious of postcritique because they see it as antithetical to their political aims. To focus on ordinary or “naïve” reactions to works of art is, for them, [b]to separate criticism from its political responsibility. In fact, if you insist that works of art reveal things to us, that everyday experiences are worth taking seriously, and that attending to our aesthetic attachments can enrich our scholarly interpretations, then you may be, according to practitioners of critique, reactionary.
But postcritique, as the students in my class learned, doesn’t mean turning away from politics. In The Limits of Critique (2015), the book credited with setting postcritique’s agenda, Rita Felski asks us to “place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” Reflecting on what a text unfurls could mean the political or ideological commitments the text reveals to us, for example. Far from being apolitical, postcritique makes it possible to examine not only how art reveals the ties that bind us to old hierarchies, but also how art can facilitate the building of new ties.
We can learn a lot about why literature matters, I think, by attending to fictional characters’ affective attachments, their nonverbal modes of expression and how they dispose themselves to other characters. When I arrived at graduate school, however, my interest in such themes wasn’t encouraged. “Remember characters aren’t real people,” a professor said in response to a paper idea. “Characters are really only read as historical devices, narrative actants, and psychological symptoms,” another offered. I started to feel as if my concerns weren’t serious enough for a dissertation. Then I met Rita Felski, who would become my dissertation adviser.
[...] There is no denying that institutional austerity in academia has sharpened the competition for jobs and resources, and this precarity is sometimes blamed for the tone of derision that dominates the debate over postcritique. But an exclusive focus on material conditions can also be a way of denying responsibility for what we do still control. As journal editors, conference organizers, university press reviewers and dissertation committee members, the power to decide what counts as a contribution, what counts as furthering the discipline and what counts as valuable engagement with each other’s scholarship remains in our own hands.
This means that it matters when we publish and celebrate essays that make no attempt to give a fair account of the author’s argument, such as by taking another’s words out of context and making assumptions about the intentions behind them. It sends the message that it is acceptable to superficially engage with a peer’s work for the sake of elevating your own. It also suggests that the goal of criticism is to perpetuate a cycle of destruction, that it’s a game with winners and losers (the most destructive response “wins”) rather than shared inquiry.
It also matters when tenured scholars assume that precarious ones care only about material conditions. “I’ve been very heartened by the responses from graduate students and assistant professors,” Felski wrote in 2017 in a response to a forum on The Limits of Critique. “Some of these scholars are already doing what I gesture toward in the book’s final pages: trying out different vocabularies and experimenting with other ways of reading and writing.”
I’m one of these graduate students. I have also witnessed how such methods enrich students’ classroom experiences. Yet I am repeatedly told—especially by those safe within the comforts of tenure—that identifying problems with how we conduct criticism means I must be disinvested from more important political and institutional battles.
What if the attitudinal problems within our discipline are part of what prevents us from collectively combatting those material conditions? Those who vilify critics of critique, after all, are not bravely repelling outsiders who threaten to undermine the authority of literary studies; they are fighting against practitioners and colleagues. Their dismissiveness takes us back to the goals of postcritique.
What might literary studies gain if we allow ourselves to be moved not just by a text but also by another person’s interpretation of it? How might exhibiting responsiveness and receptivity to each other’s work strengthen the rigor and power of the arguments against a position, and put an end to the cycle of destruction? How might we connect our individual attachments in order to collectively show why our discipline matters? (MORE - details)
RELATED: The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus
Secular leftist politics (romping alongside generic, elitist value assessment) has simply replaced that with its own pseudoscience background theories and conspiracies of "what's going on" (leftangelicalism). As we see here, even the advocate of "postcritique" -- in the course of waxing about the joy of being liberated from snobbery, moralitis, and agenda -- then switches to desiring postcritique to be respected as either being sympathetic to or advancing the fashionable nonsense it is accused of divorcing itself from.
- - - - - -
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/practi...wledgment/
EXCERPTS: . . . Some of them associated their affinity for street art [...] with accessibility ... What kind of community does this type of art foster, they wondered, as opposed to art behind security checkpoints, glass doors and admission fees? An inclusive one, somebody suggested. For one student, a woman of color from a lower-middle-class family who often felt that the theater and the ballet had not been designed (or priced) with her in mind, the mural of linked hands offset by a rainbow of colors told her, you are welcome; you contribute.
