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The Mythology of Capitalism in Criticism:
Patriarchal not artistic standards
rule
when analysis becomes performance art
By Richard Leader
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“Hey, you’ve got to check out this CD review; it’s
brutal, I mean, just brutal.”
It was brutal. It was the kind of review that pop-critics attach
to their résumés and like to take out on rainy days
to read slowly, with a sly grin after each line, confident that
for one brief moment they were absolutely able to expose someone
else as the fraud that we all are, kicking them down the basement
steps, slamming the door shut and tossing away the key. As much
as they make for good clippings and treasured reading—I received
the above invitation long after it was initially published—such
reviews often write themselves, the content less a critical revelation
than a reflection of the obvious human condition, saying far more
about the person penning them than the subject at hand.
The review in question was of Dying in Stereo, the full
length debut of Northern State, a trio of white women from Long
Island, NY who dared to make a rap album. Sure, they draw from feminism,
the easy going kind that is unable see left of Al Gore, and if you
would like to contact them you had better address the letter to
the “Ladies,” a message not in the least subdued by
the fact that their press is managed by a company named Girlie Action,
itself a supposedly ironic turn on some pornographic expression.
But just as I, very much male for my part, was able to put myself
above them in some sort of feminist hierarchy within the space of
one mere sentence, the platoon of hip white-guys reviewing their
album took it upon themselves to become the arbiters of all that
is black, with only some of them wise enough to play it safe and
couch their brand of criticism in the ethic of “urban,”
using a bit of low-rent Marxism of their own to dodge any potential
bullets aimed at their own privilege.
Northern State’s identity as spoiled academics was largely
invented by the same critics who would later decry it: having read
Fast Food Nation once has never conferred a Ph. D. on anyone,
after all, but low standards (not for rap artists in general, males
of all colors are desperate for each other’s approval, but
for women as a class) allowed critics to inflate the group’s
citation of the book and other trappings of popular liberalism into
some sort of Ivory Tower pomposity, even though the majority of
the album is rather apolitical by conventional terms given that
neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have, as of yet, adopted
hedonism as an official platform. For most contemporary Americans
politics begin and end with that two party system—one that
they are increasingly loath to talk or hear about further, the word
“political” itself becoming the most undesirable of
epithets.
Anyone aware of that dynamic can have an easy time cashing in on
that knee-jerk reaction to the political, exhibited most strongly
by those same white males who actually have the best representation
under the current system, and that is precisely what happened in
the case of Northern State: critics covering Dying in Stereo
saw the group’s politics as a convenient red-herring to introduce
into their own text. They did this in order to disguise the fact
that none of their reviews were really about Northern State but
were concerned with other conflicts, from the fact that the most
brutal writer was jealous that the group’s career got an early
boost from a doddering mega-critic who has been famously writing
for Rolling Stone longer than he himself has been alive,
to the guy who thinks that Northern State is all right by him, being
feminism (the fun kind), as opposed to the more established competing
act, Le Tigre (to him, not so much).
The review, as an art-form, was simply a tool to fry bigger fish.
It at once provides convenience and distance, features that serve
both writer and publisher equally in that the genre is self-mitigating,
the implicit brevity allowing for personal attacks that could not
be made under other circumstances, while at the same time muting
responsibility on the part of the claimants. In other words, when
lacking a proper or appropriate thesis of one’s own, capitalism
is waiting in the bullpen, ready to justify whatever performance
a writer is willing to deliver for the sake of performance, ego
being subsumed in the very tradition of criticism: a review exists
or must exist because a work-slash-product exists from which consumers
can potentially partake. No reason beyond that is assumed or required,
something ontologically justified further by the fact that most
publications assume by default a certain amount of page allocation
to criticism, a space that has to be filled and will be filled.
Writing is typically viewed as an enterprise of ego and the texts
we create must pass a test of relevance to our readers and be deemed
as useful to them as the act of creation was to our own person,
lest it be judged narcissistic; criticism as a genre allows for
the suspension of that rule, which is why so little of it these
days is about the subjects allegedly on the chopping block and is
more often an excuse for writers to launch into their own pet projects
with impunity.
I learned about this utility of criticism rather late in life.
