Section 1, Part 10 Summary and Analysis

"Neither-Nor Criticism" The author takes the title of this essay from his analysis of an anonymously published commentary on criticism, an analysis beginning with the suggestion that "criticism must be 'neither a parlour game nor a municipal service'—which means that it must be neither reactionary nor communist, neither gratuitous nor political." The author goes on to suggest that such "neither/nor" perspectives are based on a linguistic philosophy of exclusion—that is, that there are certain terms which society views with total negativity and others that it views with equally total good favor. As a result, society and criticism alike have become simplistic, a theory apparently based on two key beliefs. The first is that freedom has come to be understood as the blanket, assumed rejection of previous judgments (themselves viewed as automatically and totally negative...