P&J stats

nate is (unsurprisingly) the most ahem conformist ilxer and kogan is the least (tho i come a close second [i shouldn't have voted for the mekons -- i knew it.]

Mr. "obscuro" harvell turns out to be less so than doug, yancey, simon r, jane dark, chuck eddy, mark prindle, tim haslitt, and more (in that order).

Stacy Meyn takes the cake for sharing NO VOTES with ANYONE:

http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/02/critic.php?criticid=1162

Therefore Ed Condran [whoever he is], picks up the award as the most conformist critic bore of 2002 http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/02/critic.php?criticid=1223

the lower down the ranking = individualist maverick that makes up their own mind up, follows their own path.

Then we could find out who most resembles a walking Billboard.

Because they are lazy fuckwits ! who don't know about anything else - and bore people stoopid with their identikit-authentic-rock critic opinions! [I bet there are hundreds of these critic types scattered across local rags in the US.]

I have PLUMMETED from 50 points to 25!! I thought I had my most lazily mainstream year ever but not by P&J standards it seems.

& the gag is that "mainstream" for rock crit is inverse to actual "mainstream" -- i.e. the more you like what everyone else does, the lower you go.

(also could you do singles if its not too much work?)

1 THE EMINEM SHOW Eminem Web/Aftermath/Interscope
2 WEATHERED Creed Wind-up
3 NELLYVILLE Nelly Fo' Reel/Universal/UMRG
4 M!SSUNDAZTOOD Pink Arista
5 [HYBRID THEORY] Linkin Park Warner Bros.
6 O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? Soundtrack Lost Highway/Mercury/IDJMG
7 SILVER SIDE UP Nickelback Roadrunner/IDJMG
8 BRITNEY Britney Spears Jive/Zomba
9 NOW 8 Various Artists EMI/Universal/Sony/Zomba/Virgin
10 WORD OF MOUF Ludacris Disturbing Tha Peace/Def Jam South/IDJMG

Actually, this is no fair since several of those are from 2001.

http://www.billboard.com/billboard/yearend/2002/bb200_2.jsp

And the singles chart:

http://www.billboard.com/billboard/yearend/2002/hot100_2.jsp

(Obv I would think this because I'm an inveterate fence-sitter and because I got dead-centre 50 points last year so am best ha)

(Is someone who doesn't like *any* of these an 'independent thinker'? Cause I've heard most of Stacy Meyn's picks and most of them are total cack.)

maybe I'm not an official ILXer (I've got posts dating back about a year and a half, but I'm sporadic), but I placed lower than Kogan.

if its not there its not there mark.

are american critics sick? (at least the ones that voted for fucking wilco)

Will Derek Bailey ever get a lifetime achievement award in the future? - we need The Wire awards - because everyone else runs awards these days.

Sterling, I follow you on the differences with the Frank thing. I guess I don't mean to map the state of business writing onto the state of music writing, though: what I mean is more that Frank's critique of "market populism" as a concept revolved around the idea that the people caught up in it were doing a disservice to their readers -- and then when asked, like, "how do the readers relate to what's written?" he sort of brushed off the question. Whereas I found it one of the central questions raised by his critique, especially since he used it a little as a stick to beat market populism (to the extent of implying that that set of ideas held some responsibility for making people lose money).

I'm interested that you say indie modes of criticism developed underground, because this is one of the things I was thinking about earlier. Zines were without doubt a giant new development in the writer/reader interface. Was it a good route? Do you think that at present there are any similarly-new opportunities for that sort of thing that haven't been seized upon yet? (How about blogs, what influence do you think they've had? I can imagine a lot of good arguments that blogs aloow the "critical establishment" to react much more quickly to new ideas that seem to be successfully engaging people.)

Why is it supposed to be admirable for me to rank low on the P&J stats? I still think this question is worth asking. I also think it's worth asking the Ashanti fan and the Wilco fan similar questions - not about P&J stats but about their own fandom: Why is it supposed to be admirable to have different tastes from one's fellows? I mean, I'd expect that when people have different tastes from yours, you'd tend towards believing that their taste was worse than yours, rather than that they should be admired for it. (By "Ashanti fan" and "Wilco fan" here, I mean members of their prime audiences. Of course, other people can be Ashanti or Wilco fans too.)

I would admire a writer who could get the Ashanti fan and the Wilco fan and the guy who doesn't think he cares about either to ask themselves what it means socially to like Ashanti or Wilco, or to dislike them, or not to care. But whether in general I would admire a critic whose writing appeals to the Ashanti fan or the Wilco fan or the guy in the next cubicle etc., well, that would depend on what the critic writes, obviously, and what the reader does with it.

