Critique and Problematization

• "only that which has no history can be defined" (Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Genealogy of Morals)
• Academia is as much about asking questions as answering them - and often the former is more important.
• Bear in mind the following distinction when considering any text: between a text as SOURCE and REFERENCE:
  • REFERENCE: what is true. (ETIC) [thought question: is anything ever absolutely true? is there etic knowledge?]
  • SOURCE: what some historically and culturally embedded actor said/wrote/sang.... (EMIC)
• SOURCE vs. REFERENCE
  • Reference: containing truth statements about the world
  • Source: containing statements which may not be true, but that will teach us something when placed into context
  • That context is typically implicit; the critique makes the implicit explicit.
  • Example: Richard Wallaschek's book on Primitive Music tells us about music of the world, but tells us even more about the author's world of the late 19th century.
  • Claim: everything in the world is a SOURCE. We turn SOURCE into REFERENCE through the process of CRITIQUE:
    • Making assumptions explicit.
    • Adding enough qualifying, conditioning, contextual information to make sense of it.
    • That which is untrue in general may be true in relation to a context.
    • The goal of critique is to excavate that context: the author's life and times, and society, for instance.
• PROBLEMATIZATION: Abstract concepts ("Arab music") seem innocuous enough - they're not explicitly claiming anything...but implicitly, they are social constructions, and components of a broader world-view. Usually we consider that critique applies to statements ("music in Egypt was much better before 1975"), but concepts must also be critiqued. When we PROBLEMATIZE we critique a CONCEPT - examining its contingency as a social construction, turning it into a question (where does it come from? why purpose does it serve? who posed it and why? what does it do to those who use it?), delegitimizing its "naturalness" in favor of social constructedness...it becomes a problem to be investigated as SOURCE. E.g.: "Arab Music"
• When reviewing a reading in your SC papers, attend to each work (including both statements and concepts) both as REFERENCE and as SOURCE: summary/scope + boundaries/limits/relationships