Gottschall cuts a fascinating figure.  Here is a someone who has put themselves through the meat-grinder that is graduate school only to emerge on the other side having retained enough passion and ambition to carve out a career at a time when graduate school is increasingly becoming little more than an aspiration-trap through which universities monetise the intellectual fantasies of their students, exploiting their youth and naivete by dangling before them the prospect of an academic career that is utterly beyond the reach of all but the most gifted and driven of supplicants.  In a voice tinged with bitterness, Gottschall speaks of how the humanities have lost their way.  Rather than studying literature and unearthing truths about the books they work on, most literary humanists are now engaged in the construction of elaborate intellectual architectures.  Cathedrals of ideas drawing upon the pseudoscience of centuries past in order to construct readings and interpretations of texts that are completely unfalsifiable and completely uninformative.  This is not study conducted with the purpose of uncovering truth, this is study as a form of self-indulgent play.  Gottschall’s solution to the problem is to replace Literary Theory with science and quantitative analysis as the analytical engine of the humanities.

I have not read Gottschall’s book and so I cannot comment upon the feasibility of his manifesto, but the idea of literary criticism as a form of play does chime quite neatly with some of the aspects I enjoyed in M.D. Lachlan’s recent Fantasy novel Wolfsangel (2010).  That novel, it seems to me, is about exploring a metaphysical construct.  A spell, a prophecy and a werewolf that are bound together by the powers of madness, pain, love and identity.

Is Gottschall correct that criticism is completely severed from any notion of truth?  If he is, then that need not be a bad thing.

The Cover of The Function of Criticism

In his seminal work of historical meta-criticism The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton considers the social role played by criticism since its initial appearance alongside the creation of a middle-class intellectual public sphere in the early 18th Century.  Eagleton, a committed Marxist, opens his book with the statement :

“Modern European criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state.” [p. 9]

Eagleton then considers how the rise of capitalism has seen the public sphere almost entirely co-opted by commercial interests.  Where once the critic defended the values of his intellectual community by praising good works and castigating bad ones, he now finds himself on the outside of a community held together not by shared aesthetic standards but by the joys of consumerism, hype and a collective responsiveness to mega-budgeted marketing strategies.  Eagleton concludes his work with a neatly symmetrical warning :

“Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless its future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all.” [p. 124]

This idea of criticism as a form of political struggle is one that Gottschall addresses in his interview.  Gottschall states that the politicisation of literary criticism has resulted not only in bad scholarship and the vaporisation of large chunks of (previously) public intellectual discourse into an academic sphere largely inaccessible to people who are not a part of the academic infrastructure.  Indeed, as the Science Wars demonstrated, it is not actually clear in what way the poor benefit from Lacanian readings of Isaac Newton.  Smash all the conceptual boundaries you want but such activities will not feed the hungry or bring down any corrupt governments.

So what should the purpose of criticism be?

Cover of the new edition of Anatomy of Criticism

As Northrop Frye puts it in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) :

“The subject matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is evidently something of an art too.” [p. 3]

This strikes me as a much more healthy tack to take.  Rather than being rubbish revolutionaries, critics should be understood as artists in their own right.  Frye preempts the obvious objection by framing this ideas as uncharitably as possible :

“This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power.” [p. 3]

I would suggest that this vision of the critic as a cultural parasite had a good deal more potency when the difference between artistic forms was more pronounced.  Indeed, if artists are in the business of painting, writing music, writing novels or composing sonnets then the ‘art’ of writing an essay about a book can seem like a category mistake or a confusion of meta-levels.  However, one of the more exciting developments in recent cultural history has been the acceptance of the essay not merely as a tool for discussing art but as an artistic form in its own right.  This acceptance has also coincided with the rise of a set of aesthetic values that seem perfectly suited to the production of genuinely insightful and beautiful criticism.

