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Critical Jam #12: An Unflinching Look
Welcome to the final Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
This series began by positing itself as “an attempt to take an unflinching look at what we do,” so it is only fitting that it ends with an unflinching look at what I have done with it across the last year.
As an artist--and really, as a thinker--I have generally been interested in art as a method of self-discovery. My fictional work and my criticism, at their best, have both invariably revealed fears, joys, concerns, and beliefs that I was hiding from myself. Criticism is partially enthralling as it seeks to unearth truths and solve mysteries: What does this text mean? Why does it mean this? How did it mean this even if that wasn’t its intent? I use these questions to understand the world, myself, and texts in similar fashions. So it follows that occasionally it becomes necessary to turn my sights on my own criticism and learn.
Though I appear firm and certain on this particular angle in the column’s inception, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, the implication of criticism as its own artistic endeavor that runs through the text is not a belief I realized I had until the piece itself was written. This is perhaps most evident in the fact that I never actually say so. I get as far as the idea of criticism as existing its own end, but I don’t take this all the way to its obvious conclusion: that I view this work as art, with its own aesthetics and performances. It’s not a massive loss, but at the same time, the piece would have been stronger if I’d known exactly where I was arguing from. I wasn’t quite sharp enough to see what I was doing at that point. I couldn’t See that in myself, just yet.
The thread continues in the fourth installment, “On True Criticism,” in which I very uncharacteristically hedge about the notion of criticism as art--a tepid ‘could’ instead of strong ‘is’--but it wasn’t until two months ago, in the tenth piece “We Must Be Better,” that I was able to stand firm about this idea. Amazingly, it happens so quickly, in a piece that focuses more on the political responsibilities of criticism than the nature of criticism itself, that if you blink may miss it: “[...] as much as criticism is art,” I say, “–often some mystifying combination of eloquence, delicacy, and brutality–it is also, as you know, work.” It took nine months (and nine pieces!) for the strength of my rhetoric to evolve from subtextual premise to frank statement.
I’m particularly satisfied that this formal declaration snuck its way into “We Must Be Better,” as one of my main critiques of the column is the seemingly wide gulf between my discussions of the form as art versus as a political tool. If criticism is art and art is politics and criticism is politics, then my attempts at bringing these elements together as a critic of criticism especially could have been more rigorous. A third of the pieces address criticism as an interrogation of systemic injustice--but they seem more externally responsive than cohesive to the larger body of work. That is, it is evident to me that I have written them in response to particular emotions or events rather than, as I have done in the other set of pieces, simply exploring an idea that is interesting to me. There’s a sense of urgency or despair that is fitting to the material, but not quite fitting with the other eight texts.
It may be that this is just the reality of criticism involving systemic injustice. These are matters of life and death, so their writings will inevitably be fraught with emotion. But I remain generally dissatisfied by how lacklustre some of this work feels, rhetorically speaking. “All Rhetoric Matters,” does not feel particularly moving because it is basic. The first portion--All Lives Matter and Not All Men as a critical unit--is passingly interesting as I don’t think I have seen it elsewhere, but on the whole, the piece didn’t bring me anywhere new. Instead, it just saw me repeating the same things I’ve said on Twitter in a more cohesive fashion. It is nice that I have written this all together in one place, but it is more akin to an FAQ response than robust criticism that I feel truly proud of. This is in part because I am constantly having to repeat myself on this score and am therefore bored. This is also in part because the discourse surrounding marginalized issues is so low that it’s impossible to get into, say, the deeper possible emotional significance of a numerical value. But some of it must also be my own shortcomings.
Looking over many of these pieces, they feel necessary but neither inspiring nor critically fascinating. There’s no swagger. I didn’t stunt. I didn’t dance. I can push myself harder, even if what surrounds continues to try to drag me to their level. I could have done so. I should have.
There are angles available to me that I could have taken more time to parse, angles that touch upon art, injustice, and criticism all at once. For example, I mention “sovereignty” in what is likely the best of my pieces on injustice within this series, “It’s About Ethics in Marginalized Criticism.” Here, at least, I have done well to meticulously walk down several of the ethical quandaries of criticism involving a fellow marginalized person and, not unlike this piece, to criticize my own criticism. But sovereignty is an idea that crops up in the work somewhat unexpectedly. It’s an idea I remember floating at the time of writing, but never really digging into. A quick Command-F reveals that the notion of sovereignty within marginalized politics and issues appears five times within the essay. But at no point do I actually draw out the idea of sovereignty, what associations that word has, and how it has functioned politically. Instead of making the same old furious and basic motions, I could have completed a critical assessment of sovereignty and marginalized people/critics as nations living within nation-states. I have to demand more of myself. I read most of these overtly political selections and feel not just exhaustion but also regret about my performance as an artist. I can barely look at “A Right to be Hostile in 2016.” Despite their being the most important pieces, they also feel the weakest. It’s disappointing that, with the stakes as high as they are, I did not also have it in me to make something beautiful. It’s disappointing--but I suppose it also does make sense.
By now it is quite evident that I spend a lot of time asking for higher performance from myself--so the discovery of calm and optimism as a theme in this column has been pleasant. Much of the work comes from a place of warmth, an attempt to tell my peers that they’re working very hard, that they’re doing just fine where they are. Of course, I can See now that I was only telling myself. I view myself as a pessimist/realist, but this column seems to land me firmly on the optimist/idealist spectrum, which is very peculiar. After defining criticism as art, I go on to defend 10/10 reviews, welcome anyone and everyone into the critical field, celebrate critical positivity in the face of pressures to be negative, and present conflicts of interest as a weak challenge to our prowess. It’s a very unexpectedly “believe in me who believes in you” line of criticism and not too different, actually, from a line of criticism that treats the work as sacred, and therefore critics (artists!) as such.
My favorite piece, both in this vein and overall, must be “Psalm for the Newly Anointed.” In truth, it feels like the natural conclusion for the column. My writing on scanlations, which follows it, was interesting and asked a great many questions--but I did not feel that it truly belonged with the rest of the work, much in the same way that the more political pieces felt discordant. Perhaps because there were too many questions and not enough confidence. Or maybe simply because the subject was manga, rather than Western comics. As a whole, this column seems to suffer on the fronts of tone and pacing. But the psalm!
I cannot deny feeling that the psalm is almost perfect. I regret, perhaps, linking to some old writing about postmodernism that I now think could have stood to be more rigorous and precise, but otherwise the piece seems quite strong. What I like most is that it pulls on themes of previous pieces as well as itself--criticism as a grassroots endeavor, Seeing, the creation of a critical canon by citation of a peer. But it takes all of that and shapes them into a narrative that first, is consideration of capitalist and postmodernist hierarchies, and then evolves into one of the spirit, commenting even on the function of the spirit itself. The language is good, the frameworks are good, but what is really good is that this, more than anything, is representative of how I think and feel about criticism. There’s an element of spirit and holiness that comes into the work--evidenced by the evocation of religious language in the piece, certainly, but also scattered in the language I have chosen to use here.
The connection between the coldness of the work and the warmth of its love, even in anguish, is the key to everything that I do. I show affection to myself and to others by criticizing. I see better for myself, better for us all. I expect more. I insist, truly, on being my own god.
A year on, I can largely look on these works without despair. This may change in two years or three, but for now, the work still feels good. I’d hoped, I think, to spark conversation among my peers and was only successful once or twice--but still, what little I’ve done here has been an interesting experiment and largely worth it, if only for creating one piece that I love deeply. Critical Jam ends here, but the need for self-improvement and self-examination from myself and my peers and my field does not.
Thanks for coming.
I appreciated all of you and all of this.
I’m sure I’ll see you again very soon.
Previous: What We Talk About When We Talk About Scanlations
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to click here and buy me a coffee or follow me on Twitter at @elevenafter.
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Critical Jam #11: What We Talk About When We Talk About Scanlations
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I don’t write about unlicensed Japanese comics. I’d like to. There are some incredible BL cartoonists and books that I’d like to tell you about, for example, but the thing is: no English-language publishers have picked them up for translation, so as far as the English-language critical world is concerned--they don’t exist.
I mean, they do, obviously, but then we get to the tougher questions from readers, namely: “Oh cool, where do I read it?”
One answer is “pick the book up in Japanese.” I do this with some frequency, but this is more practical an answer for me than a large swath of manga fans, as (1) I live in a city with Japanese booksellers--yes, Amazon delivers almost everywhere, but their selection of Japanese titles is much narrower than what’s available in a full fledged bookstore--and (2) I can read Japanese, so the investment becomes much more worthwhile.
But for everyone else, there is another answer that is only spoken in the privacy of DMs, in the back alleys of cons, in the ghost town IRC channels of the world: scanlations.
Despite conventional wisdom with regards to unlicensed comics--it is absolutely understood that scans of One Piece and Naruto are illegal--there is essentially no legal caveat for comics that have yet to have an official translation, independent of whether the scans are non-commercial or non-profit. A particularly intrepid defense attorney might have success arguing scanlations fall under fair use or fair dealing against a particularly incompetent prosecutor, but given the the purpose and character of the use--the writing’s pretty much on the wall. Creative copyright extends to the right to translate and copyright protections extend internationally to all 172 signatory countries of the Berne Convention--172 countries that include the US, the UK, Australia, and Japan. Scanlations, in all their forms, are illegal.
So, what does that have to do with us? What responsibilities do we have when it comes to scanlations, as critics?
Weirdly, for anything that’s incredibly illegal, i.e., a licensed comic, our impact is minimal. In general, critics don’t tend to discuss the specifics of where we acquired the work unless it’s particularly relevant to the criticism; we just talk about the work. I may write about Full Metal Alchemist, and it may be that I have read that comic in scans instead of purchasing the licensed version, but this will never really be known in one way or another--and does not really push business towards scanlations anymore than it does legal avenues.