By the way, it's wrong to say that rock critics in the commercial press are writing only for other rock critics. By and large we're forbidden to write for other rock critics; at least, we're forbidden to write about other rock critics or about their ideas. This is one reason that rock criticism is becoming so intellectually worthless.

It'd be naive of me to say that readers simply get the rock criticism that they deserve, since I know that the readers aren't aware of all the choices available to them, that they're not presented with an interesting array of choices, that publishers and distributors can do things to control the market in defiance of consumer wishes, and so forth. Nonetheless, commercial rock criticism has something to do with what readers want. In fact, I do think that readers get the rock criticism they want, even if it turns out they don't want it. Reasons why the guy in the next cubicle might not like rock criticism are: (1) Conveying music is impossible to do in writing, and describing music is difficult and unsatisfactory: the writer has little choice but to resort to vague ("rock") or esoteric ("dark metal") genre names and to make cross references to other musicians, which the general reader often finds incomprehensible. The guy in the next cubicle gripes about this. But (2) he pretty much refuses to accept anything but description, albeit description that's augmented here and there with a hero-or-villain story in which the performer under review is championed for being daringly different or reviled for being conformist. The guy in the next cubicle rejects anything else. Look even at the response here in ILx when Chuck occasionally goes out on a limb and prints something "personal" by Jessica Grose or Amy Phillips. And if rock critics were to do in the official prints what we do here, which is to play with music and joke about it and use it to fight each other and to flirt with each other etc., not only would the guy in the next cubicle object (even though he probably does the same damn thing himself, among friends), so would a lot of you. (The guy in the cubicle does accept artist profiles and wisecrack-laden news 'n' notes, but those aren't expected to be criticism - though at this point the news 'n' notes in Rolling Stone are far more worth reading than the record reviews.)

I'm convinced I'm the only person in the world who understands Kuhn. Briefly, the way you and Nabitsuh are using the word "paradigm" isn't the way that Kuhn used it, which is fine, since he was applying it to the evolution of scientific ideas, whereas you're applying it to very different subjects. For Kuhn, a paradigm can be something like the problems in the back of a physics text (once you've solved one, you use this as a paradigm for how to solve similar problems), or it can be something like Newton's concept of motion (which is simply movement of an object through space). For paradigms to be reigning paradigms, everyone in the field has to share them, which means that everyone has to solve similar problems and have the same concept. If you're an Aristotelian, you think that a man being restored from sickness to health is analogous to a rock falling towards its place in the center of the universe and to fire seeking its place in the periphery and to an acorn growing into a tree, and that all are examples of "motion," which is a change in quality, asymmetric change from an initial state to a final state. And if this is what you believe, you simply can't do Newtonian science. Anyway, there are no such reigning paradigms in rock criticism. In rock criticism you've got habits and styles that are shared by some people, and that's it. I don't mind you or Nabitsuh calling these "paradigms," just bear in mind that these have nothing to do with Kuhn's model of scientific development, that I can see, and you're not going to get Kuhnian "paradigm shifts." You simply can't come up with a history where, let's say, everyone in rock criticism is modeling themselves after Ralph Gleason and then, because of anamolies and inconsistencies that the Gleason paradigms can't eliminate, people develop new Meltzerian paradigms that entirely replace the old.

Also, in "normal science" there's plenty of room for play; the play simply models itself on the standard paradigms, that's all. Sorry to be so pedantic. I'll do a Kuhn thread someday.

But basically it goes like this: everyone in the 90s goes nuts about the idea that (this is Frank summarizing sarcastically) "in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent . . . they manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want." In other words, sort of what you were just saying about people getting the product they want.

Frank's arguments against this are pretty much the ones you'd expect: that markets are not perfect expressions of democratic desires, that they're skewed and manipulated not only by loads of systemic things but, by definition, also by actual elites who have the capital or power to skew and manipulate them. These elites, Frank says, love market populism more than anyone, because it serves as a weapon: "Since markets express the will of the people, virtually any criticism of business could be described as an act of 'elitism' arising out of despicable contempt for the common man. According to market populism, elites are not those who, say, watch sporting events from a skybox. . . . No, elitists are the people on the other side of the equation: the labor-unionists and Keynesians who believe that society can be organized in any way other than the market way."

And of course Frank notes that at the end of this 90s period of hooray hooray for the common man and the everyday entrepreneur beating out snobby old-guard elitist with his fascinating market-approved dot-com concept, after all the day-traders and the mid-20s CEOs and the "market belongs to you!" talk, what happened? The average "you" was in fact worse off, and the actual elites were doing great.