Reality Hunger

Serving as a critical figurehead for this movement, David Shields produced a book entitled Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010).  The book is a collection of over 600 short passages, some only a sentence long, some ranging over a page.  Together, these passages present a manifesto for a form of non-fiction writing which, though anchored to existing artistic forms and  traditions such as the ‘lyrical essay’ and the ‘creative non-fiction’ memoir, seeks to transcend all of them and create something genuinely new.  What is particularly interesting about Shields’ manifesto is the fact that of the 600 passages included in the text, the vast majority are actually lifted from other sources. Indeed, Shields’ mission is beautifully articulated in one passage lifted from John D’Agata’s non-fiction collection The Next American Essay (2003) :

“612.  What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay it takes a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments.  Lyric essays seek answers yet seldom seem to find them.  They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case, may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet ‘the other,’ may start out as travelogues that forget where they are or begin as prose poems that refuse quick conclusions, may originate as lines that resist being broken or full-blooded paragraphs that start slimming down.  They’re hybrids that perch on the fence between the willed and the felt.  A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out.” [p.203-204]

This combination of subjective personal opinion anchored in objective fact (the body of a text) but heading out of the plane of the textual ecliptic at a high rate of burn strikes me as a good analogy for the nature of criticism.  As a critic I am not in the business of providing purchasing advice, but neither am I in the business of attempting to read the author’s mind by establishing the facts about a text.

As a critic, I am engaged in the construction of conceptual edifices.  I bring to bear theories and asserted truths ripped from the world and my own imagination and crash them into the text of a book or a film like a runaway train into an orphanage.  On a good day, I may make people marvel at the explosion or weep at the humanity of the dead children pulled from the wreckage.  Criticism is narcissistic, self-regarding and utterly pointless.  But then… so is most art.

Of course, art-for-art’s sake is simply a polite way of describing self-indulgence and while I would defend criticism’s right to be both intellectually respectable and utterly self-indulgent, I also think that criticism fulfils a social need.

An interesting place to begin looking for criticism’s purpose comes in the shape of another podcast.  In an episode of Entitled Opinions devoted to The Uses of Literature, Robert Harrison speaks to Joshua Landy about the distinction between Literary Theory and theories of literature.  During the podcast, Landy makes two fascinating claims:

• Firstly, he suggests that what draws many people to the study of literature is a Love of Beauty.  This Love of Beauty then crosses the aisle from being a relationship to the text to being a set of values used to engage with ideas about the text.  This explains why the likes of Freud and Lacan have continued to enjoy enormous currency among literary scholars despite their theories having long-since shed any shred of scientific respectability they might once have had.  In other words, one does not use Freud to deconstruct a text because Freud’s theories are true, one uses Freud because Freud’s theories have an aesthetic appeal of their own and by projecting Freud’s theories against a work of art, the critic is able to create his own Thing of Beauty.  As Landy puts it, “it requires you to make the grand gesture”.

• Secondly, Landy argues that by reading certain kinds of work, we are engaging in what he calls a form of ‘spiritual exercise’.  What he means by this is that to read an intelligent novel or to watch a great film is to be an active participant in a form of intellectual ballroom dancing in which the active reader tests their imagination, moral principles, sense of empathy and ability to reason against what are ultimately a series of words printed on pieces of paper.  The act of reading is an act of creation whereby the capacities of the individual are used to transform a series of words on the page into a succession of mental images.  Images of people, places, events and ideas that prompt the reader to have emotional reactions.  If the use of literature is to provide an arena for this kind of spiritual and mental exercise, then criticism — which is nothing but the results of active reading made public through the medium of prose — is all about constructing a lens.  A lens through which people can view the text and view the world.

In my review of Lachlan’s Wolfsangel, I drew a comparison between the metaphysical artefact described by the novel and the intricate ideas pulled together by the generations of theologians and philosophers who have helped to elaborate sophisticated understandings of religious beliefs.  When Lachlan is describing a spell that ties love, madness, suffering and werewolves together with the death of the gods and the end of the world, he is engaged in the same kind of activity as Nagarjuna when he was commenting upon the teachings of Buddha or Augustine when he was commenting upon Christian teachings through the lens of Neo-Platonic thought.  This activity is the construction of conceptual spaces that can be engaged with for the purposes of intellectual and spiritual exercise.  These spaces challenge your thinking, they make you change your way of looking at things, they test your commitments and force you to make new ones.  These conceptual spaces are intensely engaging and they in no way require a commitment to truth.

