What Is Criticism?

Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.

Editor’s note: Our dear author is active on Zhihu.

Today we’ve invited Real Doggo (实在狗子, “Real” for short) and its good friend Not-Real Doggo (非实在狗子, “Not-Real” for short) to talk about criticism.

Opening (voice-over accompanied by noise): You will see him; you will hear him; you do not know who he is … You see them; you are looking at them; you have not recognized them … —Lyotard.¹

Real: This interview is about criticism. First we need to settle a question: what is criticism? Then we can discuss why we need criticism, and who needs it.

Not-Real: One thing is obvious: criticism isn’t abusing people. It isn’t getting in someone’s face about the family they grew up in.

Real: When we talk about criticism, when we talk about what criticism is, we’re already practicing criticism. There is no objective standpoint for criticism. It is itself an intervention. Criticism exists in the series of effects it produces. Criticism itself is nothing but a verb. It connects theory and life, or theory and practice.

Not-Real: We generally think of theory—whether literary or philosophical—as something far removed from life.

Real: There’s some truth to that. In How to Really Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, the author advises you to buy a gun for protection if you meet someone at a party who studies Milton or Hegel. That’s prejudice. One gun is obviously not enough. You need at least a submachine gun—a really long one.

Real: But at the same time, critics will remind us that these theories are not only farther from us than we imagine (they’re actually harder to fathom), but also closer than we imagine. Our lives have long been permeated by them. Derrida once said something to the effect that, whether we know it or not, we’re all Marx’s children. Ideology not only structures our political views; it also intervenes directly in our everyday lives, including, of course, all the different areas of culture.

Not-Real: Hiroki Azuma’s stuff on Hegel is all easy to understand.

Real: Everything Azuma writes is easy to understand, and that gives us an example of criticism. I have a Japanese copy of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals here. It’s been reprinted more than twenty times in ten years, selling better than plenty of novels and manga. In fact, the book itself has appeared in plenty of novels and manga. It isn’t just a theoretical work about subculture; it has also influenced subculture itself. With Azuma, we can see the problem I call “the illusion of originality.”

Not-Real: What’s “the illusion of originality”? Can you give an example?

Real: Take Eiji Ōtsuka’s How to Make Character Novels.² Light-novel writers have known about it for ages, so they write a lot of their work to that formula. Their works end up sharing an obvious structure. Then someone sees this (obvious) structure and thinks they’ve made an original discovery. That’s the illusion of originality.

Not-Real: So this supposedly original thinker has actually discovered “secondhand stuff at second hand,” then claims to have discovered it first.

Real: Exactly. Take Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke. The first time the protagonist jerks off, he thinks he’s the first person in the world to discover it, and that he’s going to make a fortune.³ It’s that sort of feeling.

Not-Real: That analogy is way too gross! (Angry.)

Real: Theory feeding back into creative work is nothing new. The Postmodern Landscape tells this story: Jameson asked a painter which painter had influenced him most.⁴ He thought the painter would probably say Picasso. Instead, the answer was Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard. The painter said, “Lots of painters don’t think about technique. We read the latest theory, get inspiration from new theories; we read Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, and then we paint.”

Not-Real: Being original is surprisingly hard, actually, because first you have to know what other people have already done.

Real: That’s why it’s so funny when people say, “I hate parroting. I like originality.” At their level, they can’t even tell parroting from originality. They turn “I can’t” into “I don’t want to.” They turn their powerlessness into a “virtue.”

Politics and Literature

Not-Real: Lots of people refuse to connect literature and art with politics. What do you think?

Real: Whenever we see an attempt to label anything “nonpolitical,” what we’re seeing is an act of politicization in its purest form.

Not-Real: Let’s say a little about putting the author at the center, too. You’ve always been a staunch opponent of author-centered criticism.

Real: To some extent, that’s the same thing as opposing Nazism. If you believe in authorial intention, you have to believe that Mussolini launched a war to save the whole world, because that’s what he said.

Not-Real: Author-centered criticism is undoubtedly the ideology of conservatives.

Real: T. S. Eliot, Bloom, Nabokov. This lot all have Eurocentric ideas to one degree or another. And I still have to take a swipe at this: that way of thinking is just so stupid. We don’t even need to bring Roland Barthes onstage. Bakhtin already said: “[The author] sees only the emerging product of creation and not the inner, psychologically determinate, process of creation.”⁵ An author is just a writer, not a psychologist, psychoanalyst or neurologist. Why would they know their own mental processes? Have people today still not noticed that the term “the unconscious” exists on this planet? Still living in the pre-Copernican age?

Self-Criticism and Other Matters

Real: When it comes to self-criticism, we soon find ourselves in a Derridean predicament. We could say that, to practice self-criticism, you must not know that you’re criticizing yourself, or that you’re criticizing at all. Otherwise, the criticism can easily become a sham.

Not-Real: But using that as a reason not to criticize might be twice as much of a sham.

Real: You’re right. There are plenty of problems with my writing. Take my recent piece “An Ontology of 2D Ero”: I don’t explain some of the terminology adequately, especially in the second part.⁶ But honestly, there’s at least a master’s thesis in that material, so explaining everything would be a lot of trouble. In a thesis, I could take my time explaining concepts like Azuma’s database and their problems, but cramming all that into an article would make it far too long. That’s why I put “[Informal Essay]” at the beginning.

Not-Real: You have this concept you call “criticism of the other.” What does it mean?

Real: What I mean here is criticism addressed to the other. You have to bring the other in. In a lot of people’s writing, the other is absent: the sentences look like dialogue, but it’s only the writer’s own monologue. Dostoevsky, though, tells us that when someone truly keeps the other in mind, the other is there even in a monologue.

Not-Real: Can you be more specific?

Real: You explain a concept in detail, very clearly, and bring the other into a domain they previously thought beyond their reach. That’s what it means to address the other. An article packed with forbiddingly difficult terminology can certainly be a good article, but it doesn’t count as criticism, because it makes no intervention.

Not-Real: One last question. Lots of people think using theory to study 2D culture is like shooting mosquitoes with a cannon. What do you think?

Real: 2D culture is now Japan’s way of promoting itself as a matter of national policy (Cool Japan). It’s the culture foreigners are likely to think of first when Japan comes up, and somehow it gets treated as a mosquito. How narrow does your vision have to be?

Real: Besides, the turn toward minute details was a major breakthrough in cultural studies—the devil in the details, as they say. Symptomatic reading specifically looks for mosquitoes in a text. And that cannon metaphor is outdated anyway. Don’t you know warfare now is all about precision strikes on tiny targets? From that angle, we really do need to shoot mosquitoes. What we need now is a cannon that can hit mosquitoes. If a cannon can’t even hit a mosquito, can it make it to the Gulf?

Editor’s note: All right.