But for unlicensed comics--still definitely illegal, but also unable to be acquired in English legally--the jig is immediately up, so to speak. I may have an out in that I can write about Ogeretsu Tanaka’s The Proper Way to Write Love and you can assume (or not, depending on how much you trust me) that I bought the comic in Japanese--but for that other cohort of critics that I mentioned, who presumably do not read Japanese, it’s essentially immediately known that the writer read a scan and perhaps is also implicitly encouraging others to do so.
That last phrase is where the ethics become interesting. In both of the last two paragraphs, I have touched upon the concern of pushing business towards scanlations or implicitly encouraging others to do so--in essence allowing an illegal practice to thrive. This concern positions criticism as de facto advertisement or support, independent of its content. The “all publicity is good publicity” model. But should you, for example, be accused of endorsing scanlations if you write a highly negative piece about a scanlated comic? Is it only a problem if your criticism positions the source text as something a reader should seek out? And in general, does a critic have any financial responsibilities to their subject’s industry and/or creators?
That is: is it even our problem if the scanlation industry thrives secondary to our work?
Maybe. Criticism is, first and foremost, a thing that is done for ourselves rather than for any other end--but to deny the relatively common downstream effects of that action is willfully naive, after a certain point. While I may never explicitly say ‘buy this book’ in any of my positively-inclined criticism, there is an inevitable leap between ‘this book is good’ and ‘you should buy it.’ There is no denying that a critique can result in financial outcomes. But the thing that has always held true, at least for me, is that so long as you are doing critical work without the specific aim of a financial outcome, you are conducting yourself well.
But what does that mean here? For most, writing about an unlicensed comic is a tacit admission of engaging in illegal activity--but going beyond that, what is the action’s significance? Beyond the implicit confession, what does it do to the critical community? What does it do to the comics community?
Summarily: what is our role in piracy?
I can certainly imagine a universe in which a publisher, noting a series of positive reviews of a yet-to-be-licensed comic, decides to look into it and acquire the license. I can also imagine a universe in which a publisher, noting these reviews, assumes the comic is either already licensed or has already been distributed for free elsewhere and would therefore not have much of a paying market.
I can imagine a universe in which a reader, realizing they can only acquire a book in scans, only ever reads comics for free. I can imagine a different one, though, where the reader’s realization leads them to other paying avenues--buying the book in Japanese, buying a creator’s other licensed comics, waiting for the licensed version to finally be available, etc.
I also have no way to know which universes are real at which point to weigh their likelihood appropriately. My general sense is not just that ‘pirates gonna pirate’ but also that people who want to buy legally will do so. And, what’s more, that there is a huge cross-section of people who exist in both categories.
Other questions: what if I--and others capable of this task--take on this particular responsibility and try to have our cake and eat it too. Any critic able to read Japanese should have carte blanche to review unlicensed comics. But, naturally, this only solves the acquisition problem. If I read a comic in Japanese and wanted to review it, despite there being no English translation, am I to be held accountable for any readers who decide to read the scans upon reading my work? Am I actively contributing to the success of scans by discussing a work that can’t be acquired legally in English if I acquired it legally in Japanese? If the answer is no, then how is it functionally any different than an English-speaking critic reviewing a comic from a scan?
And to the extreme: what if everybody just lied?
I usually pride myself as being that kid with all the answers, but on this particular subject, just based on the series of questions I have posed--it seems I have very few. I can tell you what I wish would happen, but that’s very much based upon what I wish to be true, rather than any hard numbers one way or another.
My desired outcome is a robust critical discourse about unlicensed comics that led to their wider legal availability to the general public as soon as possible. And maybe, in time, I will think about flexing my particular abilities and platforms to get some amazing comics seen by a larger audience.
But for now, in truth, I don’t know what to do.
Do you?
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Next: An Unflinching Look
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Critical Jam #10: We Must Be Better
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
There are many painful things about being a marginalized critic, but there is one truth to which I keep returning: it is the loneliness that hurts the most. It’s the thing that makes you tired, the thing that makes you feel futile. It occurs whether your work gains traction or whether it languishes in silence. You can get a hundred thousand retweets, a million reblogs, nine job offers, or just cold hard cash and still, the feeling is the same: I am by myself. I am the only person who will do this work. If I don’t do it, no one else will.
This feeling is amplified in smaller pools. One can generally count on the fact that someone will cover issues and ideas within major cultural phenomena--blockbuster films, top 40 music, and so on--but as fanbases and social cache shrink, so too does the certainty that you can take a break, that someone else will have your back, that you are not the only person holding things together.
Immediately, I’m sure it reads as vanity. In part, it must be. “It’s all down to me” is a statement that reeks of self-importance and self-aggrandizement, certainly, but that doesn’t really mitigate its truth. Whether the notion reads to you as a hero complex or an utter nightmare is entirely dependent upon your understanding of the extant support. If other people really will lend a hand, then your presumption just exists to make you feel important. But if time and time again you’ve found yourself in the same situation, time and time again you’ve waited for someone else to step in only to find a few half-hearted grimaces--well, what conclusion are you meant to draw?
This silence happens for many reasons. Apathy is the easy one, but I don’t have much interest in investigating apathy for the moment; someone else can write another piece about oppressor-class complacency though the arguments have been out there for ages. Sometimes, there’s a desire to help but a lack of certainty and/or confidence with regards to the ‘how.’ Semi-recently, I was in a situation where I asked a white male friend to help me defuse a situation because I was exhausted and he froze--not because he didn’t care or want to help me, but because he didn’t know what to say.
This happens often within criticism. Marginalized critics find themselves left out to dry by their peers--not because the rest of us do not care in the broadest terms (as evidenced by the pat-on-the-back we give ourselves after clicking the ‘retweet’ button on someone’s work), but instead because “we didn’t know what to say.” For issues outside our wheelhouse--or, really, issues in which we don’t face oppression--we don’t have enough confidence, enough knowledge to step forward and shoulder the burden. We aren’t black, so we don’t have a good handle on black semiotics. We aren’t trans, so we don’t know enough about trans rhetoric. We aren’t indigenous, so we aren’t familiar with the narratives of settler colonialism. We don’t know what to say, so we decide that it is better to say nothing. It’s better not to run our mouths about things we aren’t fully informed about; it’s better to let marginalized people speak.
The desire to cede the stage to marginalized people is admirable, but often it does not come with a full interrogation of either motive or end-result. It is excellent in theory but can be increasingly painful in practice, depending on the size of your critical community. Shifting the burden of intervention (critical or otherwise) to a small handful of parties in the name of providing a platform to the unheard is a fine ideal that results in the sheer exhaustion of marginalized people, especially those who happen to be fewer in number within their community. Made comfortable by the excuse of ‘making space,’ we let our peers write and tweet and podcast and blog themselves into exhaustion rather than taking the next logical step: not just learning from their work, but also sharing the load as much as is possible.
We must build critical communities that do not leave its most vulnerable more vulnerable. While they are more than capable of speaking for themselves, we must begin to recognize the difference between making room for their speech and forcing them to the microphone over and over until they are hoarse. We must be pro-active in the protection and support of our marginalized peers.
Simply put: we must be better.
But what does ‘better’ look like?
The best answer is one you’ve heard before: active efforts to increase visibility of marginalized critics on a variety of platforms. If there are 80 black people each writing for 80 film publications--or, even just eight each writing for eight--there is less likelihood that the burden of addressing anti-blackness will fall to the same individual consistently. The sense that “if I don’t, no one will,” is mitigated by sheer force of numbers. This would require publications to actively seek out marginalized voices in explicit, pro-active terms, with safety nets built in as the array of available and interested voices expands.
But you know this.
You’ve heard this before. Representation matters. Hire more marginalized people. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. It’s true. All of it is true and must be addressed, but this is the part in the conversation where a large swath of us stop listening. Because we do not have hiring or editing privileges at our publications, or because we just run our own blogs, or maybe because we just like to tweet criticism every now and again, our sense is to nod sagely about the need for more marginalized voices in more platforms without actually interrogating our personal role in the creation of community and the support of our marginalized peers.
This is not a chastisement, so much as a statement of fact when it comes to general understanding of how individual action results in and reinforces cultural and community norms. Even if the sea-change of hiring/recruiting takes years (and it should not, really, if a critical mass of publications decides to make it a genuine priority), there is nothing stopping each of us from being better today.
So the question, again, but more specific--what does ‘better’ look like on an individual basis?
To me, better looks not just like numerous cis critics picking up when one trans critic is too tired to go on, but settler critics realizing how tiring it is to be a Native critic, learning more about Native politics, and introducing settler colonialist criticism into their work on a regular basis, regardless of whether a piece is capital-P problematic.
To me, better looks like active critical involvement and intervention in areas outside of our own personal oppression.
To me, better looks like help.
If--and by ‘if,’ I mean ‘when,’ --we notice that the same handful of critics (or, worse, the same lone critic) are or is having to address the same topics, then this behooves us to also begin addressing it ourselves. It may be that we do so clumsily. It may be that we do so incorrectly. It may be that a marginalized critic takes us to task for our clumsy, incorrect, and perhaps ignorant attempts to address these topics.
But our desire not to make mistakes, not to be clumsy, not to be incorrect, and, in a semi-related fashion, our desire to protect our reputations as critics cannot take precedence over the need for our marginalized peers to be protected, supported, and validated. We can afford those losses if the result is the end of loneliness, exhaustion, and self-destruction for our more vulnerable colleagues.
A final set of points: as much as criticism is art--often some mystifying combination of eloquence, delicacy, and brutality--it is also, as you know, work. And the skills of your marginalized peers at identifying certain themes and structures, while certainly partially a result of lived experience and personal sovereignty, is very much a matter of effort and praxis, of getting good at handling a particular line of argument simply because they must.
