This week I have been trying to explain to my students how empowering (for themselves and others) critical thinking, rather than criticism can be.

This has been made more than usually difficult because the course is about popular music, and the dominant mode of engagement with it in discourse is evaluative (who has or hasn’t sold out; whose music is meaningful; things that are/are not crap…all familiar tropes in music criticism, both vernacular and institutionalized). Nothing wrong with that in itself, and we all do it–at least I cannot claim otherwise. Except that criticism often does little more than reflect the socially embedded value systems of the critic (unless the critic is very, very, self-aware and reflexive); and criticism on the basis of aesthetic or even political value often works to reinforce the imbalance of cultural agency and authority that we should be problematizing. More pragmatically, such criticism doesn’t help my students to think critically about the relationships between music, culture, society, everyday life and cultural agency in specific contexts.

But Anne has inspired me this morning, not only as a teacher, but also as a research student.

Anne starts with a quote from Francis Bacon in which he says that critical thinking involves:

having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things ? and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and being a man [sic] that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.

Anne goes on to add:

By acknowledging our own contexts and making a genuine effort to understand and accomodate other paradigms and problematics, we are unable to pretend that our understandings (and technologies) are value-free or unrelated to broader relations of culture, power and history.

And that, I believe, is our responsibility and our challenge…