This post is about the slogan of self-criticism. One can trace the concern with revolutionary self-criticism to an ur-text, Stalin's 1928 comments on the subject, but Chapter 27 of Mao's Quotations is of course the most significant text for the forward-thinking discussion of questions concerning the mandatory nature of self-criticism and the spirit in which such inquiries into one's own motivations must be conducted. Mao declares that "Conscientious practice of self-criticism" is what distinguishes the Communist Party, and the Marxist cause more generally, as sharpened dialectics hone the edge of the immanent critique of capitalism. Lazy and idle dichotomies are brought under severe scrutiny and opposed formations and positions are collapsed into more far-reaching syntheses.
Hence Carles, a Maoist in his praxis if not necessarily in his philosophical training, introduces the "brilliance/shittiness" opposition in the title of this essay -- or is it a struggle session redolent of Cultural Revolution piety? In responding to the critique of a competitor, Carles responds dialectically, amplifying and sublating the ambivalent assessment of his would-be judge (who only barely stops short of denouncing Carles as a "rootless cosmopolitan" in the grand Stalinist tradition) into an autotelic autocritique. But first, Carles must devolve authority over himself, disavow expertise over his own cultural identity as well as over the analytical methodologies and modalities he has perfected elsewhere: "Can n e 1 read this article and tell me what it is abt? Got super confused, like it might be too ‘high level’ for me, like writing that belongs in a book or magazine–not on the internet."
Part of this proposition of Carles's is straight from the Mao playbook and the injunction to "guard against subjectivism, arbitrariness and the vulgarization of criticism." By problematizing the media on which criticism is levied, Carles seeks to shift the terms of the debate about his own relevance to a broader discussion of whether cultural critique can be conducted in the networked real-time space of contemporary internet communications. At the same time, he asserts not to understand something that is written about himself, implying that self-knowledge is not possible even within an epistemological schema that embraces transactionality with the other. It is a rejection of subjectivism at the root of a conjured, interpellated subjectivity in reflexive discourse. The essay he cites is at once about him and not about him; what it is about is thus radically indeterminate.
Carles also rejects the depth psychology implied by a "high level" assessment of his rhetorical subject positionality, implying instead that "Carles" as constructed in discourse is a self-consuming artifact that can bear no interpretation and about which no "deeper" motivations can be deduced. Carles is created with the public(s) he calls into being by beginning to speak. This is part of his larger dismissal of the intrusion of poetic language into dialectical criticism -- the "metaphors, similies, and other journalistic tools" he snorts at in this response. A truly scientific criticism must express itself without undue reliance on such tropes which prompt exponentially recursive semiotic and hermeneutical concerns. Whether this is an aspect of the "arch, pseudo-scientific tone," Carles's critic wishes to silence is unclear to this observer.
Carles concludes by investigating the ontology of the concept of "knowingness" -- a word which, as he points out, does not circulate sufficiently in everyday discourse to warrant inclusion in online spelling dictionaries. Does it therefore not exist? Is it interchangeable with epistemology, or is something more phenomenological intended?
Carles interrogates this conditionality through a dialectic of quality and quality: "Kept scanning the page everywhere searching 4 a ‘rating.’ From what I understand, Pitchfork is famous for giving ratings, so feeling disappointed that I didn’t get a 10.0. Not even a 1.0." Carles cannot negate the negation in this instance, despite employing the weapon of irony to defend himself from accusations of abusing it. The critical question is not knowingness, but what can be known with any certainty -- which is why Carles searches the critique for a rating -- a mathematical certainty within the uncertain imbrications of rhetoric. Instead there is only performativity, but even this Carles is quick to disavow. "Is HIPSTER RUNOFF ‘performance art’?" he asks. The implication is that performativity is always a metaperformance of the critique of the pre-existing performances. This is what self-criticism can and must be if it is to function as a progressive purgative.
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