One-Way Street

Politics and Art in the Digital Age, Part 3: Ruthless Criticism

Part three of my discussion on criticism in the digital age. Check out parts one and two.

Recently New York Times film critic A.O. Scott published this lament.

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, I’ve been waiting for “The Grapes of Wrath.” Or maybe “A Raisin in the Sun,” or “Death of a Salesman,” a Zola novel or a Woody Guthrie ballad — something that would sum up the injustices and worries of the times, and put a human face on the impersonal movements of history. The originals are all still around, available for revival and rediscovery and part of a robust artistic record of hard times past. But we are in the midst of hard times now, and it feels as if art is failing us.

What if the reason why we don’t have a Grapes of Wrath of our own is that we don’t have the means to recognize it when we see it? 

Scott is unsure where to look. "Should we be looking high or low? At sitcoms or science-fiction allegories or realist dramas?" In an age of digital reproduction, there are a lot of places to look. Digital culture offers a far greater variety of cultural objects for study, which is good. The problem is that variety doesn't offer a greater chance that we can find the book (or film or whateveer) that will capture the zeitgeist. Just the opposite. The essential text will always be the one we're not reading or watching or listening to at the moment. The essential text will always be a click away. 

We must learn to have the courage to stop looking elsewhere and take a hard look at what we already have. We need to become more like the critics of the Partisan Review. They never equivocated about what novels they thought were important. 

Although it was founded in 1934, the journal didn't find its footing until around the time The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. The journal's founding editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, staked out a position against the middlebrow leftists who came to dominate liberal discourse in the late 1930s. The Partisan Review offered more bracing liberalism than the warmed-over Stalinism of the pre-war years, and after a cataclysmic—but now perplexing—dispute over the US’s role in World War II, the journal found its sweet spot in late Modernism and (somewhat) reconstructed Trotskyism. The journal’s peak years, roughly between 1941 and 1960, were distinguished more by a critical attitude than a concerted critical approach. The typical Partisan Review essay bristled with intellectual energy and political combativeness. Fighting for one’s ideas wasn’t a polemical stance, it was a reason for being. 

By the 1960s American popular culture had drifted leftward while New York intellectual culture lost some of its verve, settling into a Great Society moderation. Commentary stole some of the Partisan Review's political thunder, and academic criticism had a bigger toolbox. Quarrelsomeness had gone out of style. It ceased publication in 2003.

The Partisan Review critics were a faction that assumed a certain authority based on a political stance toward American culture as a whole. They didn’t traffic in listicles. They would have been appalled at the use of algorithms to map out culture. They had a coherent world view that you either bought into or you didn’t. They placed artworks in context so that one could see human suffering caused by economic forces. And they weren't afraid to say, "this book matters."

To be sure, not everything the Partisan Review critics did should be emulated. Their view of American culture was too narrow. They were not always wise about the fights they picked. Some people were put off by the way they had opinions about everything, but I think that was one of their strengths. To my mind the Partisan Review can teach us how to practice the best kind of liberal criticism, what Marx called "ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be." 

To return to my original question--how can Walter Benjamin help us understand digital culture?--I think the starting point is his seminal 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I don't think there's any way to talk about digital culture without considering reproducibility. Like the Partisan Review critics, Benjamin was chiefly a literary critic. I have a PhD in English, so I'm prejudiced, but only literary criticism has the intellectual breadth to handle the prolixity of digital texts. Unlike the Partisan Review critics, Benjamin didn't overlook popular culture. Benjamin's allegorical criticism, his ability to draw correspondences between something in a litrary work and something else in economic history, is just as relevant now as it was in the 1930s. 

One aspect of Benjamin's criticism, though, strikes me as dated. He could be esoteric, especially early in his career. Partly that's because he was such a solitary thinker, and partly because he lived at a slower time that allowed for long ruminations on art. For better or for worse, criticism in the digital age has to take place in the public sphere. And it has to be fast--but not too fast as to get swept up by the wrong meme. We need a dash of Brechtian crude thinking to cut through the cruft of digital culture. And we can't be afraid to argue what's essential to our time.