All artists share this undertaking: The creation of engaging conceptual spaces.  The elaboration of intellectual playgrounds.  The building of a testing ground for ideas and identities.  This is the purpose of criticism too.

That and making shopping recommendations…

And trying to read the author’s mind…

Best of the Year : Back at the beginning of July, I posted a listing of the 100 odd films I had watched in the first six months of the year but it occurred to me at the time that this was nothing more than information dumping masquerading as a post.  So this time, I intend to do things a little bit differently by mining the data for preferences.  What this means in practical terms is that I’m going to do not one but at least two different ‘Best of the Year’ posts before posting the list of the films I have seen since the beginning of July.  I shall also be adding a 2009 tag to these posts partly for my own sake so that in six months I can look back and wonder what the hell I was thinking in deciding to pick X and not Y.

Resolutions : I also want to share some of my resolutions for 2010.  I have easily outdistanced my target of 200 films for the year, but I am going to keep this number in place for 2010.  I do not hope to see as many films next year as I did this year in part because I have decided to read more books.  In fact, I plan to finish 50 books in 2010 and I shall be keeping track of them in the same way as I have films this year.

Introspection : One of the things that has surprised me about 2009 is that I am still reading genre fiction.  This time last year I was not only bored but actively hostile to a lot of what was produced under the ‘science fiction’ label and I was envisioning a complete withdrawal of critical attention from the genre.  However, the end of 2009 finds me more engaged than I have been in years and while I may not be pumping out genre reviews at the rate I used to back in the SF Diplomat days, I am still writing about SF for a number of different venues.  One of which is not Futurismic.  This time last year, my Blasphemous Geometries column was still about the genre.  The thinking was that, as I no longer ran a genre blog, I would instead produce more thoughtful blog posts once a month for my column.  However, as time went by I found myself struggling to find things to write about and so I decided to turn Blasphemous Geometries into a video game column.  This brought me some praise from cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling and a good deal of creative happiness.

In more general terms, I think that, for me, 2009 was a year concerned with style.  Up until comparatively recently, I saw style as a rusted screen in-between the perceiver and the real world.  My academic background had taught me to value clarity and, as a result, I had no time for style in the writings of others or in my own writings.  However, as a result of not only watching intensely stylised films but seeking out highly stylised prose writing, I have come to value style over more traditional elements such as plotting.  I remember a literature teacher once telling a friend of mine that, when he was older, he would read books not for the stories but for the words and, somewhat depressingly, that prediction has finally come true for me.

So thank you all for reading and brace yourselves for my review of 2009.

I have enjoyed this year’s blogging far more than I enjoyed the previous two with SF Diplomat and I think that Ruthless Culture hosts some of my best writing and has been an online home through some of my most productive periods.  So I wanted to put up a quick post celebrating this fact and thanking all the people who regularly read and comment on this blog.  You are most useful in reminding me that I am not insane.

Here’s to another year…

The exact details of the novel and Martin’s reaction to it are largely academic.  What interested me was the nature of the response to Martin’s criticisms of the work.  Almost from the get-go, the response seemed to be from the position that Martin’s review had somehow broken the rules of engagement.  Perhaps he had included spoilers (he hadn’t) or he had based his criticisms on an early proof rather than the final version (which he had been careful not to do).  From there, the accusations levelled at Martin and the website the review was published on became more and more baroque :

• Martin does not read much fantasy

• Martin has a vendetta against the book.

• Martin has a vendetta against the book.

• Martin chose the book knowing he would not like it.

• Martin is jealous of the author.

• Martin read a lot of positive reviews of the book and decided to produce a negative one as a result.

• Strange Horizons has a bias against fantasy.

• Strange Horizons has a bias against non-British works.

• Strange Horizons had a bias against books that do not challenge the boundaries of genre.

