I gave myself a week to figure out what my stance on criticism really was. What is it that I want to write about? My imposter syndrome kicks me in the gut (quite literally with my new North American lifestyle) when I think I can call myself a critic by any standards, but every time I read other people I imagine I could one day. Call myself a critic that is.

Yesterday I found myself watching a Harvard GSD debate between a panel composed of some very renowned critics. While I do not possibly hope to condense the conversation into a few lines, I liked when Micheal Sorkin talked about his criticism not being merely passing judgement, but understanding the impact of architecture and design on the social fabric it is designed into, and then taking apart how the local culture reacts to it. I thought it made a lot of sense. The video should have included more female points of view, but it was recorded in 2015 and maybe the States was not as forward thinking back then.

That was a joke. Or was it?

Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" is an interesting book highlighting the basis of criticism, the relationship between the art and the artist, and current (or at least what was current back then) public consciousness. The introduction talks about an excess of interpretable forms of art, which might have been a novel thing in the past but is now a standard one must uphold. Everything must have meaning. This culture sometimes leaves not much for the critic to translate, as people take for granted the expected depth of a piece.

Has this made us less sensitive to these artistic forms? Maybe so. I find myself often looking away from manmade creation to natural objects, such as the dramatic layering of clouds in the sky, always a marvelous sight to behold. But I do not worry about art forms as I do about the written word, with its imposed rigidity and the obvious exclusion of those who cannot follow its rules. Commercial attention will only be bestowed on certain types of writing. The essay mentions how we tend to be less open to literary mistakes than we are to cinematic ones. Art and cinema are allowed to experiment. Writing is constantly compared to the classics.

This essay was written in 1964, and of course much has changed.

Sontag might not have realized how her overproduction would look standing next to the scale of things today. There is, of course, experimental fiction. Flash fiction. Absurdism. I must count playwriting as a more contemporary ally as it seeks to understand and give to people. There is a temporal urgency to the art.

Not that this was the reason I sought out to engage with during the course of this writing. What I must discover is the stance I carry. I have been reading multiple books, some of them quite dry, such as Terry Eagleton's "The Function of Criticism", while others have made me stop in awe. Foster Hal's "Design and Crime" opens with the words of Edward Said, a man I was introduced to as a teenager but was sadly never properly acquainted with, "What is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?"

I found this line quite important. It makes me wonder if the existence of this "critical consciousness", an easier term for which would be simply those who are self aware, is also not far too easily available now to be appreciated. As amateur critics, we cannot really interpret contemporary thinking with any past frameworks. The way to go about it, perhaps, would be to understand that while we are indeed self aware, we are still prey to biases and our biological will, which for some will stay as the ultimate truth of existence and the religion humanity at large should follow.

I will end my essay today with another Susan Sontag chapter. She begins her section on anthropology with a quote by Tristen Tropique. The saying itself is quite long, and I shall offer a smaller interpretation. The essence of it is how as humans we are bound to miss another form of being simply by existing as we are. We cannot hope to experience a place we are not present in. Humans cannot be in two places at the same time. That really is the truth of everything. I am, by nature of the generation I am born into, privy to an astonishing amount of "critical consciousness", and by that definition I am constantly aware of the places I miss out on by choosing to be absent there. That reason alone is why I cannot ever bring myself to write a judgmental opinion, as I could not possibly do justice to the multiple dimensions of design existence.

That, my dear reader, is my stance. I do not offer one dimensional arguments. I explore what has been offered, and I condense my emotions into the breadth allowed by any number of lingual combinations I exercise my craft through.

Why do I not write bilingual? That is an essay for another day.