Time for the critic as artist

Literary CriticismCriticism, writes Hegel, is "a god that self-destructs . . . a self-annihilating nothing". This definition sprang to mind recently as I sat alone outside a restaurant in Istanbul, feeling a little smug about a lecture I'd given the night before and the expenses-paid day ahead.

Inevitably, a couple of drunken locals invited me to their table. It didn't take them long to get out of me what I did for a living: I was, I admitted, a sort of critic. Hilarity ensued, followed by friendly sarcasm: more drinks were ordered, glasses raised and my back slapped. I was, after all, "a very important man!".

As Rónán McDonald's timely polemic avers, the critic has long been the object of such deflating attitudes: the very image of creative and intellectual impotence, a eunuch (as Brendan Behan put it) at the harem. And yet: a certain nostalgia seems to be abroad for a golden age of criticism, for an era, not so long ago, when critics such as Susan Sontag, Kenneth Tynan and Roland Barthes spoke with authority to a wide public within and outside the academy.

The Death of the Critic is not exactly an exercise in such nostalgia - McDonald is too attuned to present possibilities for that - but a lively, rigorous argument for the future of criticism.

A current cliché states that the age of the literary critic as public intellectual was brought to a close by two processes.

First, the insinuation of high theory into literary study - the academic vogue for such thinkers as Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva - and a consequent abstraction from actual authors and works. (And abstraction, as we're all apparently meant to agree, is always "bloodless".)

Second, a huge increase, lately accelerated by the internet, in the number of venues for non-specialist criticism of everything from poetry to grime, anime to installation art. McDonald admits all this, but is neither against abstract thought as such, nor averse to popular culture. The problem lies more precisely in a tendency shared by academics and bloggers alike: a reluctance to admit of aesthetic standards.

The academic preference for sedulous description over snap evaluation has its roots in the origins of English as a discipline. As conceived in the late 19th century, the subject was first of all a philological enquiry into the common heritage of language and literature. Mere judgments of taste were to be left to belle-lettristic reviewers. But as McDonald shows, taste has a habit of rearing its rarefied head just as you think it's been barred from the argument. Worse: it gets confused at every stage with morality, so that the history of English studies in the 20th century is a three-way struggle between quasi-scientific rigour, moral or political rectitude and statements about artistic quality. In the current climate, these last get regularly shouted down.

McDonald retorts that criticism is nothing if it is not evaluative: the Greek kritos means, precisely, the act of judgment. The culprits here are not really the conceptual giants of continental philosophy - Derrida, for example, was pretty clear about the genius of Shakespeare, Rousseau and Joyce - but the middle managers of the cultural studies industry: critics whose slack sense of relevance and inclusivity leads to a general slump in standards. Even old-fashioned critics such as John Carey - whose recent book, What Good Are the Arts?, is subject here to a well-deserved thrashing - have begun to claim that one aesthetic judgment is as "valid" as another.

In fact, that might be the very definition of contemporary critical conservatism: the belief that one opinion is much like another, and that all else is toxic elitism.

As The Death of the Critic demonstrates, that widespread notion is today's true elitism: it's actually a way of ruling out of the public sphere any thought, text or artistic form that doesn't immediately explain or endear itself. There is, however, an unavoidable contradiction in McDonald's position. On the one hand, he deprecates easy consensus. On the other, he regrets the atomisation of the public sphere that means scholars and journalists speak different critical languages. He would like to see a rapprochement between the two: engagé academics, more rigorous reviewers. He refers several times to the critic's former "authority", as though mourning some lost unity.

One could equally argue that an intensification of differences is what is required. "Criticism", it turns out, shares its etymology with "crisis" - perhaps the gulf between Ivory Tower and Grub Street will widen enough for a new form of criticism to emerge.

McDonald, brilliantly, has already imagined it: he argues in conclusion for a "new aestheticism", a creative criticism that eschews both opinion and mastery for invention and skill. A kind of imaginative riposte to the work, not its explanation: the critic as artist.

Brian Dillon is author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (2005), and an editor of Cabinet, an arts and culture quarterly. He is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives

The Death of the Critic By Rónán McDonald Continuum, 156pp. £14.99