Criteria

This is probably more of interest to me than anyone else but I think "criteria" is a very useful term and the right way out of the postmodernist trap.

At first glance, it might seem the same. You could just pick the criteria you want to get the result you want. And that, in a sense, is exactly what we do. The girl being bored to death by a bunch of hard core nerds discussing John Coltrane says, 'But can you dance to it?' And who can blame her?

And how is that different from M.H. Abrams' infamous suggestion* that we can use whatever strategies or vocabularies we want to make a text mean what we want it to mean? Well the difference is this, "you can dance to it," is a verifiable statement. If you really believe your claim, put your song into a dance club and see what happens on the floor. If people clear off when it starts to play then, no, you can't dance to it.

As Wittgenstein might say, criteria are public things whereas vocabularies and strategies are not necessarily. And that, I think, is the really wonderful thing about Elijah Wald's approach to popular music history. He switches around according to different criteria shared by the people who actually make popular music popular and shows why and how this produces different results from what critics might imagine or hope for.

The whole failure of certifiably clever people like Abrams, Richard Rorty and Nelson Goodman to make any real cultural impact outside of the people who already agreed with them stems from this. All they had was vocabularies and interpretive strategies and there is nothing easier than ignoring these things when you want to.

Again, as Wittgenstein kept reminding us, you can't sit in your little sandbox and invent criteria. These only grow out of shared practices. Of course Rorty et al did have have criteria in the sense that they had a shared practice but they had a shared practice in the same sense that people who all agree that it is worth arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin will have criteria or in the same sense that children making up imaginary friends together do. You cannot force others to care and we really don't care. And Rorty, perhaps more than any other modern philosopher, tried to get people to dance to his "music" and he failed utterly.





* I lost the original quote and it is perhaps possible that it isn't as bluntly damning as my paraphrase here but that is the end result of Abrams approach whether he admits it or not.