On Criticism: Seven Meditations

1.It was the British playwright Sarah Kane who first drew me to PAJ when I was a young writer. Previously I’d been studying English drama and Shakespearean tragedy especially. Then, as so often happens, Brecht, Artaud, and Pirandello arrived in my second and third years of college to uproot my conception of theatre. Next Beckett captivated me, first from the page, then in the rehearsal studio. He was the only author I knew who could create a disorientation in me that rivaled Kafka’s stories. Soon Caryl Churchill was starting to seem at home within this aesthetic constellation. When I encountered Kane’s work later that year, I was so hungry to know.The summer before my junior year, I’d visited London and gone to a party where some locals recommended Kane’s plays to me. Back stateside a few weeks later for a summer semester, I found her Complete Plays in the university library. It was my good luck to meet Bonnie Marranca that summer too. I’d already enrolled to take a course she was teaching at Princeton that fall on “Theatre and War in the Twentieth Century,” so on a whim, I somehow found her on Instant Messenger and wrote her directly. I don’t remember why. Probably I’d just finished reading Kane’s war drama Blasted, or maybe I’d found Ken Urban’s writings on Sarah Kane in PAJ (issue #69). Regardless, Bonnie indulged me from the start as a generous interlocutor and genuinely interested mentor.A few months later I proposed and staged Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis for a senior creative thesis. Sometime around then I also began noticing copies of PAJ in the theatre program’s offices on campus. The issues that first captured me included conversations about “Art as Spiritual Practice” with Alison Knowles, Meredith Monk, Linda Montano, and reviews and photos of Giorgio Strehler’s Tempest (in PAJ 72); then some months later, Bill Viola’s video/sound installations (discussed by Herbert Blau, in PAJ 75). These were all new names to me then. I couldn’t articulate it yet, but I could feel in my nerve endings that these critical encounters were changing me irreversibly.2.come back, and begin again, no, go onTime passes. These days I have students of my own. This past academic year, I taught a college writing workshop, my first, on criticism as a form of creative non-fiction, based on the mandatory “crit” workshops required of MFA students in criticism at Yale. In preparation, I reimmersed myself in some of the writings and authors that had spurred my own desire to write criticism when I was a student: George Bernard Shaw, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Hilton Als. Bonnie’s 1984 George Jean Nathan Award acceptance speech “Acts of Criticism” featured among these readings. She delivered it at age thirty-seven.Reflecting on how Harold Clurman challenged her in the 1970s to make her own writing more personal, Bonnie offers an observation that strikes me as still urgent today: “Then I mistakenly believed that criticism was an objective form, whereas now I see that it is the most subjective kind of writing.” Her speech has a kind of sparkle, as if studded with aphoristic gemstones: “One reason to live is to have the luxury to know writing,” she remarks.A few years later, in a 1987 guest lecture at Hunter College, criticizing the ascendant “performance culture” that has since become ubiquitous in our age of social media, she asserted the following program for herself.It is important to investigate ways to go beyond what we know as criticism, especially theatre criticism, which cannot wait for a new theatre but should take responsibility for its own future.Some of the ways I’ve set for myself are: — to make criticism a critique of criticism— to incorporate fictional technique and other forms of writing— to move in the realm of the lyrical and philosophical essay or aphorism— to situate the essay between speech and writing— to convey emotional presence— to emphasize the voice over the text— to turn criticism into writingThis Ars Poetica for criticism has long shaped and still reverberates with my own feelings about arts writing. I especially admire the space it demands for “subjectivity,” “emotional presence,” “voice” —for feeling, and the tentative delineation of perspectives in stirring language, whose horizon is lyric or philosophical. Like the philologist, the critic allows literature and philosophical reflection to approach and touch each other. It bears repeating that criticism isn’t the same thing as reviewing: the measure of good criticism can’t be the newspaper write-up or online hot take. Something more reflective, learned, personal, and artistic must be at stake in it.3.With criticism, we first must discover how to feel and discern “liking” in ourselves in the moment of aesthetic encounter with an object. This is, of course, Kant’s famous language for judgments of taste. But then we must also summon enough courage to own our liking. That way, we can advocate for what we like in conversation with others. The critic is one who restages that encounter through writing to promote shared understandings.Let me be more specific. Many students in my recent seminar seemed to have an impossible time saying whether and why they liked (or hated or felt ambivalent about) the very artworks they themselves had chosen to write on. Instead, they opted to summarize, interpret, query—to stall and demur. Of course, description’s unavoidable in criticism, and it’s necessary for critics to pose interpretive questions and not rush to judgment. But these steps alone aren’t sufficient: some act of judgment is, after all, still necessary. I’d keep asking these student writers to say more explicitly what they thought, rather than squirrel their opinions away in off-hand phrases, parenthetical asides, and snark. (Bonnie once remarked, in an editorial meeting, that “there’s nowhere to hide in an essay.”)I began to sense this diffidence was the sign of our culture’s enduring nihilism, the kind of stealthy, snobbish, bland philistinism where everyone’s entitled to their own