Subjectivity and objectivity must die

[koganbot]

Over 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.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I found myself in the position of teaching the word "objective" to my summer camp because of the Sotomayor hearings, in which one of the big debates was "Personal Experience" vs. "Being Objective." What was obvious, even to the class, was that our definition of "objective" in this debate -- "judging without personal experience" was obviously false, and we (luckily) were able to speak to a federal judge who emphasized that it's not so much that judging with "personal experience" is good or bad, it's that it's impossible not to. Which doesn't mean that everything is some opposite (impossible) extreme, but that the concept as written doesn't have any use except in a disingenuous way (as in the Republican opposition to Sotomayor) or in a way that doesn't lead anywhere productive.

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).

[koganbot]

Accidentally revisiting a bunch of old lj threads as I clean up today's batch of lj spam, and alighted here.

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).