#DearCongress

The Today Show is tracking the Twitter hashtag gathering tweets about the government shutdown

#DearCongress, ‘I am embarrassed to be an American’: Nation sounds off on shutdown

via www.today.com

One difference between 1995 and now that I haven't heard anyone mention yet is the presence of social media in political discourse. Some experts have mentioned seven days as the period in which public outcry against a government shutdown starts to build. Social media could shorten that period and, possibly, send the debate lurching into unexpected directions.

On the Red or the Blue Rug

The 2012 presidential election seems like a very unartistic election. Romney is completely artless, although he is a fabricator of the first order. Unlike in 2008, no arresting imagery has emerged from Obama's campaign this year.

Another problem is art in politics. Jonathan Horowitz's well-meaning but conceptually thin instillation Your Land/My Land illustrates the partisan divide stripped of passions, rhetoric, or interest. The exhibit has been staged in seven contemporary art museums on either side of the red/blue divide, so Horowitz probably had to keep the instillations as anodyne as a high school civics class. The exhibit presumes that American politics is almost exclusively a mass media affair, which should be the starting point for the artwork, not its end point.

To be fair, Horowitz 's task is a daunting one. First, he hasn't figured out how to critique partisanship from the outside--without appearing partisan himself. No one knows how to do that. Second, contemporary art museums should be the political of all museums, but they've been sandblasted into timidity by the right. Finally, as Randy Kennedy points out, American museums have traditionally "museums in America developed in tandem with the civic growth of the country [. . . ] Because of this, there has always been an expectation that museums, as educators more than anything else, must remain above, even far above, the fray."

The key problem, to my mind, is assuming that the political occurs in one place, like television. This assumption only reinforces the false divide between people who act and people who are acted upon--the difference between makers and takers, if you want an even more pernicious way to state it. A good starting point for a political art that fits within the American civic tradition is to use art's power of mimesis, of imitation, to make public what is private. The artist should make public both what is common to the community and what keeps us stuck in place, isolated from shared practices. In other words, the artist should reveal how we ended up getting stuck on the red or the blue rug, staring at a television. 

Cooperation in Public Space

Architects and urban planners have long debated the idea that built environments can positively affect social behavior. It's always been easier to argue for the opposite position, that ill-conceived buildings can foster anti-social behavior.  Richard Sennett proposes that properly designed public spaces can enhance cooperation. The lecture is in reference to his new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation.

 

For other views on this topic, see Michael Chen's essay on networks and architecture, as well as Ethel Baraona Pohl's look at the Plaza de la Encarnación in Seville, Spain, a site for the Movimiento 15M.

Post-Democracy

A couple of weeks ago the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas stood before a hot, crowded lecture hall at the Goethe Institute in Paris, banged his fist on a table, and shouted, "enough already!" He was referring to the current state of Europe and its slide, as he sees it, into undemocratic forms of rule. It would have been astonishing to hear Habermas raise his voice if the hall was on fire, so clearly the "post-democracy" that  Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have forged has driven him around the bend. 

If Walter Benjamin is the great romantic of the Franfurt School, Habermas is its anti-romantic. His best-known book is The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which has long influenced me. (The Public Sphere section of this blog is inspired by Habermas's book.) In this work he expanded upon  Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, historicizing it and draining it of Adorno's trademark gloom and pessimism. Where Horkheimer and Adorno saw giant corporation turning culture into a means of manipulation and repression--Mickey Mouse as hegemon--Habermas sees a breakdown of individual participation in political and cultural debates in the public sphere. Corporations and other entrenched powers may distort and confuse debate, but they're not irredeemable threats to modernity. 

In his latest book, however, Habermas tilts toward Horkheimer and Adorno's skeptical view of Western culture. The argument of  Zur Verfassung Europas (On Europe's Constitution) is that the great experiment in European unity is at a crossroads, undermined by market frenzy and political spinelessness. Institutions of questionable legality, controlled by unelected technocrats, have taken control of the continent's political economy. He wants the future of Europe to be in the hands of what he calls the "global community," by which he means, presumably, the citizens of Europe. In other words, the immensely frustrated citizens of Greece should have a voice in the debate about what to do about the debt crisis--as opposed to being reduced to caricatures of Southern fecklessness.

