Subjectivity and objectivity must die
Jul. 31st, 2009 05:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOver on Blue Lines Revisited, Tom throws a couple brief criticisms at most music convos about subjectivity, objectivity, and relativism, and I add some pessimistic comments of my own, including this one:
My complaint about the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversations, beyond most people's not knowing how to do them, is that what motivates the conversations gets sidestepped in the actual conversations themselves. The conversations arise from an uneasiness with the conventions for discussing and judging music, those conventions forcing us to make judgments but putting those judgments up for question and debate. And what the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversation generally avoids or botches is the question of authority: What authorizes what we say about music, and [a question that's more subterranean] who authorizes it? The subjectivity/objectivity/relativism terminology is awful because it gives us two dumb choices neither of which matches actual social practice: "subjectivity" tells us that we can say whatever we want, "objectivity" tells us that it's the facts that authorize what we say. Neither choice is correct, neither corresponds to what we actually do, which is to constantly make judgments about the music, judgments that, as I said, are up for question and debate. And the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism convo is generally a dishonest way to influence the debate by trying to persuade someone not to question judgments - either 'cause the judgments are "subjective" so our only choice is to agree to disagree or because they're "objective" hence based on facts about which we're not allowed to disagree, supposedly - so almost everything that actually goes into the judgments (including but hardly limited to where the music is being listened to, why, and who with) is avoided in the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism discussion... except when I'm part of the discussion, in which case you'll find me recommending that we eliminate the words "subjective" and "objective" from the language altogether and insisting that no one gets to use the word "relativism" without explaining what the hell he or she means by it.
My complaint about the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversations, beyond most people's not knowing how to do them, is that what motivates the conversations gets sidestepped in the actual conversations themselves. The conversations arise from an uneasiness with the conventions for discussing and judging music, those conventions forcing us to make judgments but putting those judgments up for question and debate. And what the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism conversation generally avoids or botches is the question of authority: What authorizes what we say about music, and [a question that's more subterranean] who authorizes it? The subjectivity/objectivity/relativism terminology is awful because it gives us two dumb choices neither of which matches actual social practice: "subjectivity" tells us that we can say whatever we want, "objectivity" tells us that it's the facts that authorize what we say. Neither choice is correct, neither corresponds to what we actually do, which is to constantly make judgments about the music, judgments that, as I said, are up for question and debate. And the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism convo is generally a dishonest way to influence the debate by trying to persuade someone not to question judgments - either 'cause the judgments are "subjective" so our only choice is to agree to disagree or because they're "objective" hence based on facts about which we're not allowed to disagree, supposedly - so almost everything that actually goes into the judgments (including but hardly limited to where the music is being listened to, why, and who with) is avoided in the subjectivity/objectivity/relativism discussion... except when I'm part of the discussion, in which case you'll find me recommending that we eliminate the words "subjective" and "objective" from the language altogether and insisting that no one gets to use the word "relativism" without explaining what the hell he or she means by it.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 12:48 pm (UTC)http://67752.tumblr.com/post/152296119/i-do-not-believe-that-jd-is-inherently
with my comment underneath. But tumblr was being ridiculous on my work network yesterday and kept crashing when I tried to reblog that quote, so in the end I just thought "sod it" and put my comment up on its own.
I also had recently read a long Metacritic forum thread on the subject which was terrible for all the reasons you mention. (The Metacritic forum is totally worthless BTW, never go there, I can't even remember why I did.)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 03:41 pm (UTC)What is 67752?
(By the way, disqus/tumblr was giving me a lot of grief too, which means that I got to rewrite my comment five or six times on paper while waiting to see if disqus would really post it.)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-31 06:42 pm (UTC)Interesting, though, that when I taught this word it was during my introduction of "authority" -- who has it and why, how we keep it in check, etc. I personally think "objective" is a perfectly reasonable word to use as a comparative, but not as its own class: one can be more objective than another, but can't be "objective" where another person is "subjective." But when you use phrases like "more objective" people tend to ignore the comparative element and have the same uninteresting debate about vocabulary. (When I first talked about "objective" in earnest, in a film class in college, we were essentially forbidden to use the word "objective" when referring to a perspective of a film; but we didn't have conversations about subjective stuff either, it was just a way for us to focus on particular points of view).
no subject
Date: 2011-07-19 02:21 pm (UTC)I personally think "objective" is a perfectly reasonable word to use as a comparative, but not as its own class: one can be more objective than another, but can't be "objective" where another person is "subjective."
But what does this mean? That "objective"-"subjective" is a continuum like "loud"-"soft rather than either/or like a light switch? But I'm objecting to it as continuum too, objecting to the contention that more of one means less of the other, that the more you're talking about yourself the less you're talking about the object, and vice versa, which I think is just plain wrong. What makes people call "H1tler was a scumbag" subjective and "H1tler had a mustache" objective isn't that the first is about the speaker while the second is about H1tler - which is ridiculous, they're both about H1tler, and they both tell us something about the speaker - but that we can imagine disagreement about the former among people who are neither insane nor incompetent in the language, even if we no longer get much disagreement on the issue of H1tler; whereas we can't imagine any disagreement about the latter statement that doesn't entail that the person disagreeing is incompetent. In actual usage, "objective" jumps around in its usage, sometimes meaning "disinterested" or "unbiased," other times meaning "true" or "it's been proven," other times meaning "real," and so forth. The first usage is relatively benign - "he thought the performance was utterly beautiful, but since it was by his own daughter, he went to his friend Roderick for a more objective judgment," a sentence that makes sense even though if we were to ask people whether beauty was objective or subjective, almost all would answer "subjective" (which should apply to Roderick just as much as to anyone else).