tastes, without having to talk much about them at all, or about art for that matter. In response, we looked closely at celebrated or infamous critics of the past, asking: “How do you decide if this critic seems authoritative? From where does her authority derive? Are you convinced by these views?”Then, in our workshops, students asked these same questions again of one another, scrutinizing their classmates’ work. My goal was to get them listening more carefully to their own voices, asking them what provides, or could begin to provide, some aesthetic authority in their own writing. If they felt they lacked authority in the moment of writing, what would they have to study to begin building up a basis?It’s a paradox that, despite all this apparent reticence, there’s no shortage of opinionated people in our contemporary, very online world. Snap judgments and social media flame wars proliferate, but substantial reflection seems to dwindle. Today algorithms delude us all into thinking we’re each our own op-ed section of one. But criticism can’t be reduced to simple opinionating. It’s a truism, but: if everyone’s a critic, then no one is.It is for this reason that both moral courage and vulnerability are inevitably bound up in the critical act. Lately I’ve come to develop appreciation for Michel Chaouli’s three-part description of the aesthetic encounter, which he summarizes at the outset of his recent book Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins with all the grace and simplicity of a haiku: “Something speaks to me. / I must tell you about it. / I don’t know how.”4.begin again all over more or less in the same placeMy critical writings started to appear in PAJ fourteen years ago, in 2010. Enough time has now passed to warrant a reassessment and a retrospective postscript (or preface). The younger version of myself who looks back from the pages of past issues still feels amiable if a bit unfamiliar to me. He’s a bit like a friend from whom I’ve grown apart, even if we’ve never fully lost touch. It’s uncanny to reconnect with this young person on the page. He’d just come through his MFA training and the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, but he had yet to experience the global tumults of 2011, Occupy Wall Street, and the turbulent decade that followed.The first PAJ review under my byline took up Janáček’s 1930 opera From the House of the Dead. Adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel, the opera appeared in a new staging by Patrice Chéreau at the Met in Fall 2009. The review drew on Nietzsche’s rhetoric of redemption from The Birth of Tragedy (published in 1872, reissued, with a new preface in 1886, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”). I described the opera as a work that depicts “human salvation . . . alongside its material counterpart, human emancipation, as the twin objects of an impossible desire.”My main questions at that time seemed to be: How do modern performance works enact and enable thinking about matters of spiritual belief and also about the possibilities of political liberation? Chéreau’s staging provoked my admiration for dramatizing “the insurgency of life that power would seek to extinguish.” Today, I am amazed that this young writer clearly hadn’t yet read some important critical works in his field, Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption, for instance.He also seems fairly certain, if presumptively so in 2010, that the words “insurgency” and “emancipation” should be suited to the word “impossible.” Probably this young writer had incautiously absorbed some of The Birth of Tragedy’s Wagnerianism and resigned pessimism. But the world was then approaching another cycle of imminent insurgencies, and their initial tremors were only just beginning to stir.Looking back over this first review now, I also marvel how it contains the seeds of concerns that still preoccupy me. In my latest work, I am still wondering: What claims can the past, even the dead, make upon the living? What connects Dostoevsky’s prison camps with our present moment? And, against all claims of supposedly “postmodern” rupture, how can we narrate the historical connections between Nietzsche’s lifetime, Janáček’s, and our present moment, in culture, society, and politics?Above all, though, this first essay raised questions for me about the enduring artistic and political values of grief, mourning, melancholy—above all, tragedy. I had only a distant sense at that time that tragedy was in the early 2000s “an unfashionable subject,” as Terry Eagleton put it, “an aristocrat among art forms, . . . too solemn and portentous for a streetwise, skeptical culture.” Or maybe I already knew that all too well, and simply didn’t care. Giorgio Agamben’s definition of being contemporary is being “untimely.”5.commencing again yesterdayOver the past decade and a half, the journal gave me space to explore my most abiding questions through encounters with some of our leading artists. I’ve often found myself returning to the work of major stage directors in the European and North American postdramatic scene—namely, Romeo Castellucci, Robert Lepage, Reza Abdoh, Robert Wilson, and Milo Rau. I include in this company the hybrid scholar-critic-theorist-director Herbert Blau, whose example still stands for me as an inspiration for the future performance-making and performance criticism in our artistic institutions.It’s curious now to discern links between these artists, when mostly I have proceeded by way of instinct and affinity. These directors have found space in their performance work for tragedy and the forms of grief; for spectacle, as such, thoughtfully deployed; for deep and substantive engagements with the histories of literature, art, philosophy. To differing degrees, each adopts a critical relation to the harshness of our contemporary world; each makes work marked by an extraordinary moral elegance, by which I mean, moral discernment; each maintains a conscious dialogue with past avant-gardes; and each is committed to the human potential for spiritual experience.1My review of