Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton

In Defense of Criticism

3 8 3 I t is nowadays the case, perhaps, that the word criticism tends to sound recherché—to suggest nostalgia for the days before film studies became intellectually strenuous. A few years ago it passed as a commonplace in advanced circles that criticism ought to be, and might become, “scientific,” and the older word evoked in itself the morass of impressionism and empiricism from which the discussion of art should be promptly rescued. Today, a new set of discourses adjure us not to criticize but to “deconstruct,” and deconstruction, whether or not it is properly scientific, certainly suggests an activity at once more bracing and more precise than any in which the student of culture was traditionally engaged. The new vocabularies are awesome—at any rate, they have attracted a good deal of publicity—and it is correspondingly necessary, if one thinks the concept of criticism worth reviving, to undertake to be as clear as possible about the intention with which one employs it. No film theory is worth anything which does not stay close to the concrete and which does not strive continually to check its own assumptions and procedures in relation to producible texts. Much of what has passed for film theory in the last decade is principally remarkable for its solipsistic and opportunistic character, and it is curious that discourses which arraign “representation” and “realism” on the ground that they serve, in essence, to naturalize a bourgeois worldview should be committed also to methods of analysis which are programmed to produce exactly the conclusions which the reader is presumed to hold in the first place. The interests of film theory are not served by finding in every “realist” text a confirmation of the Lacanian (or Foucauldian or Derridean or whatever)“problematic,” or by proselytizing for the mass production of “modernist” texts which flatter the presuppositions embodied in the attack on realism. Characteristically, and deplorably, such theory reduces the objects it purports to theorize to mere pretexts for rationalizing the validity of its own premises, and it makes a virtue of its refusal of all cognitive controls by denouncing any concern for the material integrity of the text as“empiricism.” All intellectual fashions have their slogan, and the proposition that“theory constructs its objects,”seductive and comforting as it is,is now part of the thinking literary person’s common sense. This proposition, when it is not a truism, is little more than a self-serving scholastic fiction and a license for intellectual irresponsibility, and that conception of theory is illegitimate in which the necessarily creative and formative nature of discourse is understood as a means of freeing the theory in question from the elementary critical obligation of demonstrating its own pertinence. Such theory is anti-theoretical, as well as a betrayal of the function of criticism. In Defense of Criticism (1986) 24 Chapter 24.indd 383 1/17/12 10:56 AM 3 8 4 pa r t f o u r : f i l m a n d c u l t u r a l t h e o r y It is also possible to regret the abusive, trivializing misappropriation of political—in particular, of Marxist and feminist—idioms for which structuralist and post-structuralist film theory have been responsible, and of which the banalization of the word materialist (as in “materialist film practice”) is representative. Whatever the intentions of specific users (often, doubtless, “good”), the effect in general of this usage has been to give a spurious political gloss to discourses which are in fact innocent of all politics; as a result, the language of socialism has been conscripted for service in the realm of manners and polite good form. It has been reduced, in fact, to a sign—a sign that one is familiar with the forms and keepings of a fashionable academic world in which such idioms are common currency but which issues, nevertheless, into that public world where the major struggles of our time are being fought out. It is in the nature of fashions to change. Ten years ago, before the ripples of 1968 had subsided, it was necessary for advocates of the Lacanian theory of subjectivity to qualify the phrase with the adjective “materialist”—for at that stage, one was committed, if one was committed at all, to the project of articulating psychoanalysis with historical materialism. A few years later, when the irreducible economism and class-reductionism of Marx’s thought had become clearer and historical materialism...