You may have read this essay before. You may have come across it on a blog, or in the “Essays” or “Criticism” section of a little magazine, or perhaps disguised as a book review. It is a piece of cultural criticism, but one with a particular rhythm. It starts by dunking you into the critic’s memory. You are awash in indeterminate sensation; figures from the critic’s past come into hazy half-focus. Every detail is sticky with private significance. From this thick film of recollection, the essay’s object—a song, a novel, a phenomenon—finally emerges. The analysis proceeds by shuttling back and forth between description of the object and the critic’s self-narration until it either resolves in an epiphany or collapses in a heap, exhausted from its efforts at bridging the gap between “the personal” and “the critical.”
Or maybe you have read the same essay in reverse. This backward essay starts with the object, dutifully unfolds its history, offers a few hypotheses on how all this came to be, and then closes with an extended segment of autobiographical narrative. Jia Tolentino is the undisputed master of the backward essay. One especially memorable piece, primarily about a microgenre of internet post where users fantasize about being killed by a particular celebrity (“Harry Styles, run me over with a truck”), dissolves into a vignette about a weekend Tolentino spent partying on the beach with some friends. The essay ends with the critic herself experiencing the same frisson, the unaccountable drive for annihilation, that she had been up to that moment investigating dispassionately: “On the beach, flooded with joy, I felt the tug of that familiar undertow. ‘Fucking kill me,’ I thought, suddenly desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself—which is, I suppose, one way of defining love.”[1] Tolentino’s essay wants both to test its abstract theories against “real lived experience” and to reproduce that experience in all its immediacy. It aims less at illumination than immersion—and then, hangover.
What is this essay? Forward or backward, one answer is: it is a critical essay that has assimilated characteristics of the personal essay. Call it, to repurpose a term used by Nancy K. Miller and other feminist literary theorists, personal criticism.[2] It is criticism that trades in gestures of personal involvement and disclosure. If Grace Lavery is right that autobiography has a “quantum ontology, where the autobiographical signature is either effaced or exposed,” you could say that the personal-critical essay spends more time on than off. Or better: it generates energy from flicking on and off; a fort/da game of now-you-see-the-critic, now-you-don’t. In today’s critical field, those who play this game are commercially rewarded. Personal criticism is the mode of today’s bestselling critical essayists, from Tolentino to Ta-Nehisi Coates; the lit-world press trumpets an endless series of “remarkable blend[s]” or “provocative hybrid[s]” or even “lethal cocktail[s]” of “memoir and criticism.”[3] Yet the personal critic is also abject. Untold thousands of bloggers write personal criticism for an audience of one; the same press that celebrates the “remarkable blends” wrings its hands over the spread of a new spirit of literary narcissism; academics revile the dreaded “autotheory.”[4] This coincidence of devotion and loathing, of fame and obscurity, presents an especially stubborn puzzle for that most ignominious of enterprises, the criticism of criticism.
Cultural criticism has joined the self-disclosure game relatively late. By the end of the twentieth century, a series of more specialized nonfiction forms had already absorbed features of the personal essay. You might point to the “New Journalism” of the 1960s and 1970s, where the journalist became a sort of participant-observer, a character in their own narrative. You might also look to anthropology’s turn to the first person in the 1980s under the influence of poststructuralist theory. On the other side of the ethnographer’s gaze, indigenous and other colonized authors made parallel efforts to develop new theoretical tools adequate to their own experiences at the margins of empire. Turning back to midcentury, we can see Frantz Fanon as an early master of something like this form. And in the 1990s, it was in part a dissatisfaction with the imperious abstraction of capital-T Theory that inspired the original “personal criticism.” Under this heading, feminist scholars wrote works of what might be read as argument-driven memoir—a form that, in Jane Tompkins’s words, “turns its back on theory.”[5] Away from journalism and toward the literary, away from positivism and toward Theory, away from Theory and toward the real thing: for the past several decades, wherever writers of innovative nonfiction prose turned, there they found the personal. And there they found the personal essay. Its clashing urges to tunnel into the self and step out of it in order to examine it at some remove. Its deep ambivalence about whether the person it essays is an unrepeatable individual marked by unique experiences or whether the whole point is to use the personal as a stand-in for the universal.