[...] The modus operandi of my class was what has become known as “postcritique.” Understanding postcritique begins with understanding what has been the dominant mode of interpretation in literary studies for many decades: critique. Critique involves giving an account of a text that is not the account the text would give of itself. The novel or story or poem, from this perspective, is never really about what it says it’s about. Nor is it, often, about what a non-academic reader would think it’s about. Only the critic, trained in theoretical inquiry, can unmask the social hierarchies latent in the artwork. That female character, a practitioner of critique might argue, can’t see that she is imprisoned within, not breaking free from, patriarchal structures. In turn, the reader can’t see that by identifying with this character, he is reinforcing rather than opposing these structures.
Critique has always been seen as more than a method of interpretation. It is also, for many, an important political project that is responsible for the advancement of feminism, anticapitalism, posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical race studies, among much else. Scholars attached to critique are often suspicious of postcritique because they see it as antithetical to their political aims. To focus on ordinary or “naïve” reactions to works of art is, for them, [b]to separate criticism from its political responsibility. In fact, if you insist that works of art reveal things to us, that everyday experiences are worth taking seriously, and that attending to our aesthetic attachments can enrich our scholarly interpretations, then you may be, according to practitioners of critique, reactionary.
But postcritique, as the students in my class learned, doesn’t mean turning away from politics. In The Limits of Critique (2015), the book credited with setting postcritique’s agenda, Rita Felski asks us to “place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” Reflecting on what a text unfurls could mean the political or ideological commitments the text reveals to us, for example. Far from being apolitical, postcritique makes it possible to examine not only how art reveals the ties that bind us to old hierarchies, but also how art can facilitate the building of new ties.
We can learn a lot about why literature matters, I think, by attending to fictional characters’ affective attachments, their nonverbal modes of expression and how they dispose themselves to other characters. When I arrived at graduate school, however, my interest in such themes wasn’t encouraged. “Remember characters aren’t real people,” a professor said in response to a paper idea. “Characters are really only read as historical devices, narrative actants, and psychological symptoms,” another offered. I started to feel as if my concerns weren’t serious enough for a dissertation. Then I met Rita Felski, who would become my dissertation adviser.
[...] There is no denying that institutional austerity in academia has sharpened the competition for jobs and resources, and this precarity is sometimes blamed for the tone of derision that dominates the debate over postcritique. But an exclusive focus on material conditions can also be a way of denying responsibility for what we do still control. As journal editors, conference organizers, university press reviewers and dissertation committee members, the power to decide what counts as a contribution, what counts as furthering the discipline and what counts as valuable engagement with each other’s scholarship remains in our own hands.
This means that it matters when we publish and celebrate essays that make no attempt to give a fair account of the author’s argument, such as by taking another’s words out of context and making assumptions about the intentions behind them. It sends the message that it is acceptable to superficially engage with a peer’s work for the sake of elevating your own. It also suggests that the goal of criticism is to perpetuate a cycle of destruction, that it’s a game with winners and losers (the most destructive response “wins”) rather than shared inquiry.
It also matters when tenured scholars assume that precarious ones care only about material conditions. “I’ve been very heartened by the responses from graduate students and assistant professors,” Felski wrote in 2017 in a response to a forum on The Limits of Critique. “Some of these scholars are already doing what I gesture toward in the book’s final pages: trying out different vocabularies and experimenting with other ways of reading and writing.”
I’m one of these graduate students. I have also witnessed how such methods enrich students’ classroom experiences. Yet I am repeatedly told—especially by those safe within the comforts of tenure—that identifying problems with how we conduct criticism means I must be disinvested from more important political and institutional battles.
What if the attitudinal problems within our discipline are part of what prevents us from collectively combatting those material conditions? Those who vilify critics of critique, after all, are not bravely repelling outsiders who threaten to undermine the authority of literary studies; they are fighting against practitioners and colleagues. Their dismissiveness takes us back to the goals of postcritique.
What might literary studies gain if we allow ourselves to be moved not just by a text but also by another person’s interpretation of it? How might exhibiting responsiveness and receptivity to each other’s work strengthen the rigor and power of the arguments against a position, and put an end to the cycle of destruction? How might we connect our individual attachments in order to collectively show why our discipline matters? (MORE - details)
RELATED: The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus