Given the extent to which critical theory has swept the study of literature, culture, and society in recent decades, you’d think the perfectly good English word, criticality, would be in widespread use in those fields. But it’s not. I think it should be, don’t you? Let’s start.
Indeed, the first meaning of criticality in dictionary definitions is quite general. The OED has “The quality of being critical”; American Heritage has “The quality, state, or degree of being of the highest importance”; Merriam-Webster only lists it as a noun form derived from the adjective critical, whose first meaning is “of, relating to, or being a turning point or specially important juncture.”
That gets us close to the most common usage of criticality, which is as a term in nuclear physics. Thus, American Heritage has “The point at which a nuclear reaction is self-sustaining.” If you search for criticality in Google Books, you get nothing but physics, starting with a 2005 book, Complexity and Criticality, by Kim Christensen and Nicholas R. Moloney. The book’s description includes this sentence: “Criticality refers to the behaviour of extended systems at a phase transition where scale invariance prevails.” And so it goes on from there.
In the wake of the theoretical turn in literature as well as in race, class, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity and subjectivity, we need a new definition of criticality.
I began this post with the intention of providing that definition, but now that I’m at the end of this post, I’m not ready to commit. Moreover, I’d like to know what some other critically minded folks think about this.
Comments, anyone?