Janáček’s opera unfolded still other critical pathways for my writing. Bonnie soon invited me to take up an opera and classical music “beat,” leading to engagements with composers Arvo Pärt and Kate Soper, and extending the journal’s coverage of new operatic repertory and music-theatre, which began with its very first issue. PAJ 1 had featured Louis Aragon’s writing on Robert Wilson’s “silent opera” Deafman Glance as its lead article; this was followed by a dialogue on music-theatre between composers Richard Peaselee and Stanley Silverman. (The forms of these initial inclusions, letter and dialogue, are themselves significant. I’ll say more on them in a moment.)As a music critic, I’d go on to review Lincoln Center’s first annual White Light Festival, with new works by Meredith Monk, John Luther Adams, and Anohni. Somewhat later, I even surveyed the entire 2011–12 opera season in New York for a set of experimental “Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse.” These “Notes” evince a more playful critical voice than the earlier essays; they sought to fill a gap in the critical dialogue by working to fold canonical operas (Cavalli, Lully, Mozart) more fully into the contemporary interarts conversation (alongside artists like Marina Abramović, the Wooster Group, and Robert Ashley). The amount of creative liberty the journal entrusted in me was extraordinary and exhilarating. Each new assignment was an education: I got to learn through acts of criticism, by trial and error, by doing and making.Looking back now, I see that Bonnie cultivated my critical voice with PAJ into a continual outward branching. She gave me a chance as a young editor to generate or co-develop pieces on an expanding range of topics: contemporary actors and acting methods (for PAJ 100); the visual arts, installation, and curation (for PAJ 111); the politics of “community” in contemporary performance (for PAJ 108); new non-fiction books in cultural criticism (for PAJ 127); new works of multimedia and film (for PAJ 117 and 134); new writings on contemporary Italian performance (for PAJ 94, 107, and 134); and numerous gay and queer theatre-makers (above all, Reza Abdoh for PAJ 120 and Matthew Lopez for PAJ 129).There’s been a clear and consistent editorial ethos at work here. Editing is, of course, a form of criticism by other means. I value the demand PAJ makes of its theatre writers that they engage other artistic mediums apart from the stage, other languages than English, other cultures than the U.S., other genres of writing outside of drama, and other topics apart from their preferred of this without the necessary critical in the of theatre and This is a in one that more and arts but especially our theatre should of been without their of Like my and are But within my own and the of the it’s seemed few topics were of The journal in me an a range of cultural objects and forms, with a kind of critical the my more work has alongside my criticism, but these have often and each other. can from being of What they can’t is to as for in my of I I’d more to write for Or for that matter. are I now the to these topics with like American and so I now of my the critic and PAJ In her most celebrated she future of critics to read more still be more to major artists in the of world literature and performance have into my through the journal these past It would be to to Where to the like and like or or like and writers whose theatre works were to me, like and to to remember critics who to my through PAJ and whose writing has shaped my own work. to My to the of PAJ me to George It got me reading writing on writing on writing on writing on writing on the I had to promote and the critical writing of I admire like Matthew on recent theatre and work on contemporary PAJ me past critical as for example when I first encountered and the of after from or for a from that same are too and critics to too to be luxury of writing, though, would be to upon the forms of writing the journal has especially and The journal’s conversations an that criticism must in and in between My own with critics and the New York by past conversations from the among and stands in my as one of my most and in the to from from from and its more forms of critical writing Bonnie’s own at have all critical writing as and have also in this editorial philosophy. both the journal’s and it the between languages as a of creative and In each of these the critical encounter plays in the between and is necessary for criticism to some is also necessary for the experience of and for the of that Susan once which PAJ in these critical the the to and that of art, each in its own to begin and in in that that is why this is what is our the world still in of These past few years another alongside the years of I’ve come to whether to future how the of European looks to us was the of In of The the The the and other our present moment in years after the of the first war to years was a of time to take of the . . . . What from the works that before the war is a sense of new of the was a sense of The and artists had to to that would approach a of years after the of the new is once again into is another Are we already now a new sense of soon be more been long in the over the past or with the of what some have the new American since the the same in our world of wars and and all the we’re the potential for felt that there’s been so much to and in recent I I’ve been to political works by writings by conversations on from all, I’ve been again to I’ve to major like and I’ve also been reading like Michel and It’s been a reading to be all over the past decade and a half, I still value critics whose writing a sense of and I it that has for new forms of criticism, of that in the and approach of criticism the work, it, it put if not become another for new in the arts, new and of from the this start of a new the for new forms, and for engagements with it’s time to the words and “emancipation” from each other in this moment, to set new of critical for critics and artists to work to with these The world and our work again, and