Taking (and Making) Stock of Criticism Today
W.H. Auden, the great mid-century poet, was also a keen literary and cultural critic, especially with regards to what he saw as the destruction of art by the encroachment of mass culture. In one particularly striking bit of imagery, he argues that mass culture has trained people to slurp up even difficult cultural products “like canned soup.” It’s possible Auden had in mind Warhol’s iconic pop art Campbell’s Soup Cans when he wrote these words (Warhol’s painting had come out a year or two before), but regardless, his image captures something of the dilemma of cultural consumption in our current, supersaturated society.
Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup Cans. 1962
Go to the grocery store and you will see a whole aisle of soups, stews and chowders, designed to be heated n’ eated in minutes. But try to name the most memorable can of soup you’ve ever had – is it possible? So too with our cultural effluvia. Just trying to list the T.V. shows currently in production will turn you into John Nash, slack jawed at his chalkboard, rearranging the mysteries of the universe. How many shows achieve – how many even aspire to achieve – a lasting grasp on the mind? The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for any area of production: music, books, and more. What Auden saw with gimlet eye was that this state of production was not merely about production. Sure, it’s a problem in its own right that cultural content gets cranked out at an alarming rate and come to us prepackaged, sodium levels regularized across the board. In the long run, though, the true disaster is that, exposed to the bland sameness, we lose our sense of taste. Like toddlers who, having eaten only dino nuggets, refuse to try anything not breaded and frozen, we have traded our taste for a mess of pottage.
This sorry state holds as true for professional critics as it does for the masses. That is not to say there are not good critics, or even entire publications, that consistently put out thoughtful cultural criticism. But the slant and gravity of cultural criticism in our age of overproduction and overconsumption tugs irresistibly at individual works of criticism, urging them to conform to the spirit of the age. What this looks like, mostly, is criticism that ends up as uniform and bland as canned soup. There’s a disheartening game I play with myself where I guess beforehand what a particular outlet will have to say about a new film or record or novel. The exercise is disheartening because, nine times out of ten, I guess correctly. To take a by-now ice cold “controversy,” look at these critical responses to the most recent Kanye West album. What’s frustrating about clusters of reviews like these is the essential sameness of the critical moves they make. It’s fine to like or not like any given work, but the stultifying lockstep of reviews like these leaves a distinct “paint by numbers” taste in my mouth.
Some people want to tie these critical responses to concepts like “cancel culture,” teasing out the essentially political nature of these supposedly aesthetic evaluations: an artist like Kanye, once deemed “good” for telling us that George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people, has now performed a heel turn by talking to Trump, embracing evangelicalism, and employing unsavory people in the production of his records. There’s an element of truth to this critique, as part of the deadening sameness that emerges in most major outlets today involves a measuring of works against au courant political and social mores. But these critiques pull up short and miss the mark; the desire to measure works of art against political yardsticks is at most a symptom, not the disease itself.
One major reason critics fall into ruts of criticism – whether politically motivated takedowns or breathless fawning over the latest sewage pumped out by Marvel studios – is that taking the time to develop a deep, coherent critical viewpoint amidst the deluge of cultural production is like looking for a foothold in an avalanche. Individual works of art matter less to content producers like Netflix, and content review sites like Polygon, than the great primordial churning of the content waters themselves. Indeed, “content” triumphs over creation entirely. Hate the superhero film debuting this week? No problem: ten more have lined up to replace it in the coming month. Like that new indie singer/songwriter? Here’s an algorithm with enough knock offs to crowd her out of your mind in an instant.
A thoroughly thorough critique of our present situation would include a digression on the technological contours that make this constant flux of remembering and forgetting not only possible but preferable. I do not have the time nor, to be honest, the expertise to do justice to this great enabling factor in our current landscape. The best I can do is point you in the direction of someone like L.M. Sacasas, whose work on technology has helped my own critical thinking grow immeasurably. Again, though, technology plays only a part in that landscape; Auden complained about the deadening of critical sensibilities long before the dawn of the Internet.
