Critic as Writer/Author and Reader

When Akansha Rastogi, a Delhi based young art critic visited me last week, I found her agitated in a curious fashion. She told me that she had been haunted by a question for long time: “How does one assert her authority as a writer/critic in the public realm of discourse?” As a self critique, she said that she could not assert the subjective/authorial ‘I’ in her writings. Some kind of meekness, fear, doubt and skepticism crept in her mind whenever she used ‘I’, she said. True, most of the critics, at one or the other point tend to question their own authority.

Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes

This self doubt could stem from two positions; from the critic’s tenuous relationship with the object of criticism or from his/her complete grasp on what is being discussed in the writing. While the former position forces the critic to yield to the ‘authority’ of the object, the latter makes him even to dismiss the very materiality of the object. To put it in other words, in the critical articulation two subjective positions come in confrontation and vie for supremacy. This confrontational site is a place where the interpretational possibilities of both the work of art and the critical writing take place. Here, the subjective positions articulated through the authorial ‘I’ at once disintegrate and reconstitute into multiple positions. Writing then becomes reading in criticism.

Inspired by Roland Barthes’ 1967 article titled ‘Death of the Author’, many Indian art critics, who used to operate from within the academies also had negated the subjective ‘I’ in their writings. They brought in the lowercase ‘i’ in order to position themselves within the writing. Barthes’ idea of disrupting the ideological relationship between the author and the authority through the assertion of authorial death was intended at the conversion of writerly texts into readerly texts. He discarded the unilateral creation and interpretation of the texts by arguing that one could not discern the real authorial intention in a text and any assertion to assert the authorial position within the text would limit the possibilities of its varied interpretations. Though Barthes was the first one to assert the death of author (obviously for the structural analysis of culture and politics), the New Critics of the Yale University led by William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks had indicated the chance of a text becoming readerly and belonging to the public through a critical coinage, ‘intentional fallacy’, in late 1940s itself. The post-structuralist theoreticians like Foucault and Derrida carried forward the Barthesian formulations regarding the authorial death for effectively deconstructing history, politics, language, culture and so on.

However, it is interesting to notice that despite Barthes’ declaration of the authorial death, he remains the Author of the same text. Even the authorial intentions of Derrida and Foucault are not discarded or discredited. Seen against this historical and theoretical backdrop, how would one articulate and assert his/her subjective position in a writerly text, which obviously transforms into readerly ones? How does the subjective ‘I’ itself get transformed into many ‘i’s or ‘I’s during this conversion? Which author would be able to claim all these ‘i’s and ‘I’s from a readerly position? Or is the author rendered totally helpless in the ‘readings’ that amount to vandalism?

The dispersion of author/authority and divesting the author of the right to text were the critical tools that Barthes (later Foucault and Derrida) used for disrupting the hegemonies. Perhaps, all the subaltern readings of culture, politics, gender etc were facilitated through this rupture. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s exhortation, ‘Can Subaltern Speak?’ finds its articulation in this ruptured site. If the subaltern can speak, which subjective position would be the ideal one that he/she could claim? Could it be ‘i’ that negates all authorial and authoritative intentions or the ‘I’ that claims the divested rights back to the subject?

With due respect to the Barthesian thought, I would say that the writer should claim his life back from the authorial death for the writers, seen against the larger spectrum of techno-political global imperialism, have become permanent subalterns who try to articulate their subjective positions from the margins. Even the Man Booker Prize winner or any best selling author, I would say writes from a marginal position. His fight is against the ideological might (now the imagined unity of diversity through universal consumption) that only produces one kind of text that resists and defies any kind of readerly conversions.

Art writing and criticism in India is an articulation from the peripheries. Even when it is accommodated within the mainstream production-dissemination-consumption circuit of art, the subjective positions get submerged in the general din of ‘culture’ that it also contributes to produce. Like several species develop auto genetic modifications for surviving in hostile terrains, the art critics in India too have developed a tendency to camouflage their authorial positions when they do critical writings. Even the Indian academies discourage and smother subjective articulations in students’ thesis writing. In brochures, catalogues, monographs and magazine reviews, the author tries to remain at large except for the byline in bold typography.

I would say, the art critics and art writers in India should talk from subjective positions in order to produce readerly texts that could unpack the mysteries and mythologies the ‘systems of art’ tend to produce for market survival and for the survival of market. Asserting the subjective ‘I’ may sound non-academic for we are tuned to believe so. But ‘I’ reclaims not only the life of author but also it gives him/her back the authority. The ‘I’ generates many ‘I’s. Indian art critics’ effort is to move from the lowercase ‘i’ to the uppercase ‘I’. It is not a phallic revival (then no feminist could write) but the reclamation of a divested right. There is a personal as well as societal investment in this reclamation of subjectivity of the writer. ‘I’ read in a different way is a declaration of distinction and rebellion. And it has been proved that the consumer market co-opts what is distinct and rebellious to its product line for the simple reason that a consumer’s imagined desires are satisfied only when he/she is treated and provided with socio-cultural distinction. And my dear critic, your positioning as ‘I’ makes you distinct, rebellious hence market worthy.