Easy Dismissal & Ressentiment

The Problem of Context-Dependent Critique

How art objects & the media machine create the conditions for their own critique prior even to being released to the public.

A media theory essay.

• Prologue: Resentment & Ressentiment

The difference between ‘resentment’ & ressentiment is one of duration, & of a certain depth of feeling.

Resentment tends to be a short-term negative reaction to any specific frustration caused by another person or thing. In this way, one can resent any person who says something the resentful receiver had not yet thought of, & a particular feeling of inferiority of “not having thought of it first” causes their negative reaction against both the person & the idea the person is expressing.

One can also resent an object, such as a piece of mail, a jury summons, for instance, or an unpaid bill, but this type of resentment is more subtle, has a longstanding weight that has burrowed deeper in the mind of the resentful receiver, & begins to require the term ressentiment to take into account a persons more general frustration toward the structures of society at large.

Where resentment fades into insignificant moments easily forgotten, ressentiment endures. Ressentiment is a persistent state of bitterness at the world & any persons or objects which provoke those reactions of ill-will toward the outside world & the Other.

• Part One: Easy Dismissal As An Unintended Reveal

There is a tragic irony at play for the reader when indulging the average critic (whether it’s an article about a work of art, or an internet comment under an otherwise well-liked post) & that is that, most of the readers realize that the critic hasn’t considered just how transparent their insecurities are, & how those ressentiments are so fragilely on display to everyone reading their outburst.

Too often people tend to dismiss things they haven’t read, films they haven’t seen, {music they have to hear somewhere in public but don’t want to listen to} based on what little they know about either who made it, or worse, by the type of people who do like it. This leads culture as a whole into a fierce ignorance. A refusal to engage with works of art because the peoples’ resentments are so profound at this point in history that the only way they feel they can assert themselves against the media-machine is to negate nearly anything it produces. Now, due to advertising prior to a works release, we even pre-negate the media object; everyone knowing that those negating it haven’t actually seen or heard the work itself. Every critic throwing their two-cents in of ‘how good or bad it might be,’ as a reaction against the hype-machine function of the media-machine. All of their commentary becoming almost immediately irrelevant upon the release of the media-object & its subsequent influence rendering their guesses irrelevant, or its inevitable label of mediocrity causing the pre-negating critics to feel validated enough to move on to the next upcoming release or current cultural hype-object. But to call this validation would be a disservice to the word itself; it is in fact only the empty reckoning of guesswork. When a critic has a one-in-three chance of being correct that any given upcoming media release will either be great, terrible, or mediocre, it’s not exactly a triumph of reasoning to have won a best-out-of-three coin toss.

The real problem at hand is that the ressentiment of the public increases in direct relation to capitalistic inflation. The poorer any given unknown person not is but feels in relation to the much-touted (celebrity-level successful) “one-percent” of the population is in direct relation to the “average persons” ressentiment of the society at large & their easy dismissals of any given work of art or media, including those prior even to its release, is a direct result of this pique ressentiment.

This is because their sense of poorness is not measured in their mind by their income or social strata but by a verifiable level of notoriety & influence they feel they deserve but have yet to achieve. There are plenty of cultural critics, pseudo-influencers, so-called taste-makers, lucked-out algorithmic gurus, who do quite well for themselves financially, whose names no one remembers. And this is both the cause of the ressentiment & the similarity between the well-paid critic & the average internet commenter; the internet troll taking an limp-wristed stab at an already successful work is not so different from the jaded critic being paid by a major publication to type-up a longwinded diatribe about a film or album other people seem to get genuine enjoyment out of. The internet troll comments under post the elevated troll’s critique, negating the negation, creating a kind of submedia.

At the risk of being as disagreeable as the subject demands, & to be fair: No doubt if one were to get to know the “average person” who writes damning articles or makes snide internet comments well enough, one might be surprised to find they are not average at all, that despite their ressentiment being so forcibly expressed to the pubic they remain an interesting, unique, even a kind human being in their private life, though try as they might to put their voice out into the media-machine, they in fact remain generally unknown.

