By Max Grüntgens, Dominik Kasper, Thomas Kollatz
The following brief outline will give an etymology-driven view on the the terms critique, method and annotation based on theories by several paradigmatic philosophers. The outline will conclude with a brief discussion of different views on text. It also may be worthwhile to emphasize that the philosophers, the theories, and the methodologies mentioned below are regarded as paradigmatic, and therefore as worthwhile and established starting points.
Etymologically, The term critical derives from Ancient Greek κρίνειν (krinein), meaning “to discern, to decide, to estimate, to judge”.
As a technical term, it was incorporated into European languages via French during the so called Age of Enlightenment. During the Scholastic and the Enlightenment the term was generally linked to a reflection of methodology. Following Descartes, the term is equated with a (deep) analysis, and thus closely connected to the method of (description through) decomposition and to the concept of the individual cogitio (the thinking self) regarded as the only possibly basis of secure knowledge.
Kant follows up on Descartes’ absolute critique and subsequently sharpens the term as a trancendental critique. Transcendental critique following Kant tries to delimit reason’s fundamental substructures, its capabilities, as well as its limitations: „Was sind die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Erkenntnis?“ – What are the (pre)conditions of our possibility of gaining knowledge?
Kant highlights the pervasiveness of this central, underlying critical question by asking three questions derived from it and one concerned with a wider “meta”-context:
Following these questions, Kant first radically grounds Humanity’s self-image and curtails its self-aggrandisement:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 161–2)
Following, Kant states that all of human perception and knowledge is created within the mental as well as bodily boundaries of the individual human being: “Kant […] thus conclude[s] that all of our knowledge is restricted to the way in which the world necessarily appears to creatures like us – although we also remain free to think of the world in other ways, and even must do so for the purposes of morality.” (Guyer, 33). Kant thus deconstructs a naively natural realism and a copy or correspondence theory of perception and knowledge. One the one hand, he de-centers the mode of knowledge production, while on the other hand, he centers the individual as the sole actor in regard to the production of knowledge as well as morals. Accordingly, Kant’s critical epistemology is always concentrated on morality.
Modern usages of the term critique connect in many ways to Kant’s foundation by also focusing on the destruction of groundless orientations (e.g. principles, theories), on the construction of grounded orientations, and by simultaneously emphasizing that critique is not separable from, but irresolvably intertwined with morality. Existentialist philosophers furthermore strongly emphasized that the Human being is forced to act; that “the Human being is doomed to be free. Convicted because he did not create himself, and yet free because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” (Sartre, 155)
As alluded above, the word critical is also related to the word κρίσις (crisis). The term critical may thus generate an ambiguous field of discourse ranging between one acting critically and one’s situation being critical. Being critical may thus refer to a practice as being executed in a decisive way, or as taking a decisive point of view. Or it may refer to a situation as being decisive in regard to the future derived from it. A context – either imagined as a situation or as an action – may thus be regarded as critical, when an individual finds itself in an existential situation, a situation in which one finds oneself not on one’s own volition and which forces one to act on one’s own responsibility (Stegmaier, 58).
Critique thus always revolves about the individual. It forces us to be absolutely conscious about our individual interlinkage in our own present, to accept our current present as a decisive past of a future present, and to choose; to take thoughtful action, because inaction means acting as well (Luhmann, 203–8, 211).
From the historical background hinted at above the Critical Theory of M. Horkheimer’s and T.W. Adorno’s Frankfurter Schule merged the axioms and the practical, worldly orientation of Marx’s and Engel’s historical materialism with a critique put up against traditional theory and the neopositivist movement in particular, that was regarded as negating the individual and furthering totalitarianism through its scientistic reductionism and its focus on value-freedom (Wertfreiheit). Critical theory’s rejection of value-freedom in the sciences (Wissenschaften), as put by Horkheimer, reads as follows: “Theories arise from the interests of humans. […] Depending on what torments us in the world and what we want to change, the picture that we make of it will shape itself” (GS 2, 434). For this reason, CT requires in return to take the Indiviual as well as societal embeddedness of the sciences seriously and to critically ascertain and to resolve the distortions effective in individual knowledge production and scientific institutions.
