Criticism as a Practice of the Commons

Over the last decade many literary academics have been reflecting on aims and methods. Those of us gathered in this section are, shall we say, tolerably united in our view that we should give new thought to the category of the aesthetic, though we understand this task differently. For my part, I have proposed elsewhere that literary studies would be better able to contribute to the central struggles of our time if our highly developed existing program of historical and cultural analysis (“literary scholarship”) were accompanied by an equally sophisticated program of aesthetic education (“literary criticism”). Some have found this proposal thought-provoking; others, not. In any case, it has caused at least some to wonder what “literary criticism” might look like under such a paradigm. In this short essay I experiment with one idea worth considering: What if we articulated the aims of criticism by way of the category of “the commons”? I take it that a version of this thought has occurred to many people, and I am not proposing anything radically new—but I do hope to offer a clear point of entry into this line of thinking, the better to assess how promising it might or might not be. I suggest that the language of the commons may help us address two important problems: the problem of how a specialized critical institution might understand its relationship to critical practices circulating in the society at large, and the problem of how a specialized critical institution might justify its role in cultivating necessarily value-laden practices of aesthetic judgment (though because of space constraints I focus mainly on the first of these). I also briefly express some doubts about this line of thinking, chiefly the fact that many of today’s commons exist largely at the pleasure of states and markets.