Richard Maltby—Mixed Economies

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 3

MIXED ECONOMIES

...

[65]

TELEVISION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD THEATRES

It is not possible to attribute the subsequent developments in the American film industry wholly to the effects of the Paramount decrees, but their influence was of greater consequence in the restructuring of the industry in the post-war period than any other single factor. By comparison, the impact of television on the studios has been exaggerated . Undoubtedly, the main reason for the decline in audience attendance over the period from 1947 to 1962 was the availability of television as an alternative form of entertainment. But during those fifteen years the methods of American production underwent a major reorganization which was only in part the consequence of falling attendance. It is more accurate to suggest that the effects of the Paramount decrees were exacerbated and accelerated by the immediate financial pressures imposed on the studios by audience defections.

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The initial decline in audience attendance in the immediate post-war period had little to do with television. After the peak attendance year of 1946, a fall to pre-war levels was perhaps to be expected, independent of other influences. That natural fall in audience numbers was aggravated by the post-war restructuring of the national economy, as wartime production resources were diverted into the manufacture of consumer goods. Returning servicemen married, started families, and acquired consumer durables, which both reduced the amount of money available for leisure-time spending and tied families to their homes. When box-office receipts began to decline in the 1947 season, there were fewer television sets in America than there were cinemas. Television, indeed, was one of the major beneficiaries of this redirection of the economy into the production of consumer goods, as the movies suffered from its concomitant concentration of financial resources on the nuclear unit, the suburban family home. The growth of television sales, television's enormous penetration of the American market in the ten years after 1948, and the nature of its content intensified the already existent tendency of the family audience to find its entertainment at home rather than going out to the movies to find it. That this tendency was, however, independent of television itself can be seen in the rise of book sales and the growth of the magazine industry in the immediate post- war period.

Most of the misconceptions about the relationship between the American film industry and the society in which it operates stem from the widespread acceptance of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. In the discussion of television's effect on audience decline this myth has been particularly important in imposing a simplistic causal relationship where in fact a much more complex process of interaction was taking place. By 1957, the "mass audience" had ceased to exist. An Opinion Research Corporation survey in that year found that only 15 per cent of the American public attended the cinema as often as once a week, and that this group accounted for 62 per cent of total admissions. But if the audience was no longer a mass, it still seemed to be socially heterogeneous. Apart from establishing that 72.2 per cent of cinema-goers were under 30, the survey failed to find significant variation in attendance on the basis of income, education or sex. However, even without precise demographic statistics to locate exactly which sections of the audience stopped going to the cinema, conclusions can be drawn from, for example, the pattern of theatre closures.

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Viewed from a distance, the statistical evidence would appear to indicate a severe general decline in film attendance and in theatre seating in the first post-war decade. There was a drop in seating capacity of 18 per cent, from 12.5 million seats in 1948 to 10.6 million in 1954. In the decade after 1946, 4,120 theatres closed altogether. Another 5,200 theatres were operating at a loss by 1956, while 5,700 were breaking even. Of the 19,000 cinemas operating in the United States, 56 per cent were failing to make a pro-fit, and it was estimated that, as a whole, the exhibition sector was making a net loss of $11.8 million.

Frederic Stuart argues cogently that television was responsible for 80 per cent of the decline in audience attendance between 1948 and 1956, basing his conclusion on a state-by-state study of box-office receipts and theatre closures. While the evidence he presents would appear overwhelming, his statistical data conceal the extent to which the theatre closures constituted a structural reorganization of the exhibition industry, and the way the production companies' response to the Paramount decrees and the threat of television exacerbated the initial decline in overall attendance. The vast majority of the theatres that closed, and a very high proportion of those doing poorly, were small, late-run houses in neighborhood areas, used to changing their programs at least twice a week and gaining their support from a small proportion of the local community who attended regularly. These were the theatres that had made two staple Hollywood products--the family film and the B-feature--profitable concerns. They catered to the middle-class family audiences who had "gone to the movies" once or twice a week, rather than specifically going to see an individual film. But despite their numbers and the size of their audiences, these theatres had not, even in the 1930s, comprised a particularly important source of revenue to distributors, because of the relatively low rentals they were charged. In the post-war economic atmosphere, their share of the market was steadily diminishing. In 1951 the 8,000 small theatres at the bottom of the exhibition ladder produced only 20 per cent of gross domestic rental income.

Even the demise of the small neighborhood theatre cannot be attributed entirely to television. Rather, it was the result of a set of interlocking and cumulative pressures--of which television was one--and has to be seen in the light of other developments in exhibition. ...

Richard Maltby—The Seat of Harry Cohn's Pants

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 2

THE BUSINESS OF FANTASY

THE CONDITION OF CRISIS

...

[51]

THE SEAT OF HARRY COHN'S PANTS

The industry as a whole needed the stability of predictable box-office earnings to guarantee the production and advertising pattern of large-scale short-term investment. This was a division of interests which corresponded to the requirements for novelty and predictability of the films themselves. Movie economics resembled those of the fashion industry in their dependence on stable consumption of a product which was constantly being modified, and in their ambiguously determining and dependent relationship with audience "taste." Many of Hollywood's moguls had worked in clothing trades early in their careers and may have acquired the particular skills which entrepreneurial success in both industries required: in particular, "the ability to suspend one's own tastes and calculate the desires of others."