As depicted above, critique, criticality, and crisis span a diverse and modulating field of semantic and discursive tension. Through time, different approaches highlighted different areas within this field, vacillating between a more theoretical and a more practical focus. Key, however, to all approaches was and is that a truly critical outlook has to acknowledge …
Derives etymologically from greek meta “towards” and hodos “the way”, therefore meaning “the way towards s.th.” In Latin, we find the analogously coined equivalents in “via, regula” (regō + instr. Suffix -ula; cp. gr. kanon). Both etymologies connect to the semantic field of movement and emphasize that a method, like a path, is generated through constant usage.
The Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie (876) defines a method as “a process that is planned according to means and purposes, leading to technical skill in solving theoretical and practical tasks.” As a rule-based process a method is also related to an algorithm.
Accordingly, method is placed in a semantic space ranging from “giving direction (of view, of motion)” over “providing a step-by-step manual” to “evaluating, measuring (an outcome)”.
In the context of critique and theories, a method may be useful to either deconstruct an established theory, or to generate a new one through critical means. Two foundational types of method are given by Leibniz that may be instrumental in an critical approach:
Synthesis occurs when, starting with the principles, we derive doctrines and tasks through composition. […] Analysis, on the other hand, occurs when we seek the principles, with the help of which [said doctrines or tasks] become demonstrable or solvable, based on a given conclusion or a given task. (Leibniz, 194, citation follows Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, vol. 2, 877)
The analytic method tries to arrive at axiomatic or at least basic elements as foundational building blocks through the means of decomposition, abstraction, set theory, (materialistic) reduction, and more.
The synthetic method tries to establish complex structures, e.g. higher methods or theories, by means of composition and relating of basic elements to each other to form more complex higher order structures.
Both methods may be joined in a ouroboros, a hermeneutic spiral, or a feedback loop, where each method channels its output or outputs into the opposing method to either be de-structured or synthesized.
Other methods derived from the more protoypical methods above may be found throughout the history of philosophy. For the most part, all of these methods share a structured approach that is lucidly formulated and henceforth allows a controlled application to a specific set of problems. Some examples are:
Etymologically, the term annotation derives from the latin verbs annotо̄ & adnotо̄. The early form adnotо̄ — composed of the preposition ad, engl. to, towards something, and of the verb notо̄, eng. to mark, to attach a sign — points to an underlying correlation: to attach signs to something in order to make a statement about something. Furthermore, notо̄ shows a close connection to nо̄tus & nо̄scо̄, engl. “known, experienced, understood”. Notо̄ thus always refers back to a necessarily preceding yet ungraspable change of internal subjective state. After this stroll through etymology, one may arrive at a maxim like the following:
By means of the praxis of annotating, the annotating subject (un)consciously establishes a link between a perceivable as well as intelligible object and a specific proposition that relates something the subject has formerly (un)consciously established as subjectively meaningful.
If we see annotating from an abstract, top down perspective, we may regard it as the combined practice of “distinction” and “indication”. Subsequently, we may regard scholarly annotation as a subtype of a more common type of foundational knowledge production, inherent in all living things. Thus, common annotation as well as scholarly annotation is always integrated in operations of perception and knowledge production in the context of specific systems, e.g. in individual consciousnesses as well as in societies, that have the reproduction of their respective system as their basic intention (Luhmann, 60–1, 71).
The terminology is “distinction” and “indication”. Why should one differentiate, if one does not want to designate one instead of the other? Distinction is a limit, indication a difference. You then have two sides, but with the proviso that you can not use both at the same time, because then the distinction would be meaningless. (Luhmann, 71)
The fundamental prerequisite to be able to annotate an object is that one must have already been able to differentiate this object as a kind of foreground from a kind of background, and, during the same gesture, must have been able to indicate this object as the object that’s currently important. In most cases this kind of differentiation and indication is done unconsciously and based on learned cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken) of perception, sensory processing, and knowledge production (Luhmann, 60, 74–8).
As seen in the two aspects above, annotation – as its most simple form of perception – is always geared towards the distinction of a system (the observing self) from the environment (the world), hence towards different corresponding forms of objects as foreground-background pairs.