The specialized hybrid-nonfiction forms of the late twentieth century orbited a cast of character types: the gonzo journalist, the revolutionary organic intellectual, the tenured theorist. Each of these critical personae represents an attempt to balance contradictory demands: the individual call of conscience with the professional duty to speak a technical discourse; the exigency of theorizing a people’s crisis with the undercover work of purloining the master’s tools. And yet these voices spoke with the assurance of one with both a profession and a calling. More often than not, today’s practitioner of personal criticism seems to have neither. It’s hardly necessary to survey the damage. As private equity firms ransack general-readership publications, and as the academic job market in the humanities shrivels to the point of virtual nonexistence, criticism today is not something one can easily make a career of.[6] Today’s median practitioner of criticism is at best a freelancer and at worst an elevated hobbyist: either someone who can sell their labor only sporadically and with great effort or someone who cannot sell their labor at all but who works anyway, presumably for the love of the game. (In a recent book, Leigh Claire La Berge calls this second scene one of “decommodified labor.”[7]) One way to put the question about personal criticism, then, is: what pressures does the critic face under these conditions, and how might the tropes and voices of the personal essay help the critic manage them? And in doing this balancing act, might the personal critic have stumbled on a new function for criticism writ large?
Consider the opening to Pitchfork’s review of Radiohead’s Kid A (2000), arguably one of the most infamous pieces of personal criticism on the internet. “I had never even seen a shooting star before,” reviewer Brent DiCrescenzo wrote at the dawn of the millennium.[8] “25 years of rotations, passes through comets’ paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky.” This is not a dispassionate voice of aesthetic evaluation but an irreducibly particular individual. He is twenty-five years old, and we know something from the start about what he has and has not experienced. While the band plays a song off the yet-to-be-released Kid A, he—Brent—sees a shooting star for the first time. From this bite-sized scene of memoir, the reader also comes to understand something at once more abstract and more crucial. They start to see—they may feel the piece trying to convince them—why Brent DiCrescenzo, this relatively unknown young writer, is qualified to write this particular review. His brush in Florence with the sublime, or the sublime teetering into the ridiculous, is his credential. The review’s bombastic opening is in this way more than a dazzling stylistic stunt. It is in fact a purple-prose version of that other form of life writing, the CV.
In the personal-critical essay, an I emerges to sell its services. The I that has never seen a shooting star is a collector of experiences. It may not have much in terms of material possessions, and it certainly does not have clout, but it can claim a set of unique life circumstances. This I knows that in a field constrained by artificial scarcity, if it has any hope of standing out among talented thousands, it must refine these unique circumstances into a narratively digestible form—the form of the experience—and disclose them. It must pitch itself at every turn. Like so many of us, this I treats self-disclosure as the price of entry into a future full of promise, a habit it perhaps picked up while writing that most blasted of documents, the college admissions essay.[9] Ryan Ruby has aptly described the essay’s use of this I as an “authenticating mechanism,” a way for the “emerging critic” who may not have academic credentials or a reliable audience to invent a context that authorizes them to write about their object.[10] Personal criticism’s autobiographical I, then, answers the college admissions essay’s basic question: out of all the people in the world, why me? It is this confrontation with its own replaceability that spurs its anxious performance of personality.
The personal critic responds to the demand to capitalize on their life experiences by conjuring an autobiographical I. But from another side, the critic also faces a demand to deliver an unforgettable experience. To convince the reader that their time reading the essay will be time well spent. In response to this demand, personal criticism conjures up another, strikingly different self. This is a phantom self that wants to be interchangeable, that wants to minimize or at least empty out its own presence. Sometimes it doesn’t even appear as an I—in the Kid A review, it is mostly a you, an avatar of the first person. This avatar is made to feel things. From Pitchfork: “To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album’s overall theme, Yorke bows out with [the lyric] ‘I will see you in the next life.’ If you’re not already there with him.”[11] The autobiographical I’s experience of the art object is surgically excised from its tissue of unique life circumstances and attributed to you. Which is to say, to anyone else. This goes some way toward explaining why this particular review was an internet sensation when it was first published.[12] In contrast to music criticism’s standard-bearers like Robert Christgau, whose “Consumer Guides” evenhandedly advise the reader on the best buys, this was a criticism that aspired to channel the jolt and churn of aesthetic experience itself.[13] As DiCrescenzo explained years later, “I wanted my reviews to make the reader feel [how] the record made me feel.”[14] Higher up in the hierarchy of critical prestige, Vivian Gornick says much the same thing:
What we critics do—in the aggregate—is to provide, one hopes, a perceptive if not prophetic response to imaginative work; it either rings true or not, on the skin, in the nerve endings, at the given moment. If our responses are themselves imaginative—rich, ardent, inclusive—they will make a contribution to the record of the way it feels to be writing and reading now.[15]
On this account, the critic’s job is to record their responses to works of literature and art; to capture “the way it feels” to be here, now, reading and writing. The critic writes, as Gornick puts it earlier in the same essay, in order “to give us back the taste of our own experience.” It is no coincidence that this last formulation comes from her account of memoir.