Don’t be fooled by seemingly flawless motion. Intrinsic skill and experience is involved, but much of it is muscle memory. That marginalized critic you love and respect likely had to take a lot of haymakers and uppercuts before they learned to See them coming. They might make it look easy and, some days, it may very well be, but energy is finite.
And the reward for being good in a fight can’t be the condemnation to do so alone, forever.
Previous: Psalm for the Newly Anointed
Next: What We Talk About When We Talk About Scanlations
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to click here and buy me a coffee or follow me on Twitter at @elevenafter.
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Critical Jam #9: Psalm for the Newly Anointed
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but: nobody’s in charge.
For newer media especially--games and comics and whatever comes next--there is no established authority, no canon of critical texts that guides the consumer, the critic, the creator. There’s nothing enshrining us, nothing empowering us. No true criticism; a legitimation crisis.
This is freeing in some aspects, but frustrating in others. In her January Crown on the Ground column, critic Emma Houxbois touches upon the transience in comics criticism in particular, though her points are applicable to the present states of criticism elsewhere:
“One of the truest and most fundamental realities of comics criticism is that it’s a transient field with a very short life cycle. People come into it with little to no formal training because there’s little to none available and they have a crack at it until they move onto something more fruitful or diminishing returns catch up with them. As a result there’s no established and easily accessible canon, there’s little in the way of bodies of work to build from and refine the field, especially since the waves of consolidation and site shutdowns have wiped out massive amounts of it.”
In other words--with nothing shoring us up, we are vulnerable, scattered, and easily erased. Though some handful of us are protected by the pillars of major publications, the vast majority exist on social media, in the comments sections, and websites that fall just as soon as they rise. With a few exceptions, none are household names and none (individually) wield the power to make or break their subjects. This instability, the absence of permanence reflected both in where criticism can be found as well as its shifting flagbearers, has a great deal to do with why people like to say that modern criticism is dead, bad, or somewhere in between.
You can pin it to the rise of the digital age, certainly. The transition from analog to digital has meant that years of work can vanish with the closing of a site, with the click of a button. And in turn, anyone with access to the Internet can become a critic--present company included. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr--all of them allow for greater access than ever before. Criticism has ceased to become (at least, entirely) the province of the elite and has expanded to a much more grassroots endeavor.
“Because The Internet” is an all right answer, but I think postmodernism--a concept that precedes the Internet by a longshot--is a slightly better fit. It’s a movement, literary, artistic, and otherwise, specifically concerned with the destruction of gods and masters in favor for contingent truths and individual narratives. (I’ve written a light discussion of postmodernism through comics here.) I favor it for many reasons, up to and including its revolutionary potential, but I hold it in tension with its force for destruction. The expansion and impermanence of criticism, while opening the doors to many, also makes it difficult for the lot of us to eat. Because anyone could potentially do the work we do, the labor becomes cheap and many of us go unpaid, regardless of the quality of our material.
Quality is hard to pin down too, under a postmodernist regime. Everything is subjective--no gods and no masters, remember?--so who is to say really, who is a good critic or a bad one. Greater access should lead to a more meritocratic system of rewards, but because there is no uniform set of criteria, the infrastructure inevitably collapses upon itself. The arbitrary rubric assigns value, but can only do so if its arbitrariness is allowed unjust sovereignty. We random users of the Internet are finally permitted the title of critic, but now the title means nothing at all, and so, we frequently work for free. Tricky. Frustrating. A double edged sword. In eroding the canonic power of the elite critic, we erode ourselves. Our crowded presence and eagerness to welcome everyone devalues the field.
So the death of criticism is frequently touted because we are no longer kingmakers or heartbreakers. There was a time--or so they say--that a restaurant, a play, a ballet, a film, would live or die by the word of an individual critic. Back then, criticism was Good--which is as much a designation of quality as it was a designation of power. After all, critics of the modernist tradition and style of these kingmakers still exist and still win Pulitzers for their efforts, but the impact of a single critic’s word, even of the Pulitzer-winning variety, has diminished over time. These days, a critic can write beautiful, carefully considered prose in discussion of their subject and be met with some variety of “Yeah? Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man” in the comments section.
Which, when all is said and done, is irritatingly just.
It is just my opinion and that it exists in such a way that it can be dismissed soundly in favor of someone else’s is an annoyingly just consequence of destroying everyone’s sense of authority. This monstrosity of collapsed power which leaves many of us working for free is the consequence of inviting everyone to the party, and for newer media, doing so before a canon could establish itself in the background.
Part of the problem is that the old ways are not entirely dead. Modern structures, specifically, power structures still exist and therefore still benefit from and exploit the hierarchy. As strong as grassroots efforts have become, criticism backed by established outlets holds more weight than criticism elsewhere. The would-be meritocratic rise of quality criticism is hampered not just by an inability to judge quality objectively, but also the same old devaluing problems we had during modernist times--that one’s criticism is only as good as where it appears and is only financially compensated when it appears in those forums. In other words--you’re not Good until you’ve been externally validated as Good, usually in the form of someone thinking you’re Good enough to compensate with capital.
It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg game: is the criticism presumed Good because the critic was paid well for it, or was the critic paid well because the criticism was Good? Or is it Good because it is exclusive, because not everyone is chosen to write for particular publications, so surely the choice was based on merit. “She must know what she’s doing if she writes for The Guardian,” and so on.
I’m not sure what comes next, what comes after this. We’re trapped in a righteous hell of our own making, because we don’t have the political strength to see ourselves paid fairly and because acquiring the political strength would turn us into the systemic monsters we seek to topple.
I don’t know what comes next, but, in the end, I think everyone starts to look for God.
For me, part of Seeing with eyes unclouded is continually reckoning with my own irrelevance, but at the same time--it’s tiring to have no one in charge, tiring to make every evaluative decision for oneself, tiring to wade through a sea of information without a single, certain guide for what is Absolutely Good or Absolutely Bad. It’s exhausting to permit such uncertainty. And so, we take shortcuts, we look for some form of God to pass us The Word so we don’t have to burden ourselves. It’s the sensible thing to do if we are tired, if our attempts to strike out on our own have burned us, if the world has been proven to be cold without Him, without some kind of authority on whose criticism is Good.
Maybe what’s next is a return to modernism, a retreat to structural certainty. Maybe the kingmakers will rise again. Maybe criticism will be Good once more.
But probably not. Postmodernism is here to stay and its embracing of fractionation is such that it cannot be defeated. The Internet doesn’t seem to be going anywhere either. So, as I find myself asking so often in this column: what’s to do?
We cannot and should not return to the old ways of denying access to the many, but we can all collectively take this access and make it something great. My solution, generally, has been to behave as though I possess the authority of a kingmaking critic, while still holding firmly to the reality of my complete and utter unimportance. I’ve decided to be my own god.
That most of us remain uncompensated is something that remains, largely, out of our control, but the way we conduct ourselves always is. The endpoint of this hierarchical deconstruction is the formation of us as new, smaller gods rather than erasing godhood entirely. If we, individually, are the newly anointed, then we must act with the same discretion, honor, and reverence as we would have expected from the old ones. We must treat our work and the work of others with the same respect as we would any old classics, while still realizing that it’s just our opinion.
It’s artifice, certainly, but it’s an artifice that improves us--which is rather the function of god to begin with. If there’s nobody in charge, nobody on the throne, nobody to worship--it may very well be that you’re the only one left.
Act accordingly.
Previous: On Conflicts of Interest
Next: We Must Be Better
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Critical Jam #8: On Conflicts of Interest
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I am not incredibly concerned about conflict of interest within criticism. This might be the wrong attitude to take, but then, I’m not that concerned with people who think it is, and so, the cycle continues.
In general, the idea is meant to protect something, but I can’t be sure what. Some of it is straightforward: if the critic is being paid by the creator or the creator’s publisher, they stand to financially benefit from positive critical reception and therefore criticism is a no-no. Fine, good, no troubles there. There’s also an important question--one I will not go into here--about general access, about how critic-creator relationships influence whether a creator’s work gets covered at a publication over others, even if it’s not by the critic themself.
That last clause is the one that interests me most, though.
It seems we have agreed the following: Critic A is friends with Creator X and therefore should not write about Creator X’s work, as a matter of--integrity? Honesty? Credibility? Most probably, all three. But then whose integrity, whose honesty, whose credibility? The critic’s, presumably. Maybe the publication’s, since they’re the ones that insist on disclaimers, but this more seems like some kind of weird industry standard than any ethical reflection on the publication’s part--that is, unless they have a reputation for dishonest conduct to begin with.
That’s what it is, maybe. Reputation. A critic does not write about a friend’s work so that no one can accuse them of nepotism, favoritism, or the like. I am more willing to accept this line of thought as it at least places the critic’s choices before nebulous ethical propriety. If a critic doesn’t want to risk their reputation, that is certainly their prerogative--even if I think it’s wholly unnecessary.
Let’s tackle a different portion of the question: How good of friends must Critic A and Creator X be before Critic A can no longer write about their work without being compromised? Are we talking a ‘happy birthday’ greeting on Facebook or will they have to have gone out for drinks a few times? How many times? Once? Twice? Thrice? Is it enough that they have a friendly rapport on social media? Or must they be invited to birthday parties? Christenings? Afternoon tea?
Okay, you got me--these are silly questions because the answer is “you know it when you see it,” obviously. You can (mostly) tell when a critic and a creator are friends, as the two will conduct themselves with each other as though they are friends. There’s no metric; you can just tell.
But, of course, this is also true with the larger question of conflict of interest and why we are concerned about it. Presumably all this to-do is to keep hack critics from writing nice things about their hack friend’s work and providing them with free advertisement, but I’ve got some startling news for you all:
“Hacks gonna hack,” I think, is how the kids would put it.