As the editor of the undergraduate magazine at SUNY Buffalo, I always
questioned (and yet sadly never vetoed) the reasoning behind our
publishing highly negative reviews of records by obscure musicians
that no one was ever in any danger of purchasing on accident. Later,
as a videogame journalist, hearing my peers at press junkets gush—between
sips of their margaritas—about how sadistically they once
tore apart some low budget game created in some downtrodden ex-Soviet
republic boggled my mind: I just could not see the capitalistic
utility of such actions. A negative review of a major product can
benefit a readership, allowing them to save their money as they
are preemptively steered away from it, while a strategically negative
review of something popular and well loved can actually benefit
a publication, where rancor against cultural icons by so-called
“contrarians” is less daring these days than opportunistic,
especially on the internet where readership can spike to immense
levels from one day to the next. A thesis on the inferiority of
something of no importance does neither of those things, and the
significance of such writing must be sought elsewhere.
Given how little our culture generally values virtuosity in the
arts, it is a strange paradox that it is now most commonly found
in a genre regarded as possessing so little artistic worth—men
these days, their confidence flagging, refuse to put much stock
into anything so femininely subjective as a critical review, frothing
at the possibility that a mere “opinion” could ever
stand toe to toe with a more masculine “fact,” or more
likely, their own opinion—where florid turns of phases are
now greeted with acclaim, treasured, and passed around with headings
like “you’ve got to check out this review, it’s
brutal!” Indeed, that very brutality is the greater share
of the appeal, the injection of it into a text being enough to rehabilitate
an ill-favored genre of writing amongst men: film, music and videogame
reviews, no matter how fashionable it has become to ridicule them
for “bias” (FOX’s “Fair and Balanced”
campaign certainly contributing to this ethos of mock-objectivity),
are just about the only thing that men actually bother reading these
days. It is no coincidence that short critical litanies, always
having the background of capitalism to prop them up when they falter,
support concentrations of invective that more serious forms of literature
reject, that would most often collapse under the weight of such
malice.
It was my own mental-investment in the idea of capitalism that
kept me from realizing this aspect of criticism. After all, outside
the domain of academic literary criticism—which has its own
sundry of traditions that, for better or worse, often militate against
the physical aspect of texts except for certain occasions when doing
so has some measure of quaint appeal; viz. contemporary reactions
to dada—reviews are done for products, material things that
are bought and sold, and any amateur critic, which includes everyone
who ever comes into contact with material culture, sees the idea
of criticism in exactly those terms: Is this product, defined by
capitalism first and content second, worth my money or that of my
friends, family, or co-workers? Professional critics of popular
culture sometimes allude to that paradigm, often in terms of “time,”
at once being equal to and synonymous with money, as per the aphorism,
but at the same moment indicating that there is some deeper, indelible,
and more meaningful value to an experience, a meaning that professionals
are more equipped to recognize and comment upon. No matter how true
all of that might be it only serves to drive capitalism into the
background, a position that capitalism will only submit to when
it finds it advantageous to its own goals or those of larger phenomenon
to which it currently serves fealty—such as patriarchy.
While most will gladly accede that nearly everything in life is
political in one way or another—hence my assertion here that
criticism has far more to do with ideology than the marketplace,
will, at least initially, fail to impress—the myth that capitalism
is the defining feature of our material and social culture serves
to hide exactly how divorced most criticism is from commercial reality:
The New York Times’ all-important Best Seller list
was fragmented into several sections in 2000 to not-so-secretly
thrust J.K. Rowling and her passel of Harry Potters into a children’s
book ghetto, saving the fiction column for men and their real works
of art, at least by popular standards that appreciate a little bit
of pontification with their pablum, Mitch Albom (The Five People
You Meet in Heaven) serving as a patron saint. While wrangling
one’s way onto the Best Seller list is often the best way
to sell even more copies, a fact of life that the Times
most certainly enjoys for the sake of its own prestige, a book’s
presence on that list is no guarantee that it will ever receive
a review by the Times, even if writers are lining up in
droves to pen their own: all of that is up to the whims of editors,
who follow their own politics (still very much in line with patriarchy
despite any accusations of a Leftist-slant), rather than those of
the marketplace that they hold in high ambivalence, both adoring
it for making their publication relevant and despising it for having
plebian tastes, guided far too often by the likes of Oprah Winfrey.