The multifaceted nature of the problem we face as consumers and would-be critics of culture risks paralyzing us entirely. How can we fight patterns if we cannot even fully comprehend them? I take some hope in the idea that we do not fully need to know the sources of our discontent to ward them off. Obviously some sense of underlying causes is important; it’s worth a film critic knowing (as too few seem to) the difference between sitting in a theater watching a film shot and projected on film stock versus sitting in your underwear watching digitally filmed images on your iPhone. But there are steps to take to break the fever even if we can’t plumb the depths of its cause. Or, to return to Auden’s soup, we can make stock of our situation even before we take stock of it.
Making stock is a favorite metaphor (you might say a stock image) I return to again and again when teaching my students about thinking and writing. It’s not enough to have the necessary ingredients gathered; stock requires time, a slow simmering where the low intensity works to extract deep flavor. So in thinking and writing. In a microwave culture where hot takes emerge in seconds only to burn our mouths as we gobble them down, we must aspire to the state of the stock maker, working our ideas over and over at a low heat until we have squeezed the full juice of meaning from them, as T.S. Eliot liked to say.
For Auden, borrowing from the philosophy of Simone Weil, the successful critic relies on a deep well of attention. In a somewhat strange move, Auden refers to attention as a form of prayer. What he means by this, ultimately, is that attention draws us out of ourselves and into the object being contemplated. As he says, “Whenever a man so concentrates his attention – be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God – that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.” Ultimately for Auden, as an Anglican, the highest form of prayer must be directed toward God. Nevertheless, these lesser imitations of prayer, these givings of our attention to objects which are not God, have their place in personal development, and in our education as consumers of culture (he recommended this form of “prayer” as an essential component of education, especially for aspiring poets).
For we stock-making cultural critics, the daily practice of turning our attention to objects worthy of that attention, and the requisite turning away from less worthy objects that entails, works as a form of practice, a ritual that activates our critical powers for when we really need them. What does this practice look like on the ground? It starts with a recovery of the art of close reading (broadly construed; we can “read” movies or music along with books). Too much contemporary criticism jumps directly into linking the what and the why of a work without first considering the how. In other words, plot summary plus broadly construed criticism (cultural, social, political) equals successful criticism. We can resist this trend by insisting that deep description of the systems at play in a work matters, that, as Leon Kass put it in a recent interview, we can’t just read “for argument or ammunition,” but must realize that works themselves teach us how they want to be read.
It must also entail a letting go, both of the desire to master everything that swims into our ken, and of the desire to make all things meaningful. In other words, realizing that we cannot say what is worth saying about the works that matter if we insist on spending our days consuming everything in sight. How we spend our time matters. Is it worth catching up on the latest buzziest prestige drama if that means I cannot give the proper attention to a record I am supposed to review? The pull toward mastery, toward a keeping up with the cultural Joneses, is real, but must be resisted.
Along with that desire comes another: to consider that every work we consume, insofar as we consume it, is just as valuable as any other. I would love to believe that my investment in basketball podcasts, or detective novels (a favorite of Auden’s), or Bob’s Burgers – to name but a few of my personal obsessions – constitutes some sort of important critical act on my part. Rather, to grow as a critic I have to realize that these lesser goods, while not bad, must be understood as secondary – the accoutrements, not the main dish. Unpopular as it may be to say, the job of the critic involves making distinctions, and one of the most important distinctions to make rests in deciding what works of art may be merely glanced at, and which demand our fuller attention. Treating all artworks the same may feel democratic, but in reality it merely contributes to the homogenizing forces already at play.
In the end, giving attention in the right measure to the right places constitutes an act of justice; a small act of justice, to be sure, but not an insignificant one. If we are to pick out best we can those small bobbing bits of culture worth holding onto amidst the flood of “content,” those fragments to shore against our ruin, then we have to attune ourselves to the difficult practice of careful attention. The instant gratification provided by drive thru clickbait criticism simultaneously starves us of real attention and entangles us further in its addictive supply of empty calories. Man should not live on canned soup alone, but on the rich stock of long-simmered thoughtfulness, no matter how long it takes on the stove.
