David Amrock

I started writing in earnest because I wanted to critically investigate the notions of art and design, especially in light of the unavoidably related topics of technology and politics. I quickly found I couldn’t do all this without establishing an overt ethical position. All critical territory is moral territory: hence the preceding two essays, “Criticism” and “Justice & violence.”

Both essays, for being so short, have been worked over excessively. Abstract writing is daunting. The prose is not as smooth as I’d like, but I feel I’ve delayed them long enough.

I expect to spend a lot of time in this space readdressing their questions. I’m writing here in the first place to record my thoughts, to get them out, and in the second place to return to those thoughts, to reexamine and interrogate them as much as possible.

Contrary to what these first two essays (and some forthcoming ones) might suggest, I don’t mean to spend all my time on abstractions and principles. Interrogation of thought will mean reckoning with concrete fact, and I plan to do that. I do however think that establishing principle is important, and neglected, in criticism.

The fashion in American political argument is to work along the lines I’ve described in the “Criticism” essay: to argue against war, or prison, or deportation, on the grounds of economic benefit, rather than on the grounds of human dignity and the basic human right to live freely. The latter position is the principled one; the former serves the assumption that our society’s economic activity is, in general, righteous, an assumption which I think is incorrect.

In writing critically I hope to better understand moral principle for myself, but I also hope to illuminate moral thinking in ways that are socially productive: to offer, as I suggest in the first two essays, not only negative assessment but means for positive improvement.