read any particularly bad long-form criticism lately?

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So I've got a paper due on Monday where I'm trying to apply Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production to pop-music criticism...

In the book, Macherey identifies a number of fallacies and mistakes that he believes critics often make about literature, among them the normative fallacy ("criticism as judgment" or "criticism as 'this-could-be-better'") and the related attempt to compare two works despite their comprising two different domains and objects; the emprical fallacy (criticism as a means to the end of uncovering the "true meaning" of a given work); the denial of a work's complexity; the myth of the artist creating something out of nothing; the attempt to assimilate a work into something it isn't (i.e., rap into black culture/struggle/politics/life or rock 'n roll into rebellion/sex/peace); and the Marxist tendency to depict a work as a mirror to reality (and thus describe it as a shadow). The central idea is that much criticism falls prey to the desire to reduce (or "deny the irreducibility") or "explain away" a work in favor of something else (a nonexistent perfect work; a hidden truth; an ideology).

ANYWAY: I have some examples of these mistakes being made, but would love more. The longer the criticism the better. Can you think of any piece you've read recently that pissed you off because of its Platonist/Aristotelianist desire to dehistoricize and deny the materiality of a single or album?

max (maxreax), Sunday, 10 December 2006 01:33 (seventeen years ago) link

n.b.: I realize that attempting to simplistically apply literary theory/criticism to music theory/criticism is simplistic and, perhaps, wrongheaded. But Macherey's point larger point about "explaining away" a given text is one that I think applies to a lot of music criticism (not to mention that the dominant model for music criticism is, for all intents and purposes, literary criticism, so I might as well use Macherey as my own model).

max (maxreax), Sunday, 10 December 2006 01:35 (seventeen years ago) link

The problem with that line of thinking is that each of those fallacies is, to a large extent, what criticism is for. If we want the irreducible essence of a text, we're inevitably forced to go to the text itself. Part of the project of criticism is to explore what you're accepting as "fallacies."

And while it's obviously true that any one of those fallacies can take a critic farther and farther from truth, or a worthwhile estimation of the original text, every one of them can also act as the avenue to getting something wonderful. E.g., turning a text into a symbol of something within culture -- like you say about hip-hop and black culture -- can be revealing when done right, and the entire history of texts being meaningful outside of themselves relies entirely on people doing exactly that work. Similarly, the "comparative" fallacy there can be hugely interesting and revealing -- if not about the original texts, then about the choices we make in judging and receiving them (which can turn out, at some point, to be really huge and fascinating moral choices, or things that reveal our deepest visions of what the world should be like).

The funny thing here is that calling all those things "fallacies" of criticism actually falls into one of the fallacies listed -- the "Marxist tendency to depict a work as a mirror to reality (and thus describe it as a shadow)." I mean, the whole assumption here is that criticism is a shadow of the original text, and that it has some obligation to faithfully mirror the irreducible original! And I'm not sure that's the project of criticism, or that it's ever been the product of criticism. Criticism exists not as a shadow of the text, but as both an example and a discussion of how the text functions among its audience. It can be about not what the text "means" but what the text means in context, how it operates in the world.

the pony-poop paradox (the pony-poop paradox), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:12 (seventeen years ago) link

why is this macherey person so hung up on "mistakes"? isn't everything a mistake?

scott seward (121212), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:25 (seventeen years ago) link

because he has to write a paper?

friday on the porch (lfam), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:29 (seventeen years ago) link

being dead, that's about as perfect as people get. everything else is a botch. some botches more entertaining than others.

scott seward (121212), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:29 (seventeen years ago) link

The problem with that line of thinking is that each of those fallacies is, to a large extent, what criticism is for. If we want the irreducible essence of a text, we're inevitably forced to go to the text itself. Part of the project of criticism is to explore what you're accepting as "fallacies."

