Culture of Criticism: A Morning Thought

To this point, although I do agree with Sophie, deep down, that the world without arguments is probably the most peaceful world, the realm of criticism is not as one-sided as she imaginatively presumed. Criticism has been used as a tool to reach the logic of knowledge. A person trying to buy a banana must know how to determine the quality of the inside by the outside appearance Just like buying a banana, without knowing the negative side of it by judging its intrinsic value, there is no way for the customers to make a right decision.

It is also important that note that the emergence of the structuralism as well as post-structuralism in the early 1900s is pivotal. Scholars in the period mainly construct a new and pioneering form of criticism, mostly associated with “literary criticism� whether or not these scholars themselves would accept the term, focusing on the close and deep reading of the literature. Not only do they try to understand the text through its direct meaning and formal denotation, but they also make an attempt to read the underlying meaning of the literature in order to find the authoritarian purpose of the text as well as the “political unconscious� – a critic of this school of thought must presume the role of a doctor who diagnoses the literature. This method of criticism has been developed by many scholars and advocates the new horizon of criticism. The most profoundly written criticism after the turmoil of the anti-political movement is found in Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,� a critical essay published in 1984 which is a wonderful link between criticism in general and architectural criticism, whose ideas would be established a few year after. In Jameson’s essay, he made an attempt to theorize the changing condition of the society by the emerging consumerism culture as a result of the tendency to leap toward the capitalistic culture of the world at large. To him, architecture is a representation of the symbolic realms that represent the bourgeois conventionalism through so-called postmodern spectacles. He remarks, “it was in the representation of architecture that sparked dynamic dialogues of postmodernism as a cultural logic.� For Sophie, here I quote my intellectual mentor:

When the standard is the promotion of an ever-advancing civilization, it can’t be wrong. The civilization wouldn’t advance, unless it is disturbed or prodded into motion or made to adopt new paradigms as they occur. New paradigms, if they are faulty, tend to be self-correcting. But the neat thing is that the paradigm may uncover another paradigm, which would never have happened without the impetus of the previous one. All this to say, that maintaining the status quo is deadly in this age of great transformations and changes.

This is what a philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, discussed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962.

In architecture, criticism might have long been embedded in the practice of architecture from the beginning yet mainly with the aesthetic treatment of the envelope. What we know today as architectural criticism, from people like Peter Eisenman, K. Michael Hays, Stanford Anderson, and Jeffrey Kipnis is the result of a century-long process of development passing from one generation to the other by means of the judgment, needless to say, given to the quality of architecture based on certain criteria set specifically for critical investigation. In the ancient time up to the Renaissance, the practice of architecture was regarded as a practice of aesthetic, which is by no means autonomous, so the criticism in the time of Classicism dealt mostly with the aesthetic condition related to proportion, ornamentation, and, later on, hyperbolization of formal appearance. Early architectural treatises, like Vitruvius’ “Ten Books of Architecture� were brilliant in their descriptions on “how to build,� but failed to give the “reason to build.� What good was the criticism when the template of architectural production inherited from the previous times were more than necessary? As so in the history, not until 1400s in the Renaissance when Italian polymath Leone Battista Alberti wrote a series of criticism, including “On Painting� and “Ten Books of Architecture,� which critiqued the architecture he has observed was the missing “why� added to the notion in the rubric of architectural treaty. For centuries, architects and artists utilized criticism (though not known as criticism at that point) as a tool to understand the value of their own works in order to transcend them.

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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.