Here’s my friend Sara Hendren, a couple of years ago, on critique and repair:
We’re seeing critique in the public sphere: criticism of leadership, of the weaknesses in our infrastructural systems, of our cultural confusion about acting collectively. Critique is alive and well (thank goodness!). What are its modes of action? Critique unmasks hidden or suppressed realities. It reveals ugly truths. It subverts or even negates mainstream or inherited or lazy narratives. We’re seeing its vivid power in every variety: in words and images, in books and popular culture, and naturally, on social media. It’s a beautiful (and alternately wrenching, and always vital) thing to witness.
We’re also seeing rhetorical acts of repair: proposals for new worlds that might be prototyped anew in the wake of disaster. There are calls for new models of business and medicine and education, newly flexible work structures, new forms of architecture and urban planning, new service models for community safety. The longer work of these reparative ideas has yet to be tested, but if we stay with just the rhetorical — these first acts of naming and calling for repair — we can identify its complementary modes of action. Repair language suggests new futures. It invites possibility. Perhaps it translates ideas from the past that might be reinvigorated or more accessibly understood, or perhaps it enchants by asking: what if? What if this new different thing could come to life?
This is great stuff.
I’ve been wanting to respond to Sara’s outline-for-thinking for some time (the text file in which I’m writing was created a year ago) but I keep hesitating. I hesitate because I’m thinking about this:
Understanding each mode [critique and repair] as a post — as a vantage with a view of the horizon that is necessarily partial, with particular assets and with unavoidable drawbacks — is one way to sidestep the often corrosive debates about “civility” that tend to explode in urgent times. Instead of policing the tone of others, wanting either less or more anger, less or more imagination and kindness, we might instead ask: What is my post? And what might be the alternate, equally productive posts of others, the ones who may well be moving toward a shared horizon? We don’t have to be the same. Each project is different, its actions and its affordances. By occupying one, you gain some things and you lose some things—and by occupying the other, the same is also true.
I am more skeptical about critique than Sara is, but that may be because, as she puts it, repair is what I have seen as my post, my calling — which might make me insufficiently appreciative of those who see critique as their post.
Also, in some follow-up thoughts, Sara describes a certain mode of “technological critique” which involves “the articulation of urgent socio-political questions made real in things. Things-to-think-with, which is not just for the gallery viewer. They’re public technologies with high stakes attached.” This notion of designed and constructed entities as critique evades some of my concerns, because my skepticism about critique arises from its loose and careless deployment of language. The deployment of things — well, that’s different.
But most of us think of critique as something done with words; so maybe I should just plunge ahead. And isn’t that what a blog is for? — plunging ahead, I mean, even if only to retreat later. Floating trial balloons and then waiting for them to be shot down, or shooting them down yourself. So … some thoughts, presented in aphoristic form but subject to later development:
1) The prospect of critique appeals — it looks easy, which is one reason why so many people try it — but is very difficult to do effectively; the prospect of repair intimidates, but almost any sincere attempt at repair is helpful or at least instructive (to those who perform it and those who observe).
2) The dominant venues of our discourse today — social media and other online environments — promote the degeneration of critique into snark or mockery by their encouragement of (a) the mere performance of virtue and (b) a distancing, physical and otherwise, from the objects of one’s critique.
3) Critique tends to do its best work when the critics know that they must share a substantive lifeworld with the people they are critiquing — even as they argue that the contours and structures of that lifeworld must become radically different than they are.
4) Actual repair is hard to dislike. The I-did-the-best-I-could-with-what-I-had ethos of There, I Fixed It inspires as much admiration as derision.
5) Repair without critique hobbles; critique divorced from repair corrodes.
6) Asking “How can I improve this situation?” is almost always a better question than “Whose fault is this?” — and indeed, that second question can become more useful and meaningful when it is asked as part of the process of answering the second.
7) Les Murray, “Politics and Art”:
Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.
8) Lesslie Newbigin: “The redemption with which He is concerned is both social and cosmic, and therefore the way of its working involves at every point the re-creation of true human relationships and of true relationship between man and the rest of the created order.”
