Tag Archives: Kenneth Burke

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The Pleasures of Criticism

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Good criticism ‘opens up’ our understanding of an object, idea or event: what its presence can mean as part of the human experience. 

                                 Paul Goldberger

The title here may be misleading.  I have no interest in selling the idea that harsh judgments are ‘fun’ to make.  That’s what “criticism” can mean.  But it isn’t what I think of when I use the term.  I’m more interested in its second and less common meaning: writing that combines analysis and assessment of the most interesting forms of expressive activity.  Criticism is a sustained and considered effort to understand a new project: usually the work of an artist or innovator interested in moving beyond the strictly utilitarian. Critics try to make sense of what these people have done or perhaps failed to do.  They may come from academic or journalistic organizations, or freelance on their own.

Almost every field–from architecture to food–has potential ‘appreciators’ who profess to use fresh eyes and ears to extend our understanding about a particular effort.  Criticism can be as accessible as reviews of new books, plays or music in a news outlet like the New York Times.  It can also be seen in the rarer video essays of Anthony Bourdain, Leonard Bernstein or Michael Tilson Thomas.  Some efforts stand as monumental and single works of sustained analysis, like like Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950. (Oxford, 1975).  And some can be impressive panoramas that leave us richer in our understanding of a single kind of human enterprise. Among these, I’d count Michael Arlen’s fascinating assessment of television in the Vietnam era, Living Room War. (Viking, 1969).

                                  Joan Didion

Criticism ought to be a cherished kind of writing—not just because it promises incisive observation, but because good criticism ‘opens up’ our understanding of an event: what its presence can mean as part of the human experience.  To use a simple example, I will never eat in most of the restaurants that the New York Times’ food critic will write about.  But Pete Wells’ assessment of the food and the experience of a particular eatery is still interesting.  Wells isn’t doing a Yelp review.  His best reviews place an establishment in a timeline, and its food in a broader culinary tradition.  The food he samples functions as a kind of ‘find’ in an archaeological dig.  It’s roots are from somewhere else, but handed down and modified by whoever is in the kitchen.  And, of course, its New York.  So most restaurants feed strivers looking for sensations that are different and potentially better.  Who knew that Malaysian coffee can be so different?  How have Americans not understood the varied and fascinating textures of something as basic as rice?

      Robert Hughes illustration by John Spooner

Try any field of effort, and there are fascinating critics from the present or recent past to explore.  Many have been journalists: Robert Hughes on art, Alex Ross on concert music, Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael on film, Joan Dideon on the East and West coast life, Paul Goldberger on architecture, or Gary Giddens on jazz.  Whatever the work, we expect critics to be curious, aware, and more interested in discovering and knowing than judging.

 

Living in the thick of a culture requires sorting out and assessing the passing parade of ideas and artifacts that vie to make an impression.

I was trained as a rhetorical theorist and critic.  No shingle hangs out of my office to attract potential customers.  But with communication as my world I am never at a loss for subjects to explore and ponder. I and thousands of other academics are following in the footsteps of other rhetorical critics before us, including Wayne Booth, Hugh Duncan, Jane Blankenship, Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke.  The names of these academics are perhaps not familiar.  Yet they have shaped what communication means in the American academy.  They are still read by flocks of undergraduates on their way to sharpening their critical and analytical skills.

                     Kenneth Burke

Burke wrote what many of us sometimes say in moments of exasperation: we are all critics.  Living in the thick of a culture requires sorting out and assessing the passing parade of ideas and artifacts that vie to make an impression.  The key difference is that our own ad-hoc judgments are usually personal: said without much prior knowledge and not very well worked out.  That’s why our opinions are usually less interesting than a gifted writer who is also a professional appreciator.

 

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‘Things Will Get Worse Before They Get Worse’

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The rhetoric of rules places a heavy burden on the most creative among us. Too often rule-makers measure success in terms of compliance rather than initiative.  

I am optimistic by nature.  But that optimism doesn’t extend to organizational life.  As time passes, even very good organizations seem to have natural tendencies to layer their rules and procedures with ever more layers.  Rules and procedures are rarely streamlined.  Instead, they are supplemented.  If policies and guidelines are burdensome now, just wait a few years.  They will be even more numerous.

This tendency is equivalent to the process of ‘lawyering up’ that has happened in many corporations and institutions over the last decades.  As the law professor and trial lawyer Alan Dershowitz noted, a common litigation strategy is “papering the other side to death.” He meant, of course, that an organization can intimidate a plaintiff  by requiring so much data and information that the cost of a “win” becomes too risky and time-consuming.  The more the other side is papered, the more it is encumbered by procedures and rules.

I’ve written about this “papering” process before. In hindsight it seems as durable an organizational impulse as any. Even though paper has been replaced by online files, there seems to be a natural tendency to bureaucratize even the simplest processes, ostensibly to be “uniform.” Indeed, our organizational life seems to thrive on hiring and promoting rule-makers: policy specialists, evaluators, consultants, compliance officers, lawyers, professional writers, ethics officers, assistant managers, quality-assurance advisors, contract law specialists and others–some with the kind of obsessive-compulsive tendencies that would be recognized in a mental health facility.

Rules function in part to mystify others into compliance.  It seems their attractiveness comes from the very human need to impose behavioral norms on others. I used to think of a bureaucracy’s love of forms functioned for its own sake.  But it seems more likely that this feature of modern life flows from an interest in exercising power and control.  That need blinds us to the advantages of individual initiative.  “I’ll get the task done on time” has too often been replaced by the question, “What rubric should I follow?”  The quick jump to deference to procedure is a smoother pathway to organizational success.  And who does not like to suggest that their procedures ought to be followed by everybody?

The compulsion toward overwrought rule-making has not produced a comparable group of  specialists to reverse the process.

Organizational culture naturally seeks uniformity, which is not always always a bad thing. The problem is that the folks who write the rules seem to self-select, forming groups who are all too willing to “paper” the rest of us.  And so most of my colleagues spend more of their working time completing forms, documenting their work, submitting to endless reviews, and attending less-than-essential meetings where more procedures can be dreamed up. My campus has 110 active  ‘memorandas of agreement’ that faculty and staff are supposed to follow to the letter. A colleague in health care similarly reports that paperwork from the insurance industry is turning into an endless tsunami of requests for even more documentation.  Who has time for patients?

Alas, this compulsion toward overwrought rule-making has not produced a comparable group of  specialists motivated to reverse the process. So organizational culture typically embraces a snowballing accumulation of regulations.  New procedures stack up like layers of ocean sediment.

The rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called this tendency to over-produce regulatory flotsam “the bureaucratization of the imaginative.” It’s a perfect phrase. Reining in creativity by “regularizing” work simplifies organizational life, but has a deadening effect on innovators. In effect, the rhetoric of rules places a heavy burden on the most creative among us. Too often this impulse leads to the redefinition of professional success as compliance rather than initiative.