Habermas is a believer in a united Europe. He sees it as a project worth pursuing. However, he regards the democratic underpinnings of the union as critically endangered. He concluded his Paris lecture with this warning: "If the European project fails, then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before."

Just as the U.S. isn't immune to the economic crises of Europe, we're not immune to its political crises. In fact, we may be out in front of Europe in the development of a post-democracy.

Shame, Lies, and WikiLeaks

Slavoj Žižek weighs in on the WikiLeaks controversy with characteristic dialectical zig-zags ending in an apocalyptic vision.

He starts in one of his favorite places: American popular cinema. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s director, corresponds to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In Nolan's film district attorney Harvey Dent and police commissioner Gordon collude to cover up the truth about Dent's vigilantism in order to preserve the social order of Gotham City. The Joker threatens to reveal the truth behind the lie that holds society together. Julian Assange, in the same manner, wants to reveal the truth behind the "necessary lie" conservative philosopher Leo Strauss identified as the glue that holds democracy together. In Strauss's view, or rather in Žižek's view of Strauss's view, elites obscure the material relations of economic and political power from the gullible masses through soothing fables of social harmony.

Yet Assange only appears to have pulled back the curtains of the necessary lie. Žižek pins the "liberal ideology" of All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief on WikiLeaks. The free flow of information, this line of thinking goes, is sufficient to speak truth to (and about) power.

For all its reformist zeal, however, WikiLeaks didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about the working of the American State Department. For Žižek,

The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

We could see for ourselves that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a buffoon. It's oddly comforting to find out that American diplomats think he is, too. But for Žižek, this is precisely the problem. We can no longer pretend that Berlusconi isn't running a clown democracy, that we needn't worry about a bullying moron taking over an industrialized nation through media manipulation.

Finally, we have the truth about the workings of American diplomats--or more accurately, one percent of the truth, if WikiLeaks' extortionist threats are to be believed. Now what do we do? One thing we're not doing, Žižek claims, is feeling ashamed about how we're complicit with the corrupt power relations in the United States.

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

There must be a Hegelian term for when things get dodgy in the dialectic. First of all, in the U.S. we've already had our moment of shame and moved on to a particular form of apocalyptic anger in the form of the Tea Party and other loudly disgruntled groups. Žižek is no Tea Partier, but he shares their nihilism in his demands that the only honest way out of our shame is total revolution, the contours of which he neglects to provide.

Žižek is reading a lot of Hegel these days. Too bad he's left behind his original intellectual mentor, Jacques Lacan, who would have dismissed the Tea Partiers as a bunch of hysterics and reminded Žižek the truth remains forever veiled, that whatever shame we may feel is actually a méconnaissance, a false recognition. Even the Joker has to subscribe to the necessary lie that his criminal schemes seek something real.

The Function of Criticism Today (Redux)

The end of the year is a bad time for writing on arts and culture. All those Ten Best lists start to run together after a while. That's why I was looking forward to reading the "Why Criticism Matters" feature in the New York Times Book Review. The book review editors tilted the discussion with setting Alfred Kazin’s "The Function of Criticism Today" (1960) as a touchstone. Each contributor mourned a lost golden age of literary culture, and skipped over pretty much everything that happened since. Only Elif Batuman, in her invocation of Fredric Jameson, acknowledged that any sort of worthwhile criticism was written between 1960 and whenever they started writing.

None of the contributors proposed any kind of radical change in the nature of criticism. For the most part, they affirmed the type of criticism that appears in the New York Times Book Review. These are the salient points of agreement:

