i think the simple answer here is that i’m both a communist and someone who is heavily invested in literary + media criticism to the point where i spend a lot of my time reading about it when i’m not writing it myself, and it would be ideologically inconsistent for me not to synthesise those two facts and put some effort into understanding how my principles should interact with my academic engagement. the most obvious form of this comes through understanding that the university exists under the aegis of hegemony and is designed to limit access to knowledge and epistemic production; speaking more broadly, access to what we term ‘media literacy’ (an ability to parse and explain media in a format legible to others and consistent within a particular epistemic construction) is far more stratified than people care to admit, its most legible forms tending to emerge out of the same fundamentally unequal terms upon which the academy itself is structured. being a communist means trying to imagine liberatory forms of pedagogy & knowledge production, which in turn means identifying the assumptions shaped by capitalist structuring of intellectual engagement and removing them from my own discourse.
so for example, in the process of categorising “good”/”bad” media and attaching moral weight to these categories, people tend to make rhetorical appeals to “literacy” wherein an absence of it constitutes an intellectual failing and reads as something of an embarrassment on the part of the ‘illiterate’ individual. literacy (and the very narrow field of skills that we acknowledge as constituting “literacy”) is difficult, unevenly distributed, and massively dependent on your access to particular resources. to make appeals to “literacy” as indicative of one’s social worth is hugely reactionary; moreover, an ability to present oneself as “literate” on the narrow terms that the discourse on here tends to set hugely depends on, again, positionality. “literate” in the literal sense of course means an ability to read and understand written information, but its usage on here tends to veer more towards an angle of like, “media literacy,” an ability to understand, unpack, and respond to the discourse of a text. to be “literate” within this discourse (on here, at least) often requires having a solid grasp on the english language; think how many people are already rhetorically discarded because their english just isn’t good enough for them to confidently present themselves as ‘literate' to an english-speaking audience. it means being able to communicate in a style that carries intellectual currency; this in turn means having a sophisticated vocabulary and a solid grasp of grammar and syntax (see, again, a need for english, and of course the fact that what constitutes ‘correct’ grammar/syntax is not at all a politically neutral categorisation). it means having particular capabilities that people with learning difficulties will lack; more precisely, it means setting terms by which people who (for whatever reason) lack XYZ capabilities which make up a “literate” individual are made rhetorically disposable and excluded from the category of people deserving of respect & grace (in online spaces and off). needless to say, i think how "literacy" gets deployed on this website as a litmus test of one's intellectual and therefore moral worth is reactionary.
& i guess i just noticed that a lot of the presuppositions being held in “literary” spaces on this website (most often from like, english lit undergrad students....) just weren’t consistent with how i wanted to think about lit & litcrit. like for example, appeals to a lack of “reading comprehension”/”media literacy” as indicative of someone’s bad character, or as necessarily indicative of intellectual incuriosity (which in turn has its own set of discursive baggage). an obfuscation of the fact that critical analysis is a learnt skill and an insistence that having the ability to critically assess a text (and demonstrate that assessment---cf. my comments above on literacy) is not only intuitive, but in fact an ethical necessity such that lacking this ability is indicative of a moral failing. blanket dismissals of forms of engagement deemed insufficiently intellectual (and how “fandom” often gets used as a shorthand for these intellectual failings, closing off what i think are fascinating questions about how fannish engagement articulates its critical responses to a text). a lot of insistence that people were stupid, lazy, incurious, participating in literary criticism in the “wrong” ways, not understanding the Themes and the Motifs, and (from what i could see) very little active effort going towards actually trying to open up literary criticism to a wider audience. (a really solid example of litcrit accessibility, btw, is Synchronous Emma, where you can tell that every blog post has been designed to facilitate deep & thoughtful engagement with the text whilst keeping in mind disparate levels of fluency in literary discourse.)
so from these observations, i began to question the ideas we're bringing to the table when we talk about "good" and "bad" art, "good" and "bad" engagement with art, and why we attach particular moral characteristics to these categories. i began to look at the assumptions which make up the discourse of the literary academy & see how they were reproduced at the level of like, social interaction on a microblogging platform, from emphasis being placed on the edifying and intellectually necessary properties of the classics rendering them able to transcend their reactionary content & social function to constant appeals to the publishing industry as a legitimating site. and the more time i spent with it, the more i was just like, this is ridiculous, you're all ridiculous, we need to start being more imaginative in our literary discourse, etc etc.
this doesn’t mean that i don’t think we should be able to call art “good” or “bad” -- just that i needed to be honest with myself about what i thought “good” or “bad” actually meant, and start asking questions about why i associated certain characteristics with “badness” (which often translated to a perceived absence of intellectual merit) rather than taking those things for granted. it's about interrogating all the assumptions i was holding onto around what literature 'is,' what it 'does,' what it can do, why we think of it being a certain way and recoil at the thought of it being something else. (i keep returning to literature as an example because that's my main area of study & the site where i find it easiest to articulate all these ideas, but similar principles apply across the board.)
like, i think being a communist means being prepared to question everything about your worldview from the base up; every time you catch yourself taking a particular assumption for granted, you should be able to challenge and unpack it such that you can know why you think what you think. for me, because i have a brain that’s permanently locked on to Doing Media Criticism, that meant asking questions like: why do i think of this as ‘good’ and this as ‘bad’? what are the frameworks i’m using to determine ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and what are the underlying assumptions going into those frameworks, and do i really agree with them? what would it look like if i were to imagine a form of literary criticism which challenged these assumptions? can i make sense of litcrit as an intellectual practice without lending credence to these hierarchies? to whom are these hierarchies loyal and to whom are they beneficial?
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