Wednesday, June 04, 2008

I'm not sure ...

... More on Certainty; or is it Moron Certainty? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I like uncertainty. Life consists mostly of judgment calls. One of the reasons I agree with Auden about irregular systems of measurement is that such systems implicitly acknowledge that every measurement is approximate. The decimal system offers the illusion of a precision that cannot be achieved. If Pi only approximates to 3.14159, then it follows that the circumference of a circle can only be approximated. The value of knowledge is not that it brings us closer to certainty, but that it protects us from it. The more you know about something or someone, the more mysterious they become. That is why descriptive criticism is better than evaluative criticism. Evaluative criticism is about me, about how I feel about something. Descriptive criticism has a powerful subjective component as well, but it forces you to look at the thing you are undertaking to judge, and the more closely you examine that and try to describe it, the more you are forced to weigh more carefully those feelings you have about it. Those feelings may even start to change.

2 comments:

  1. "The more you know about something or someone, the more mysterious they become. That is why descriptive criticism is better than evaluative criticism."

    Isn't descriptive criticism of necessity evaluative Frank? Work that is good will truly become more mysterious the more you look at it; work that is poor wont? Work that is good will contain many layers of complexity, beauty, insight...much to ponder and describe. Work that is poor, contains little of this, and therefore little to describe?

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  2. Yes, it is, Nigel, but indirectly and more grounded in the work itself than the critic's sensibility. If I can accurately and precisely describe what I have experienced, you will know how I feel about it, because I cannot accurately and precisely describe it without making all sorts of judgments along the way.
    What I was objecting to is the sort of thing I encountered not long ago when I met someone and mentioned a certain contemporary composer. He immediately made a disparaging remark about the composer's music. Well, that composer has written a lot of music and I know a lot of it very well. Not all of it is great, but all of it is well-made, and some of it is very good. My interlocutor was telling me nothing about the music. He was telling me about himself, what a great judge of music he was. It's the two-thumbs-up-or-down syndrome.
    I should have been more precise and said that evaluative criticism is best done by way of description, which forces you to look carefully at the details of the work. Otherwise, we don't get criticism. We get memoir.
    And notice how my blurt and your question have, I hope, got us closer to a clear statement.

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