But "irreducible essence" is a contradiction in terms for Macherey (n.b. I sympathize with M but don't necessarily agree w/ him entirely); an essentialist line of thinking assumes that a given text only has a single meaning (or even a finite number of meanings). Macherey's take (as is my understanding) is that criticism shouldn't be concerned w/ searching out or finding the "hidden"/"true"/"essential" meaning of a given text but w/ producing new meanings--that is, we shouldn't be looking to reproduce a text's meaning (whether that meaning exists as the intentionality of the author or as a reflection of culture/society or in its relationship to a nonexistent perfect text) but to produce new meanings. What the work is saying is different from what can be said of the work.

I do think that you're right; that each or all of the so-called "fallacies" can be helpful and interesting, but I think it's important to do it right--to qualify your reading as merely one out of an infinite number; to acknowledge that a given work's existence can't be reduced to your single take. The fact is, (for me), Macherey is quite good at pointing out what we do wrong, but as I think you can guess, not great at suggesting new alternatives; he seems to want critics to embrace the complexities and inherent contradictions without specifying exactly how.

why is this macherey person so hung up on "mistakes"? isn't everything a mistake?

I guess the idea is that in order to elaborate a new productive theory of "reading" we have to show why the old reproductive theory was wrong.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:33 (seventeen years ago) link

The funny thing here is that calling all those things "fallacies" of criticism actually falls into one of the fallacies listed -- the "Marxist tendency to depict a work as a mirror to reality (and thus describe it as a shadow)." I mean, the whole assumption here is that criticism is a shadow of the original text, and that it has some obligation to faithfully mirror the irreducible original! And I'm not sure that's the project of criticism, or that it's ever been the product of criticism. Criticism exists not as a shadow of the text, but as both an example and a discussion of how the text functions among its audience. It can be about not what the text "means" but what the text means in context, how it operates in the world.

Actually I think is close to what Macherey means--"reading" and "writing" are not reversible operations; the text as written by the author is necessarily different from the text as read by the critic due to the machinations of history/ideology/context/what have you. Criticism is not a "search" for meaning but a "production" of it.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 00:41 (seventeen years ago) link

I think it's important to do it right--to qualify your reading as merely one out of an infinite number; to acknowledge that a given work's existence can't be reduced to your single take.

See, I like to think this is implicit in the whole project of criticism, and doesn't exactly need to be disclaimed each time. I mean, I wish it were just remembered as a matter of course -- by critics, by their readers, by their detractors -- that creating meaning via one of those fallacies is just one avenue of thought, and not some kind of absolutist judgment on anyone's part. (It's kind of preposterous to imagine otherwise, really, and yet I suppose we all veer into that trap sometimes.)

the pony-poop paradox (the pony-poop paradox), Monday, 11 December 2006 06:52 (seventeen years ago) link

I think Macherey sounds largely otm. Of course you could find examples of good writing that break one or more of his "rules", but everything max lists up there is A Bad Thing that criticism could do with less of.

Fat Lady Wrestler (Modal Fugue), Monday, 11 December 2006 11:06 (seventeen years ago) link

I like Machery, or the little that I've read of him. He wrote a long time ago so I don't think that all of what he was saying was at that point considered implicit in the project of criticism - see New Criticism etc.

I almost feel that what he is talking about is not criticism here, but the critical self-reflexivity of criticism - these "mistakes" aren't necessarily mistakes when they are practicised, but they are when they are considered to be what criticism is for.

Tim F (Tim F), Monday, 11 December 2006 15:09 (seventeen years ago) link

I've never read Machery, but nabisco is right, any kind of criticism is necessarily a "reduction," even the thing that you say Machey proposes, max. there are useful and paradigm-shifting ways of reducing a work, though!

horseshoe (horseshoe), Monday, 11 December 2006 16:24 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't think so necessarily, horseshoe--to me there is a difference between explicating (and therefore reducing) a work and addressing a work without glossing over its complexities and contradictions.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 17:47 (seventeen years ago) link

I offered some summaries of theme in the songs from the Joanna Newsom album in a review I wrote, but I would think that, for someone reading the review, it is a given that they are reductive; no claims were made, obviously, to the summaries being absolute or comprehensive. (Given the context of the word count, naturally, this was all that was possible.)

In any case, I'd be interested in seeing some examples of text explications where the reductions are somehow problematic.