Here is a new function for criticism: not evaluating the object but reproducing the critic’s experience of the object. Since the turn of the millennium especially, the critic has become chiefly someone who responds, who feels the raw impact of culture on their nerves, and who writes primarily to pass on this unmediated crush of sensation to the reader. They have become a surrogate experiencer. David Shields wrote over a decade ago about a growing “reality hunger” in the arts, a desire for “‘raw’ material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional.”[16] Unsurprisingly, his list of new forms animated by this hunger includes “criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography.”[17] Reality hunger seems to emerge from a vague sense that we live in a fallen world: as Shields puts it, riffing off Paul Elie, the problem is that “contemporary culture makes pilgrimage impossible. Experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption by others in advance. Even the rare, authentically direct experience is spoiled by self-consciousness.”[18] We might see personal criticism as a paradoxical attempt to defeat this problem of secondhand experience through more secondhand experience, to halt the paralyzing metastasis of self-reflexivity through more self-reflexivity. The wager is this: even though we’ve lost our ability to experience directly, an impression conveyed vividly enough—and in the first person—can recover the raw feel of direct experience. In Mark Greif’s words, “accident is precipitated; immediacy is studied; fate is forced.”[19] The personal critic must juggle self-promotion, what Lavery calls “the hustle,” along with this imperative to satiate reality hunger, to evoke an impersonal and transferrable experience.
Personal criticism concerns itself less with judgment than with encounter. Its central trope is “the first time.” Again, Tolentino is our best guide. “The first time I read Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country,” begins one of her essays; “The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the internet seemed to be begging celebrities to kill them,” begins the one we have already seen.[20] The goal is to preserve a first-time encounter, as if in amber. This, the personal-critical essay says, is how it felt to be there. When I first saw it, heard it, read it. And of course, This is how I changed. It moved me in this way. There is a touch of the conversion narrative here: these encounters are species of epiphanies. (Think of that other college essay prompt: Write about an experience that changed you.) No matter the content of the epiphany, though, the personal-critical essay strains above all to convey the wonderful freshness of a first-time encounter—of experiencing something directly, unclouded by the gauze of concepts and other abstractions. Tolentino’s repetitions and DiCrescenzo’s solecisms might be symptoms of the general speedup that the internet has inflicted on criticism. But more fundamentally, they are indices of this tension, this struggle to vacuum-seal a generic version of the epiphanic.[21]
Personal criticism, put another way, has taken to heart Susan Sontag’s famous declaration that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”[22] And yet Sontag had no way of knowing just how deeply the erotics of art—“art” in the broadest sense—would come to saturate critical culture. Personal criticism today is not just the province of little magazines and other prestige culture-writing outlets. It is also an important mode in media-journalism genres like the television show “recap,” a kind of short, punchy piece that places a heavy premium on authorial “voice.” The recap not only summarizes plot but also gives an account of how a segment of television struck a particular body. “My body dissolved into chills,” one recapper recently wrote about the season finale of a certain academia-themed Netflix show.[23] This is a distinctive overperformance of being moved—and being moved as being annihilated—not unlike that hyperbolic mode of social-media speak where “this destroyed me” is the ultimate statement of praise. As Sianne Ngai writes about the viral “double rainbow” YouTube video, here the sublime/ridiculous “aesthetic artifact and affective response [are]…conflated in a way that end[s] up doubly short-circuiting the original object of aesthetic appreciation and leaving it behind.”[24] Personal criticism fuses the object itself and the critic’s first-person reaction into a single, hybrid entity. Or superimposes one onto the other—a structure literalized in the conventions of the reaction video and the TikTok duet. Encounter = object + rhapsodic first-person reaction.
