Excesses of millennial capitalism, excesses of violence: several critical fragments regarding the cinema of Michael Haneke.(Critical essay)

 
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. 
But unless I learn to use 
The difference between poetry and rhetoric 
My power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold ... 
--Audre Lourde, Power 

Exegetical Method and Polemic on Millennial Capitalism

A point of illumination on the process of critical thinking and writing one would be hard pressed to dispute is that it is ineluctably a reflection of the moment in which it is produced. A critic/writer can be no more, to greater or lesser extents, than the sum of, among other things, his ever-shifting politics, personal history, image-repertoire and ethical values. All or some of these characteristics may be masked or exposed to varying degrees when the moment necessitates (the effort to appear 'totally objective'--an oxymoron, really--being one), but the fact remains that critical practice is forever braided to the threads of the critic's, for lack of a better word, 'personality.' Likewise, one might extend this rather elementary insight to artists of any and all rank. In fact, for an artist to practice his craft devoid of personal investment is to merely give motion to the gestures of the craft and, in turn, reject the conduct of art. It should follow, then, that the skillful articulation of an artist's innermost obsessions and concerns stands certainly, for the critic, as a principle criteria of assessment. The obvious question that arises here is, how are we to discern in the work of art what does and does not belong to the 'personality' of the artist? In other words, what in a given work is of value and what are we to ignore or discard?

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Assessing the work of the critic should, in theory, be a less foggy enterprise than assessing the wok of the artist, as it is the duty of the critic to openly make intellectual judgments that are both objectively critical and personally informed, and to do so with as little obfuscation as possible. It is the 'personality' of the critic that is his greatest asset. Contrarily, the artist, particularly filmmakers, given the broad division of labour involved in the production of a film, need not make any such commitment to personal revelation to perform his craft successfully; for example, I find Sam Raimi's Spiderman (2002) to be exemplary of the American action genre and a fine piece of entertainment, but I cannot say it reveals anything to me about Raimi personally or politically, or about the regrettable socio-economic conditions coterminous with its production and historical moment, or that any of his films dating back to The Evil Dead (1981) reflect any differently.