• The Internet has ruined everyone's attention span and unleashed a mob of opinionated amateurs on the canon. The proper response of critics is to write well. This is the most dubious of the arguments made, as Mark Athitakis points out.
• If criticism isn't doing so well right now, it's because literature isn't either. Today's writers produce works that are elitist and apolitical. Criticism serves the interests of "competitive connoisseurship" (Pankaj Mishra's terrific phrase). In other words, literary culture reflects the culture at large.
• Critics and creative writers are equals sharing the same basic purpose: to explain the world to the reader. Adam Kirsch is especially good on this point.
• Although critics are equals to novelists and poets, a good critic should be modest, even self-effacing. He or she should serve the reader and the text under consideration. Walter Benjamin took this position as well. This is also a good way to think about teaching.
• Literary criticism no longer serves as the model for all other kinds of criticism, as Matthew Arnold believed. I disagree with this point.
• Literary critics are no longer public intellectuals in the same sense as Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling were. I also disagree with this point, although less strongly.
• The meaning of a literary work isn't self-evident, so it is the critic's job not simply to evaluate, but also to explain and interpret. For example, Batuman learned from Freud that "certain facts about our lives are only ever articulated in the form of fictional stories — stories whose plots are related only in the most complex and unapparent ways to the essentially nonnarrative concerns they express."
• The value of literature is still hard to convey, but it endures even in the age of the Internet.

MAS Context 8: PUBLIC

MAS Context's latest issue looks at the idea of the public, a vexed concept with a rich and complex history. Two definitions of the public emerge in the journal's eighth issue. The first is the public as a collective, something more defined than a mass but broader than a crowd. The public sphere, a distinct concept, would fall under this category. The second definition concerns the spaces at once clearly demarcated yet accessible to all.

Lick Fai Eric Ho, in his "Open Manifesto for Mass Creation," wants to use the former to build the latter. He calls for a "collaborative creativity" in which "bottom-up and original ideas can challenge preconceived notions of what architecture is and can do," particularly standard-issue architecture that is "increasingly bland and overwhelmed with sameness." In other words, collaborative architecture would be a cross between Creative Commons and crowdsourcing. Similar ideas have been percolating for a while. Belinda Tato's Ecosistema Urbano, for example, is doing something similar. The possibility of a truly collective design is tantalizing, but the obstacles aren't simply technical or procedural. As the El Peine del Viento in Spain (see below) indicates, public consensus can be prone to error, and I wonder if a new architecture would necessarily emerge from the hive mind.

Sometimes the public wants things to remain the same, as Edward Emile Richardson demonstrates, in his starkly titled essay "Despair." Richardson traces the social and legal hurdles facing public housing residents in New Orleans after Katrina and HUD bulldozers demolished the city's four largest public housing projects. Some displaced residents were directed to mixed-income housing funded with grants from HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere). Others were handed Section 8 vouchers. Ostensibly, the programs allowed people to choose where to live, but neither program accounted for the shortage of eligible units for displaced public housing residents. Cut off from their social networks and housing officials, an untold number of former public housing residents became homeless or left New Orleans altogether.

To rectify the shortcomings of public housing reforms of the 1990s, the Obama Administration has proposed new legislation called PETRA. Richardson is generally positive about the bill. He mainly objects to the proposal to privatize ownership of federal properties. However, even if it's passed, PETRA is probably too little, too late for New Orleanians, "Their communities have already been torn asunder," Richardson writes despairingly, "their homes dissolved and reformed into New Urbanist market experiments that have yet to withstand the test of time."

In "White House 2.0" the online architectural coop LabRAD imagines an open-source White House. LabRAD founders Wayne Congar and Arielle Assouline-Lichten assert that the existing White House is "the final and most formidable roadblock prohibiting dialogue between the public and political power players." White House 2.0 would be wired to receive public sentiment from across the globe in real time. One could imagine, for instance, Malia Obama keeping tabs on Kyrgyzstan, then pestering her father about it like she did the BP spill.

It's an interesting to note that James Hoban’s 1792 design for White House 1.0 occurred just as an awareness of a "public" began to emerge--not a mass public like we have today, but a body of common readers who are interested in philosophical, scientific and political matters. Enlightenment writers, regardless of their particular beliefs, thought that it was their task to raise this public out of ignorance, superstition and tradition, and to show the people the way to true knowledge based on reason. White House 2.0 marks the moment at which reason moves from the head to the fingertips. Rationality resides in communication and information, a digitized version of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative rationality. The beta version of White House 2.0 can be seen in the WikiLeaks torrent of government communications.

David Yoon reimagines the streets of Los Angeles if they hadn't been laid out for Cadillacs with giant tail fins. He scrunches together the curbs of the city's famously wide streets. Sometimes the results are intimate and romantic, like Santa Monica Boulevard (at left). Other times the streets become seedier, like a stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. Rob Smith presents a real-life instance of intimate public space in his photographs of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai.