That is, a hack critic--here meaning a critic without either integrity or an ability to judge a work independent of their relationship to the creator--is always going to produce hack work. This is entirely independent of any kind of cultural rules or sense of critical propriety. We all know what bad work looks like; we know it when we see it. If a critic is giving their creator friend undue credit, that will be evident in the work, likely with unsubstantiated positivity and arguments backed with little evidence.
(That said, positivity is not sufficient evidence for hackery. One wholly positive examination of work done incisively is worth a thousand 0/10 reviews that don’t actually engage the work.)
We judge the integrity of the critic, the quality of their work, on a daily basis. If their work is shoddy, unrefined, and dare I say, pandering, they’ll be known by that, regardless of the subject matter. Critical integrity is always at stake, no matter the context--so why does it suddenly matter more when friendship comes into play?
It’s that pesky reputation thing again, most likely. “It just looks bad.” But what it looks like is almost entirely dependent upon the critic. Do good work and it will stand for itself. That’s really it.
The argument may be that you don’t want to give a reader a reason to doubt your stance, but quite frankly, the reader has eight reasons to doubt your stance--up to and including that you think The Dark Knight Returns isn’t that great, that your Twitter jokes are a bit shit, and that you sometimes enjoy comics from licensed properties. Criticism, as an intensely subjective field, is a mire of ‘reasons to doubt this critic’s point of view, based upon x opinion they had elsewhere.’
Another question: what are the social rules for recusal when you dislike a creator? Negative interactions aren’t regulated with nearly the same fervor as positive ones are, I think, and there is much less concern about conflict of interest in this regard. Are you meant to put, at the top of your piece, “hey, I did actually previously call the creator of this work a jackass on Twitter, so,” or is it at the critic’s discretion? Does it matter if they dislike the creator based on the nature of their work? Do the same rules of “the critic should not” apply in this case? How deep should the dislike go? On this side of the spectrum, if you write more than one negative thing about a creator’s work, later on you’ll be accused of having an axe to grind. Write lengthy and considered negative criticism of a piece and I promise you, there’ll always be some joker out there upset about the “hit piece” you wrote about his fave.
This is the crux of what I’m trying to say: you cannot control whether someone thinks you’re full of shit, so you may as well just act as though they don’t exist.
Do good work and stop fussing about accusations of unfair bias. Do good work and the best reason not to write about your friend’s work will not be that the public will think you’re a shill. Do good work and the best reason not to write about your friend’s work will be that you would still like to be friends afterwards (though ideally your friends understand that your work’s your work and are appreciative of the honest criticism.)
Do good work. That’s all.
If you know that you aren’t, that you’re being more positive than you should, that you’re unable to See, then stop. That’s fine. That’s part of doing good work and, to my more sentimental mind, honoring the craft. So is turning around, realizing that you’re only writing about your friends’ work, and asking yourself why.
There is little use in passing ‘don’t write about your friends’ work’ off as a stand-in for what we really mean--‘do good work.’ It’s an insult to our critical prowess, a judgment of our ability to put the work first before we are even permitted to demonstrate it. The entire notion dishonors us, really. But more than that: it sidesteps the real issue--that, if you did write a puff piece on your friend’s shoddy work, then you did bad criticism, your work is substandard, you dishonored yourself and what you do. Using that as a shorthand for our true concern means that we now have to waste time discussing a critic’s bias rather than the actual problem: that they made glaring omissions, argued for something badly, or failed to dig into something as incisively as they could. Quite simply: the work is bad.
In all honesty: I don’t care if a critic is married to the creator of their subject so long as the criticism is good. I don’t care in the slightest and I think telling the creator’s partner that they can’t, as a matter of course, write about the work is foolish. If it’s bad--bad by the parameters that I laid out earlier: glaring omissions, bad arguments, superficial examinations, etc., --then it’s the editor’s job to tell them that it’s bad and sort them out. But if it’s not, then I would pay quite a lot of money for a book of criticism as given by spouses and partners. Novelty aside--as well as the delicious idea of someone eviscerating their partner’s work-- think of the connections they might make! Think of what they might See critically that would go unSeen from another perspective--and all of it wasted for a silly rule.
In the new year, it’s still the old motto--the theme of pretty much every installment of this column--: Do good work and be excellent.
Or, in other words, honor yourself and honor this.
And in still others--good luck.
Previous: A Right to Be Hostile in 2016
Next: Psalm for the Newly Anointed
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Critical Jam #7: A Right to be Hostile in 2016
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
It’s been twenty years since Aaron McGruder’s daily comic strip, The Boondocks, first appeared on Hitline.com in 1996. It’s been ten years since it ended, after being syndicated in over 300 U.S. newspapers and transformed into a successful animated TV show. Twenty years since it started, ten years since it ended and--not much has changed.
Yeah, sure, an oppressive regime unlike any previously seen on American soil is about to take power, but the gap between where we were before and where we are now is likely smaller than most think. As many marginalized people know, we have been on the brink of this for at least the length of my 26-year-lifetime and, more probably, much longer than that.
And, so, reading A Right to be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury in 2016 feels more familiar than it should. Some of the conversations are dated and highly specific to the times--a sequence about Napster, a running bit about Miss Cleo--but a lot more feels painfully close to the here and now. The names change, but the game’s the same.
(November 6, 2000)
Sometimes, this is amusing. In the strip above, from sixteen years ago, a couple is at war with each other over the choice of a third party vote and here we are again, sixteen years later, attempting to blame the relative handful of people who voted for a third party instead of addressing the millions who went to the polls for a white supremacist and anti-Semite. In 2000, it’d be hard to say who precisely this strip’s joke was on (beyond, clearly, George W. Bush), but in 2016, the joke is obviously on us, a population who managed to learn almost nothing sixteen years later.
Time has intervened in other ways, though. There’s a strip from 2001 that describes Bill Cosby as the “master of positive black entertainment.” But then, there’s also a running joke throughout the entire strip about how bad mainstream black movies are--something that rings less true in 2016, after past successes (Ava DuVernay’s Selma and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave), present successes (Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight), and hopes for the future (Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time).
Nonetheless, reading A Right to be Hostile is a perfect microcosm of heaven and hell as a 2016 black critic. The heavenly portion is all down to the protagonist, Huey Freeman, who knows my life so well.
(April 8, 2000)
Huey is, in all probability, at least a little bit depressed. He’s also constantly furious, constantly undermined. And worst of all, he seems to be quietly aware of the utter futility of those emotions. I laugh as he writes his zine, “The Free Huey World Report,” which endeavors to release essays on the true nature of Western hegemony--a zine that no more than three or four people ever read--but, as the writer of a tiny column in which I try to address the Big Questions of Criticism, often as they relate to Western hegemony--I cannot laugh that hard.
This is the thing about The Boondocks, the thing about A Right to be Hostile, and the thing about still having the right to be hostile in 2016--the joke’s on them but the joke is always, in some part on you. You can laugh at the strife because that’s better than crying, but in the end you are still the punchline. That’s the joke, you see? No one takes Huey’s (mostly) righteous anger seriously, feels what he feels--not his brother, not his grandfather, not his next-door neighbor, not even his best friend.
(September 29, 2001)
But I can dig it. I feel like this, often. His presence on the page is validating, emotionally and critically. I am Huey. Huey is me. And both brilliantly and terribly, Huey is me before I even knew who ‘me’ was. In 2000, I was 11 years old and couldn’t figure out why all the black kids sat together, why they didn’t sit with white kids like I did. Now I’m 26 and trying to figure out how a comic strip from 16 years ago so perfectly represents my current reality, what point there is in trying to re-say what has already been said.
This is the critically hellish portion, the portion I have casually alluded to so far but not confronted out right--A Right to be Hostile, in 2016, is evidence that all that I would like to say has already been said. It is maddening, both as a critic and as a human being. If my critical purpose is to See that which is not easily Seen, then what the hell am I doing making the same observations that have already been made by other black people who have suffered some years before me. This is easily Seen. This is easily witnessed. We have been here before and my revelations are not revelations at all. I am only the latest in a long line of black people trying to argue for my own humanity. What else am I supposed to think when strips like the one below, from June 2000, say what I’ve been trying to say for the last five years, more than a decade before I even knew to say it.
(June 9, 2000)
So what’s to do, fellow marginalized critics? What’s to do, me? How do we contend with the fact that we are spinning our wheels in perpetuum? What is the point of repeating what my ancestors have already said, only for my descendants to do the same? How do we grapple with the fact that nothing has changed?
I have a thought.
What if we just….stopped?
There is already enough material out there, somewhere in the world, arguing for our humanity. We have spent enough of our time trying to find new ways to convince white people, abled people, non-queer people, cis people, whomever that our lives have value. Even now, we search for some new way to put it, some new comparison, some new turn of phrase with the hope that maybe this time will suddenly make them understand that our lives matter.
The texts have already been written and the arguments have already been made. Let’s just republish it all. When our rights are violated, our personhood disrespected, our selves denied, let’s just go all the way back to the old texts. Instead of fresh op-eds on police brutality and thinkpieces on disenfranchisement, let’s all just agree to stop. We’ll copy and paste straight from Frantz Fanon, and we’ll be sure to put the date in enormous red font to make it clear that we’ve been saying the same shit since 1952. Or take it back to Sojourner and remind them that we’ve been saying the same shit since 1851.
Imagine the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, all of them everywhere, just filled with old essays and reports. Let people see that essentially nothing has changed, that everything we are saying has already been said.
Because the onus cannot and should not be upon us to find new songs and dances to entice our oppressors.
Or maybe because, in truth: we have already tried everything else.