(The reason I talked about this w/r/t criticism is that Frank's books are based on reading, well, lots of business and management literature: they're critiques of prevailing ideas in that realm, sort of like this discussion critiques prevailing ideas and conceptual tools in music writing. Frank's great at calling bullshit on the bad ideas, and I really wanted to know ... you know, all the crap about readers and if they believed the bad ideas and why and etc.)

Oh and Frank -- I hate to say it, working for his publisher and all, but I think Kuhn long ago lost all claim to the meanings of the word "paradigm" and the term "paradigm shift." I'm not sure how sad I am about that -- I would say that flexing the meaning makes it more useful in other things, but then I suppose we could just talk about "trends in thought," etc.

I wuz trying to play fuller to N's kuhn, and assumed given who publishes fuller's book that he'd catch the jibe:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13944.ctl

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000C138A-D70A-1C73-9B81809EC588EF21

Beyond all the macroeconomic stuff, even if markets worked in the way that classical economicists wished, they still wouldn't guarantee populism, based as they are on one dollar one vote.

"Paradigm was a perfectly good word, until I messed it up," said Kuhn in an interview shortly before his death. Before Kuhn, "paradigm" was just another word like "example" or "model," and like those words could be used to refer to something precise or something vague, as needed. The trouble now isn't that people are simply non-Kuhnian in their usage, but that they're pseudo-Kuhnian, using the word to evoke the idea of great conceptual shifts à la Copernicus when all they're really saying is that, e.g., people are using digital samplers more than they used to, and this conflicts with some long-dead high-school English teacher's idea of creativity. So that's why I try to avoid using the word when talking about non-Copernicuses.

Ha, Sterling: long ago I tried to pimp the Fuller book to Mark S on here, and he said something like "oh I don't care less who Fuller is, whoever he is he doesn't understand Kuhn properly."

Sterling, what you said about "market populism" as a paradigm versus "current rockcrit" as a paradigm is funny becase -- this isn't going to make any sense but whatever -- Fuller is actually sort of talking about let's call it "Kuhnianism" itself as a destructive model/trend/paradigm (yes there's a funny paradoxical twist to this but not really), by the same sort of inertia, I think, by which you're saying rockcrit model/paradigm has gotten that way. (As opposed to something like market populism, yeah, which in the 90s was sort of an active celebrated trend on the upswing, absolutely, not some calcified entrenched old way of thinking. It billed itself as revolutionary and was thus, I imagine The Other Frank might say, all the more powerful/dangerous.)

Like I said to nabisco ages ago on another thread -- "you think that by explaining the problem you've solved it when in fact you've only compounded it": the general methodology of examining why things are the way they are (but not where they're going and what pushes and pulls on and within them) leads, i think, only to panglossianism.

& kuhn too coz yr. either some rebel out to re-establish the foundations of human knowledge (and 99% of the time therefore to be laughed off) or yr. just another cog. There's no inbetween. you can see this methodology in the scientific american review where if fuller doesn't like the way things are, then he must be asking us to believe in MENTALISM and RAINING FROGS -- WHERE DOES THE MADNESS END I ASK YOU!?

you think that by explaining a problem you've solved it when in fact you've only compounded it.

I don't see Kuhn as explaining a problem, any more than I see Darwin as explaining a problem or Einstein as explaining a problem. How are the theories of natural selection and relativity descriptions of problems? (Kuhn did see problems in philosophy of science and history of science, and he came up with what he thought were solutions to the problems, though his solution became a problem for the former, since I don't see how once you accept Kuhn you can even do philosophy of science. Of course there's no law that people have to accept Kuhn, but if they don't, they ought to at least try to understand him and to come up with alternatives.)

*(this is true even if that was sterling not fuller**)

**(i assume i had only just read a review of the fuller book nabs, as i totally cd not recall it when you mentioned it back there, let alone my ahem robust response)

I don't want to argue over kuhn (coz i'm not up to it) but just to note that in the above quote frank defines exactly what fuller dislikes about kuhn -- that he defines interesting/important problems out of existence.8

Not possible. That's not how the word is used anymore. No one who speaks of a "paradigm shift" is using the word to refer to a particular model or example - instead, that person is talking about a fundamental, overall change in the assumptions, models, theories, and practices of an entire field or profession or - I don't know - all of Western Civilization or something. Now, a nonscientific endeavor can undergo fundamental shifts, but to call such a shift a "paradigm shift" is to assert something that is almost never true: that the field once used an old set of assumptions, models, theories, and practices and that this set is being displaced by another set of assumptions, models, theories, and practices that is incompatible with the first. I just don't see how you can have a paradigm shift in a field that was never ruled by a particular paradigm ("paradigm" in the sense not of a model but of a set of related assumptions, models, theories, and practices), a field where people never agreed on their basic assumptions in the first place. And sure, you can use "paradigm" without referring to "reigning paradigms" and "paradigm shifts," but those latter usages are so common that you'll evoke them in the reader no matter what you intend.