• Strange Horizons are allowing books to be reviewed by people utterly unsuited to them.

What is common to all of these theories is that they all seek to explain away Martin’s reaction to the novel rather than engaging with it.  When faced with a negative review of a book they like, fans immediately look not to the subjectivity of their own tastes and the fact that this subjectivity allows for variations from person to person, but rather that there is some agency motivating this negative review.

In a happy collision of postings, I think read a new post over on K-punk about some people’s criticisms of the work of philosopher Alain Badiou.

What is fascinating to me is that the same forces guiding the reaction to Martin’s review also seem to be guiding Mark’s reaction to critics of Badiou.  However, because Mark is not only eloquent but also extremely clever, his arguments are properly supported, and so we can better grasp the motivations of those who would silence Martin.

Mark’s piece effectively serves to rule out as inadmissable a whole raft of criticisms of Badiou’s work.  Not because they are inaccurate, but because they are in breach of the rules of proper engagement :

“Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what – all good sense knows – is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man. Which isn’t to make the fatuous relativist claim that devotees of Badiou are the same as Trekkies; it is to make the point that Graham has been tirelessly reiterating – that the critique from nowhere is nothing but trolling. Trolls pride themselves on not being fans, on not having the investments shared by those occupying whatever space they are trolling.”

In other words, not only is being a fan an acceptable state to be in, it is also the only meaningful position from which to engage with anything.  To properly engage with a text, you must attack it from a particular theoretical and/or aesthetic position.  To fail to possess such a position is to be little more than a troll (and I take it that Mark chose this emotive work with some considerable caution).

This neatly maps on to the reaction against Martin.  The fans of the book see Martin’s reaction to it and assume that Martin is either pushing a particular aesthetic agenda (namely one that prioritises edgy works of British SF) or he is acting out some kind of strange psychodrama that is little more than trolling.

Mark goes on to explain how trolling, as a form of engagement, is one that is instilled by higher education :

“In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent – in the worst way – than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from – the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted – the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them).”

This very much echoes my own background as a graduate student in analytical philosophy.  I remember our research seminars would involve someone reading out a paper or some of their recent work only for it to be torn to shreds by people who a) were working entirely outside of the field of the person giving the paper and b) usually had no information to go on other than their own expertise and what had just been read out.  This type of critiquing gives birth to a belief in certain universal laws of not only logic but also argumentative discourse.  Many is the paper I sat through which would be debated in terms of “simplicity”, “intuitiveness” and even “cleanliness”.  Mark drives his point further home :

“There is a strong relationship between the Fan and the critic. The best critics do not pretend to offer value-neutral judgements from nowhere – as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Lacan have shown in their different ways, no such place exists , although the fantasy position of something like Analytic Philosophy is to pretend that it does. Again, this is not a relativist or anti-realist point – any sophisticated realist position has to deal with the fact that we can’t step over own own shadow”

Debate in analytical philosophy is not directionless.  Rather it stems from a belief in certain universal strictures.  This is why analytical philosophy students are taught formal logic and why more and more of analytical philosophy has become colonised by scientific ideas.

This left me wondering whether I (and others like me) are making the same mistake as the people in my old research seminars.  When we argue about the failings of a book’s prose style or the lack of narrative coherence or the weak characterisation or the poor structure, are we invoking an imaginary set of universal principles?  are we effectively attacking works from nowhere and with nothing?  are we being simply trolls?

I do not think that this is necessarily so.

The difference between someone who reviews books from within the values of a genre and someone who professes no loyalties to the values of a genre is that the fan can point to his critical position and say “I stand for this”.  The external critic cannot, but this is not to say that they do not stand anywhere.  When an analytical philosopher attacks an idea, he does so whilst committed to certain theories and postulates.  He is, in effect, attacking from the position of a fan even though he himself does not necessarily recognise that he is merely a fan or that his devotion to a particular position is all that he is defending.  Instead he is attacking from the point of view that certain values are either actually universal or they should be.  This shrinks the space for Mark’s trolls.  Under this view, trolling would be buying into whichever critical principle you need in order to take down a particular work but then shedding said principle when you move onto the next book.  In other words it is lambasting one book for weak plotting whilst downplaying the importance of plot in the next work you review.

