Crit Snit

The Affaire Dvorak has happily meta-ed itself well past Dvorak himself. I’m quite enjoying the many blogs about the importance, danger and art of criticizing one another. Wealth Bondage has a awesome list of How to Criticize, and AKMA reminds us how hard real criticism is. Damn straight. That’s why good teachers are so rare.

AKMA points to Cinnamon’s correspondence with Dave Rogers in which she suggests that bloggers happily blogging to and about one another constitute an exclusionary clique. AKMA responds by recasting the same phenomenon in different value-laden words: “Somewhere someone got the odd idea that it’s wrong for people with similar interests to hang out together…”

You’re both right. (And to satisfy those who insist that criticism is the only proof of authenticity: You’re both wrong.) CAUTION: Extreme obviousness ahead. Of course we like to talk with people who are interested in the same things and who share the assumptions that let a conversation go forward. Of course this can become a clique when it excludes difference and pats itself on the back for doing so. Of course this can also be the way in which the world is joined and minds are enlarged. And that is precisely why we are — in general — better off opting for praise and elaboration rather than criticism and condemnation: criticizing others is all too often a way of excluding them from the conversation.

Of course, such criticism isn’t what criticism is truly about. Separating the wheat from the chaff — the original meaning of criticism — is a form of respect. But, in that regard I’d say that the hyper-clique that grew up around the blogthread on authenticity was highly self-critical.

But we don’t have to — and can’t — legislate what is the Proper and Acceptable Form of Criticism. As AKMA writes, we

…can keeping writing one another into copyright-free harmony, and we can criticize one another, and encourage one another, and printa donna journalists can find criticism and encouragement at the level of insight that’s comfortable for them.

CAUTION: Sermonizing obviousness ahead. It’s the same in bloggery as everywhere else: we are drawn to what draws us, we are interested in what interests us. The only difference is that we have an epochal opportunity to learn from one another. The criticism that mocks does so at the cost of learning, although it has its own pleasures: little is more enjoyable than a ripping good flame fest. The cost: flames anodize cliques. Real criticism is exactly what makes learning possible.

Categories: Uncategorized dw