Unfortunately, "paradigm" has become a buzz word used to make the writer and reader feel that they're engaged in great things, doing battle against the massed forces of convention by shifting the very ground on which the conventions stand. This impulse is understandable, and maybe inspires some enthusiastic young people to start thinking about cultural assumptions and so forth. But if they (and we) just leave it at that - "We are undergoing a sea change, and aren't we grand!" - it never gets beyond posturing. And the problem isn't just that they're being pseudo-Kuhnian, but that they're being unintentionally anti-Kuhnian - because they're trying to flee the past, while Kuhn was trying to understand it. He wanted to understand discarded modes of thought, and he felt that to do so required that we learn the old modes as if we were learning a lost language, some of whose terms can't be understood from the perspective of the new modes that replaced the old. And so the historian has to work to understand on its own terms something that's now old and unfamiliar. And Kuhn, in trying to understand how old modes evolved into new ones, insisted that we could not do so by thinking of the old modes as precursors to the new. And he further insisted that we could not understand how people came up with new ideas if we treated their initial modifications and departures from the old modes as moving towards the new modes that they subsequently came up with. Now, I just don't see many people using the phrase "paradigm shift" to alert themselves to the fact that they need to suspend their new mode of thought in trying to understand an old "paradigm," or using it to remind themselves that the old cannot be understood as prelude to the new. In fact, I don't see much interest in the old at all.

(As I recall Asimov did a lovely job of capturing what yr. talking about too, in is his essays on phlogiston -- tho of course I haven't read those since jr. high or so.)

For example, historically the law of theft relied on the paradigm form of theft as 'theft as taking' [actually, it's traced back to Ancient Greece where the paradigm form of manifest criminality/theft was taking at night. AT NIGHT! And if you were thieved from at night, as long as you shouted out, then you could administer justice by death, legally, on the spot] as the central operative law. What the law found as it shifted into the emergence of Organised Police, legal positivism, Legalism's rise was that there were an abundance of activities which didn't fit within the paradigm form of theft: finding, carrying off whilst already in possession etc. As the Criminal Law became more organised and centralised (the disappearance of the moving Circuit Court in England, the police as I said) we find that the Common Law precedents which were used to help make finding, carrying away (which they found 'wrong' but 'outwith' the paradigm) etc fit - these were boundled up into a new paradigm (here's the shift) where Law was rules: legislation, statutes, etc. (And actually, interestingly enough, this drawing up of the law of theft helped recognise another paradigm shift: theft as taking became theft as appropriation.)

This is how I understand paradigm shifts. Now, please.]

And yeah, Kuhn was mentioned.

So Fletcher is trying to be Kuhnian, but I don't know enough about law to know if the shift he's describing is Kuhnian. I think not, and this is why: Law as Rules doesn't put Law as Paradigms out of business. The two aren't incompatible. The former merely organizes the latter, tries to get everyone more-or-less using the same paradigms. Even when "theft" is defined by statute, you still have to decide how to apply the term as so defined, and these decisions are made in particular cases, some of the cases, if they're significant enough, becoming (exemplar-type) paradigms! "Precedent" is what judges call their paradigms. Not to say that historically the bundling up into legislation etc. wasn't a Big Thing; it's just not a Kuhnian (matrix-type) paradigm shift.

Actually, the change in the definition of "theft" is closer to what Kuhn had in mind, though I still doubt that it's enough of a shift; "appropriation" is an extension of the idea of "taking," not a change in it (I believe).

Another side note: Kuhn used "paradigm" (meaning "exemplar") to emphasize that scientists followed models not rules, hence science was an analogical not a methodical activity (so, there's no general scientific method, and no need to write philosophical papers detailing that [nonexistent] method) - which seems right, except that "following a model" and "following a rule" aren't all that easy to differentiate. The former allows for more variation and more creativity, I guess, since the assumption is that you can follow a model in this or that way but that you follow a rule whole or not at all - but then, don't you follow rules on the basis of how you or others had previously followed them, these previous instances being models of how to follow them? It's good to think of "model" and "rule" as comparative terms (like "loud" and "soft") rather than as either-or dichotomies (like an on-off switch). It's also good to think of "comparative" and "either-or" as comparative terms rather than as...