Previous: On Critical Positivity
Next: On Conflicts of Interest
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Critical Jam #6: On Critical Positivity
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I’ve had quite a few conversations about positivity, recently. Not the annoying version where everyone wants you to conform to the Nothing To See Here party line, but instead the version where someone deeply likes something and would like to express it. I have to say, for my part--hating comes pretty naturally. I am a natural-born hater. I can never let somebody have their moment without at least thinking of what could have been better. I’m being glib here, because criticism is so frequently conflated with hating that I may as well take ownership of the term--but my hating is what makes me an all right critic, probably. Still, in the end, no one likes a Debbie Downer. To maintain the perception of fairness, consumers usually like to read even-handed criticism or even-handed critics--people and pieces that like some things but dislike others.
This actually becomes tricky in a bad world where most things are bad, though. Or should I say, it becomes tricky when you don’t believe the world is bad or that most things are bad. Then accurate critics become haters, or more generous critics become easily satisfied, and so on. But a lot of the trouble can come when a reader thinks you’re hating because it simply cannot be as bad as you say. Which is much more to do with them than it is with you, so take heart, young critic, and hate away if you think it appropriate.
But you know, there are other kinds of critics. Specifically, the ones with whom I have chatted and feel like no one wants to hear about how much they love something. I wrote earlier about the 10/10 review, discussing review inflation, the significance of numbers, and other things--but in general, I think many critics find it hard to be positive within a critical community. Even the colloquial understanding of the word ‘criticism’ comes with a connotation of negativity. For some, writing only about positives means writing uncritically--which is not necessarily so.
To start with, I think we must draw a bright line between reviews and criticism before going forward. I said in the same 10/10 review piece that reviews fall under the umbrella of criticism--but we require more nuance here because one word is being used to cover several actions. Let’s try to denote these differing actions with ‘criticism’ and ‘Criticism’. Lowercase criticism is the one that contains both reviews and Criticism. It covers any kind of evaluatory look at an item. Uppercase Criticism, however, explores a particular angle in a work. This form of Criticism is less concerned with a wholesale evaluation of something and more a singular argument.
There is room for positivity in all forms, really. 10/10 reviews are nice...but so are highly positive forms of Criticism. It is excellent to read a critic digging into why something really works--and this, in no uncertain terms, is a valid form of Criticism. While reviews tend to feel as though they must evaluate an entire work, Criticism is free to only look at what does not work--or only look at what does. All it takes is a critical examination of why these things happen and you’re golden.
It comes down to this--criticism has its own intrinsic value and, whether positive or negative, you should write about whatever stirs your passions. You’re flexing the same muscles either way: Why did this piece work for you? What did you connect with? What structures were in place that allowed you to do that? etc., etc. The game’s the same, just with a different tone.
Beyond being a card-carrying hater, I frequently enter the negative sphere as a matter of stakes. Mistakes are very costly in certain realms, so there is some sense of urgency when it comes to addressing those mistakes. But, this is Criticism of necessity rather than Criticism for enjoyment--which makes positive Critical evaluations all the more precious and necessary for me and anyone in a similar situation. The world’s bad, but good work is good and we all approach the badness of the world differently.
I think some are worried about articulating why something is good, as they feel it’s something that emotionally ‘happens.’ I can feel this way sometimes. As a natural hater, it’s easier for me to see what’s wrong, often, than it is to see what’s making me so happy with a piece. Fortunately, I am emotionally dead enough to believe that nothing just ‘happens’ emotionally, that humanity is much more systematic than we would like to believe. Emotions are evoked from something and after sitting down with the work for a little bit, asking it and yourself questions, odds are you’ll come up with what that something is. It’s process, just like anything else.
Or maybe it’s also a fear of missing something. I write a lot about critics’ Seeing things and I can understand the fear that the thing you love actually isn’t good at all. There is a cultural impression that a negative reading of an item is more legitimate than a positive one--perhaps because most of us are natural born haters, whether we’d like to admit it. But uncouple yourself from these paradigms. Your criticism is precisely as strong as what you can argue for. A badly-argued negative take will never be as strong as your rhetorically-strong love letter. Be confident. You are wise and great. (And if you aren’t, find an editor who is and split the difference.)
Sometimes there’s a conflation of positive criticism and “positivity.” The latter is the annoying Nothing to See Here version I mentioned in the opening. Sometimes you’ll hear creators ask for positive criticism, which is, mostly an ego massage. You’ve heard it before. “Critics only want to talk about what’s bad and never about what’s good.” Or maybe “it’s crushing to only hear about the bad things.” And likely “it’s not helpful to only say what I’m doing wrong.” But ignore that. Let the babies cry because your critical work has nothing to do with them. If they need encouragement, they can find a priest, hire a life coach, or buy a security blanket. You have no duty to be helpful.
But if you must concern yourself with the utility/helpfulness of your work--positive criticism remains a necessary complement to its negative counterpart, if only to serve as a body of evidence. There often comes a point, in response to criticism, when someone asks “well what else were they/was I supposed to do?” Perhaps they imply their way was the only way. Or even imply that they did not choose to construct their piece in the way they did. (Everything is a choice, children.) Fortunately, here you come with your sterling pile of positive criticism, highlighting all the times someone else managed to convey the same themes effectively.
Here is what I want to underline: write whatever you want. Write positively. Effuse joy. Rip things to shreds. Spew hate. Do whatever, just do it well. Tell the truth. Let me see how you feel so I can feel that too.
To be completely honest, I had trouble even writing this piece. Writing positively is something I like to do, but still, deeply, feels less legitimate than the rage I’m prone to. So naturally, writing positively about writing positively felt incredibly uncomfortable. But here is what Claire Napier told me: "critical positivity is the greatest feeling achievement”--that it is an achievement that feels the best of all of our work. I rather agree. With the myriad ways that something can go wrong--and with how good it can feel to fight what needs to be fought, to burn that which needs to be burned--it’s just nice. And niceness isn’t something to discount.
Sometimes, you have a good day and you wanna come home and tell someone about how good it was, how you felt, why it was so good. All that’s true in criticism is also true in life. Come on home. Come tell me how your day was.
I really want to hear about it.
Previous: It’s about Ethics in Marginalized Criticism
Next: A Right to be Hostile in 2016
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Critical Jam #5: It’s About Ethics in Marginalized Criticism
Welcome to Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I read something recently that touched on writing about ethics. I’m trying to remember what the source is and if I do, I’ll edit it in, but the thrust of the position was this: when writing about ethics, rather than providing an absolute solution--which is likely self-limited and only applicable to the writer--it is better to represent the complexities of the human condition.
I will try to attempt this here.
I have an answer that corresponds to my values and what is important to me, but as we say, here on the Internet: your mileage may vary.
A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece delineating the numerous anti-black elements of a particular comic book. The comic was written and drawn by two white men--but, in fact, a black man did the lettering. And while I named the two white men several times, the black man’s name appeared only once, in the credits at the top of the piece.
The presumed criticism of this choice was, to me, obvious. And though I did what I did with specific intention, I assumed questions would be coming my way. First, how could I accuse a comic of being anti-black when a black man had worked on it? And then possibly, how could I erase the contributions of a black man by placing all of the responsibility on the two creators? And certainly: didn’t that make my argument pretty convenient?
As a critic, I am in the business of anticipating and addressing opposing arguments. I am in the business of presenting my position as unassailably as possible. Not addressing the black creator’s involvement was, theoretically, allowing a relatively large gap in my armor. And in this particular piece, I certainly engaged with the arguments of the opposition and brought up how I thought naysayers would respond. But this singular angle, the question of this creator’s involvement and what it meant for the larger work--this I left alone. And this I would leave alone again, if I had to choose.
In some media, it is relatively easy to know who is responsible for what, in terms of the creative process. Novels tend to be written by one person, so we can say with a decent amount of confidence that the decisions made about the storytelling, prose, etc., were made by the novelist. (But there are exceptions. See: Gordon Lish’s near re-writes of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) But with collaborative media--film, comics--one can never quite know what idea came from where, despite the title of ‘writer’ ‘director’, ‘letterer’, ‘editor’, and so on. Different teams work and are organized in different ways.
So a possible reality emerges--a reality in which the black man whose contributions I have failed to address was actually an instrumental part of the decision-making with regards to this anti-black comic. Thus, by not saying his name in equal measure or addressing his involvement in the creative team, I may not be giving him due credit--which becomes a problem both on the level of representation and also the larger problem of the hard work of many creators being unfairly attributed to others or ignored wholesale. In comics, erasing artists, colorists, and letterers is a bad look. And regardless of the media, erasing a black person from their own work is an even worse one.
So, why?
I tend to approach ethical quandaries with decision hierarchies--or, less complicatedly, I think about greater and lesser evils. Which outcome is the one that must be avoided at all costs?
Normally, the answer is erasure. Black people--marginalized people as a whole--are constantly erased from their own narratives. Our contributions are ignored, which serves to further culturally and politically disenfranchise us.
But in some cases, like this comic, there seemed a worse endpoint. Attributing the brunt of my criticism equally amongst the white writer, the white artist, and the black letterer might have assured that his work did not go unnoticed, but it also would have assured something else.
My criticisms of the text would remain the same, but the consequences with regards to the creators would have been massively different. Including the creator would effectively require me to hold him responsible for promulgating anti-black narratives, despite being black himself and, in theory, being in a position to “know better.”
This is that avoid-at-all-costs outcome.
There are many things I don’t know about the letterer. I don’t, for example, know how much involvement he did or did not have with what we’ll call “showrunning” decisions. I also don’t know how he felt about those decisions. It may have been that he was intimately involved; it may have been that he had very little involvement at all.
I also don’t know how he feels about the work as a whole, regardless of his involvement.