The more celebrity & wealth are broadcasted daily in contrast to the general populace, the more the peoples ressentiment will be stirred, & their more their dismissals of any new works of media will become commonplace reactions. Reactions that lead to a choice of ignorence. To make half-baked praise or dismissal of any work of media one has not yet seen, heard, or read, is to choose to ignore the content itself. Even after its release, to choose to focus on the context of a work of art rather than engage with the content is to paradoxically choose ignorance. The more informed one is about the biographical details of a work of art, the less they are able to experience the object as a sensory experience unto itself. To focus on the intellectual experience of a works context is to obscure the direct experience of being-with the work as it is. This is now & has been the core problem with art theorist, art historians, & art collectors for decades, centuries if not millennia when we consider the field of hermeneutics.

To utilize the context of how a work came into being, the conditions under which it was made & by whom, those biographical details of the artists life, the gossip or hearsay regarding its production, or even the publics’ predictions & reception of a work of art before, during, & after its release, all of these contexts are used by people as a way of finding reasons to dismiss the work itself. To focus only on its hype, its controversies, its surrounding contexts, is to fail to engage with the work as it is.

In short, context has the power to ruin content. We are so overfed context by the hype-machine (& its many detractors) to such an extent that the majority of consumers have become so remote from the content itself as to be unable to experience the work without the lenses of context that we bought into prior to its consumption. And worse yet, those that never consume a given media-object based on its contra-hype merely accept the contexts that their peers have settled upon out of a desire for social acceptance. Precisely became the media-machine is so unrelenting in producing so much content that no one person could ever consume in a single lifetime the unending mediocrity put out every year by all the various streaming services of television, music, & cinema. So the people need to find reasons to choose what to ignore. And the websites they frequent, the social media circles they’re addicted to, as well as their reactions for or against their family, friends, & coworkers’ opinions, all result more in ‘what not to consume’ rather than ‘what show to watch next.’ That is, except for when the contra-hype machine guesses wrong (as they often do & like to ignore that fact as quickly as possible) when a media-object that was lamented upon its announcement that it will soon be released becomes successful, or a critical darling, then even the people who desired to express their ressentiment through pre-dismissal of a work tend to change their tune, throw up their hands & say “Fine! I’ll see the new masterpiece that’s just been released,” whatever it might be.

And this is overarching issue with the daily bombardment of new content by the media-machine. The people, in the face of near-feudal, oligarchal consumer capitalism, have come to resent even masterpieces that comes into existence.

“As if there weren’t enough classics I’m ‘supposed’ to see, now there’s a new one: ‘Destined to be a classic!’ It says right there on the advertisement…”

And all of this, all of these ressentiments at the machine, all these insecurities thinly veiled by easy dismissals & contra-hype, all the context-dependent critiques with no content, are all because of the nagging feeling that they, these critics, whoever they are, if given the opportunity, if blessed at somepoint by chance, might be able to make something better than what they’re being sold.

• Addendum: All Ressentiment is Resentment of Transparence.

More often than i’d like admit, i’ve to see people on the internet dismiss some young writers turn of phrase, be it in a meme or a tweet or a haiku, as being “notes app poetry.” i have even seen this generic criticism thrown at dead poets who favored minimalist phrasing, such as Emily Dickinson, Yoko Ono, & in one startling display of miseducation, it was even levied at Sappho… all of them & more i have seen some anonymous commenter attempting to take a dead person down a notch by calling their work ‘notes app poetry.’ This anonymous comment is of course laughable, as it can never take away their already well-ingrained influence of these works over generations of readers. But it also reveals how the internet-only autodidacticism & easy dismissal via hypercategorization has become a base reaction in the face of the dwindling & defunded North American education system.

The problem with this kind of takeaway, with context-dependent critique, is that it says nothing about the content of what is being said in the work, but instead chooses to dismiss someones chosen form of human expression by only the context of its the medium utilized to write it down. Which, when said like that, ought to sound absurd. Because it is. Harshly put, the critique itself is as shallow & glib as it believes ‘notes app’ writing to be. Even harshlier put, a glib critique that focuses on context rather than content is always an attempt to mask the insecurity of the critic feeling that they may not able to write or make something quite as vulnerable, as learned, as passionate, or as decisive as those whose work they try to dismiss. Their insistence on mediocrity masks their own. Instead of their heart, they wear their ressentiment on their sleeve.

In not being able to create themselves, or even truly engage with the context, they fall-back into ressentiment of the contexts of the medium itself. Like generations before us, who lamented the word processor in lieu of the typewriter, who bemoaned the typewriter in favor of penmanship, who wrongheadedly dismissed photography as being ‘too easy’ a representation of reality compared to skilled painting, now the critics groan at the note-taking apps on our pocket computers as a method of writing as valid as any other. (Somewhere in a critics notes app they’re secretly typing the uninspiring phrase: “Some things never change.”) But the reality of the situation is as inspiring as any thing else if you cock your head & look at it just right. If you gave a neuroscientist, a great poet, a skilled architect, or a political philosopher a ‘notes app’ instead of a laptop, a notebook, or a chalkboard, they would all more or less write the same quality of content in that app as they would if it were handwritten, drawn, or typed on a typewriter. The content remains the same regardless of the method of documentation. The medium is not the message, in this instance. If one were to write a phrase by hand in calligraphy with ink & quill, or typed hastily into their phone, spraypainted sloppily or elegantly across a bridge underpass, the phrase remains the same. The effect is different for the audience, due to the varying styles, but the content of the words themselves remain consistent regardless of their presentation.

The etymology of the word “art” comes from the Latin Ars which meant ‘skill’ or craft. But a skill & a craft are in fact two notably distinct forces. One can have the skill of riding a bike without any knowledge of the craft of how to make a bicycle.

Any written form of human expression, including critique, be it poetic or scientific, requires at the very least the skill of the language being expressed. There are of course notable critics who have elevated the craft of critique to a valuable form of literature; Pauline Kael, André Bazin, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, to name a few. The problem here is that, historically speaking, when a critic becomes so masterful with their craft, if the scope of their critique is wide enough they earn the tile of ‘cultural critic’ regardless of their topics of choice, but even then, if their prose is engaging & convincing enough, they cease even to be called a critic, & begin to be referred to by their readers as an ‘essayist’ instead.

Do critics die where quality writing begins? Is the essayist born when the impulse to criticize takes a backseat to reason & creative impulse?

Sontag, in her masterful essay Against Interpretation, had this to contribute:

“Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art — & in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”

Here we have a poetic illustration of how one engages with content sans context, or content regardless of its known contexts. And that is through transparence. Of being present with the media-object itself as direct experience.

What the artist dares to bare to the audience is their transparence: a conduit to an essence imbued in the object. Not the essence of the artist, the essence of what remains from out the process of the objects creation, as distinct from the artist. It is the thing being shown without it needing to be said. The work of art experienced as it is, as it is perceived by the senses, as it is known when face-to-face-with it; Not as it is talked about.

And this sense of transparence is precisely what the average critic lacks, recoils from, & resents. And lack of transparence is precisely what the critics’ audiences are able to see in the insecurities of the sense of ‘not having created yet’ in the critics’ ressentiments. Insecurities rarely fuel expression, too often they occlude it. Yet through it all, if one can become aware of this social phenomena of ressentiment occurring in oneself, it is always possible to grow out of its unappealing impulses, & evolve as a critic toward a broader, more nuanced, & yes, even more generous perspective. One of transparence & acceptance, rather than resentment & dismissal. The desire to critique is the desire to be seen.