This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
Criticism is a response, and therefore inherently engaged. All that we call "criticism" includes a subject responding to an object.
When citizens apply judgment to the world into which they have been thrown, we call it "criticism." Real criticism is inherently political and domestic, and is therefore a product of the social being, and yet it is a movement that springs from autonomy. Criticism is born out of the individual's will towards liberation from the apparatus of control.
Criticism must react against an external, and the external world as seen by the critic is a world of controlling powers: the force of groups or states, customs, traditions, doctrines, political discourses and ideologies, historical or other reconstructions, literatures, myths, arts, institutions, cultures, relationships, arrangements, contracts, laws, agreements, economies, individuals, down to language and representation itself.
Even the word "no" can suffice for a critical response, be it ever so crude it is efficacious. The word is in fact the first tool we use to escape the power of others. But from this simple beginning, we develop far more sophisticated reactions to outside stimuli. We embrace, and tentatively test, and categorize, and rank, and emulate and shun and memorize... and try to forget.
For further implications more on the Higher Criticism of the Bible.