[Tendrils of smoke start to waft from computer.]

But mainly, I wanted to point out that it is posible to begin to methodoligize metaphorical thinking. Better to view rules and models as universals and specifics, passing into one another.

mathematical analysis of statistical data bridging demography and anthropology.

models pass into rules through accumulation of followers & generalization of their experience?

"We may begin by remarking that the method of the differential calculus shows on the face of it that it was not invented and constructed for its own sake. Not only was it not invented for its own sake as another mode of analytical procedure; on the contrary, the arbitrary omission of terms arising from the expansion of a function is absolutely contrary to all mathematical principles, it being arbitrary in the sense that the whole of this development is nevertheless assumed to belong completely to the matter in hand, this being regarded as the difference between the developed function of a variable (after this has been given the form of a binomial) and the original function. The need for such a mode of procedure and the lack of any internal justification at once suggest that the origin and foundation must lie elsewhere. It happens in other sciences too, that what is placed at the beginning of a science as its elements and from which the principles of the science are supposed to be derived is not self-evident, and that it is rather in the sequel that the raison d'étre and proof of those elements is to be found. The course of events in the history of the differential calculus makes it plain that the matter had its origin mainly in the various so-called tangential methods, in what could be considered ingenious devices; it was only later that mathematicians reflected on the nature of the method after it had been extended to other objects, and reduced it to abstract formulae which they then also attempted to raise to the status of principle."

...

At first, then, model as such appears in opposition to rule; but model is itself a rule, a purely self-related determinateness distinct from the determinateness of its other, from rule as such. But model is not only a rule; it is the truth of rule itself, the latter having exhibited its own transition into model. Model, on the other hand, is in its truth the externality which is no longer indifferent but has returned into itself. It is thus rule itself in such a manner that apart from this determination there would no longer be any rule as such. The positing of the totality requires the double transition, not only of the one determinateness into its other, but equally the transition of this other, its return, into the first. The first transition yields the identity of both, but at first only in itself or in principle; rule is contained in model, but this is still a one-sided determinateness. That the converse is equally true, namely, that model is contained in rule and is equally only a sublated determinateness, this results from the second transition-the return into the first determinateness. This observation on the necessity of the double transition is of great importance throughout the whole compass of scientific method.

Suggestions: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't the only or necessarily the best thing he wrote. My favorite, actually, esp. if you don't have much free time, is Section 4 of a paper called "Revisiting Planck," which was originally published in 1984 in some magazine called HSPS (14[2]: 231-52) but which he reprinted as the Afterword to the second edition (i.e., U. of Chicago rather than Oxford) of Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (which may be great itself, but I didn't read much of it, since I don't understand the mathematical symbols). I also recommend the brief essay "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" which is the first piece in The Road Since Structure and shows clearly what he means by "incommensurability" - and also puts his Planck idea into laymen's terms. And the Kepler chapter in The Copernican Revolution is excellent for showing how a great thinker wasn't being irrational or unscientific in believing in stuff that we now tend to think of as hooey.

Better to view rules and models as universals and specifics, passing into one another.

I don't know what you mean, but I think I disagree. I don't think "universals vs. specifics" is relevant to this. The analogy doesn't hold, that rules are like universals and that models are like specifics. If something's a model, then by definition it can be generalized (otherwise it wouldn't model anything). Kuhn is contrasting two different ways of generalizing, by rules or by resemblance. His point is that different things can be modeled on a model in different ways: so he's saying that we know that a duck is a duck not (1) if it has specific characteristics that define it in every case as a duck (= rule following), but rather (2) if it resembles something else that's called a duck (= using a model, and there's no decision in advance as to what way the duck has to resemble other ducks). Kuhn is following Wittgenstein's idea that (for instance) a game has to have some things in common with some other games, but that it needn't necessarily have anything in common with all other games. Whereas following a rule implies that it would. But what I'm getting at is that you can say that following a model is like following a rule ("Rule Number One: Do it like this, or like something like it, in some way or another") and that rules always involve modeling (that is, there's no rule for how to apply the rule, unless of course you want to say that "apply it more or less like this, but in different circumstances" is a rule)[smoke is now pouring out of the computer].

A rule as a generalization of models, appearing in the guise of an exemplary model. (the negation is negated). It is not that scientists more follow rules or more follow models but the systemization of science is the practice of developing both as aspects of knowledge in the process of becoming.

the bakhtin piece was the bhangra one for hyperdub.