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Monday, 11 December 2006 18:09 (seventeen years ago) link

(i.e., does the problem come about when the critic does, in fact, assume an absolute or comprehensive reading? or are their other problems with explication, too?)

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Monday, 11 December 2006 18:11 (seventeen years ago) link

I think it's important to do it right--to qualify your reading as merely one out of an infinite number; to acknowledge that a given work's existence can't be reduced to your single take.

All critics should write imho at the beginning of each piece of criticism.

Raw Patrick (Raw Patrick), Monday, 11 December 2006 18:51 (seventeen years ago) link

Well, I've been re-reading the Macherey and I think my take on it is sort of lacking--it seems that his objection to explication isn't that it assumes a single meaning (necessarily) but that it assumes a coherency and internal consistency that is always lacking in a text (here he's cribbing from Spinoza's reading of the Bible). I guess what he might say about yr. Joanna Newsom review, Tim, is that you're merely "re-producing" the meaning already inherent in the songs without producing a new reading that takes into account the ideologically-derived inconsistency and gaps and, crucially, examines what the text does not say and demonstrates the ways in which Ys is working against itself.

I'm still not 100% on this, in any event. It's informed a lot by Althusser & Spinoza, neither of whom I am particularly familiar with.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 18:54 (seventeen years ago) link

It certainly sounds like he was responding to New Criticism, which is full of that kind of totalising cobblers.

Fat Lady Wrestler (Modal Fugue), Monday, 11 December 2006 19:45 (seventeen years ago) link

Yeah--but also (and maybe more) to Lukacs, Barthes and the formalists.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 19:51 (seventeen years ago) link

Barthes? Really? I mean, there's a big obvious habit with Barthes of approaching things from cheeky "provocative" angles, or decoding the mundane in grand metaphor-stretching ways that are pretty clearly subjective -- I think of him as one of the people who's farthest from totalizing everything. (When someone's all like "the brassiere is an analog of the colonial mind, which seeks to restrict the occupied land while simultaneously lending it the illusion of beauty and fertility" you can be pretty sure you're just getting one reading.)

nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 11 December 2006 20:01 (seventeen years ago) link

Yeah, I was gonna say Barthes is far more playful than that. From the brief precis of Macherey's career I've read I can see him having beef with the more doctrinaire structuralists.

Fat Lady Wrestler (Modal Fugue), Monday, 11 December 2006 20:11 (seventeen years ago) link

He certainly objects to the tendency towards ahistorical readings that structuralism can encourage--Macherey is writing in '66, too, two years before "Death of an Author" and Barthes's more post-structural stuff... the objection is more towards Writing Degree Zero-type work where Barthes seems to be arguing that the only reality is the structure or "code" in which the message is sent.

max (maxreax), Monday, 11 December 2006 20:28 (seventeen years ago) link

merely "re-producing" the meaning already inherent in the songs without producing a new reading that takes into account the ideologically-derived inconsistency and gaps and, crucially, examines what the text does not say and demonstrates the ways in which Ys is working against itself.

Why the assumption that it IS working against itself, though? Is all human activity ideologically inconsistent, with every action carrying with it an element of the individual working against his/herself?

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 03:24 (seventeen years ago) link

No, not all human activity (I don't think), but certainly art is; I think Macherey's objection would be your assumption that the text is created entirely of Newsom and not dependent on any number of historically-determined factors--and therefore we can't enforce a unity on the text no matter how much we/Newsom might like to.

max (maxreax), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 06:53 (seventeen years ago) link

dude just find some articles by dero.

sterl clover (s_clover), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 07:12 (seventeen years ago) link

I mostly ended up just using articles from the RS "Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

max (maxreax), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 07:19 (seventeen years ago) link

Well, I'm afraid I don't understand how all art is inherently working against itself in some way or another.

Also, offering interpretations of theme does not imply that the critic is assuming the text was created entirely of the author! (Or even that the critic was attempting to "enforce a unity on the text" unless, I would think, the critic was explicitly absolute about it in his/her language.)

