This was supposed to be a review, a critique of a text. It will not be, at least, not in the most traditional sense. I simply cannot imagine it being this without taking on some of the major assumptions lurking within the forms of “critique” and “review” writing and these are the assumptions I want to work against.
This post, instead then, will be a critique of a performance--my own “aesthetic” performance in creating my first blog post for this class. I will “critique,” so to speak, the process of writing my first blog post--the review of something that I found pleasurable. My critique of my own critique, though, will be interlaced (and in service of) a more general critique of Critique and review of Review. Because without this essential move toward critiquing or reviewing the embeddedness and performativity of Critique or Review itself, it will be all the more impossible to get at some of the core issues that have concerned us in this class, and, perhaps most importantly some issues that have emerged both in the foreground and background of the pleasures (and displeasures) of our everyday lives.
My performance is formulated long before it is witnessed. It begins, perhaps, in the barely comprehensible remarks that a baby can make out through her families’ spattered phrases and gesture. Whatever it is, though, the beginning of the traditional critique must erase this. A traditional critique often neatly begins at the so-called chronological beginning and forgets the social, cultural and historical beginnings. It freezes a text and its conventions within time and space despite the fact that time and space flow through these texts. I must insist that we start from different beginnings, but nonetheless, beginnings that must inevitably be trapped by their narrativizablilty. Tied up in my first blog post are many beginnings...the course that we are all in that prompted us to create this blog post; knowledge of what a blog post is and how to create one; how to “design”--or choose from the available templates on the blog; how to select something that is “pleasurable” that will say particular things about the identity I want to construct and not other things....these are some of the many, many invisible beginnings in the blog text I created. Beginnings that, are not often not available or even acknowledged when a we engage in the act of review or critique.
I could tell you that when I look at a painting, or the ocean, or my niece’s focused gaze, that I experience beauty in ways that completely undermine (or are at least in tension with) the formal writings we’ve read in this class. I could tell you that despite the rigid taxonomies and hegemonic assumptions, beauty evades this theoretical writing, that it is somehow more than the attempts to define, to formalize, to claim knowledge of it. Yet, disappointingly, I do not believe this to be true--at least not completely. Although I was not previously aware of the deep culture roots of what we deem “aesthetic,” I know they are there. I know they are there in every utterance of what is beautiful and what is not. I know this through social and cultural experience and although I cannot pinpoint why thinking particular things are more beautiful than others is more associated with power, I know beauty and power are inseparably bound up in one another.
I start to write my first blog post several times but am halted by my worry of what I think is beautiful and how that might be read by others. I formally know nothing about “aesthetics”--I am still prudent around this word...careful with my relationship to it. I spell it cautiously, paying attention to when the red squiggly lines call out to me to tell me that I have missed an “e” or an “h”. But I know that I have to write about it. I know I have to locate what I find beautiful, what I find pleasurable. I toss around multiple possibilites, keenly aware of what each will say about me, how each will mark my taste. I definitely can’t write about my love of Celine Dion music unless I can do this writing in a tongue-and-cheek I-know-I’m-totally-uncool-way--unless I can pre-empt judgements about my taste. I choose to talk about cuneiform. I chose to talk about something that is often believed to be divorced from bodies.
A critique is always a performance and performance responds to and then becomes critique. I critique my own production, then, because I want to attempt to break down the passivity of the observer, viewer, listener, audience. During live performances, the role of the audience and the collective experience is often acknowledged; however, I want to highlight here that texts that are experienced in a less immediate way are experienced actively as well. For example, there was a great moment at the Next Step theatre three weeks ago that I could easily have written this entire post about. An actress mistakenly set down a prop at the very outer most edge of the table. The scene, which was already suspenseful, was heightened by the fact that I, and other audience members, were so keenly aware of the fact that the prop might, at any minute, fall and alter the performance in unforeseen ways. It is easy to see how performances, which frequently depend upon the contingent movements of human bodies, are seen as active and dynamic. It is much more difficult, I think, to see how a painting or a drawing or a blog post are also contingent and dynamic in this same way as they too are forms of responses to contexts. Every time we struggle to articulate something or decide not to write something, we are placing the frame on the edge of the table. To break down the boundaries between critique and performance, it is necessary to view texts more fluidly and dynamically and less passively.
Hmm...so now I don’t have much time left. So...what to write about in my first blog post for this class??? Whatever I choose will say something about me. But what should it say? I could write about the textiles in the production of Belle’s Strategem I saw in August. No. I could write about the fact that I grew up listening to music by Celine Dion music (in French and English) and still have a soft spot for it. No, writing tongue-and-cheek isn’t a comfortable style for me. I am finally so short on time so I choose to write about one of the most interesting--and least visited--exhibits I saw at the Louvre this past summer. I chose to write about cuneiform. I am fascinated when I see cuneiform. I am moved. But I also know that talking about this is a safe choice in an English department. It is a safe choice because it is so historically and institutionally validated and stamped with a social and cultural seal of approval that it won’t say much about me.
I write my post on cuneiform and I hate that I can’t easily articulate the complexities around this decision. I hate that I can’t make my blog post or my blog, both shrouded with the lie of “choice”--choice in color, choice in template, choice in picture, choice of what to write about, say what I want them to. Bloggers design constraints push me away from creating a blog that represents what I want it to. The constraints of culture and social position constrain me from representing myself in a way that I want to. What would it be like to be able to create a blog that reflects what I value in design? What would it be like to not have to consider so carefully how what I write about will position me? Choice without much control is not choice; yet, it is framed as such and I am responsible to it as such.
I am so thrilled when someone critiques how people wrote about art in European museums during our first night’s class discussion. I know this critique is, in part, aimed at my post. And it helps me to unravel and see more clearly what I already knew...that my performance of critique was too careful, too neat.
What does it mean to step into the role of “the critic”? A “critic” is one person, one individual who sees or hears or experiences something and then engages in the act of critiquing that thing, generally for the supposed benefit of others. Yet the performance, critique and production are so tightly bound. Before I knew you, the members of this class, I could imagine how you’d respond to what I said. I tried to anticipate your critiques of my critiques and, when, possible, to pre-empt them. I produced my text for you and for myself in line with the constraints imposed upon me by the culture and the social. Most importantly, my critique of my own performance on my initial blog here was no less a performance than it was there.
I cannot, then, very honestly take on the role of “The Critic” as an individual writing this post or any other “critique” or “review” . I know that although it is my hands that are pecking at the keys at this moment, that my performative critiques are shaped by you and others and that without this software, without our class discussions, the museums I’ve visited, the books I’ve read, the food I’ve eaten, the places I’ve been to, the amount of sleep I’ve had, I would have performed critique differently. I know that critique, although seemingly the act an observation of an individual, entails far more than this...includes far more than this.
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