The Critic as Producer (?)

In his programmatic 1934 lecture, »The Author as Producer«, Walter Benjamin lays out the basic parameters of a materialist model of literary activism. Questioning a widely shared consensus on the Left, he proposes that it is not enough for a truly progressive literature to give voice to »[t]he best political tendency« (Benjamin 1999, 777); what is crucially required beyond such mere correct assertions is an Umfunktionierung of the very means of production of literature: a ›functional transformation‹ of the medium and its infrastructure after a thorough cognitive mapping of the writing subject onto the space of the system. In the process, the author recognizes and identifies themselves as a producer whose objective interests coincide with those of all other producers, i.e., the proletariat. Hence Benjamin’s enthusiasm for Brecht’s experiments with epic theatre as a functional transformation of the very infrastructure of a traditionally aristocratic and bourgeois cultural institution. In the hands of the author as producer, the theatre turns into a tool of critique and mobilization – one »which is able, first, to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal« (ibid.).

While Benjamin focuses on ›the author‹, I would like to inquire if, and in what ways, his considerations may just as well be fruitfully tested out for the topic of this volume that centers on the politics not of literature but of literary theory. Can we (re)think literary studies along similar lines and imagine the critic as producer? Would this be possible even in a situation where there is no unified imagined reference point like ›the proletariat‹ with which, for Benjamin, the author could not simply take sides but indeed identify as producer? Following Benjamin’s lead, I’d like to propose three points:

1. It is not enough to write about literary texts ›with the correct tendency‹ – say, from a postcolonial, feminist, queer, ecocritical, antiracist, Indigenous platform – as long as one complies with the demands of the established norms of the academic apparatus with its inbuilt gatekeeping functions, its compulsory competitiveness and its tendential detachment from most other areas of social life.

2. What is instead required is a critical reflection of one’s own implication within that system, and an attempt to disidentify with that positionality. It is here that agency emerges as the »creative performance of a given script« (Spivak 1999, 78). What this interplay of ›script‹ and ›performance‹ looks like will crucially depend on the concrete status assigned to the individual scholar, since the tenured full professor will have far more leeway to bend the script than, say, the ad-hoc staff member or the euphemistically dubbed ›independent researcher‹.

3. Such a self-localization would enable the critic to face their embeddedness in the ›means of production‹ that are available to and formative of their institutional context, in most cases: the university; and, still following Benjamin, to embark on the tortuous (but perhaps also joyful) project of the university’s functional transformation from a ›machine that accumulates‹ (la paperson 2017) into an apparatus which, to cite Benjamin once again, »is able […] to induce other producers to produce« (1999, 777).

For the literary scholar, such an intervention into the academic normal could start from an occasional strategic recalibration of the implied public one is writing for. Needless to state, the specialist exchange of ideas and positions with fellow experts will have to remain a necessary part of the profession, but it would be fascinating to see what effects it would have if we all took on the challenge to also reach out to extramural readerships and share our findings with non-specialist recipients: not in a patronizing way but in the hope of finding new partners for productive equal-footing exchanges. True, this would be a very modest step towards a ›functional transformation‹ of the university. But as an exercise in disidentifying with the dominant script prepared for the academic expert, and as a tiny step towards the critic as producer, I recommend that, »For each piece of scholar-facing work produced, humanities researchers ought to commit to creating one or more public-facing components« (Looser 2025, 2).

Naturally, there must be a question mark over all this. But just as naturally, this question mark must be placed in brackets.