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 07:59 (seventeen years ago) link

Perhaps "working against itself" is the wrong way to put it--what if I said "inconsistent" or "heterogenous"? The only reason I said you assumed that the text was created by an author was because of this--

Is all human activity ideologically inconsistent, with every action carrying with it an element of the individual working against his/herself?

--which implied that the ideological inconsistencies of Newsom's (or whoever's) work would arise out of her own inconsistencies; I think (and this is getting into the Althusserian territory w/ which I'm not particularly familiar) the idea is that the inconsistencies arise out of the multiplicity of producing agents (history, ideology, author, etc.) w/ any given text.

max (maxreax), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 08:03 (seventeen years ago) link

Don't you think the term "inconsistent" is loaded, though? It implies problems (as, certainly, does the premise of the artist "working against him/herself" or the text "working against itself").

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 08:10 (seventeen years ago) link

To elaborate: are there not always a myriad of ways in which factors related to history, ideology, the self, etc. that are operating at any given moment in a particular text might be consistent or inconsistent? And also a myriad of ways in which these consistencies or inconsistencies might or might not be problematic?

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 08:20 (seventeen years ago) link

I think the inconsistencies we're talking about are not within the art itself but within any interpretation of it - so yes every interpretation of a piece of art has problems insofar as there are ultimately things it struggles to explain or is silent on.

I think the main way we can talk about the artist/text working aginst herself/itself is in the sense that the most obvious interpretation of a piece of art (or the artist's favoured interpretation) is undermined by some component or aspect of the artwork in question. To the extent to which any work appears - or is presented as being - a coherent whole, inconsistencies are almost by definition "problems", but if the art of artist makes no such claims then we don't have the same issues with inconsistencies (we might not even term them such).

As with Althusser I get a very strong psuedo-deconstructionist vibe from Machery.

Tim F (Tim F), Tuesday, 12 December 2006 12:25 (seventeen years ago) link

I wonder how often artists would, in fact, make this claim about something they've created, though: that the given work is only understandable as an entity that is easily described in a finite way and void of the multipicitous historical, ideological, psychological, spiritual (etc.) implications.

Tim Ellison is number one proponent of Beatle!!!Mania!!! on nu-ILX (tim ellison), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 06:29 (seventeen years ago) link

Tim E--Yeah, inconsistency does imply problems. Macherey thinks of this as inherent in any text (he's cribbing here more or less directly from Spinoza, who read the Bible [model of all texts] as inconsistent/problematic). Tim F is right--what Macherey means is that an author will attempt to create a unified text with a "project" (in the example that Macherey uses, Verne's "Hidden Island," the "project" of the text is to show human technology's ability to master & control nature--it's a modernized Robinson Crusoe; Crusoe had a ton of socially-made goods, but these castaways will mold nature themselves), but that the text itself will problematize and often contradict that conveyance (in "Hidden Island," the shipwrecked crew is given a cache of socially-made goods by Captain Nemo and suddenly old Robinson Crusoe breaks into new Robinson Crusoe as the text undermines Verne's product). Thus the text has revealed something totally unintended.

Do I think artists would claim this to be the case? I think some would admit the inability of any text to be unified--but I'd venture that that's a result of 100+ years of anti-Aristotelian criticism that's moved the author out of its literally God-like place of prominence.

Tim F--Macherey (whether or not Derrida would admit it) seems to have presaged "Structure Sign and Play" by a few years--esp. in its discussion of "difference," which anticipates "differance" in important ways that I probably couldn't articulate.

max (maxreax), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 06:50 (seventeen years ago) link

I suspect that in current rock criticism the main sense in which the author-as-God approach is used is negatively: that as, critics are often slapped down for describing songs in terms which (it is alleged) the song's creator couldn't possibly understand, let alone articulate.

Tim F (Tim F), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 08:52 (seventeen years ago) link

Certainly with someone like Justin Timberlake--less so with a Bob Dylan.

max (maxreax), Wednesday, 13 December 2006 17:33 (seventeen years ago) link

Yeah, I impliedly meant this is used against people like Britney, Justin etc.

Tim F (Tim F), Thursday, 14 December 2006 11:25 (seventeen years ago) link


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