Fortunately for Potter fans, the novelist Stephen King stepped
up to the plate, appraising the fourth book in the series for the
Times. This review proved so popular—a famous and
successful man helping adult women justify their own love for the
Potter mythos by placing his masculine stamp of approval on it proved
to be a plum—that it won King a position on staff at Entertainment
Weekly, where he went on to evaluate Rowling’s fifth
book. Heaping praise on her in gushing yet supercilious ways, he
took on the role of the archetypical schoolmarm when criticizing
her overuse of adverbs, only to suddenly declare that same fault
cute and “endearing” in a bit of sexist condescension;
this he perhaps tried to mitigate by releasing a hand-written version
of the review, scrawled on wide-ruled paper, giving the surface
impression that he was the precocious student, even though
his text implied the contrary.
Shortly thereafter, King and Rowling both received a kick in the
pants by the crotchety literary icon, Harold Bloom, who called them
out in his Los Angeles Times piece, “Dumbing down
American readers.” While Bloom was primarily upset that King
had won a National Book Foundation award, most of his acrimony was
directed towards Rowling for corrupting our youth with the senseless
repetition of common speech patterns such as “stretches his
legs” (an accusation ironically similar to the one King himself
leveled), intoning how much of a shame it is that hacks win awards
and acclaim just because they cater to the caprice of the mob. Turning
his wrath towards King again, Bloom asserted that there are only
four living American novelists worth praising, all of whom are coincidentally
white, male geriatrics like he himself. Bloom’s own polemic
is intensely political in its own breed of apoliticism—where
good writing is simply good on its own, possessing some sort of
Gnostic spark of life, apart from social theories such as Marxism
or feminism that are then rendered as irrelevant as to any New Critic,
hence his unapologetic tone in defense of the Western Canon—and
one can certainly remain sympathetic to his “dumbing down”
platform without subscribing to his other points, but the real political
issue is that he was permitted to say what he did in a genuine editorial,
straight to the point, without being forced to turn to the medium
of the book review to serve as an intermediary.
It has gotten to the point where only men of Harold Bloom’s
stature are allowed to be true and authentic critics without having
to resort to surreptitiously bandying such commentary onto the back
of a commercial product review: he did not review the Potter book,
he commented on it without the necessity of fitting his words into
a framework dictated by the marketplace, nor did he have to go full-throttle
in the other direction and gussy up his argument into some sort
of academic treatise that would inevitably limit the scope of his
audience; he just spoke his mind freely and without pause, not having
to even pretend to care about factors that did not interest or appeal
to him. That is a luxury that not even his equally privileged Generation
X equivalents possess, who now exist in a world where they are often
forced to do a whole lot of pretending. Consider Bloom’s fellow
Yale graduate, Stephen Burt, who reviewed a memoir of the poet William
Matthews for The New York Times. Written by Matthews’
son, Sebastian, In My Father’s Footsteps is a tale
of his own journey into the world of poetry, his father sitting
at the right hand of many of its luminaries, and the depredations
that went with it. Burt includes a laundry list of sins in his review:
the elder Matthews not only slept with his own students with near
impunity (“sexual misconduct” did cost him a job at
the University of Washington, though it hardly diminished his future
opportunities in academia), but he once held class at his home and
was so sure that any of his female graduate students would do anything
to please him that he allowed Sebastian, then in eleventh grade,
to have his pick among them—and he did.
Stephen Burt describes these instances as mere factoids, happenstances
that add spice and pizzazz to the review but are permitted to remain
virtually meaningless apart from whatever biases the reader brings
to them, whether they inspire mirth or outrage. Even when he describes
these historical events as a product of systemic male entitlement
at the institutional level, a bad thing he dryly points out, he
does so wearing a mask of gray: there is not a hint of jealousy,
disdain, revulsion, or anything so emotional that might impel a
reader to ask the obvious political question of why Matthews’
memoir is deserving of a review in the Times when thousands
of other memoirs do not receive such treatment and how that attention
itself might also be product of male entitlement. The necessity
of criticism as an a priori obviates against such questions of entitlement,
an artifact that Burt can then comfortably locate chronologically
in the past, rather than admitting the continuation of the process
into the present—his present—and how his own use of
criticism as a genre might serve as a vehicle for its transmission.