When reading, writing, speaking, or using other cultural techniques we always have at least an audience of one: ourselves. Because we ourselves are our first and foremost audience, everything we think and do is done in relation to our situatedness. Consequently, if we annotate a passage within a text, we annotate because we find any kind of purpose in this operation at this specific point in time.
As stated above the operation of annotation is always situated in a horizon of purpose. This purpose, however, doesn’t have to be purpose- or meaningful in a scientific oder scholarly way, it just has to be at least compatible as a connecting factor for future operations (“Anschlussfähigkeit”, Luhmann). Thus to be able to clearly see what is particularly compatible within a specific scholarly system one would have to try to observe the theoretical architecture, the structural load, and other bounding factors of said system; this knowledge may help to operate in a deliberately purposeful way (see also the next point below).
The foundation of every view is the subjective. Subjective in this context is regarded in its Latin sense as “that which is underlying (all experience)”. Seen from the perspective of phenomenology, human beings are situated within bounds that may never be fully transcended.
[Phenomenology is thus in the mode of] discovering the unexpected horizons within which the real finds itself, which is thus captured by the representative thinking, but also from the concrete, pre-predicative life, starting from the body (innocent), starting from the culture (less innocent perhaps). Hands reach, turning of the head, speaking a language, [all] being the “sedimentation” of a story - all this transcendentally requires contemplation and contemplated. In demonstrating that consciousness and the represented being emerge from an unrepresentable “context,” Husserl has cast doubt on the place of truth in representation. […] The ideas that transcend consciousness can not be separated from their genesis in through-and-through temporal consciousness. (Levinas, cited following Stegmaier, 38–9, see also 44–6)
In phenomenology these bounds are not seen as a mere limitation, divorcing human being from a hypothetical thing-in-itself, but as necessary constituents that only just make epistemic processes possible.
The sociologist Luhmann incorporates elements of this phenomenological approach when he thinks of human consciousness as an observing system that is necessarily operationally closed in itself. Every input a system may gain is not just copied into the system, it is re-created within the system, and thus within the system’s intrinsic operational bounds.
When one introduces the observer, the speaker or the one to whom something is attributable, one relativizes the ontology. in fact, one must always carry the thought of an observer when one wants to say what the case is, so one must always observe an observer, name an observer, designate a system reference when making statements about the world. […] We now always have to deal with a description of the world, which filters out the presentation of the facts including purposes, readiness to act and the like by the reference to an observer. There is always the question of who says that and who does it and from what system the world is seen so and not otherwise. (Luhmann, 134)
In contemporary phenomenological thought in general and in Luhmann’s systems theory in particular “there is no view from nowhere” (Zahavi, 12).
The search for objectivity is […] laudable, but we should’nt forget that any objectivity, any explanation, […] theoretical modelling, presupposes the first-person perspective as its precondition. […] [Every science is] a cultural formation. It is knowledge that is shared by a community of experiencing subjects and which presupposes a triangulation of points of view or perspectives. This is also why the ususal opposition of first-person vs. third-person accounts is misleading. It makes us forget that third-person scientific accounts are accomplished and generated by a community of conscious [first-person] subjects. […] [The 3P-view] is a view we can adopt on the world. Science [however] has its roots in the lifeworld, […] [in] the prescientific sphere, and is performed by embodied and embedded subjects. (Zahavi, 53–4)
Thus, a central prerequisite that makes this phenomenological take on experience and knowledge feasible and useful is the incorporation of a explicit system reference, e.g. in form of distinct meta information about the annotating scholar, her epistemological makeup, her historical biography, and her societal and institutional involvement.
This contingency is the necessary (pre)condition of our possibility to operate. It may be worthwhile to emphasize that – in the context of phenomenology and systems theory – there is no possibility to critically (deeply) reflect on or question this interprenetration (Luhmann, 257) or traces (Derrida, ) while in actu, in operation, in the process itself, because it is underlying the possibility of any operation.
