Roger Ebert and the Social Value of Criticism

On Friday, April 5, 2013, I saw something I would never expect to see: the passing of a critic reported as front page news in the New York Times. The critic in question was, of course, Roger Ebert, the celebrity film critic who passed away presumably (the obituaries aren’t clear on this) due to complications relating to his thyroid cancer.

The purpose of my post is not to lionize Roger Ebert. Anyway, I’m hardly in any position to do so. I may have seen an episode or two of At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert in the 1980s, and I don’t recall ever reading any film criticism that he has written, except for maybe by accident at Rotten Tomatoes. About the only thing that sticks in my mind about Ebert’s critical writing is the controversy he stirred up with his half-baked claim that video games can’t be art, though to his credit he did subsequently engage the objections raised, finally concluding, “I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place.”[1]

No, my purpose is to reflect on the social value of criticism on the occasion of one of the world’s most famous critics’ death.

The “Intentional Fallacy” and the “Affective Fallacy” of Interaction Design?

This post is a speculative exploration of an interesting position. I do not present it as my considered position; rather, I am just trying to think through some interesting thoughts. I encourage people to engage with me on this via comments.

The gist of the issue has to do with what we take to be the primary “way in” to understand and evaluate interaction designs. What I am interested in is how seriously we (as researchers, practitioners, users, and members of society) should seek to understand and factor in the intentions of the designers who made them and the felt experiences of those who use them. Such intentions and felt experiences may include cognitive states, affective states, assumptions and values, predispositions, aspirations, and so forth.

The alternative view that I wish to explore dispenses with such subjective qualities and seeks meaning only in the qualities of the artifact itself. Representing this approach, I will work with a seminal pair of papers in literary theory called “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” by Wimsatt and Beardsley, as my primary sources for this position, though I will also explore what it means to apply this work of literary theory to design (since literature and design seem to be two different sorts of thing). Again, this is all very speculative and playful for now.

The Logic of Foucault’s “Author Function”

Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here.

Currently, our class is reading a philosophical genealogy of theories of authorship, as we seek to explicate the nature of the creative agency in interaction design. The piece is a book chapter called “Authors” by philosopher Peter Lamarque, as part of his The Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge). One of my students asked me to explain Foucault’s notion of the author-function, and this post is my attempt at an answer.

Underlying Lamarque’s summary of Foucault’s idea here is a heavy reliance on a logical distinction between intensional and extensional reference. (Note that intensional here has nothing to do with the word intentional, as in author intention). Lamarque is saying that Foucault’s author-function can be described as having intensional but not extensional reference. Let me begin by explaining these two terms (see also: the Wikipedia article on the distinction between sense and reference).

Now, words (and other signifiers) can refer to concepts in the mind or things in the world.

• Intensional reference is when we refer to a concept in the mind.
• Extensional reference is when we refer to a thing in the world.

Oftentimes, we can refer simultaneously both intensionally and extensionally. When I say, “[Name] is a student in Interaction Culture” there is a concept of both the class and of being a student in the class, and an assignment of an individual, [Name], to that role. This is intensional reference. But there is also the physical person out there in the world, [Name] herself, and that is extensional reference.

Now imagine this: “the present king of France.” You can understand the sense of this phrase, if you know what the present means, what a king is, and what France is. However, France is not presently a monarchy and therefore has no king. Therefore, “the present king of France” refers intensionally (we can form a concept of the king in our mind) but not extensionally (there is no person in the world who is the present king of France). We can say that “Louis XIV was a king of France,” and this sentence has both intensional and extensional reference.

Study of Film and HCI

Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here.

I mentioned during class today that HCI luminary Elizabeth Churchill had an interesting post on Facebook earlier today. Here is the quote:

Another brilliant independent movie I watched today. Made me reflect on self presentation and emotional isolation. It occurred to me that current discourses in the HCI and CSCW communities when it comes to loneliness, privacy and connection really only touch the surface when it comes to thinking about the complexity and multiplicity of ways humans have when it comes to managing identity, human social interaction and social withdrawal.http://dreamsofalife.com/

Obviously, I agree with the gist of her idea (I haven’t seen the movie, so I have no opinion on it specifically). I think most commercial filmmaking is a form of experience design. And I note that filmmaking, film theory, and film criticism are mature phenomena that have grappled for decades with issues that we are beginning to deal seriously with in HCI–identify, alienation, longing, hope, isolation, social participation and withdrawal, etc. Thus, it seems obvious to me that film can and should be an intellectual resource to help us make progress on issues in HCI/interaction design.

Aesthetic Understanding

Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here.

For the past two years, I used a reading in this course from Richard Eldridge’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. I dropped the reading for this time around–one of many casualties that came as a result of making room for adding Carroll’s Brillo book [On Criticism] to the syllabus.

Anyway, Eldridge had some very nice quotes about what an aesthetic understanding (= Barnard’s “understanding”; = Carroll’s “analysis”) is, which I thought I would share here, in hopes of further elucidating some of these concepts.

Since [artists'] problem situations, and especially problem situations of artistic work, can be complex, since the action of artistic making is frequently temporally extended, and since thoughts, reasons, plans, intentions, and so forth of the agent [i.e., artist] are formed out of publicly intelligible strategies, some articulated and some not, we need not and should not longer on worries about any single “real intentional cause” of the artist’s action. Any story that cogently relates details of the work and of collateral historical evidence where available to any respect of the artist’s complex problem situation may be regarded as a story that tells a truth about the work – about what it is as a product of action and about what it means.

A False Dichotomy: Critics and Aesthetic Judgments

Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here.

Every year that I teach this class, the first few weeks feature considerable skepticism about the role or legitimacy of aesthetic judgments or criticism.

Typically, the way many students think is something like this. Either critics really do somehow speak for everyone else, or beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet it is hard to believe that critics speak for everyone else, since all of the following seem to apply: critics make judgments that the population as a whole don’t agree with or accept; critics don’t even agree with themselves; it is elitist and undemocratic to have a bunch of taste police telling the rest of us what to like; art is not the sort of thing for which it is even possible to form objective judgments. Therefore, it can’t be the case that critics really do speak for everyone else, and therefore beauty must be in the eye of the beholder.

Several of you have posed some variation of this argument on the blog. One of you even demanded scientific evidence for the proposition that there can be a rational and evidentiary basis for criticism.

I think this line of reasoning is problematic, if you think more carefully about it. And it is destructive to your profession. In what follows, I will argue my position in more detail.

On Peer Reviewing Argument Papers in HCI

Here is my thesis, so if you skip the rest of this post, you at least know what I want to say: if you peer review an “argument” paper for HCI this year (also known as an essay), whether or not you agree with it doesn’t matter very much. The ability of an essay to compel agreement is far lower than, say, that of a scientific report. And thus the contribution of an essay can’t inhere in its ability to compel agreement; it must be elsewhere. In this post, I define what an essay is and does; I argue that constructive disagreement is at the heart of the essay and humanistic dialogic methodologies in general; and finally I reject and then propose some norms for evaluating argument/essay paper submitted to HCI venues.

I begin with the essay itself. Essays are a common form of discourse in which the author(s) attempt or try (hence the etymology of “essay”) to think deeply and reflectively about a problem, theory, concept, etc. That is, essays do not present themselves as offering the truth or of being correct, but rather are the product of a skilled and personal struggle with a difficult issue of interest. A significant portion of original scholarly work in the humanities takes an essay form, including philosophy, literary and other forms of criticism, and ethnography, among others.

And even a very passing familiarity with essays in any field reveals something fundamental to them: almost no one ever agrees with them (including their authors themselves some years later). I’ll share an example or two just to show what I mean.