I often feel, when I'm reading literary criticism that relies heavily upon critical theory, or which are themselves largely defined as critical theory (the distinction is of course potentially fraught), as if I am engaged in some sort of competition or contest, and I am losing.
Likely, this is not a useful formulation. If I trip and fall over tangled syntax; if I become lost in the forest of allusions; if I fall into the chasm inside a hyphenated or /ed or vexéd term, (see how I just made one up myself) – if these things trouble me, it isn't the criticism's fault, it's my own lack of understanding. I have read barely any literary theory. I took only half of a semester of philosophy in undergrad and read Plato back in ninth grade. That's as far as it goes with me.
And yet – is there something more to these sense I have of so many theory-heavy essays as strategic tennis matches? Could it possibly go beyond my own inadequacies? Sometimes, I think, a work of criticism uses theory like a bombardment. It covers you in the very difficult, allusive, translated ideas of abstract thinkers until you can't even see the central text anymore, so that the author can storm it and take possession. That's a terribly hostile metaphor – hostile in its images and also hostile towards critical theory, and I feel the need to apologize for it, but then sometimes apology itself can become an almost-hostile strategy (passive-aggressive, I guess that is), whereby every methodology needs a justification, and every justification is acknowledged inadequate, until the work seems to reduce itself to a position of unassailable personalness. Do you understand me? The acknowledgement that reading – any reading, be it the reading of the primary critical object or the readings of the critical theorist authorites – always involves strategy and bias becomes less an opening for thought-provoking parlallel critical universes than a justification for quasi-incomprehensiblity. The essay can't comprehend because nothing can comprehend everything, and therefore it is itself incomprehensible.
I am getting incomprehensible myself – and maybe that's a lot of what happens to me and to the writers I feel like I'm playing table tennis with. One of the founding principles, as I understand it, for most of what we call critical theory is that it is really, really hard to analyze our own thought structures. Because, of course, we can't ever really step outside of them. And so the only way we can see them is to look in a mirror of some sort, which entails a necessary sort of distortion. So it's hardly surprising that syntax or vocabulary might end up being distorted or distended during that process.
But that still doesn't account for the competitiveness to which I sometimes feel subject when I'm reading theory-heavy criticism. It's the name-dropping and the sentence-entangling that does it for me – there are ways to be careful without being sneaky, ways to be multifarious without being overwhelming, ways to be complex without being confusing – and sometimes I feel like criticism isn't just accidentally choosing the latter terms over the former, but deliberately doing so. Sometimes movies and plays do it too, I guess. I don't tend to like it when they do.
Does this just make me insecure? Pedestrian? I'll admit to both of those things. I am insecure and pedestrian. Maybe I'm insecure because I'm pedestrian, or pedestrian because I'm insecure. Even so, does that mean I shouldn't be able to understand writing that tried to grapple with big philosophical questions? Maybe. I mean, I could be wrong – it could be that an appropriate analogy for my current reading skillset is that I’m trying to conduct experiments in genetic sequencing with a home chemistry set.
I don't know. The thing I have the worst trouble with is criticism that deals with Marxism and Marxists. I just don't understand so much of it. And that's sadly what I keep reading about, since I'm trying to write about commercial and "popular" phenomena.
Likely, this is not a useful formulation. If I trip and fall over tangled syntax; if I become lost in the forest of allusions; if I fall into the chasm inside a hyphenated or /ed or vexéd term, (see how I just made one up myself) – if these things trouble me, it isn't the criticism's fault, it's my own lack of understanding. I have read barely any literary theory. I took only half of a semester of philosophy in undergrad and read Plato back in ninth grade. That's as far as it goes with me.
And yet – is there something more to these sense I have of so many theory-heavy essays as strategic tennis matches? Could it possibly go beyond my own inadequacies? Sometimes, I think, a work of criticism uses theory like a bombardment. It covers you in the very difficult, allusive, translated ideas of abstract thinkers until you can't even see the central text anymore, so that the author can storm it and take possession. That's a terribly hostile metaphor – hostile in its images and also hostile towards critical theory, and I feel the need to apologize for it, but then sometimes apology itself can become an almost-hostile strategy (passive-aggressive, I guess that is), whereby every methodology needs a justification, and every justification is acknowledged inadequate, until the work seems to reduce itself to a position of unassailable personalness. Do you understand me? The acknowledgement that reading – any reading, be it the reading of the primary critical object or the readings of the critical theorist authorites – always involves strategy and bias becomes less an opening for thought-provoking parlallel critical universes than a justification for quasi-incomprehensiblity. The essay can't comprehend because nothing can comprehend everything, and therefore it is itself incomprehensible.
I am getting incomprehensible myself – and maybe that's a lot of what happens to me and to the writers I feel like I'm playing table tennis with. One of the founding principles, as I understand it, for most of what we call critical theory is that it is really, really hard to analyze our own thought structures. Because, of course, we can't ever really step outside of them. And so the only way we can see them is to look in a mirror of some sort, which entails a necessary sort of distortion. So it's hardly surprising that syntax or vocabulary might end up being distorted or distended during that process.
But that still doesn't account for the competitiveness to which I sometimes feel subject when I'm reading theory-heavy criticism. It's the name-dropping and the sentence-entangling that does it for me – there are ways to be careful without being sneaky, ways to be multifarious without being overwhelming, ways to be complex without being confusing – and sometimes I feel like criticism isn't just accidentally choosing the latter terms over the former, but deliberately doing so. Sometimes movies and plays do it too, I guess. I don't tend to like it when they do.
Does this just make me insecure? Pedestrian? I'll admit to both of those things. I am insecure and pedestrian. Maybe I'm insecure because I'm pedestrian, or pedestrian because I'm insecure. Even so, does that mean I shouldn't be able to understand writing that tried to grapple with big philosophical questions? Maybe. I mean, I could be wrong – it could be that an appropriate analogy for my current reading skillset is that I’m trying to conduct experiments in genetic sequencing with a home chemistry set.
I don't know. The thing I have the worst trouble with is criticism that deals with Marxism and Marxists. I just don't understand so much of it. And that's sadly what I keep reading about, since I'm trying to write about commercial and "popular" phenomena.
Labels: anger, anxiety, reading, the_profession
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