Bob J Onggo

The exhibit’s specs:
http://gambit.mit.edu/images/WOW.pdf

In terms of what essays do for a field of research… I’d say that essay are the fundamental activity of research, as the essay is what opens that area for research, even if the essay has been eviscerated down, and i think i see this a fair amount in many fields, to the ‘theory’ and ‘literature review’ sections of scientific papers. The essay, stated or not, exists in scientific papers in those sections and perhaps in other sections, but as one reads texts like leviathan and the airpump or laboratory life, one quickly sees that all scientific writing is a matter of fitting the essay into the literary genre accepted by the field. In the essay…. that’s where we describe how we came to the position to do research, both universally, and specifically, it tells the readers which problems we are fighting with, how we understand them, etc. etc. Now, of course, scientism rears its ugly head here as do issues of clarity, terseness, etc. etc. that are part of the ideology surrounding transfer of knowledge that developed in early modernity to publish experiments and results, and still reigns today… much of that ideology is why the essay has been eviscerated in scientific genres, or at least that’s the argument i’d make.

So the short answer to your question is that rather than revealing external reality as it is (which science is better at), critical essays about cultural texts transform us, make us better readers, better content creators, more sensitive/imaginative to the suffering of others, etc.

In my case, I read film theory to help me better understand how culture is represented on the screen, how reality can be presented on the screen, and the ethical, aesthetic, and functional implications of that. I read fashion theory to help me understand identity and subjectivity, which in turn helps me understand how people present themselves in social media. Yet both fashion and film also help me cultivate a sense of visual literacy, so I can not only see a visual style I appreciate, but so I can also critique it robustly and derive a wide array of potential design insights. Feminist, Marxist, and Queer theory help me understand how these designs reflect ideologies and assumptions about “normal” everyday life, and how these reflections emancipate and/or repress others. I read this kind of criticism to make me a better “reader” (of cultural texts) and a more sensitive, ethically informed designer. It’s a lifelong task.

The first part regards his contention that criticism attempts to work in a scientific manner, and his examples were Marxism and the New Criticism. To those he might also have added Russian Formalism and structuralism. These are all reasonable counterexamples and so they have a place here. But it is a place at the margins.

The New Criticism began in the 1920s and was more or less finished by the end of the 1960s. Russian Formalism also was around the 1920s. Marxism was considered a science in the 19th century. And structuralism was also popular from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. In short, all of these might be considered modernist modes of critique and all of them were dead by the end of the 1960s, at least in terms of their scientific pretensions. Roland Barthes, the great structuralist who wrote the scientistic work, The Fashion System in the mid-1960s had this to say of it in 1971: he was under the delusions of a “euphoric dream of scientificity.”

So while you are technically correct that some forms of criticism had scientific yearnings, your examples are now half a century out of date. So it is possible to aspire toward objective criticism–E.D. Hirsch even more recently pushed that agenda–but it is far from mainstream and not even really a respected position in literary theory and cultural studies–nor has it been since 1970.

So I maintain the original point, which is that most serious cultural, literary, film, and art criticism is not about being objective or replicable, but is in fact about the reflective processes of the expert subject. This is not to suggest that their significance is limited to an individual subjectivity; certainly, feminist, Marxist, queer theoretic and other socially activist theoretic traditions clearly are oriented towards verifiable change in the real world. Yet I would still argue that when these appear in critical essays, they are presented not as replicable science but rather as modeling a critical engagement to a phenomenon that typically exposes some hidden aspect of it (e.g., ideology, repressive hierarchy, etc.) to expose it to some further, subsequent intervention (which could happen through science or some other discourse).

Finally, my use of the word “resonance” is not my own. I cribbed it from Stephen Greenblatt, who was a key figure in the emergence of New Historicism, which in turn was a major strategy in the emergence of cultural studies. Resonance and salience are different precisely as you describe: salience seems to have a certain intersubjective quality: X isn’t salient unless someone agrees with you that it is. Whereas resonance is much more personal. One might say that the move from criticism to social science is a move from an initial resonance to a demonstrative salience. I definitely need to think more about that, however.

I have one other point, but I think it is worth its own post, so I’ll just give a teaser here. I return to what got Jeremy and I going in the first place. Jeremy wrote his objection to many doing sloppy discourse analysis and/or close reading is that “they skip the way that they came to see that, which is what makes the work replicable and can make it scientific if that is a goal.” In my responses, I reacted to the last 2/3 of that statement (the part about science and replicability). But actually, the most important part was the first third: “they skip the way they came to see that.” In that regard, I absolutely agree; a good close reading has no trouble establishing how they came to their final understanding; indeed, a good essay is an expression of that very process. Where I differ (and to be fair, Jeremy was writing a comment on a blog post, not a carefully crafted statement for the Cambridge Companion To ___) is that I see replicability and science as representing one legitimate direction among others. And my original thesis in this post (and which I still maintain) is that in HCI, there is a silent bias that it is the only one. And that, not these quibbles with Jeremy about the active decades of the New Criticism, that was the real target of my diatribe here.