The Burden of Criticism: Consequences of Taking a Critical Stance

Critique of Critique, 2023

What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. [Attached are the book's opening sections--Introduction and Overture].

Symposium: ‘On Criticism.’ Friday 23 November 2018, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Hosted by Royal Holloway-based Platform Journal. The cry of criticism in crisis from about ten years ago has recently gained a new momentum. In the early 2000s, writers like Noël Carroll, Rónán McDonals and James Elkins attempted to capture the climate of literary criticism. In his book What Happened to Art Criticism (2003) the critic and art historian Elkins wrote about the tension that operates between a mode of descriptive reviewing, on the one hand, and of critical evaluation on the other. He proactively claimed that ‘descriptive criticism begs the question of what criticism is by making it appear that there is no question’ (p. 42). He made this statement before the mushrooming of online publishing began to democratise the field of art criticism, while simultaneously expanding it due to the increasing numbers of art writing finding a way to being (self)published. Yet, these developments might only have...

Monthly Review, 1990

Michael Walzer's absorbing book combines subtle commentary on the complex nature of "social criticism and political commitment" with keen, economical portraits of eleven major twentieth-century intellectuals. Walzer presents a fresh, forceful definition ofthe critic's role: the critic is not separate from or outside the society that he or she interrogates and challenges, but is, rather, "connected" to it, engaged in its central concerns and passionately, if complicatedly, involved in the struggles of the common people. Like Norman Birnbaum and Russell Jacoby, Walzer contests the reign of "specialization" and "professionalism," especially in the academy, that prevents many critics and intellectuals today from addressing the public at large. I He urges them to rededicate themselves, as "connected critics," to speaking in a crisp, resonant voice that popular audiences can understand. But while Walzer describes this attractive position in thoughtful, suggestive ways, he fails finally to make a wholly convincing case for it. He counsels critics to acknowledge their bonds to "the people," yet he never asks who these people are and how their interests, values, and desires might be recognized and hence given expression in intellectual work. In his first chapter, Walzer scrutinizes a number of accepted notions about "social criticism" and the characteristic identity of WilliamCainteachesin the Englishdepartmentat Wellesley College. He is the author of The Crisis in Criticism and F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism, and is now completing a book on W.E.B. DuBois.

Review essay on Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler & Saba Mahmood. Is critique secular? Blasphemy, injury and free speech. xx, 148 pp. bibliogrs. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2013. £12.99 (paper)

Between the dream and the reality of people's experiences irony prepares the ground for disappointment and the emergence of alternatives. These alternatives can provide the means to critique the dream; they can also be seen as a focus of criticism in relation to the dream as an expression of 'the good'. The good society is what is at stake during the periods of crisis, where confidence in the ‘good’ is shaken by events or under threat through a play of interpretations that have no point of anchorage. In the call to topple a tyrant or a monarch , the leader who filled the place of power is toppled, leaving it empty. In democracy, this space is permanently, as Lefort (1988) called it the empty place of power. It may be occupied by presidents and prime ministers but they have no permanent right to it. The real occupants are the ‘people’, or at least those who have voting rights. However, as already argued, the people and their access to the public are highly problematic terms framed by the organisation of power to shape opinion, reduce choice and limit access to the resources and mechanisms through which power operates. This potentially creates the conditions for criticism of the operation of democratic processes. However, there are different views as to the meaning and practices appropriate for democracy. These alternatives then create the conditions for critiques. Thus, as a brief distinction, criticism may be directed towards the operation of a system, whereas critique challenges the system itself. That is to say, critique challenges the basis upon which a way of seeing, a political and social order, a legal system, or a way of working, allocating resources and distributing wealth has legitimacy. .... The chapter goes on to explore the develops of critiques that challenge unjust power.

Media Theory , 2023

What is the fate of critique-especially media critique-in a social context that widely and enthusiastically embraces criticism and critical approaches? Starting from the position that critique has become a widespread intellectual orientation across both intellectual work and popular cultural engagement, this article discusses how media critique might produce meaningful and productive knowledge when a critical attitude towards the media is widely considered common sense. Arguing against perspectives that would make postcritique the enemy of critique, it suggests that critique would be better able to illuminate the current conjuncture if the aggression of critical suspicion were replaced with a more democratic and reflexive form of critical doubt.

Methods of Analysis, 2020

Critical analysis gets taken for granted through a sentiment that “everyone is a critic.” From the playpen, children grow up criticizing each other and their elders for breaking rules. These and other “kin objections to cultural rule violations” are common and prolific across history and contemporary societies (Jenkins, 1991, p. 404). Similarly, giving and receiving a critique, or “crit,” are synonymous with education (Petrina, 2017). Given the volumes of information sorted by everyday users of the web and its social media platforms, critical thinking has resurged as form of logic looking for fallacies. If so naturalized, then is the method of critical analysis and “a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures,” etc. all the more important?

The AnaChronisT

We might want to reco nsid er our formali st criti cal attitudes to literature along the lines suggested by the questi on imm orta lised by Stanl ey Fish: "Is the re a text in this class?" 1 Rather than stayin g with the notion of int erpr etive communities, however, I w ould lik e to u se th e questi on as a wake-up call to redire ct attention from theory to text, and allow our seh •es to ask an oth er imp ortant question: "Is this text about an ythin g?" W e may find out , as a reward for our infinite courage, that for a text to be "seriously, even passionately, about some thing," as the eminent postmodernist novelist and auth or of fictional aut obiographi es John Barth insisted the case should be ,2 is not, after all, mutu ally exclusive w ith the text being poetic ally creat ed, ver bally spectacular, or structurall y impeccable; we may indeed conclude that for a text to be about somethin g will not nec essarily diminish the pleasur es of th e text. Why would it preclud e any pleasur e inde ed, one might wonder. Th e answer leads into the heart of academ ic debat es about the liter ary canon and th e power struggles conducted around inclusion and exclusion of student bodie s, bodies of texts, and m emb ers of staff. Th ere are losses to suffer and pri vileges to gain, all hanging in the balance. The dang ers of havin g to sit throu gh defences of dissertations w here one nev er eYen heard of the author s' n ame s, let alone read the works discus sed, will have to be pitched against th e fre edom t o study wh at on e is

Forthcoming in Zoon Politikon (2021)

While criticism of management and other authorities might sometimes count as virtuous, it is often taken as a disturbance of business operations. Some people even think that criticism reflects badly on managers, as it supposedly shows that they do not have sufficient control over their employees. As I see it, then, feedback or criticism is framed in a highly ambivalent way: