Was reading through Barthes’ Criticism and Truth yesterday, and the arguments between the Old and the New criticism.
The Old criticism regards itself as the objective, neutral language. It is scarcely a ‘language’ at all, just the reflection of the way things are. The New, by contrast, is always either 'subjective' or partisan - it is smuggling in a political agenda.
The Old speaks with a fluency that is natural, the New with clunking artifice. It is mere ‘jargon’. The Old answers to the steady contours of the world, the New creates unreal distinctions and wants to change the world by fiat.
The New criticism’s ‘jargon’ is both utterly ‘incomprehensible’ and, at the same time, renders familiar ideas unnecessarily obscure. It is the argot of a tribe rather than the idiom of everyman.
You know the story. Gradually the New becomes the Old, sinks into the texture of the world and seems one with it, and so another New comes along, and is attacked in the same terms.
The fact that this pattern was long ago diagnosed hasn’t stopped it being endlessly replayed.
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