Nor does it allow anyone to ask why Burt himself was awarded the
right to compose the review rather than a myriad of equally qualified
poets, many of them women, and perhaps whether it was his very ability
to wear that blasé mask of patriarchal objectivity that resulted
in his appointment to the task. “Entitlement” is merely
a word that learned men are now supposed to know and using it is
proof of that learning (the term was even applied to Northern State
by their brutal critic, who for all of their jejune faults now somehow
exist on the same plane as a William Matthews; though only in terms
of peccancy and not their enduring value in spite of it!) even if
there is no understanding of what privilege means on a more visceral
level, a dishonesty from which the older generation of Harold Blooms
was exempt.
Conversely, the utility of women lies precisely in their bias and
lack of objectivity, emotionalism which is valued not only for its
ability to make men look stoically rigid by way of comparison, but
for its own moments of expediency, as when Florence King evaluated
Carolyn Heilbrun’s biography of Gloria Steinem for the National
Review in 1996. Capitalism was irrelevant: few if any of the
conservative journal’s readers would ever express interest
in purchasing the book, no matter its quality, and only three
sentences were employed in actual criticism of Heilbrun’s
text. Neither capitalistic nor artistic standards were applied.
Instead, the review was merely an excuse to strip-mine the biography
for damning quotations in order to paint Steinem as a simpering
idiot whose so-called feminist empire was built upon her being a
whore to one scion of industry after another—never mind that
hatchet jobs are an infinitely more valuable service to the patriarchy
than blow jobs. While Florence King might have enjoyed having a
bit of sport at her rival’s expense, the true benefactor of
her words was the National Review, now allowed to effectively
call Steinem a “stupid slut” with not just King’s
own status as a woman insulating them from responsibility but also
the artifice of the book review as a genre, where it is possible
to say something without really saying it.
The same piece was reprinted eight years later in July of 2004,
still as fresh and useful as ever, preceded by a brief editorial
note (very likely composed by a man) inviting people to “enjoy
the carnage,” much in the same way that I was sadistically
invited by an acquaintance to enjoy the brutalization of Northern
State. While criticism is enjoyed for its often implicit violence,
the political underpinnings of that aggression are made all the
more sinister by the mythologized assumption of capitalism on the
part of writers and readers alike, allowing even more dominant ideologies
to remain hidden. Our training in capitalism, that requires us to
see it as the pivotal aspect of our culture (regardless of whether
we approve of it or not), hamstrings our ability to see such patriarchal
minded criticism for what it is.
While antifeminist writers have many occasions to promote their
craft, it takes a fair amount of effort to mangle facts sufficiently
enough to make their screeds stand on their own as compelling arguments:
genres such as the book review, and to a lesser extent, obituaries
(such was the case after the death of Andrea Dworkin), serve as
occasion—summoning some sense of obligation—that
lesson the standards applied to the very necessity of a writer’s
commentary: that ego test pitting the reader’s benefit against
the creator’s narcissism. Only an expert amongst experts would
dare to write a book explicitly challenging Catharine MacKinnon’s
views on law; only someone with an impeccably strong résumé
and heaps of popularity would bother to attack her in an article
for a major magazine and hope to get it past editors; and yet upon
the publication of her latest book, Women’s Lives, Men’s
Laws, every male who lived in New York and fancied himself
a writer was clamoring to get his own take—not on the book
itself, of course, but on how the feminist movement has gone astray
due to women like her—published in every form of media available
to him, from magazines to the blog. For the most part they succeeded
in this and came out unscathed; even when feminists objected, the
male writers themselves received attention that often outstripped
their talents or was disproportionate to their status in the marketplace,
ensuring that they will continue their exploitation of this phenomenon
in the future. The effigy of capitalism, planted firmly in our minds
whenever we approach the subject of criticism, serves to disguise
attacks on women’s persons (and not texts-slash-products)
that would otherwise be seen as the attacks that they incontrovertibly
are.
