Culture of Criticism: A Morning Thought

I woke up one morning – it was a Saturday – and checked my email before 8am as usual and found an email written to me by a presumably young and enthusiastic reader of architecture. The content of the email was fascinating. Not only did the author explain her own understanding of “criticism” with straightforwardness and clarity, but also used an interesting term in criticizing the current method in which criticism is viewed as a discipline. Her explicit comments brought me gratitude and also humility to think that I had a small part in her architectural thinking. I will now call the writer of this email “Sophie” – just like the main character in the renowned philosophical novel “Sophie’s World.” I paraphrase what she wrote:

Criticism is not about “good” or “bad,” it is not also about “being accepted” or “not being accepted,” and lastly, criticism is not about “being open-minded” or “being close-minded.”

Then, she continued with a long paragraph describing what she thought criticism should be. Truly, I was amazed and really enjoyed reading her email. I felt that the words she wrote were full of energy and unbounded enthusiasm: I cannot recall how long it has been since I have read such a powerful opinion piece.

Notwithstanding my fascination and admiration, I also found that Sophie’s understanding of criticism is not entirely accurate. Although, I also realize that maybe what Sophie meant was not criticism in general, but “architectural criticism” per se. However, no matter what she meant, it still does not change the way in which criticism should be understood. The entire notion of criticism has been derived from one main root, and the structure and the cause of criticism are by no means different although the details can be varied from adjective to adjective. For instance, “literary criticism” is different in details and methodology from “architectural criticism.” This urged me to give up going back to bed after routinely checking my email to compose this short piece on criticism, which I give the name “Culture of Criticism.”

Let me start with the definition of criticism as I understand it. I do not know Greek, but I know as everybody knows that the term “critic,” as well as hundreds other terminologies associated with knowledge (as well as Sophie), comes from Greek linguistics, the father of philosophy. A critic is person who offers a value judgment by definition; therefore, “criticism” is an act of qualitative judgment and construal, aiming at, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “expressing disapprovals of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” In the context of ancient Greek where people were searching for the value of intellectuality in the context of the seminal democratic society, “criticism” was a tool to understand the nature of knowledge. By pointing out the areas of disapproval, the entire community learned to think and re-think, to be argumentative, to be sophisticated in thinking, and to be thoughtful of what they spoke, for which they were all responsible. The most famous masterpiece of criticism during this time is Plato’s “Poetics,” a fundamental book for students of criticism in which Plato criticized that art is secondary to literature: Whereas literature connotes and active act of interpretation by the readers, giving broad horizon of thoughts, art is fixated to one meaning as its figurative form denotes one meaning per se, which is, to Plato, the end of the affair. In this sense, Plato is saying that literature is “better” than art. I think what Plato gives us here is by all means valuable. What is important to Plato is the effectiveness of logical thinking. Criticism, in this sense would decry defects in thinking rather than defects in the object being criticized. Perhaps, it is easier to discern an ineffective intellectual process in literature than it is in art. Literature, especially expository writing, adheres by rules of logic. Art may or may not adhere to strict logical rules. The prevalence of logic may be found in Greek architecture, which was built on the perfection of geometric forms and the anthropomorphic Golden Section. Of course, his criticism is truly an opinion because artists today would claim that art can also connote multiple meanings in a diverse pluralistic sense, not just a single narrative; for instance if we take a look at Conceptual Art or Abstract Art, only a few meanings of the art itself are passively demonstrative, the rest, which are the more important part of the art itself, are substantiated by the active interpretation of the audiences. Therefore, what we learn critically from Plato is that criticism can change if the context of the object into which the criticism goes is altered. The only form of art available back then was realism, which could be thought of as the imitation of reality; whereas forms of literature were totally imaginative dreaming of utopians that never existed – telling us why the only approved interpretation of art 400 years before Christ is Platonic.

In the modern times, criticism gradually becomes an act of interpretation of, mainly, literature. Due to the change of atmosphere in the landscape of new knowledge in the era of industrialization and constant social and political change, intellectuals elevated the status of criticism from being just individual opinions to a popular activity for scholarly investigation of literary or historical texts, if not philosophy. Many of the renowned thinkers and philosophers in this time used criticism as a tool to understand the fundamental nature of knowledge, the reality and the existence of mind. This is something that cannot be done prior to this time, such as ancient Greek time when histories have not yet been written. By criticizing the general concepts of the society that could be seen as something surrealistic derived solely from the sensory experience, probably the most influential thinker of the modern time namely Immanuel Kant created his philosophy, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” using “critique” as the main subject of understanding of his title; while at the other end, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel purpo sefully used the methods of criticism to generate a series of opposite possibilities, know as “dialectics,” to simulate an alternative route to answer the question of history by virtue of qualitative “value” judgment.

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Non is an academic based in Thailand and educated in the U.S. in History and Urban Studies. His core research topic is on the culture of criticism.