The system always thinks of its beginning from the middle. If it’s complex enough, it can ask the question of how it all started. […] [That is,] structures are only real when used. […] There is only reality as operating itself. […] There are not structures and processes, but systems are formed by the type of operation with which they are realized. What then becomes necessary, remembered, reused, or unused to structures depends on invoking and retrieving operations in that system. (Luhmann, 76, 316)
However, one may – and should – halt specific operations, take a point of view of “observing the observer”, a.k.a. change the system reference, and think about the (pre)conditions for the point of view of observation one was in when last in operation.
An objectively correct ‘one-size-fits-all’ type of Annotation does not exist. “Any understanding of reality is by definition perspectival. Effacing our perspective does not bring us any closer to the world. It merely prevents us from understanding anything at all.” (Zahavi, 28) Thus every instantiation of Annotation as operation in practice ties in with a discursive web of prior Annotations.
When we use the term text, we often do so in a pre-critical way. We don’t question what a text is, may be, or how distinctively we might perceive texts phenomenologically. A lot of paradigmatic thinkers, however, have put out distinct concepts of what a text might be. Following, I want to give a short overview of three approaches.
Lotman’s approach draws onto critical approaches layed out above. He thinks of text as its own system of signs that is operationally closed off from the so called “real world”; as “secondary modelling systems”. For Lotman, text is not reducable to actual written records alone. He incorporates every asthetic sign system into his coinage of “text”. Consequently, Lotman employs a fluid model of “text” and imagines central textual attributes like “demarcation” (Abgegrenztheit) and “structure” (Strukturalität) as variable. (Kammer, Lüdeke, 23–5)
Central to Lotman are a text’s embeddedness into processes of communication (Lotman, 26). Text-external relations are seen as “the ratio of the set of elements fixed in the text to the set of elements from which the selection of a particular element used was made.” (Lotman, 26–7)
Another central concern of Lotman related to structuralism is the relation of invariants and isomorphisms. According to him, “abstract texts” like named text groups or era classifications may be constructed by describing the system of its invariant and variant rules and isomorphic structures (Lotman, 33). Annotation methods may be used to explicate these isomorphic structures and a text genus’s variants and invariants.
Barthes emphasizes constructivist approaches to text. “The Text is a methodological field. […] The work rests in the hand, the text rests in the language.” (Barthes, 42) Barthes thus emphasizes the processual, performative aspects of a text and the necessity of active engagement with a text, which are both needed to constitute the text: “The text only manifests itself in the process of work, in the process of production.” (Barthes, 42)
Martens – following Mukařovský – has a constructivist view on the text as well. Mukařovský distinguishes between the text as material artefact and a corresponding aesthetic object that is instantiated within the reader’s mind. This instance is “reflex and correlate” of the reader’s consciousness (Kammer, Lüdeke, 92). Martens also emphasizes the performative aspects of text dependent on the reader’s consciousness: “[Text] is always on the move, never fully fixable from the point of view of the recipient” (Martens, 99). At the same time, Martens points to the pragmatics of textual production and accordingly, opens a new perspective on the materiality of texts (Martens, 103).
Modern theories of text aim for a complex model of text in regard not only to the internal relations of its constituent elements, but also in regard to the performativity and processuality in the context of the reader’s consciousness and to the pragmatics of the cultural context. All these approaches locate texts between stasis and dynamism (Martens, 105), oftentimes most ephemerally:
It is only a complex concept of text – that grasps the interplay of stability and unbounded movement of syntagmatic coherence and paradigmatic polyvalence – that can do justice to the artful character of text. (Martens, 107)
The number of possible goals of an annotation practice, are in a direct relationship to the potential granularity of an object. What levels of granularity are there to annotate resources and what exactly is of interest?
Often in texts one will find:
Images are either pixel coordinate systems for raster graphics or vector coordinate systems for vector graphics. In the digital context, the layers of a file system and the areas of a file (head, body) can also represent possible layers of granularity. In a certain sense, granularity represents the coordinate system in which the annotation can be spatially located in relation to its object and in relation to other annotations.
The query language for XML-DAten (files and databases)
Code Examples: The data used in the slides of 2017, 2018, 2019 are taken from the academy projects PROPYLÄEN. Forschungsplattform zu Goethes Biographica and Deutsche Inschriften Online or are under a free license.