The first thought came to my mind when I read Carroll’s statement “it is a philosophy of criticism…It is an attempt to excavate the foundations of any critical practice, whether theory driven or otherwise”. So what’s the “foundations”? It seems evaluation is the foundation in his book.
He proposes that evaluation is central to the criticism of art, but he also says it does not mean that criticism only has (or must have?) evaluation, instead it has description, contextualization, classification, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis as “hierarchical subservient to the purposes of evaluation”. I was wondering what a criticism (if any, perhaps not) which only has description looks like. It sounds like an abstract, a summary, or a synoptic. Well, I just try to think about what he exactly means when using these terms. Also why are these six intellectual activities “hierarchical”? I feel they can be intertwined and overlapped under some situations. For example, when I describe, contextualize and classify, amn’t I “analyzing” the intellectual content in mind?
Another question is when he describes artistic evaluation-evluation in light of artistic categories and political evaluation. It may be difficult to completely separate these two, as this example. It may be inevitable to touch”politics” when “evaluating” this work. Of course later he mentions differences between “interpreting” creator’s intention and “evaluating” the work’s value. But he also has said interpretation serves the purposes of evaluation.
Last question about the productivity of criticism, he says criticism is productive, even negative criticism can lead to improvement. Should we regard criticism as deconstructive, constructive, reconstructive, or all of the three, or none of the three?
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January 16, 2013 at 3:54 pm
slouraine
Honestly I had trouble figuring out just what Carroll meant by “evaluation”. Maybe I missed it earlier in the book, but I didn’t find a suitable definition until page 45:
“to discover what is valuable or worthy of attention in artwork and to explain why this is so”
Maybe the others (description, contextualization, classification, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis) are “hierarchical” because evaluation in his terms encompasses them all?
———————–
To address your last question: I think in design, criticism is generally meant to be constructive. You can always improve design, and as our professor Marty Siegel maintains, “Design is never done.” There can always be improvements and iteration, and in fact a lot of technology continues to iterate, and new versions are released periodically. (Or in the case of the iPhone, new versions are released every 5 minutes or so)
So in that sense, I would regard criticism in ID to be constructive.
January 17, 2013 at 9:30 am
raynezhou
1. I think what Carroll means by “hierarchical” is that the most important part of criticism is evaluation. All the other parts, such as contextualization, should work for the purpose of evaluation. In this way, they are on lower hierarchy of evaluation. They only exist in criticism if they are needed by evaluation.
2. This is an interesting question. Why can’t we separate the political meaning with the aesthetic experience? I guess firstly is to find out why we know this poster has political meaning. Why? Because I can see Obama, and I can see a word “hope”. But why do they have political meaning? Because I know Obama is the president of United States, and I know what the word “hope” means. I may also know a little bit about the relationship of these two. Thus, that’s how I discover the political implication of this poster. So please imagine somebody who doesn’t know Obama, and doesn’t understand English at all. Will he still be affected by the political part of this poster? Can the one evaluate this kinds of art works solely from an aesthetic point of view?
3. For the last question, I think what he means by saying “negative criticism can lead to improvement” is that negative criticism can urge the artist to improve. So this is a kind of constructive too. What Carroll means by constructive is that no matter how we categorize a critique into deconstructive, constructive, or reconstructive, the final destination and purpose of this critique must be constructive, which means that, to my point of view, the intention of the critic for writing this critique is to improve something.
January 17, 2013 at 10:08 am
jeffreybardzell
What Rayne says here:
… is also how I read Carroll.
January 17, 2013 at 10:31 am
jeffreybardzell
Regarding this question:
… There’s two things to keep in mind that may help de-confuse this kind of thing.
First, these six words for Carroll (description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, analysis) are all used in a particular, technical sense–they have a more precise and more narrow meaning for Carroll than they do in everyday English. When I read a book like this, I pretend that these words have an asterisk after them, so that when Carroll writes about classification or interpretation, I imagine it to be classification* or interpretation* to remind myself that what he is saying only applies to this narrow and technical sense. So we have to be careful ourselves not to conflate the technical and everyday senses of these words when we reflect on the writing. If we rewrite your question in this way:
… we can see how the answer might very well be “no,” because analyzing* has a narrow and special meaning; but if we treat “analyzing” in the everyday sense of the term, then the answer would be “yes.”
Second, Carroll is not trying to make a firm ontological argument that these activities are so radically and fundamentally distinct that it is possible (let alone common) to have significant critical thoughts where, for example, only one of his activities (description, classification, etc.) is actually used. Rather, I think he is trying to call attention to the different types of thoughts and statements we have and make, to make it easier for us to see the constitutive parts of criticism. Take this example:
This statement is explicitly a description of the contents of the film. Yet it is easy to see that implicitly there is also classification (it is a documentary film), contextualization (it is a Nazi propaganda film from the era before World War II broke out), interpretation (this film is sympathetic to the Nazi party and Hitler), and evaluation (this is tricky: on an academic blog, you can correctly infer that I am condemning this film; had the exact same statement appeared on a neo-Nazi blog, you might infer just the opposite).
Anyway, I don’t think it’s productive for us to attempt to logically separate each of Carroll’s terms as if they could function in complete isolation of each other; the better strategy is, for example, to look back at Reynold’s reading of Gatsby and be able to perceive the mechanisms of his critical activity more insightfully than we could before we had this reading. Or, still another more productive way to read Carroll is to try it out:
I hope this is helpful….