A new idea has come to me as regards what I was saying before with respect to criticism. To recap, I was thinking that criticism is something we all have, something we all feel as we look at the image of the world, and that it reflected our continuity, our course, our position in time between memory and sensation. I also speculated that to convert our emotional judgment of our reality into criticism converts course into discourse, and that doing so makes what you say participate in the social order. The psychotherapy encounter establishes the dichotomy of analysand and analyst which is memory and sensation, autobiography and analysis. Between autobiography and analysis there is criticism, both personal and general, an expression of evaluative relatedness. But when evaluative relatedness is converted into discourse, it speaks for the social order; the metaphor I used was the idea that if one looks into the mirror, they become the world. "Aesthetic discourse" I maintained kept us in the position of subjectivity, that it was an expression of subjective perspective, rather than a mirroring of the subject into the world, a displacement of self as extension of the will of the social order. Criticism is much like science, or analysis, it embodies the social, beyond the personal, even while being comparatively more personal. It feels much like there is a second dichotomy that exists between the dichotomy of memory/sensation, analysand/analyst, which is not the dichotomy that constitutes the perception of spacetime, but perhaps, the dichotomy that constitutes the perception of relatedness, of orientation.
In my previous post I drew this dichotomy as existing between criticism and influence, criticism and the aesthetic, the critic and the artist, and ended up deciding upon one pole of the dichotomy. There was the art of reflection, of giving form to one's judgments in the manner of directly expressing them, which in the process bestows them upon the social order even as it judges the social order. It is sort of like all criticism ended up being like "teasing," something a social order might welcome to humanize itself. The work of the artist represents subjectivity, and thus the work of the critic, which is a product of subjectivity, becomes objectivity, much in the same way the analysand/analyst relationship works. The artist puts their work before the critic, which is no longer their biography but their embodied judgment, and then this judgment is judged. The artwork is influential, because its value-judgment is embodied, rather than declarative; this influence is then tempered by criticism, reprising a new subject/object split. New, because time itself is perceived owing to the resolution of the split between memory and sensation which permits 2D images to be 3D and to express temporal progress. Criticism and artistry therefore must derive from a similar ontological/psychological situation related to our feeling for the image of the world. Artistry is the image of the world, and criticism is the feeling for it. But in becoming "discourses," artistry expresses feeling, and criticism the image of the world. The analysand/analyst relationship likely works similarly, a la transference and countertransference, in that roles are reversed, the analytic silence projecting its own autobiography onto the patient, and the patient's autobiography expressing an analysis of the doctor.
Likewise, the critic becomes the image of the world which the critic strives to influence with its feeling for it, appropriated by the social order. The artist renders the image of the world which then symbolizes their feeling for it, and their subjectivity. The critic converts subjectivity into society and the artist converts society into subjectivity. This conversion is not progressive, not continuity or course. The pure discourse of art does in fact establish the critical dichotomy in like fashion to the autobiography, which establishes the analytical dichotomy. The extremes take us to dis-course, off-course. Both artistry and criticism are evaluative rather than factual, and concern themselves with the orientation of subject within world or social order, just as between memory and sensation, we get perception of the spacetime we are in. Artistry expresses this orientation through embodying subjectivity, by being-a-mirror. Criticism expresses this orientation through embodying subjectivity, by looking-in-a-mirror. Look at a mirror, and you are the world; be a mirror, and you are a self. Much like the analysand/analyst relationship, the analysand and the artist is the preferable place to be located, because you do not become an extension of the social order, and hang on to your individuality. The problem with that is the fact that the self is not a fixed place, but an evaluative relationship with the world, and that is what the artist/critic dichotomy wishes to express in the first place, our feeling for the image of the world, criticism and influence.
The artist paints the world, mirrors the world, and reflects themselves, their judgment of the world. The critic shares their judgment of the world, mirrors themselves, and reflects the world, paints the world. The critic ends up being influential and the artist ends up being critical. The social order is speaking through criticism; whereas the artist represents an alternative social order out of the judgments that express their own relatedness, and this alternative social order is nothing other than themselves. The self is a social order, and the social order is a self, by way of orientation. The artist and the autobiographer are the sympathetic part of the equation, unless you are inhuman. However the self cannot even be perceived without its relatedness, the self is meaningless to consider aside from its being an expression of relationship with social order, which is not always counter-positional, but supportive or agonistic as the case may be. Such that the artist may surpass the dialectic of criticism, the aesthetic discourse of "feeling for" must be overcome for a middle ground with the critical discourse of "the image of the world." For what society and community taken to an absolute is what criticizes and destroys the individual. Much like therapy, with respect to the critical academy, you are cured of your artistry when you become a professor, when you become a voice for the social order. An orientation fails to be expressed in the artist or in the critic, only a perpetual tension of self and social.
Thus the artist must somehow become an artist-critic, or a critical-artist, in order to express continuity with the orientation that is their experience of life, a feeling for the image of the world. And the only means to do so is satire, is the becoming of a satirist, that form which directly expresses criticism and yet expresses the image of the world. The satirist is a self who is a relatedness, an orientation, the articulation of a social order, not the phrasing of an alternative social order. Satire orients us to the world, and orients the world to ourselves. It is influential criticism and critical influence.
REALITY
MEMORY SATIRE SENSATION
JUDGMENT
Amen.
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