A Take on Takes on Takes, or the Function of Criticism in the Present Time

This is not about that Harper’s letter, nor is it about “cancel culture” writ large, though at first blush any discussion about criticism, or what we now refer to casually as “a take” seems consigned to that vortex — to a loop so banal we might as well be listening to it while sipping on a $22 cocktail in some poorly lit hotel lobby.

In a recent conversation with a friend and colleague — OK, it was my spouse, Sarah Kessler, who is also a critic and a scholar — we were lamenting how much we both second-guess ourselves whenever we actually commit our takes on popular culture to writing. Sure, I’ll happily spout whatever I happen to be feeling at any given moment about Little Fires Everywhere or Superstore on one of my podcast episodes. Or I’ll surrender an entire precious hour to tweet a thread about my disappointment in the series finale of The Affair, a show for which I evangelized throughout its entire tawdry, hetero-disasterkink run. But when tasked with cementing a point of view, even an ambivalent one, in a review or longer form piece for a so-called reputable publication, a creeping timidity seizes my very skin. Its tendrils crawl over my forearms as if to bind me from actually typing what I want to say.

Graduate students in the humanities (and I can speak from past experience) are more than familiar with this sensation. It’s the same fear of being pinned to a bad or “incorrect” read that choked some of us into silence in our seminars. For all the talk about political correctness, few even bother to pause and think about the other varieties of correctness — the decorum, the industry standards, the proper diction — that have stifled “freedom of expression.” Surely those of us who are, for better or worse, now ordained by various institutions to have opinions out loud for publics to hear have ceased to have such petty fears about our expertise?!

Actually, no. Never.

Especially if you’re a woman, if you’re queer, or if you’re a trans person, a disabled person, a person of color, or all of the above. Indeed, many of the very solid takedowns of the Harper’s letter, as well as the cancel culture crybabies who contort the very concepts of censorship, public debate, and freedom of speech to recast themselves as the victims, have duly pointed out the double-standard at the heart of such laments. In sum, those who feel “cancelled” by culture now have always, from their privileged positions, been at the very center of determining what actually constitutes culture with barely any pushback. Now that others’ perspectives on platforms far and wide are actually dislodging the points of view sanctioned as “elite” or verified (as it were) by their appearance in the most middling of middle-brow publications, those who have been blue-checked since birth are tantruming hard, and resigning from the fancy posts they can totally afford to quit.

And yet, what continues to elude discussions about the current crisis around expertise, who gets to wield it, and where it might come from, is a discussion of what it actually means to be a critic. To be a critic is, in many respects, to surrender one’s opinions to the world for that world to have at it with impunity. Our expertise as critics doesn’t offer us protection and doesn’t endow us with infallibility. Nor does our status as critics guarantee our takes will always be accepted by global acclimation. In short, one’s take is always subject to another take, especially when there are multiple platforms to share our takes on takes, in a world where we no longer need to be authorized, certified, degreed, or verified.

As someone who specializes in writing about the contemporary moment, but who 20 years ago wrote a dissertation about critics and criticism in the 19th century (oh, the irony of whipping out such credentials now), I can assure you that absolutely none of this is new. Takes on takes are not endemic to Twitter or to other social media platforms, no matter how badly the crankiest among us want to blame these technologies.

As I wrote back then, even Matthew Arnold, the “sweetness and light” guy with the braggadocio to tell us about the “Function of Criticism in the Present Time” in 1864, was willing to get mixxy with his many detractors. For him the daily newspapers were the Twitter-like scourge of the moment. Arnold’s essays on criticism in many respects anticipated what criticism became, or at least how we were trained to do it in the hallowed halls of academia. His most commonly referenced work, Culture and Anarchy —a series of essays for The Cornhill Magazine gathered into a single volume in 1869 — essentially defined criticism’s role in shaping national tastes with enough delicate refinement to keep the Philistines and barbarians at bay. And yet in most of his own criticism, which fronted with elegance and tact, Arnold was notably vicious in his footnotes, where he called out the people whose takes on his takes about literature and culture were less than kind.

The historian Anthony Grafton, in his book The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), describes the footnote as an “entertaining” if lethal form of intellectual and professional engagement that delimits the boundaries of critical communities. He also alludes to a more passionate use of the footnote as a tool of professional revenge: “Unlike other types of credentials […] footnotes sometimes afford entertainment — normally in the form of daggers stuck in the backs of the author’s colleagues.” Indeed, Arnold constantly avenged himself through his footnotes with a levity that might be regarded as unprofessional. Instead of using footnotes to legitimize his sources, he frequently used them to shade his nemeses, perhaps most notably James Fitzjames Stephens, e.g. “A writer in the Saturday Review, who has offered me some counsels about style for which I am truly grateful, suggests that [my phrase] should stand as follows: — To take as your unit an established base of notation, ten being given as the base of notation, is, except for numbers under twenty, the simplest way of counting. I tried it so, but I assure him, without jealousy, that the more I looked at his improved way of looking at the thing, the less I liked it. It seems to me that the maxim, in this shape, would never make the tour of a world, where most of us are plain easy-spoken people.”

All this is, I suppose, a roundabout way of saying that criticism as we know it — from its most elitist foundations idealizing the practice as a “disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” as Arnold famously wrote in “The Function of Criticism in the Present Time” — is actually built on heaping loads of petty bullshit. Plenty of shade was cast over all that sweetness and light. The more we remind ourselves of this simple fact, the sooner we can get on with it.

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Karen Tongson is professor of English, gender & sexuality studies, and American studies & ethnicity at USC. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of two books: Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011), and Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019). Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, NPR, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in other scholarly and public forums. She cohosts the GenX-themed podcast, Waiting to X-hale, with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh. For more information, visit www.karentongson.org. Twitter: @inlandemperor | Instagram: @tongsonator