Abraham Maslow
One of the most controversial and most covered aspects of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings had to do with the question of objectivity. The barrage of questions and comments that followed the review of Sotomayor's now infamous 2001 "wise Latina" comment surely reveals anxieties and assumptions about objectivity in United States culture. For one, it exposes the still existing influence of the Enlightenment on American politics (an influence that I believe a lot of people still hold dear). I would argue that the attention to the comment also reveals that there is a sort of default subject position in the United States. With assertions that Sotomayor's gender and ethnic identity will influence her decisions suggests, there seems to be an implication that she would be more objective, more neutral, were she not situated by those identity markers. The white male heterosexual subject is apparently one that does not need to be interrogated in confirmation hearings, and this likely explains why John Roberts was not asked how being a wealthy heterosexual white male will affect his decisions.
Questions of objectivity, situatedness, and attachment/detatchment are especially interesting to me recently. My discipline has in many ways abandoned notions of objectivity, critical detachment/disinterestedness in favor of theories that emphasize and seek to expose situatedness, power structures, social construction, metanarratives, etc. Though I very much subscribe to these postmodernist/poststructuralist theories, I do think that they have the effect of detaching the discipline from other fields in academia (the sciences and some aspects of the social sciences, especially) and from the general public. It is ironic that my field's insistence on situatedness makes us seem disconnected from the "real" world and too caught up in the theoretical realm.
It is exciting and interesting that there has recently been a resurgence of the idea of critical detachment and formalism in the humanities because I do think that it will force us to re-interrogate what detachment and objectivity mean and how they function, which will hopefully result in a more nuanced positioning towards them. Critics like Seyla Benhabib and Amanda Anderson have have recently articulated theories that put a more positive spin on detachment. Benhabib argues that effective social criticism almost always involves some sort of separation from a society and tradition (which, for her, are likely corrupt). Anderson relates detachment to cosmopolitanism and argues that new cosmopolitanism can be defined "as the capacious inclusion of multiple forms of affiliation, disaffiliation, and reaffiliation, simultaneously insisting on the need for informing principles of self-reflexivity, critique, and common humanity."
What I think is most important is to examine the critical, social, and rhetorical agency of these various theories on objectivity and detachment and see how they themselves are situating mechanisms. One of my biggest problems with opposing subjectivity to objectivity is that such an opposition fails to examine how the desire for objectivity is surely part of one's subjectivity. I prefer "situatedness" because one can be situated by their belief in disinterestedness, but that is just me at the moment.
Edit: Chelsea was smart and reminded me that my glorious friend and fellow blogger Matt recently had a post related to issues of subjective and objective criticism. I encourage you to read it over at Cinema without Organs
I see a connection here to what Matt was blogging about in terms of film criticism - just in that there is some kind of "implied" objectiveness in being an academic or having a certain level of expertise in a subject. While I too would like to see some kind of turn towards at least considering objectivity - I am the first to admit that all my criticism is driven by a basic like/dislike "written about in a smart way."
ReplyDeleteHey, I hear that's ok too.
Such a smart comment, Chelsea. I was actually thinking about the connection to Matt's post, too. Film studies and criticism is such a fascinating discipline because it is still so very tied up in formalism and ideas about what "good" filmic technique is. This is surely partially driven by the fact that Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art is the most taught intro to film book out there, and they are both all about formalism and structuralism. The (not so) latent elitism in Mick LaSalle's comment seems very troubling, though. I think that I am much more comfortable with the more subjective point of view that drives your criticism.
ReplyDeleteTrue - because my criticism probably tends less towards elitism and more toward the so-called (falsely, in my opinion) "low brow."
ReplyDeleteI hate Bordwell & Thompson. How's that for subjective?
Oh hey - thanks for linking to my blog!
ReplyDeleteAlthough my deepest love is the philosophical study of subjectivity itself... I think a lot of what Felix Guattari was doing in his later years was a way of recouping 'objectivity' in the humanities. In Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis, he was employing what he called 'transversal' approaches, or approaches that deal with molecular/libinal/machinic operations.
What this did is sidestepped (or refuted) the question of how particular discourses deal with a situation - for example, Freudian psychoanalysis tries to relate psychological problems back to the Oedipal triangle. This is how discourses operate as a type of formalism/structuralism at their basic levels. Guattari was saying, ok, this psychological problem stems from this and this and this, but it sure as hell isn't father, mother, me.
Guattari's idea was to study the smaller, unique social and psychological changes that take place. In this way he relied on observation, and resisted jumping to pre-formed conclusions/solutions. That seems like an attempt to scientific objectivity to me! What is really interesting is how he implemented these ideas in psychotherapy and even politics (he ran for office in France!).