On The Critic

On the critic

September 20, 2022

Everyone's a critic. It's a sign of the times. In a land, a country, even a world of increasingly abundant artifacts of culture - words, stories, images, spectacles, songs, - it's the human urge to reduce the entropy of all this product that comes to the foreground even as the main objects that this urge works upon recede somewhat into the setting in which we work. The natural human urge to systematize leads to the popularization of critique as a position from which to perceive the myriad mutually agreed-upon and pleasant delusions by which the average person now does more than slightly more than entertain themselves. This fact is perhaps variable by the material conditions of economic paradigms, but perhaps part of the inevitability of civilization's development: nevertheless, there is a sort of imperative to just make sense of the flavor of a human life met on the street or in public. It's an imperative toward criticism too. "We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal," Nietzsche commented (Human, All Too Human, 248). It's a necessity just to understand the passive fantasies consumed, by whoever you may be talking to.

Even a casual familiarity with pop culture and so on, whatever may have piqued someone's curiosity, reveals uncomfortable limitations on certain linkages between works; songs carrying repeated emotional appeals in different instances; tones, imagery, structural cliches; and then this alongside a really uncomfortable variety of artistic culture to be consumed. But even more familiarity or range doesn't really institute critique or "The Critic". But this point in the progression does elucidate a very distinct need peculiar to this time of fragmented and also identity-constitutive media landscapes, for a more complex and nuanced, fuller-fleshed concept of The Critic as a person who exists in society.

What, even, is critique is not so clear. It is precisely this media landscape that makes suspicion believe that any pen can be held captive to a higher will, and yet this is completely opposite of the sense in which this media landscape would have come about. In a similar way the conflicted notions about what makes honest criticism hides what criticism is, - and certainly, Foucault underscores that critique is not a notion from cliche.

A critique does not consist in saying that things are not good as they are. It consists in seeing what kinds of self-evidences and liberties the practices we accept rest on.

("So Is It Important to Think?")

As a basic reward from basic industriousness, a functionally illimited array of pleasant delusions can suck you in and walk you back out of something agreed-upon to be all-around agreeable. It's important to note that things are in so many ways better than they have ever been. I promise the contra-point to this is not the problem of too many options. In fact I'm not sure that this concerns some comment on the current moment at all; I'm disposed to say this concerns a feature of society that the current moment has only made relevant, and that the very current has finally given a problem so very deep-seated that the feature has to be defined out of obscurity.

Not everyone is a Critic actually. I wish for there to be one and hope it appears, and that passes for criticism for most. It is a sign of the times, though, that we yearn for this more than most times in the past.

On The Critic, it is such a thing that hasn't existed when things are too big or too fractured a spectacle. But even though both those are emblematic of our current times writ large and in broad strokes, I think it is the relevance of the limited linkages of sound and music, cliches of imagery too, and their inoperability and misuse as actual cultural touchstones, that provide the traction and the resistance that he needs to operate.

Things are better than they have ever been, but by being better than they ever are, these things that are concerns of the Critic, have almost exceeded the bounds of an audience's taste, without exceeding their understanding. Somehow, this almost makes things the worst they have ever been; and we yearn, that the Critic inhabit this space, sociologically, even perhaps philosophically, in society.

Let's talk about music in the audiovisual paradigm as a sort of drug to dope a construct from too much fractal variety into familiarity. It's the fractal variety that they want, but it disappears even for them into indistinguishability without some frustrating irreducibility to lash out against that carries the energy into the body of the work where the work is essentially the same: to reduce obscurity, or complexity, to the familiar or the irreducible-further. But it's a strange thing to understand because the familiar is hard to reduce further but it's glossed out of impossibility and with great rage; the possible-to-operate-upon is easier than these markers of impossibility, but its not only there that the work can be done.

These markers creating this traction have to be recognizable, but old favorites of everybody, so have they survived because they could have no meaning made of them by the Critics? Same with artistic cliches. And yet they trigger that mood to critique in the Critic...so do they say, to them, to look elsewhere, to critique them? And what does this say for the real production of music to take or not take into account in the age when the Critic is active?

Isn't this a thing? A sort of Ethics of Elsewhere.