The encounter, of course, is also the fundamental unit of service work. It is the scene where the worker imbues the product with a surplus of emotion and delivers the resulting enchanted object to the customer with the proverbial smile. If Mark McGurl is right that today’s fiction writer has become “a kind of service provider, and the reader a valued customer, a customer who is as they say ‘always right,’” personal criticism’s fixation on encounter suggests that today’s critics find themselves in much the same position.[25] The recap, in its widely noted coziness with fandom culture, its status as an enhancement to the experience of consumption, is only the barest manifestation of criticism’s slide into the sphere of service work. In fact, fandom haunts personal criticism more broadly: recall Tolentino’s analysis of fawning posts about celebrities, as well as what the language of the boardroom might call the “synergy” between DiCrescenzo’s Kid A review and Radiohead’s online hype operation.[26]
Much has been made of a recent poptimist or anti-critical turn in the world of criticism, best encapsulated in the webcomic slogan “Shhh… let people enjoy things.”[27] But could it be that criticism now isn’t for letting people enjoy things, but for helping them enjoy things? Or helping them feel anything at all? Personal criticism announces this new vision of the critical essay as a mood-altering technology with special exuberance. Trudging out to the front lines of experience, the personal critic assumes the job of feeling things for the rest of us: I experienced this, goes the archetypal title to one genre of online essay, so that you didn’t have to—which is also to say, but then I wrote about it so that you could. This is the ultimate function of personal criticism’s second, phantom I. Its overheated performance of being moved is supposed to be therapeutic not for the critic but for the reader. Personal criticism is in this way an instrument, as Sarah Brouillette writes about social media memoir elsewhere in this dossier, for “constantly monitoring our emotional health as a way of managing what is happening so quickly, dizzyingly around us.” The essay sends out a reassuring signal that the lines of communication between us and the world are still open. That despite everything, meaningful aesthetic experiences are still possible.
Faced on one side with the instability of freelancing life, personal criticism calls up an autobiographical I that speaks the language of the pitch or application, of the compelled self-disclosure as a demand for proof of experiential capital.[28] Faced on the other side with the pressure to justify its own existence in an overcrowded field, it creates another self: a depersonalized cultural nerve ending, a pure conduit for sensation. It is tempting to judge the success of a given piece of personal criticism based on how little sweat it shows under these two pressures. And yet so many of these essays buckle. If personal criticism often pantomimes inappropriately violent reactions—shattering epiphanies, bodies dissolving into chills—perhaps it is because the personal-critical essay secretly longs to make all this experience stop, by whatever means. And surely the quickest way to halt experience once and for all is to extinguish the self. This is the real subtext of Tolentino’s closing lines: “‘Fucking kill me,’ I thought, suddenly desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself.” In context, it is a wish for an extreme limit experience that could drown out the speaker’s “murmur of guilt” over the bland violence of her comfortable lifestyle.[29] But in a broader view, these lines read like an allegory for the personal-critical essay’s quiet revolt against the demands of experiential capital. Its desire to give up the self-promotional racket and the service with a smile; its wish to push its marginality further and further to the point of self-dissolution. Treated either instrumentally as a tool for modulating our moods or condescendingly as a special zone of noninstrumentality, criticism today is doubly devalued. So too is the critic’s labor, purchased for pennies on the word, if not for nothing, while the ostensible therapeutic benefit of writing about oneself supposedly makes up for the lack of pay. Forced to do everything for nothing, exhausted from ventriloquizing both a bloated, narcissistic I and an empty, interchangeable one, what else can the personal critic say but “Fucking kill me”?
Greif puts it best: faced with a state of “painful overexperience,” the exhausted quester ends up reaching for “anti-experience,” for a sort of anesthesia.[30] At its breaking point, though, personal criticism suggests that the best way out is through. Overloaded with experience, crumbling under the weight of the twin burdens of self-branding and resensitizing the world, personal criticism in its very failure sounds a cry of protest, however ineffectual, against the regime of experiential capital. Its secret mantra is: annihilate me, disintegrate me, free me from the demands of mandatory confession, release me from the obligation to be a surrogate experiencer. (DiCrescenzo writes admiringly about Radiohead’s dedication to “destroying themselves” on Kid A.[31]) If there is anything abject about personal criticism, it is this yearning for annihilation. But then again, if there is anything to be celebrated about personal criticism, maybe it is also this. Personal criticism pushes the cult of experience, with its opposing visions of personhood as either a catalog of achievements or a container for generic and transmittable feelings, past its limit in hopes of finally dissolving it. Its most cherished wish, despite itself, is for a world after experience—which is to say, a world after personhood as we know it.
