#find this ironic coming from a piece in the new yorker lmao but 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

[familyabolisher]

In “Professing Criticism,” Guillory concludes an essay titled “On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education” by pointing to the rise of venues that accommodate the kinds of criticism that the university cannot. “These are sites (for the most part) of intellectual exchange on the internet, new versions of ‘little magazines,’ such as n+1, or of journals such as The Point, as well as the now vast proliferation of blogs on cultural matters, some of which host high-level exchanges,” he writes. “Such sites disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse.” He does not develop the point further. Yet one suspects, given what such magazines and blogs can afford to pay, that any prospective contributor will have to hold a job, or several. Here one catches a sudden glimpse of a future in which the Scholar-Critic kaleidoscopes into many hyphenated identities: the Critic-Copy Editor, the Critic-Community Organizer, the Critic-Assistant, the Critic-Amazon Warehouse Associate-Uber Driver. (I leave to one side the Critic of Independent Means and the Critic Who Married Into Money.)

This new kind of critic may write for one of the magazines that Guillory names. But there’s no reason to restrict ourselves to such venues. It is not unusual to stumble upon an essay on Goodreads or Substack that is just as perceptive as academic or journalistic essays, which, no matter how many rounds of revision they undergo, reflect the déformation professionnelle of their respective spheres. Nor should we limit the domain of criticism to writing. Anyone who has taught students knows that the best critiques are often produced in the classroom, through conversations in which one is trying to demonstrate how a poem or a novel works to many different readers, few of whom aspire to write or to join the professoriat.

Early in “Professing Criticism,” Guillory writes that I. A. Richards regarded criticism “as a practice in which every reader of literature was engaged.” But a different proposition presents itself: If everybody is a critic, then no one is. The idea recalls Guillory’s ending to “Cultural Capital,” in which he walks his reader through a thought experiment that Karl Marx undertook in “The German Ideology.” Under the communist organization of society, Marx speculates, eliminating the division of labor will also eliminate the distinction that accrues to artists—writers, painters, sculptors, composers, actors, critics, and other producers of “unique labors.” The utopian horizon of aesthetic production is the disappearance of the painter, the writer, the actor, the composer, and the critic—or, rather, the disappearance of painting, writing, and so on as autonomous domains. In this world, there would be no professional critics, only people who engage in criticism as one activity among many.

“Cultural producers would still compete to have their products read, studied, looked at, heard, lived in, sung, worn, and would still accumulate cultural capital in the form of ‘prestige’ or fame,” Guillory writes. But it would not matter whether you published criticism in the form of a Goodreads review or a magazine article; whether criticism was transmitted through the written word or the spoken one, in the form of podcasts or public lectures; whether the object of criticism was a novel, a film, a show, a song, a dance, a painting, a dress. All that would matter would be the logic of the critic’s thought, the pleasure of her style, the persuasiveness of her judgments, and the education imparted through her words. The result would be to liberate criticism from the institutions of the materially advantaged, allowing it to overflow into the activities of daily life.