Marginalized people do not all agree about marginalized issues. While I will freely shut down a white person’s take on blackness, it is not my place to tell another black person how to feel about black issues. There is enough in the ether about what it means to be Real Black or Fake Black without me ascribing a single viewpoint to the entire race. If a black person read and enjoyed the comic I wrote about, so be it. A world certainly exists where the letterer in question looked at what he was working on and, realizing its implications, still thought that it was great. Because I don’t know him at all, that world could easily be this one.
And if that’s the case, he will have no problem saying so himself. This is the theoretical risk of leaving his contribution out. When he comes forward and says that he was involved at every step or that he was proud of the book as a whole, all it does is make me look bad for leaving him out. It’s my and my argument’s loss; the risk is almost entirely my own. (Almost--though. Let’s not forget the hurt and harm erasure causes.)
But here’s what else: what if he hadn’t realized at all? This is a nightmare I have all the time. Because I often perceive myself to be Fake Black, I worry that I will accidentally contribute to anti-blackness without being aware. What if, after looking back on it, the letterer sees all the things he’s (potentially) missed and regrets what he’s participated in? If the other world, in which he is quite proud of what he’s done exists, so too might this one.
And so, ethically-speaking, I think it would be wrong for me to bring that responsibility to his doorstep. As someone who struggles with her own sense of blackness regularly, I could not bring myself to either interrogate someone else on this score or implicitly force them to account for themselves. “You should have known better” is just another way of asking “are you even really black?” And this letterer is black, whatever his stance on the work. His stance is his sovereign right.
For me, the question of erasure isn’t really about erasure at all. Erasure is bad, yes, but the pressures of representing a marginalized group all on one’s ownsome without being able to just live are, in my mind, worse. In these contexts, more than anything else, I am primarily thinking about mercy. This may be the wrong thing--and the patriarchal thing--to think. (Patriarchal as, really, I must have a high-to-omniscient opinion of myself if I’ve declared my actions as merciful.) But when I look at outcomes, it seems to be the only correct choice. A burden is being placed either way--for the marginalized person to step forward and say that they have no problem with the work; or for the marginalized person to have to answer for things that may not have occurred to them and may implicitly be taken as a statement on their self-sovereignty. But the difference in the burdens is that one is backed by structures that are meant to crush us and the other is not.
Here’s another question: what would I have done if the letterer specifically said, afterwards, that he wanted to be included and that it be noted prominently that he, a black person, was a part of the creative team?
Here’s another answer: Probably the same thing.
Sounds bad, right? Here I have this marginalized person telling me what they want and I am declining to provide it! What happened to their sovereignty? What happened to them making decisions for themselves? But here’s the way I tend to look at it. It’s one thing for someone to want me to stab them. It’s a whole other thing for me to be required to do the stabbing.
Still: the metaphor exposes me. It says “Hey, JAM thinks that such an action is self-harming! She thinks she knows better than another black person about blackness; she doesn’t believe in sovereignty after all!”
It is what it is. I think, similarly, my stance is my sovereign right, but If you want to push me to that, I can be pushed. Still, as I said: these are the complexities of the human condition, and specifically, the marginalized condition. We must be ourselves and also everyone who looks like us. We must hew to some kind of party line that we have not quite agreed upon. We must have similar priorities or suffer either deference or arrogance. The stakes are always such that we cannot just be.
So here’s the realest of talks when it comes to ethics in marginalized criticism--at least as a marginalized person. Figure out what you believe. Sometimes it’ll jive with what other people in your group think; sometimes it won’t. Do as little harm as you can--to yourself and to others. Then go forth and enact that as carefully as you can. What you believe is what you believe and if you find yourself at odds with someone else in your group--that’s all right. Chances are, what’s causing this pressure is big structures trying to crush you both and now you’ve been put in a position where you may or may not have to scrap. It’s okay. It’s all okay. It’s a bad world but you have to be able to sleep at night. Do what allows you to do that and you’re winning. No matter who you are.
Previous: On True Criticism
Next: On Critical Positivity
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Critical Jam #4: On True Criticism
Welcome to the Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
I re-read an article recently, the one that solidified my decision to start this column--Daniel Mendelsohn’s A Critic’s Manifesto. It’s a beautiful piece that encapsulates a great deal of what I love about criticism as well as what I feel to be true about the work. But it is, as most things are, imperfect. I shudder at the perpetual attachment of pronoun ‘he’ to the term critic--especially as used by a male critic, who purports himself as accountable for the turns of phrases he uses--and the presentation of critics in parallel with either doctors or judges is a particularly weak argument, given both attend professional schools to acquire a very specific set of knowledge, skills, and licenses. One is an artist regardless of whether one attends art school. Critics are simply required to attend life--and the best of us attend it well.
The thing I like least about Mendelsohn’s piece, though, is the notion of the True or Serious critic--that everyone is not a critic. You can see the quiet fear in the end of the work, a fear of the average opinion crowding the space of True Criticism--a fear I at least partially put in context with an insistent use of the word ‘he.’ The piece is so otherwise convincing that you may miss the tiny leap between ‘good critic’ and ‘true critic,’ but a leap it is nonetheless. The conflation is tempting--if only because it permits the myth that the only True Critics are the Good critics--but in fact, many or (more likely) most of us are mediocre or bad. But we are all still critics.
I’m including everything here. GoodReads ratings, Yelp and Amazon reviews, tweets, self-indulgent Tumblr columns--it’s all in there and it’s all real and it’s all fair game. What they say is true: everyone’s a critic. And it’s fascinating to see how Mendelsohn is almost aware of the fear-based logic that suggests otherwise:
“...what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.”
He then goes on to argue that the problem is that criticism has similarly got “out of the hands” of the true critics, etc., etc., but It’s that last part of the quote that’s the most revealing. What we fear with the rise of grassroots criticism--and, for that matter, grassroots creation--is the absence of gods and masters. It’s a legitimation crisis. If there is no hierarchical structure, no above and below, and no true and false--then how is one to know one’s place in the world? Without modernist establishments, how am I to know whether I belong in the critical class, whether my arguments are good, whether they carry more weight than the average person’s?
I can’t, really. Even in the presence of the establishment. This column could suddenly begin appearing in The New Yorker and still I’d never know. At that stage, I could, perhaps, be defined as accomplished--but we’ve all read enough bad criticism from accomplished critics to know these metrics are meaningless. “Am I good?” is a bad question and contingent upon too many variables to be useful, but we still ask it anyway. We want to be good; we have to in order to be good. Self-examination is necessary to our way of life.
But ‘good’ is subjective and arbitrary. Your faves are not my faves and my faves are not yours. There are no absolutes, so you have to build your own rubrics and change them as they prove to be rigorous or not. My mark of ‘good’ is usually when I come across a critic whose material shows me something I would not have picked up on my own and does it in a strongly convincing way--whether by presenting unusual/interesting lines of argument and premises or anticipating alternate views and decimating each in turn or maybe just using incredibly apt turns of phrase. There are very few who I feel meet my criteria of ‘good,’ but this is fine because my standards are only relevant to me. Nothing collapses in the absence of an absolute truth. (Maybe bad) Amazon reviews have no bearing on this piece. This (maybe bad) piece has no bearing on the reviews. The field is not harmed for the existence of would-be lesser versions. Everything is all right. There’s no need to panic. The good work hasn’t vanished. It’s all okay.
Criticism is beautiful, but one’s particular taste/opinions are, on the whole, unimportant in the grand scheme of things. (I say this with the obvious exception of political discussion and systemic injustice, in which case criticism and opinions are desperately important and must be handled appropriately.) We critics should all defend our opinions--and, on the rare occasion we are wrong, be open to having our minds changed--but it’s perfectly all right to embrace the irrelevance of our own tastes. Or the irrelevance of us. We aren’t needed or obligated to some use, which is among the things that could qualify what we do as art.
And, in fact, the expansion of this art to its “lowest” forms increases the likelihood that Mendelsohn’s would-be True Critic will appear. Though legitimizing all criticism diminishes the critic as tastemaker, it opens the door to those who might be otherwise unknown. The idea of some genius critic still lurking in GoodReads forums is nothing short of incredible. Maybe EggheadMotoko2501 actually has ground-breaking ideas about film. Frequently, you hear that criticism is dead--sometimes this means that there are no longer any critics with real power, other times it means that there’s simply ‘no good criticism’--but this new(ish) collapse of hierarchy just means that good criticism isn’t being served up to you on a platter. No one is telling audiences who the critical authority is--because there is none. If you’re dissatisfied with the average quality of criticism in your given medium, fair dues, although if you’re looking at averages all you’re going to get is the average. But if you’re asserting that there is no good criticism to be found anywhere, I can almost guarantee that this is a result of your not looking hard enough or at all. Somebody, somewhere, is tweeting or posting or snapchatting good material. The net is vast and infinite, which means that the sheer absolute number of good critics, or even dare-I-say, true critics, to be found is higher than ever before--and that’s the best thing of all.
In other words: your new favorite critic could be, at any minute, be behind any door, at any time--just waiting for you to find them. And, oh, what a moment. What a moment to experience. Again and again and again.
Previous: In Defense of 10/10 Reviews
Next: It’s About Ethics in Marginalized Criticism
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Critical Jam #3: In Defense of the 10/10 Review
Welcome to the Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
Two months ago, at the inception of this column, I wrote about the purpose of criticism. The thrust of the argument was that criticism stands alone and exists as its own end, independent of external attempts to make use of it. But, of course, this does not mean that the uses of criticism are not worth examining or discussing.
We can start with a review, which some (many?) feel is separate from criticism. From where I’m standing, reviews certainly fall under the umbrella of criticism. It’s the square-rectangle paradigm: not all criticism can be considered a review, but all reviews should certainly be considered as criticism. So long as the review (a good faith one, of course) is a parsing of the negatives and the positives, a dig into the what worked and what did not--calling it criticism is fair game. I regret this definition already, as inevitably some things will fall in or out of this on technicality, but this is a battle I’m willing to concede in order to move on to what I’d really like to discuss: the 10/10 review.