The last features in PUBLIC focus less on high-tech redefinitions of the public and more on old-fashioned phenomenological experiences of space. The El Peine del Viento (Wind Comb) is a seaside park in San Sebastian, Spain, created by sculptor Eduardo Chillida and architect Luis Peña Ganchegui. MAS Context editor Iker Gil interviews Chillida's son Luis about the genesis of the project, which started in 1966. Chillida notes that there was a great deal of public skepticism about a plan to build a sculpture park by the sea. "'They are going to place some steel rods in the rocks?'" Chillida quotes. "'Why don’t they make parking for the beach or a cafeteria?'" Eventually, however, the serenity of the park won over the public. Chillida says, "In the end, it was the project itself that convinced the people of its own worth. Everybody feels that they are part of this project. It has become the emblem of the city, the image of San Sebastian. If you do a project and people don’t like it, they will always question it, but if you make it right, people will embrace it."

El Peine del Viento wasn't mentioned anyone's favorite place in the "What Is Your Favorite Public Space?" feature, which is probably just as well for residents of San Sebastian. Ken Byron wrote in to say his favorite space was Millennium Park in Chicago, also one of my favorites, as is the Piazza del Campo in Siena, cited by David Jimenez. (I contributed an entry too, and longtime readers won't be surprised by my favorite space.) Somebody known only as Niemann precisely captured the mystery of how public spaces work. His or her favorite public space was Tian’anmen Square in Beijing, a space you'd think only Deng Xiaoping could love: "No trash cans, no amenities, no benches, no landscape, no art, no privacy. Some lighting, many security cameras. But it works."

Fun Friday: The Last Newspaper and Last Picture Show Edition

Last night was my company Christmas party and, appropriately enough for a publishing company in the last days of the printed book, it was a modest affair. I had one martini and a slice of quesadilla--not exactly a bacchanal. Media is undergoing huge changes right now. Where I work we have almost daily conversations about how the publishing and media landscape is changing. Mostly, we can't decide what to do. However, as certain mediums disappear, others will take their place. This weekend is a good time to survey the current state of a rapidly changing landscape.

The Ninth edition of the Select Media Festival opened last night and runs through December 12th at Co-Prosperity Sphere and other spaces in Bridgeport, on Chicago's South Side. The festival features video programs, performances and presentations in conjunction with live music and action. The centerpiece of the festival is a group exhibition, Infoporn II, which explores various forms of data visualization in the form of installations, a publication library, interactive projects, and infographics. Tonight's feature is Emily Clayton's Sad Cycle, a collection of sculptural works interpreting death rituals. The exhibition is part of a larger series examining grief. Sad Cycle will be on display from 6-9 PM at Eastern Expansion, 244 W 31st Street. Also tonight at a nearby venue is the Select Media Festival 9 opening party, starting at 7 PM at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S Morgan Street. Tickets are $6. There will be performances by J+J+J, Aleks Eva , Lord of the Yum Yum, and Michael Perkins. After 12:30 AM the party moves on to Maria's at 960 W 31st Street. From 6-9 tomorrow night at Co-Prosperity Sphere is Meet the Presenters, during which "Pechu Kucha-toids, 20 X 20-ers, video curators, powerpointers, and Tour Guides of reknown explain their work in a simple lecture presentation format and screening." Sunday's closing event will be BYOB (Bring your own Beamer), an exhibition of projected artwork. The exhibition was inspired by an idea by Berlin-based Rafaël Rozendaal. More information about the SMF9 event can be found here.

The SMF9 is connected to The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space, which is one of the most interesting exhibits taking place anywhere this winter. Curated by Kazys Varnelis and Joseph Grima, The New City Reader is a performance-based editorial residency designed as a part of the Last Newspaper, an exhibit running at New York’s New Museum from October 6, 2010‒January 9, 2011. The New City Reader comes in one edition only, but each week over the course of the project a new section will appear within the New Museum’s gallery space as well as in public spaces throughout New York for collective reading. Like any other newspaper, The New City Reader will have classifieds, but don't expect ordinary classifieds. They will be administered by LGNLGN and, instead of advertising used Honda Accords and the like, the New City Reader's ads will "map longing, desire, guilt and regret in the city, as well as the city's losses and desires." Ads are free.