I suspect that this is where Theory has its place within reviewing and criticism.  If you invest in a theoretical frame-work then you need never worry about falling into mercenary trolling.  If you are a feminist, you can reliably attack and praise different works for their obeissance to the values of feminism.  The same goes for fans of Marx, Freud, Lacan or Badiou.

Where Mark and the fantasy fans make their mistake is in thinking that only these store-bought conceptual frameworks are valid things to believe in.  Either one is committed to a recognisable ideology (which opponents can read about and attack) or one is producing noise by setting fire to works without upholding any principles.

My suggestion, therefore, is that people pay a bit more attention to the pre-theoretical values their criticism embodies.  If they do, they might well find that being pro-cutting edge British SF is not really that harmful an accusation to face down at all.

While no one has to do any of the above or more, sometimes I’m reading through a blog and it’s as though the person operating it has largely chosen to remove him/herself from the material being presented. It seems as though for many of the blogs that I’ve read, that the blogger has taken a fairly passive role to the material s/he is presenting. Yes, some will use the first-person on occasion, but it often feels tacked on, as if s/he were writing a plot summary and then decided to use a paragraph or two at the end to interject his/her opinions on the matter. Such things feel bolted-on to me, as if two separate things (description of book, reaction to book) are forcibly combined, rather than an integration of the two taking place. While useful for many as an indicator of how the reviewer reacted to a piece, as a review essay, it is rather wanting to me.

This is rather a timely comment as, over the last week, I have been thinking of fiddling with the format a bit.  When I started Ruthless Culture my aim was to write about films in a way that was not possible at the various reviewing gigs I had and which sat uncomfortably with the SF-focus of my old blog.  Because of that ‘mission statement’ I also cut out most of the editorialising and linking that I traditionally did in between any substantial pieces I might write.  I saw this as cutting out the fluff.

I think that this has resulted in a blog that feels a trifle dry.  So, in addition to the longer critical and review pieces I produce I am also going to produce shorter non-critical posts which should serve to even out the tone somewhat.

However, I can completely understand why one would not want to go down this particular road.  In fact, off the top of my head, here are four reasons for sticking to the facts :

1) Most of us lead quite dull lives – We’re not all trapped in the middle of a civil war or living through a flu epidemic or making our way  in the world as rent boys catering to the Argentinian political classes.  Most of our lives are crushingly mundane and it has never been completely clear to me why anyone should take an interest in my life.  In fact, I tend to think that the trend for ‘compulsive sharing’ that our culture has drifted into is rather narcisssistic.

2) Some of us are trained to filter out the subjective – The skills I have as a critic stem largely from my academic training and in academic circles the subjective is neither here nor there.  I was once castigated for using the first person pronoun in an essay (I kept doing it though).  So for many bloggers I suspect it never occurs to them to write about themselves whilst writing about other things.

3) There are different reasons for keeping a blog – I think it’s pretty clear that, even among intellectual blogs, it is better for readers if the blogger strikes a stance more friendly and discursive than that required for proper intellectual analysis but some bloggers are not overly bothered about what their readerships think.  If you write for yourself then there’s no reason why you should strive to be more accessible and transparent.

4) It’s a Jungle Out There – By including personal matters in one’s blogging one is effectively putting information into the public domain.  Some people (Larry included) do not blog under their own name and so insulate their real life from their online life by making sure that nobody can gogle their name and discover that they’re a cross dresser, a manic depressive or a collector of Nazi memorabelia.  Some of us do blog under our real names and so might well ‘withhold’ in quite a different way, namely by refusing to share personal details about oneself.

Clearly, there’s a spectrum here with nothing but hard-core criticism at one end and nothing but discussions of your lover’s oral sex technique and the health of your cats at the other but I think that pretty much any position in the spectrum one chooses to adopt is entirely defensible as long as one realises the trade-offs one is making by adopting one position rather than another.