Abstract
James Grant’s book is essentially a work of philosophical inquiry, and in some of its arguments it can be assessed properly only within the terms of the literature to which it aims to contribute. Nevertheless, Grant addresses questions about the activity of ‘criticism’ which have relevance more generally for thinking about media and popular culture as well as the traditional fields of arts research. What kind of argument and what kinds of evidence are involved in evaluating the nature and meanings of a cultural artefact and in passing judgement as to its quality? On what kind of basis can critical exchange be carried out in a way which is productive rather than simply an exercise in the expression of divergent views?
These are clearly issues with an ancient lineage but they have appeared in media and cultural studies as part of the problem of assessing the ‘value’ of cultural products within the context of mass production, and the relating of aesthetic value to social and political value. They have become part of the difficulties of taking analytic hold of ‘the popular’ and getting confident bearings on ‘the elite’. Here, a disinclination to pass aesthetic judgement at all and instead to privilege economic and political positioning has been commented on in film and television studies, with Brunsdon (1990) making a particularly cogent and early case about the problems of evasion.
With considerable simplification, the broad situation as it cuts across all the arts can be seen as a play-off between the more ‘objectivist’ and the more ‘subjectivist’ perspectives. In the former, a belief in the secure grounding of judgements of quality (and therefore also of ‘badness’) is maintained, if at times somewhat nervously, along with a degree of confidence in the discourses likely to produce this. In the latter, judgement is seen as extensively personal and relative, replicating the variability of aesthetic encounter as an experience. So some critics want explicitly to project the security of their judgements as to the inherent qualities of a work, often to the point of dogmatic pronouncement, while others (and recent trends in film and television reviewing are interesting here) are more concerned to indicate the biographical, individual factors that inform their appraisals, factors which are therefore not likely to carry a general application but are by no means less interesting for that. Very little critical practice of either kind is prepared to make connections with the sociology of culture and to recognize the economic and social framing of the cultural spaces it operates within and the cultural capital it is involved in brokering.
Grant focuses on the way in which critics go about producing propositions concerning value and the kind of language they use to articulate and support a description and a judgement. Not surprisingly, he recognizes the slippery devices of special pleading and of circularity they frequently employ, as well as their attempts at open and ‘honest’ deliberation. He is also interested in how criticism works with its readers (sometimes other critics) to secure their agreement (perhaps encouraging them to note features in a work that they had previously ignored or misinterpreted) or their rejection, partial or wholesale, in favour of their own prior judgements. Among the theories he discusses, those of Noel Carroll (2009) are particularly relevant for media and cultural studies, since Carroll takes some of his examples from the media rather than literature, music and the fine arts. Carroll inclines strongly to the view that trained critics are able to pass judgements with good levels of objectivity and that this activity constitutes a kind of benchmarking essential to cultural health. Grant raises a number of questions about the kind of robustness concerning ‘sound justification’ indicated here and introduces factors of contingency and variation without thereby slipping into a relativist position in which criticism is merely the exchange of views about which no judgements as to accuracy and ‘correctness’ can be made. And he is surely right that ‘criticism’ goes well beyond passing judgement. It importantly includes attempting to describe the properties of works and exploring what are often indeterminate meanings (inevitably leading to variations and instability in evaluation). The productivity of critical discourse is often less a matter of ‘winning agreement’ and achieving confirmation than in opening up for examination evaluative space itself, although just how ‘wide’ this opening up is prepared to go varies considerably. By looking closely at how matters of perception, evaluation and explanation are involved he mounts a case about how criticism informs ‘appreciation’ (a word with its own slippery possibilities and now one having a very dated ring, perhaps unfortunately so). He notes that ‘there are three basic kinds of change critics can cause to help us better appreciate a work. They can affect what we respond to, how we respond, and why we respond’ (p. 174).
His examination of the kinds of discourse criticism involves leads him to give particular consideration to the role of metaphor within it, as part of its capacity to be ‘imaginative’ (to seek out the ‘non-obvious’) in ways that enjoy more freedom than propositional accounts in which the object of attention is less semantically open. Here, he extends his analysis beyond the ways in which metaphoric ‘likeness-making’ works to extend the force and vivacity of critical language in order to make comments more generally about the role of metaphor in thinking and describing. Again, his purpose is the clarification of a term that has been subject to a degree of mystification.
Grant offers an instructive clarity about many of the issues affecting judgement of culture, particularly about the structures and vocabulary in which these judgements are presented. For those outside of the philosophy of aesthetics, however, contextual questions will press in. We might want to investigate further the status of ‘criticism’ as the specialized, professionalized activity which Grant’s book largely assumes it to be. In what ways does the practice of academic criticism, locked as it is within the increasingly rarefied atmospheres of arts disciplines, relate to changing practices of arts reviewing in newspapers and in broadcasting, where elements of ‘consumer information’ and often of ‘promotion’, as well as highly personalized styling, have long been apparent? And what of that broader sphere of exchange about the arts which is now given extensive expression on the web, allowing ‘amateur’ critical discourses in which imitation of professional modes occurs alongside both ‘fan’ celebration, curtly dismissive judgements and a good deal of thoughtful and reflectively subjectivized exploration (see here, for instance, Rixon, 2013, and the overview in Corner, 2013)? Whatever the benefits of close scrutiny of critical practice as a specialized discourse around value, and Grant’s book certainly confirms these, a social and economic framing of what is going on both in the production and consumption of criticism is also needed. Bourdieu, of course, provides a magisterial template for conducting an examination of the distribution of art values and ‘tastes’. This is so, even if there is a danger in some of his writing of a kind of reverse imbalance – the strength of his emphasis on the arts as positional goods leading to under-recognition of the specificity, density and satisfactions both of aesthetic experience and discussion about it.