How, JAM?, you ask. How can you, by this very definition, permit a 10/10 review when a critic is meant to be evaluating positives and negatives and no work can ever truly be perfect?
Well, (a) I just told you not to get hung up on my fast and loose rationale for calling a review criticism, but more importantly (b) what if I told you that the critic probably knows and gave the work full marks anyway?
There seems to be a deep font of hatred for a perfectly scored review. Admittedly, this hatred usually comes with some complications, often related to motive. Certain sources are known for consistently positive (and some say, uncritical) reviews and have developed reputations for wishing to curry favor. The rationale is, rate a game, book, movie, etc., well and the publisher/studio will continue to provide the site with materials, and by extension, #content. 10/10 ratings in exchange for clicks, advertising revenue. And--fair enough. Some part of it is likely due to weak editorial, but this disappointing symbiosis certainly does exist.
But so too do regular reviewers out there, giving 10/10s with all they’ve got. Separate from the corporate machine are writers who frequently assign perfect scores to works that they love and so, separate from the conversation about currying favor is another about the cheapening of review scores--review inflation. By these naysayers’ reckoning, the reviewer is giving out too many perfect scores. They’re too easy and their standards are too low. They’ll give it up for anybody. A good score from them doesn’t mean anything because they’re too easy to please.
I think now’s a good time to mention that I’ve never “officially” given a 10/10 review. The first site I wrote for, Comicosity, used ratings but none the places I went on to write for used that particular tool. That’s not to say that I never would’ve given one, though. My average on ComicBookRoundUp.com is something like 7.5. The highest mark I ever gave were two 9.5s, one for the penultimate Aja/Fraction/Hollingsworth Hawkeye issue and one for an issue of Cox/ Janin/King/Seeley’s Grayson that involves an excellent fight scene between Dick and Midnighter. A 10 never quite happened, but there were comics--corporate comics, even--that I could imagine giving 10s to. Funnily enough, the Grayson: Future’s End one shot, for example, comes to mind. And so does Hawkeye #19. So, with this information, you can see that I am (or was) a particular type of critic/reviewer: 10s are achievable, but rare/seemingly impossible; on average, a work will receive a 7.5 rating--in theory, half were above this number and half below. These metrics place me, perhaps not in the “desired” category (which is nebulous, as a 7.5 average may be too high for many, or at the very least, some), but likely in the ‘not giving it up too easy’ category. In this line of argument, a 10 from me actually means something because a 10 is not so easily given.
But really, a 10 from me only means something if you meet very specific parameters. To start with, if corporate superhero comics--which Grayson and Hawkeye are--don’t interest you in the slightest, a 10 will not do much to move the needle. But even supposing you do like corporate superhero comics, perhaps you’re certain that you don’t like either Grayson or Hawkeye--then my 10s lose a bit of their shine. You may even have read those particular issues and thought my 10s were completely unjustified. In other words: regardless of the critic, a 10 is never just a 10. It is contingent and contextual.
The rarity is irrelevant; if I gave three times that number, the same assessment would have to happen in order for a reader to find it useful: Does this critic assess a comic on a similar terms to me? Do they enjoy what I enjoy? Are they bored by the same thing that bores me? I could give a 10 to precisely one work in my entire career, but its value would vary based on whether a reader’s tastes jived with mine. Criticism, while based in arguments, is also based on premises--and very often, in evaluating art, these premises are based upon taste.
I’ll pause here for the usual allowances. Obviously, criticism can be useful to a reader for more than just an alignment of tastes. Many people enjoy reading critics whose tastes they don’t share, whether because they have interesting things to say or because they say things in an interesting way. But given that the experience of art frequently requires the expenditure of capital, a critic’s recommendation or discouragement can play a role in whether a reader spends money--and all the interesting criticism in the world can’t quite hold up to the despair of having spent money on something the consumer doesn’t enjoy. Critics aren’t responsible for this despair, obviously--no one’s taste is going to match up exactly--but my point here is that finding an alignment of tastes inevitably becomes part of the reader-critic experience, at the very least when it comes to making purchases.
So given the arbitrariness of the value of a 10 and the heavy reliance on taste, what do we make of the 10/10 review? If it is meaningless--and, as I will repeat again for the pedants, perfection is a merely theoretical goal--then what is the point of giving them? Surely a 9.5 is more useful, as it presents a more balanced view and at least warns the consumer of what few shortcomings may exist. It avoids the lie of the perfect work while still conveying how good the work was.
The real problem, I think, is the deception of numbers. Or rather, that some are deceived by numbers. It is hardly the numbers’ problem. Numbers give the impression of objectivity, of scientific criteria, when actually they are used and manipulated in presentation and interpretation the same way words are. We say numbers don’t lie, but numbers lie all the time. Take a step back for a second: the idea that 9.5 is somehow more reflective of a comic’s quality than a 10 is, to put it kindly, a bit ridiculous. That additional 0.5 has no significance and an insistence that a work can never achieve a 10 just means that the experience of a 10 will be passed along to a lesser digit. If a 10 can never be had, then a 9.5 becomes a 10. If a 9.5 can never be had, then the 10 becomes a 9. And so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera. The number itself doesn’t matter when it’s understood that a value is the “best one can get”--and even then, as earlier mentioned, the “best” is shifting and contingent.
So we’ve stripped the numerical value of the 10, the rare value of the 10, and the objective value of the 10. All are arbitrary and changeable, like many or most things. So, what remains? Well, this is an essay written in defense of the 10/10 and after breaking it down, I imagine it’s time to build it back up, so here I go:
10/10 is the purest rating on the out-of-ten rating spectrum.
Dramatic, I know. But stick with me. The most compelling argument for this is that a 10/10 rating makes plain the numerical lie. By presenting a rating of full marks, the critic is forcing the reader to confront a problem: obviously the work in question cannot be completely, 10 out of 10, 100.00% without flaws--so something else must be happening. The reader, observing the 10/10, can choose one of two ways to interpret this assessment: (1) the critic is stupid and thinks that nothing negative at all could be said about this work, (2) the critic is aware that flaws do (or are likely to) exist in some capacity and so is interpreting it based on slightly different criteria than objective “here are the good things” vs “here are the bad things.” I’d approximate this criteria as “the experience.” In other words, the critic awards the 10/10 for their experience of the work. Their experience of the piece was without flaw. This gives room for the flaws of the art that do not mitigate a flawlessly experienced artistic work or narrative.
Even more interestingly: a 10/10 creates a moment of instability, a confrontation of objective digits versus subjective emotions that drives one into the only true space of artistic assessment: the unstable and incomparable quantity of experience and taste. That forced instability recreates and represents that space by creating a number-versus-art conflict, a 10/10 to describe the only thing we have left--how the piece made us feel.
Which is pretty cool, I think.
A freely given 10/10, irrespective of rareness, objectivity, or numbers, is the purest expression of an artistic experience and tells the reader one thing: “I loved this.” And presumably for a reader whose tastes align with the critic, this is valuable information. If Critic X gave this movie a 10/10 and I tend to love what Critic X loves, then I can reasonably expect to love this movie too, even if its craft is somehow imperfect.
Criticism is multipurpose and multifunctional. Approaching criticism as an approximation of one’s own tastes and experiences is as useful a function as using criticism to expand and challenge one’s way of thinking. Even if you, as a critic, cannot yourself employ the 10/10, I recommend embracing its existence in the world surrounding you and appreciating its meaning to others. If you cannot do that, at least, be impressed by what the 10/10 contains, by its representative dissonance, by its paradoxical challenge to not forget the emotional experience of art.
10/10 reviews are necessary. They are useful. They are beautiful.
A 10/10...is perfect.
Previous: All Rhetoric Matters
Next: On True Criticism
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Critical Jam #2: All Rhetoric Matters
Welcome to the Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
Two or so years ago, a movement began. The movement was called Black Lives Matter. This was troubling to some and soon a response came: All Lives Matter.
Curiously, Not All Men seems to have risen on similar time line. Google Analytics traces its memetic launch to March or April 2014. It’s the reply you hear from men whenever women express their frustration with sexism.
I like to look at All Lives Matter and Not All Men as a critical unit because they display something important about marginalization, rhetoric, and ultimately context. White men who use both phrases insist two things--(1) that it’s wrong to specify the significance of black/latinx/racially marginalized lives when every single life has equal importance; (2) that it’s wrong to paint all men with the same brush when it’s individual men behaving badly.
There’s an understanding here about when rhetorical specificity is appropriate and when it is not. All Lives Matter shuts down specificity; Not All Men insists upon it. Often these lines of argument are espoused separately, which allows the user to present one and seemingly either condemn generalization or champion the need for narrowly tailored critique. But a look at the almost circular Venn Diagram of who is using these phrases brings to bear the fact that these people are not stupid--or at least insofar as it comes to the appropriateness of generalization versus specificity. This is strategy. If they were simply demanding generalization, they would believe that All Lives Matter and Yes All Men. If they required specificity, the take would be Black Lives Matter and Not All Men.
Something else, rhetorically, is at play. The lines are falling somewhere else, so let us dissect. It is not a matter of generalization versus specificity, but instead a question of when it is appropriate to generalize versus when it is appropriate to be specific. This “All Lives Matter & Not All Men” necessitates specificity in circumstances that, unsurprisingly, absolve them of wrongdoing. These choices of specific versus general are employed with precision to reject frameworks of systemic injustice. These choices are being made on purpose.
At this point, my argument is specific. I am discussing white men, All Lives Matter, and Not All Men--but let’s generalize. Questions of specificity are waters that critics navigate often, if not, always. A good argument relies on knowing when it is appropriate or even necessary to be either general or specific. A bad one fails to differentiate between things that aren’t equivalent in the relevant respects. We live and die on these distinctions--quite literally, when it comes to marginalized criticism.
