Engineering Beauty

The fourth and most understandable error we made...was to have turned over all aspects of freeway route selection and design to the engineering profession. Of course, engineering is an absolutely necessary element in the road-building process. But engineering proficiency...is not all that is required. ... Freeways do not exist apart from the world. ...even the Division of Highways recognizes the fact that values of a sort that do not lend themselves to narrow economic analysis are important. ... These "community" values have been ignored partly, perhaps, because of policy, but to a much greater extent because the typical civil engineer is equipped neither by talent, training, or sympathy to evaluate them. (106)

William Bronson
How to Kill a Golden State (1968)

Here is one of those expansive and vexing social problems of which engineers↔"community" values and doctors↔people skills are merely two parochial examples. It often seems that anyone less than a Super(wo)man is bound to wreak havoc when afforded professional/specialist status in high-leverage vocations at propitious times in history. Further, "values" and "esthetic considerations" (106) introduce into any such discourse myriad intractible obstacles which promise to enforce a race to the bottom where the best ideas are compromised away. By steering clear of such procedural obstacles, the narrow technocratic consensus internal to a rigorous and specialized field such as engineering can be implemented rapidly; but of course rapid implementation tonedeaf to the bigger picture can be particularly disastrous.

Hence factors which "do not lend themselves to narrow economic analysis" must not be confused for factors which do not manifest in the economic sphere; but what, then, IS the role and value of such analysis if even those who perform, trumpet, and rely upon it readily concede that it is significantly incomplete?

Of all the professional disciplines we might call upon for judgments of a non-quantitative nature, the last one, in my book, would be engineering. (106)

Asking the Division of Highways to view freeways as "works of art" is roughly comparable to asking the neophytes of St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park to design the Oroville Dam." (107)

Anecdotally this is a view of Engineers which even I've heard before. It probably is not misplaced. The error trap here, rather, is to minimize the extent to which this is not an Engineering or a Medical problem but a Human problem. The panoply of intellectual and personal assets that would enable a technocrat to achieve balanced success is quite exceptional. Shit, even artists don't seem to display much aesthetic sense; in fact as they've become more conscious of themselves as a distinct societal group, the society and the group alike have only become more adept at making end runs around aesthetics.

What are the possible solutions, if there are any?

Boris Pushkarev, the distinguished architect, proposed...a general approach to the over-all design control problem to which I heartily subscribe. "A highway engineer cannot be a regional planner and an architect at once, but regional planners, economists, sculptors, graphic designers, psychologists, biologists and geologists can work together with the engineer in visual coordination teams to integrate the freeway plan with the over-all development plan of the urbanized landscape, and to make the freeway an enduring work of beauty." (107)

Sure they can...this was the 1960s after all. This is, like the rest of the issues dredged up here, a broader human problem which has probably been studied (to the extent possible, of course) by a broader academic contingent. And of course I have often been skeptical of such collaboration in my own bailywick, though ultimately that is not so much a question of essential value as one of process determining results. To wit, is there any doubt that the hypothetical ideal solution is in fact for the engineers to be renaissance (wo)men? And if it has been purely hypothetical and ideal throughout the Industrial era, does Post-Industrial automation and the unplanned obsolescence of the laborer not in fact justify, perhaps eventually enforce a degree of selectivity which was unthinkable before but which threatens, in fact, to become not just possible but necessary?

This (strictly ideal) solution avoids the friction that inevitably arises in the course of the type of collaboration WB and Pushkarev recommend here. This is, to be sure, a friction which is endemic to such enterprises and is magnified exponentially with each added team member, and this, I stand convinced, regardless of how high- or low-functioning the team ultimately proves to be.

Against this proposal is, above all, the difficulty of implementing an effective mechanism of selection at each stage of academic and professional development. The very concept of renaissance (wo)man has long since been thoroughly and irrevocably coopted by the college admission process, and so, as every applicant seems to be one, so none of them seem that way. And again, the introduction of squishier criteria rooted in values, aesthetics, etc., the very point of the whole discussion here, is itself a great source of social friction; in fact, perhaps THE greatest.

[from a notebook, 2017]

Détourn or Deform?

"A Maximum of Openness: Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Karen Kurczynski"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 195

JdJ: ... If you look at it, you can see that I printed it in the smallest font possible so that no one could read it. And it was on purpose. I was already at that moment not very happy with the guys in Drakabygget, mainly Thorsen, I must say. The Drakabygget people were making détournements of articles of mine, such as "Gog and Magog," in their magazine. They even did it with articles by Jorn. You could say there was a degree of faking in what they were doing. One thing that has not been mentioned is that we, the Situationists, always had an anti-copyright declaration in all the magazines. ... Of course it means that everything is permitted, but you don't expect your comrades to deform your texts as they were meant to be serious.

KK: Deform or détourn?

JdJ: Deform, I think. It's a good question.

The Art of Socializing

When I was in college, one of my professors was fond of referring to music as "The Social Art." It has also been said that an ensemble is very similar to a marriage, only among many people rather than just two. These are indeed an accurate descriptions of music, but it is something to loathe, not celebrate.

Music's inherently social and collaborative nature is overwhelmingly stifling and burdensome to its practitioners, who understandably have trouble putting aside a laundry list of non-musical personal differences: clashing personalities, personal hygiene problems, varying organizational skills, past romantic involvement, physical mannerisms, egotism, substance abuse, and even deep-seated cultural divisions of race and class can all cause an otherwise fruitful collaboration to go up in smoke (or, more likely, never happen at all).

To cite yet another well-known anecdote, "Familiarity breeds contempt." Perhaps it is evidence of how difficult it is to create truly exceptional musical products that performers and colleagues rarely last long without developing irrevocable animosity for each other (i.e. over the failure to produce such products via their collaboration). It is more likely, however, that it merely reflects this laundry list of pre-existing conditions, at least a few of which virtually all of us bring along to any collaborative endeavor.

In theory, music may indeed be "The Social Art," but in practice, it would be more aptly described as "The Art of Socializing" manifested on many different levels, a tangled mess of precarious interpersonal relationships which few people have the patience, skill, and guile to sustain for long enough periods of time to reach whatever musical goals they might have.

Is it realistic to expect people to put aside significant personal differences for the benefit of the music? Some would argue that musical success is crucially dependent on social cohesion among the collaborators. Others would quickly point out that counter examples abound throughout recent musical history. To a great extent, once you have managed to assemble the group and thrust them into action (i.e. on stage in front of other sentient beings), they will, on reflex, simply turn their attention to the task at hand no matter how glorious or dismal the offstage relationships have gotten. Where music particularly becomes "The Social Art" is where the music requires prolonged exposure, rehearsal, and study in order to realize, hence presupposing a commitment on behalf of all involved to remain engaged with these collective efforts.

In other words, familiarity among people may breed contempt, but between a performing musician and a particular piece of music, it breeds proficiency, if not artistry. This is a paradox which few musicians are able to solve (or, more likely, avoid, which can only happen out of sheer luck). Those few musicians, however, will be exceptionally able to sustain fruitful musical collaborations, and whether or not any given observer judges them to have been musically successful, they will likely have the most successful careers in every other sense.