This weekend is the second to last for the Bank of America Cinema, which is closing after 39 years of operation. The movie theater is located in a Portage Park bank that is being sold, and while the new owners may keep the unique theater open, managers Michael Phillips (no relation to the Tribune critic), Rebecca Hall and Julian Antos anticipate they won't. The theater specializes in old films that aren't on DVD. Tomorrow night's feature is Arthur Penn's conspiracy thriller/surrealist noir Mickey One (1965), starring Warren Beatty as a paranoid comedian fleeing the mob in Chicago. (Much of the film was shot on location here.) The last film will be screened on December 18. It will Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland (1934). Admission is $5 and popcorn is $1--practically Depression-Era prices.

The future of everything, it seems, is online. The excellent online journal MAS Context just published their latest issue, PUBLIC. This issue looks at the public in all its forms--the public sphere, public space, the public as a collective. I'll have more on the issue next week.

Bloggers, Hobbits, and Architectural Critics

Iker Gil of MAS Context forwards on this post from Shannon Mattern of The New School about the role of bloggers in architectural discourse. Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and other bloggers come under fire again for being both outsiders (because they don't do scholarship with primary materials) and insiders. (The editorial remarks are in the original.)

There’s no little [Ed., 11/14: okay, critique is not nonexistent, but it's scarce] apparent constructive “critique culture” among architectural bloggers. Yes, bloggers can of course be critical of the stuff they’re writing about, but who’s launched a serious critique of the bloggers themselves or the blogging enterprise — or of all the other “other spaces” of design discourse: the peripheral publications and labs and collectives? We have an opportunity to be critical of the role that Manaugh and the Archinect folks and others play in shaping architectural discourse. We have an opportunity to look critically at the net politics of the cLAB / NetLab / Volume (all Columbia-supported; I’d love to take a peek at GSAPP‘s books!) / New Museum nexus. Yet all we get is boosterism. Fawning reviews. Beverage company-sponsored downtown gatherings in who-knows-how-they-can-afford-this? penthouse studios. Chuckles over the cleverness of it all. Critical comments (critical not only of the argument being made, but also of the blogging practice or platform) posted to one’s blog are typically immediately (and sometimes ungraciously) rebutted [Ed., 11/14: Manaugh actually called me a "xenophobic" "Gollum-like figure" -- so we're pulling out the Hobbit attacks, are we?].

Scroll down to find Manaugh's response in the comments section, in which he clarifies his Gollum remark.

There are a number of issues at work here. None of them are unique to writing about architecture and design, nor are they particular to bloggers. The rise of online media has initiated a vast renegotiation of the contract between writer and reader. We're a long way from settling those negotiations. (For a discussion specifically about architectural writing, see Javier Arbona's essay in MAS Context.) Yet despite this upheaval, constants remain. Authority in writing still depends on access--to archives, to primary texts, to industry insiders, to readers, to the eyes and ears of one's peers. Ideally, a critic would have free access to all of these sources of power, but as a practical matter, that's never possible. Film critics, for example, know they gain access to industry insiders at the cost of the respect of their peers. Academics (and practitioners) may skillfully cultivate influence within their fields, yet they must depend on others to gain a readership.

Whether criticism is practiced by a staff writer or a university professor or a blogger, the role of criticism doesn't change. Criticism as we know it arose in the eighteenth century, when artists freed themselves from the patronage system and entered the marketplace. Critics informed the public about which paintings were worth purchasing, which books worth reading, which design worth building. Not surprisingly, the reasoning and motives behind these choices were frequently questioned. Nevertheless, it's not possible to dispense with critics. They're necessary when everyone is a freelancer.

Squabbles over the sources of authority are as old as criticism. Arguments may be confusing or exasperating for readers, but they remind us that there are different kinds of critics with differing claims to authority. Argumentation is what keeps the whole enterprise vital. But I'm not sure that Hobbit attacks help very much.