This support for entrenched social structures, to the detraction
of more progressive agents who would work against the status quo,
happens not just in the sneak-attacks that are launched under the
auspice of critical reviews but in more cunning and obtuse ways:
it often serves as an escape valve, allowing the anger and resentment
of people in the arts to be shunted off in directions that are harmless
to the presiding hierarchy—a hierarchy which wishes to be
seen as anything but a hierarchy, and would rather pretend that
success and failure is the result of a fickle market guided by an
Invisible Hand, rather than the social prerogatives of a ruling
elite governing the arts. Few industries have mechanisms for critiquing
those same industries, after all, but as long as young people working
at entry-level publications can complain about the dirty old men
at institutions such as Rolling Stone with offhand remarks
shoehorned into their own music reviews—or worse, so-called
“rants” in ephemeral blogs, which serve similarly as
escape valves for expression in the publishing business—pressure
that might eventually threaten to topple such hierarchies is relieved,
the process of dissipation done by the disaffected themselves. Rather
than combating these hierarchies in a deliberate, sophisticated,
and thoughtful ways, young writers today are taking the easy way
out, a smooth road called “criticism” nicely paved for
them (not to mention widened into abject meaningless) by their elders
in order to mollify them.
Criticism has also taken odd turns in more sophisticated venues:
the inaugural issue of the 1978 poetics magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
featured book reviews that functioned as performance art before
anything else, leading to a letters-page squabble in the two subsequent
issues. One writer, John Taggart, complained that it would be more
accurate to describe the reviews as “variations on a theme
suggested by X” which did a disservice to small-press poets
who rarely receive reviews or any coverage at all, only to have
their work used as a launch pad for such self-promotional theatrics
by others. Loris Essary later responded with an accusation of ‘capitalism’
on the part of Taggart, arguing that he was treating text as a commodity
by allowing it to be colored by whatever printer happens to distribute
it, when the text itself should remain central and absolute. Taggart
was a bit prescient in suggesting a comparison between these performance-critics
and the New Critics in his initial letter; indeed, while not completely
unpersuasive, Essary was rather staid in his accusation and perhaps
self-negating in that he did not make it an occasion to give a bit
of a performance of his own. While the reviews in the magazine struck
a balance for the rest of its two year run, the difference between
it and the examples given above are manifest in its parochialism,
the smaller field of participants and readers (almost all of whom
were male; a charge long leveled against this branch of poetry)
enforced a certain amount of human responsibility. Patriarchy is
always hard at work against the humane: hence critics had little
incentive to honor that of Northern State, Rowling, or Steinem,
while even in death William Matthews was somehow redeemed as a feminist,
The Atlantic reprinting an interview he gave only a month
before, his penultimate words stating what a “scandal”
it was that the voices of women have not been heard over the past
few decades, never mind what his generation valued and continues
to value most in female poets.
Just as the centrality of capitalism is a distortion of the truth,
other mythologies work in conjunction to downplay precisely how
important criticism is as a vehicle for expressing the dominant
ideologies of our society, not just in men’s massive turn
away from the subjective in the wake of September 11th and our religious
spin into a bizarre form of neo-Platonism, but in the frequent debasement
of critics themselves, the adage “those who can, do; those
who can’t, criticize” supposedly haunting them at every
step. Never mind how many books Stephen King sold before his invitation
to Entertainment Weekly, Roger Ebert’s early stint
as Russ Meyer’s enabler, or the now legendary and envied exploits
of Cameron Crowe: all men without female equivalents. Across nearly
every industry those who serve as critics have a better chance at
“doing” than those who do not, a fact that proves advantageous
to males who not only score those positions as reviewers in greater
numbers across every form of media, compared to their female associates,
but also for their training in masculine bluster to believe they
have the right to cut someone else, often much more successful than
themselves, down to a more manageable size or to even go the extra
mile and shred them to ribbons. Even if they never make that allegedly
all-important step from criticizing to doing, and no matter how
ignominious a life of such stasis might be to accept by any red-blooded
male—in keeping with the politics of our times—it just
might take a spoon full of brutality to help that medicine go down.
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