March 25, 2004
Sven Birkerts on criticism
An earlier post made note of Dale Peck's supposedly final negative review. (Click here to read that magazine's press release about the article.) The target of that essay, Sven Birkerts, has his own go at the state of criticism--including a fairly detailed summary meta-critical discourse over the last twelve months--in the Spring issue of Bookforum. The piece is a long defense of the humanist, belletristic, arguably "rearguard" critical style that has waned considerably since the widespread importation of theory (and academic language/specificity) into general interest publications. A key paragraph:
What I am talking about here is, it's true, more polemic and feature-related journalism than reviewing per se, but the vitality of the latter depends in a thousand subtle ways on the vitality of the former, and if our situation feels demoralized, dissipated, without urgent core, it is to some degree because we are without a larger rallying cause and without any stirring sense of possibility. This is not to say that there are no rallying causes available—I can think of a few, beginning with the outrages of the current administration—but that we seem to be without the rallying will. We have lost the sense that there is any gathering place. Our intellectual life is fragmented. It has, perhaps of economic necessity, migrated into the academy, where it can only conform to the dominant strictures of theory-suffused disciplines (the luftmenschen of old, as Russell Jacoby reminded us in The Last Intellectuals, are no more). Connected and informed as never before, we nonetheless register a dispiriting sense of isolation, of not mattering.
and later:
Partisan Review in its heyday was a model of mattering. Its circulation never exceeded fifteen thousand, but it nevertheless outlined the very nerve system of influence in our collective cultural life. Its main contribution, over and above the contents of any of its pieces, was that in its great years it gave us an intellectual idea of ourselves. It created the terms of the debate. By postulating a certain kind of intelligentsia, it helped to foster it. That intelligentsia was nonacademic (though academics devoured the journal) and politically and morally engaged; it deplored provincialism and assumed a cosmopolitan view; it believed in the necessity of the modernist project. We have nothing like the modernist aesthetic certainties. Indeed, our lot—henceforth—is to be suspicious of all projects. In a pluralistic and relativistic culture like ours, the clash of rival pundits may be the best we can come up with.
Having recently purchased the Fall 1962 Partisan Review for a friend (fifty cents at Strand!) and marveled at its contributor list, I can understand Birkerts's position, even if the "pre-emptive strike" timing of this essay undermines the high road implied by his tone.
All of this is particularly relevant today, as after work I am heading to SVA for a panel titled "The Crisis in Criticism," featuring Jerry Saltz, Nancy Princethal, Raphael Rubenstein, Katy Siegel, and one or two others. (Though the word crisis loses its bite when I look to my bookshelf and see Maurice Berger's The Crisis of Criticism, published June 1998.)