I feel that I have to break this down and be clear about what I mean when I use the word “literally” in conjunction with “live and die” with regards to marginalized critique. I literally--literally--mean that a failure to distinguish the need for specificity in conversations about marginalized criticism is a life-or-death matter. The ideas and rhetoric that bolster systemic injustice are directly responsible for its downstream effects, including: murder, rape, assault, disenfranchisement. In other words: all rhetoric matters. All of it. Yes, all articles. And, yes, all tweets.
Marginalized criticism is an interrogation of systemic injustice. It is a political act. And how it is received, responded to, and represented by the powerful is just as political. And a failure to handle it with appropriate care and respect--regardless of intent--is an abuse of power.
Though this column is meant to be about criticism in general, not specific to any medium or field, I’ll use an example from my own area--comics. It seems that, every six to eight weeks within the Twitter comics community, we have a conversation about the state of comics criticism. This is, generally, much ado about nothing, but inevitably there is a lament about how poor comics criticism is, or perhaps an assertion that it’s more difficult to create than it is to criticize. Very rarely are these remarks made in malice--but very often are they received in anger because the speaker has failed in being appropriately specific.
This may seem like an undue burden. After all, if listeners know the speaker doesn’t mean marginalized critique and instead, say, synopses passing for criticism or passers-by leaving vitriolic comments on a piece of art--then why must they specify any further? Is this not a case of Not All Critics, in which we seek to be individually absolved of others’ sins?
Remember the context. Remember the frameworks. Remember what’s backing up these distinctions.
So long as marginalized issues go unaddressed and so long as marginalized criticism falls on willfully ignorant ears, so too will the duty to differentiate (and the duty not to conflate) exist. This specificity is not shoring up critics’ egos; it’s guaranteeing that a line of rhetoric does not further oppression. It is, in fact, doing one’s due diligence. It is taking care not to add to the burden of those who are already trying to lift the yoke.
It is, quite simply, being responsible.
And what’s more, it’s easy. All it demands is additional thought and, I suppose, giving a fuck. This is the bare minimum when it comes to expressing criticism, regardless of whether you consider it your profession or just a thing you do to entertain your 91.3K Twitter followers.
It is entirely possible for important conversations to happen without either muddying the waters--face it: uncareful criticism wastes everybody’s time--or participating in larger power structures. The majority of us, critic or no, are capable of nuance, are capable of being responsible. So--why doesn’t it happen? Largely: disingenuousness, disregard, and most commonly, some insidious combination of both.
Make no mistake: much of this ill-handling is intentional and strategic. It benefits structural power to co-opt, reframe, or misrepresent marginalized concerns. It’s how speaking truth to power becomes “entitlement” and “toxicity.” It’s the reason marginalized anger is presented, side-by-side, with bad actors, only for that conflation to be weaponized against us moments later. Again: this is strategy. These are concerted efforts whose intent is to preserve extant injustices, crush the disenfranchised, and frankly, to do harm.
This rhetorical line will read like paranoia, but it’s the logical conclusion to draw when arguments are made out of self-preservation. The objection will be that marginalized critique is similarly made out of self-preservation, but the key difference here--the need for specificity rather than a general view that self-preservation is both normal and healthy--is that self-preservation by the empowered is, by definition, a reification of systemic injustice.
Sit with that one for a minute. Understand the wider rhetorical connection between individual, emotional action and structural responsibility. Act accordingly. Be better.
Or--don’t.
The thing I’m sitting with is the disregard. The laziness. The evidence that these rhetorical failures--no, actually, rhetorical choices--in otherwise intelligent human beings are simply a matter of not giving a fuck. It’s the arguments made that implicitly suggest that a person does not care about the consequences, did not think about the consequences, does not care to think about the consequences. It’s well within their grasp but the effort is not made. And worse: it’s not in what they say, but how they say it. It’s a very particular sleight of hand.
Still: we are critics. We look not just at the content of an argument, but how it manifests, what premises it relies upon, and what is viewed as an acceptable rhetorical loss. As I said last month, we are at our best when we manage to see what others may not--and criticism is its own end.
And, very probably, it will be my end too.
Previous: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Next: In Defense of 10/10 Reviews
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to click here and buy me a coffee or follow me on Twitter at @elevenafter.
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Critical Jam #1: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Welcome to the inaugural installment of Critical Jam, J.A. Micheline’s monthly column on criticism.
A critic-turned-creator friend of mine referred to this column, my attempt to discuss criticism as a critic, in a way that will be familiar to many of you. He suggested that it was my attempt to “watch the watchmen.” It was probably a quip, but I find myself taking it apart. Is that what critics are? Are we watchmen? Is that our purpose?
I don’t think so.
In this context, “watchmen” is used in a variety of ways. Most will source that particular phrasing to Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Juvenal’s original Latin, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” is translated often as “who will guard the guardians.” So the term “watchmen”, whether you’re looking at it from the Gibbons/Moore standpoint or Juvenal’s, signifies some understood space between hero, protector, and guardian.
It’s not a reach to suggest that some, most, or many think of criticism this way. Critics have been alleged to be protectors of Good Media and guardians of Good Taste. Our presence, it’s said, is meant to improve our chosen field—comics, film, video games, horticulture, whatever—by encouraging Good works and condemning Bad ones. We aid not just potential audiences, who may be wondering whether a work is worth their time and/or money, but also creative forces who seek to improve themselves.
It’s a nice model. In this framework, we take our full heroic form. With critics as the primary force of promoting good works and pushing creativity further, we become The Real MVPs. And so, an argument evolves such that a field can only really be as good as its best critics. Then, in turn, we are required to be our very best, like no one ever was.
If this sounds to you like a load of self-congratulatory bollocks, I agree: that’s almost entirely what it is. That framework has much less to do with a critic’s purpose than a critic’s utility—that is, why we do what we do versus what everyone else decides to do with it. The entire notion is built on critics performing duties that are in some way useful to others, on our existing to make others better. And a great deal of friction occurs when it seems that we have failed in this capacity.
It is frustrating to some when we have failed to be useful and when we have failed to provide “constructive” criticism. This comes in echoes of “10/10 reviews are worthless,” “critics don’t create; they only destroy” and so on. To those who read our work—actually, no, to those who wish to use us—our cardinal sin is to be useless, to be without worth to others.
This doesn’t sit well with me—least of all because, as a black cisgender woman in the Western world, I am not pleased with the idea of existing for the purpose of others. My skin, for over 200 years, was a signifier for usefulness rather than personhood. My vagina is, etymologically, a “sheath for a sword.” A few months ago, a good friend told me that I am a brilliant “whetstone”—a compliment I understand but simultaneously resent. I exist for my own ends. As do critics. Though many of us may indeed seek to better our fields, this is not to be assumed. If betterment is achieved in passing, so be it. But it is not our responsibility. Editors improve work. Not us.
So what, then, is our purpose? What is the point of criticism? What is the point of us? And, usefulness aside, are we even necessary?
Our purpose is to look at things critically. The point of criticism is criticism. The point of us is us.
We can argue, if you like, about necessity, but eventually it will devolve into conversations about water, oxygen, and the nine essential amino acids, so let’s just move on and, in passing, acknowledge that criticism isn’t any more or less necessary than anything else. Necessity can’t be agreed upon without a defined end/goal and you already know how I feel about that.
We exist because we do. We do critical work because it is satisfying for us to do so. It is enough to be its own end, regardless of what others take from it. If it is necessary, it is because it is necessary for us.
And, in fact, approaching criticism as a means rather than the end, forging it in the name of external usefulness--and to be clear, I mean Capital-C-Criticism rather than critical feedback given privately--tends to significantly undermine the work itself.
Let’s go back to the usefulness argument and, also, back to the self-congratulatory bollocks because those arguments are inextricable. Distress at our lack of usefulness is borne of an assumption that we should be useful, and ultimately an assumption that our use is to make things better. Or, really, a complaint that our work is not constructive is rooted in the assumption that we contribute to the state of the art. It is actually a compliment. So perhaps this hero narrative is less self-congratulatory and more the logical endpoint of the responsibility with which we’re charged. We are not congratulating ourselves, but instead being implicitly and externally congratulated. Can it be arrogance, narcissism, etc, if it’s the truth?
In short: yes.
Half of what makes a good critic--which is different from being a useful critic--is an ability to “see.” We are good when we see what may have been difficult to see otherwise, be they narrative blind spots, implicit arguments, or insidious political stances. But we can only do this when we look at everything ruthlessly and contextualize. Old Mad-Eye was right: this requires constant vigilance. We must examine every element--including ourselves.
Framing our work as that of watchmen, as an admirable attempt to expand the medium actually makes us worse at our jobs. The business of criticism is the business of arguments and evidence. We build a case for our position, cite relevant ideas and material, ground our opinions in the strongest foundation possible. We anticipate the opposition’s arguments and hit them with the one-two punch--and to do that we have to be able to see the flaws in our work before someone else does.
Constant vigilance means, among other things, the consideration that we critics are the flaw in the system. And this column, this look at criticism as a critic, is an attempt to take an unflinching look at what we do. I am not a watchman and, to be crystal clear, this series does not exist for the policing (or bettering) of others. Critical examinations of criticism are sufficiently--and necessarily--interesting as their own end.
Because as soon as we position ourselves as watchmen, we dilute that sense of vigilance. As soon as we consider ourselves watchmen, we lose perspective. We cannot “see” ourselves. As soon as we become watchmen, then the question must be asked: who is watching us?
Next: All Rhetoric Matters
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to click here and buy me a coffee or follow me on Twitter at @elevenafter.
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