← Memoir Dossier
Notes:
[1] Jia Tolentino, “Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You,” New Yorker, June 21, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/love-death-and-begging-for-celebrities-to-kill-you.
[2] See Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991). I borrow my title from this book.
[3] James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), jacket copy; Kathryn Maris, “Those Little Crushes,” TLS, September 27, 2019, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/those-little-crushes/; Paul Perry, “Lethal Cocktail of Memoir and Criticism,” Irish Independent, March 11, 2019, https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/lethal-cocktail-of-memoir-and-criticism-37893799.html.
[4] See Sarah Brouillette’s essay in this dossier for an especially deft account of this panic over the memoir boom of the past several decades.
[5] Jane Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” in The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, ed. Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23–40.
[6] Emily Stewart, “What Is Private Equity, and Why Is It Killing Everything You Love?,” Vox, January 6, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/6/21024740/private-equity-taylor-swift-toys-r-us-elizabeth-warren.
[7] Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
[8] Brent DiCrescenzo, “Radiohead: Kid A,” Pitchfork, October 2, 2000, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/.
[9] I draw here on Merve Emre’s “The Personal Essay,” forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to the Essay. As Emre shows, the American college admissions essay, which solidified as a genre by around 1920, is key to the genealogy of the personal essay and its distinct mode of “production of personhood.”
[10] Ryan Ruby (_ryanruby_), “In the case of critics (such as myself) who lack these academic credentials, and who are emerging (such that the byline is not necessarily enough to justify reading) grounding the criticism in a personal context supplies this authenticating mechanism *in the piece itself.*,” Twitter, Jul 2, 2021, 3:12 p.m., https://twitter.com/_ryanruby_/status/1411085398961426432/.
[11] DiCrescenzo, “Radiohead: Kid A.”
[12] Eli Enis, “Everything in Its Right Place: How a Perfect 10.0 Review of Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ Changed Music Criticism 20 Years Ago,” Billboard, March 26, 2020, https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/9342543/radiohead-kid-a-pitchfork-review-brent-discrescenzo-2000.
[13] For more on this contrast, see Richard Beck, “5.4,” n+1, Fall 2011, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-12/reviews/pitchfork/.
[14] DiCrescenzo in Enis, “Everything in Its Right Place.”
[15] Vivian Gornick, “Memoir & Criticism,” n+1, Spring 2006, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/memoir-criticism/.
[16] David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 5.
[17] Shields, Reality Hunger, 5.
[18] Shields, Reality Hunger, 182.
[19] Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), 79.
[20] Jia Tolentino, “What Edith Wharton Knew, a Century Ago, About Women and Fame in America,” New Yorker, September 9, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-edith-wharton-knew-a-century-ago-about-women-and-fame-in-america; Tolentino, “Love, Death, and Begging.”
[21] DiCrescenzo, “Radiohead: Kid A.” On canning the unmediated and epiphanic, see Mitch Therieau, “Pod-Products for Pod-People,” The Baffler, April 2, 2020, https://thebaffler.com/latest/pod-products-for-pod-people-therieau.
[22] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967), 14.
[23] Amanda Whiting, “The Chair Series-Finale Recap: The System Is on Notice,” Vulture, August 21, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/article/the-chair-recap-season-1-episode-6-the-chair.html.
[24] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 28.
[25] Mark McGurl, “Retail Therapy,” Bookforum, September 30, 2021, https://www.bookforum.com/culture/an-excerpt-from-everything-and-less-on-fiction-in-the-age-of-amazon-24650.
[26] See Beck, “5.4,” for an account of how Radiohead fan sites linked to the review and drove up traffic to Pitchfork.
[27] This meme has spawned a glut of think pieces: see B. D. McClay, “Let People Enjoy This Essay,” Gawker, August 19, 2021, https://www.gawker.com/culture/let-people-enjoy-this-essay; Kate Wagner, “Don’t Let People Enjoy Things,” The Baffler, May 9, 2019, https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/dont-let-people-enjoy-things-wagner; Constance Grady, “How ‘Let People Enjoy Things’ Became a Fight against Criticism,” Vox, May 16, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/16/18618425/let-people-enjoy-things-criticism.
[28] On the concept of experiential capital, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 171.
[29] Tolentino, “Love, Death, and Begging.”
[30] Greif, Against Everything, 226.
[31] DiCrescenzo, “Radiohead: Kid A.”