The promotion of fashion as a mechanism for the superficial alteration of a fundamentally consistent product was as important to the workings of the film industry as it was to the garment business, because it attached unnatural limits to the durability of the product in question. Films, like clothes, went out of fashion before they were worn out. This imposed an attitude towards the product on the part of the producers that influenced their manner of distribution. The felt need to be fashionable reinforced the notion of the product having a short commercial life, and being worthless after expiry. Fashion had to be latched on to quickly; producers, like dress designers, had to stay one step ahead of public taste, anticipating it by at least a year in order to have product ready for the market.

The studio heads' claim to control over production was in part based on the assertion that they had unique intuitive abilities to gauge and predict audience reaction to the individual films their companies produced. In their interventions over story development, characterization, casting or costume design, all the moguls insisted on their mediating role as arbiters of the Common Taste, though few were as terse in expressing their peculiar gift for judgment as Harry Cohn:

When I'm alone in the projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If

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my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that.

The claim to insight, whether exercised in Cohn's manner of demanding nineteen minutes cut from a completed print because his fanny started to squirm nineteen minutes from the film's end, or in the extensive and detailed control over productions maintained by Thalberg or Selznick, was a crucial element in the moguls' power over their employees. It provided a rationale one step short of naked authoritarianism for their intervention in creative matters, and served as a constant reminder to writers and directors that their objective was to produce profitable entertainment, not art.

The moguls' claimed abilities to predict audience taste were also central to their relationship with their financial overlords in New York. It amounted to a justification of autonomy for production, by providing a further mechanism for stability. Industry economics dictated that films should be designed to appeal to the widest possible audience as the most reliable guarantor of profitability. The mythology of Hollywood constructed by the moguls insisted that audience taste was inherently unpredictable and that, as a result, film could not be subject to simple financial expedients. Film production did not require conventional accounting abilities so much as a capacity to manage the irrational and the unpredictable, skills to which the moguls laid an exclusive claim. Rather than encouraging programs of audience research which might undermine their claims the studio heads promoted their own image as predictors of the public taste as a means of securing their independence from East Coast financial pressure. The effectiveness of this strategy, and the extent to which it was endorsed by their parent companies, was confirmed by the enormous salaries the studio executives were paid.

The moguls made themselves the men who gave the public what the public wanted. What the public wanted was in large part revealed by what they went to see, but the studio heads secured for themselves the vital position of determining what it was about any successful film that had appealed to audiences, and that could therefore be capitalized upon in later productions. The moguls' mediating role was, therefore, not only between their companies' creative employees and New York executives, but also between audience reaction and subsequent product. Their attitudes permeated everything Hollywood produced, and those attitudes

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were chiefly influenced by a commitment to short-term profitability which geared production to the repetition of successful ingredients via generic formulae and the star system, and by an equal commitment to the ideal of "harmless entertainment" which structured the expression of ideology in the American cinema.

Hollywood's existence as a major industry, and its need for long-term economic stability to provide a secure base for its short-term financial adventurism encouraged its acceptance of the existing status quo. The moguls defined their activity as responding to audience tastes rather than formulating them, and hence saw their product as reactive, not innovative. This essentially conservative definition of the cinema's ideological function allowed films to reflect changes in social and political attitudes by fitting them in as topical, novel elements in basically stable patterns . A new idea introduced as a superficial variation on an established theme or plot structure no more disturbed the overall ideology of the combined studio product than a new star disturbed the mechanisms of the star system. A superficial and topical radicalism was always permissible if it could be bracketed into a stable and already comprehensible narrative structure. The attitude was neatly summarized by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, in a memo of May 1940 to Ernest Pascal, a writer working on the script of How Green Was My Valley:

This is a revolutionary type of story; therefore, our treatment should not be revolutionary. Now it fumbles around and I get the impression that we are trying to do an English Grapes of Wrath and prove that the mineowners were very mean and that the laborers finally won out over them. All this might be fine if it were happening today, like Grapes of Wrath, but this is years ago and who gives a damn? The smart thing to do is to try to keep all the rest in the background and focus mainly on the human story as seen through Huw's eyes.

[Gussow, Zanuck: Don't Say Yes Until I've Finished Talking]

The conservatism of this attitude blended perfectly with the entertainment ethic, to which the studio heads adhered until, at the earliest, 1940. Under the questioning of their political impartiality by the 1941 Nye-Clark Senatorial Investigating Committee, a few members of the Hollywood community, including Zanuck, proposed a defense of such

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cinematic social comment as there has been by arguing that the cinema's social responsibility obliged it consciously to enter contemporarv political debates. But, among senior studio personnel, this opinion was held only by a small minority, and its influence over production was slight, even for Zanuck, who managed without difficulty to combine it with a wholehearted endorsement of the entertainment ethic:

If you have something worth while to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market ... without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime.

Zanuck did not question the extent to which making a political statement correspond to the requirements of entertainment as understood by the studio formulae might distort its message, any more than the question bothered him during the supervision of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley:

In The Grapes of Wrath we had to make a very vital decision ... whether to tell the story of the Okies as a whole or the story of one isolated family. This meant the elimination of the flood ... the elimination of the fights with the police ... the dropping of certain characters very important in the book and writing an entirely new last act.... When I think what I got away with [on How Green Was My Valley] ... and won the Academy Award with the picture, it really is astonishing. Not only did we drop five or six characters but we eliminated the most controversial element in the book, which was the labor and capital battle in connection with the strike.

In both cases, Zanuck was effectively taking potentially controversial material and rendering it safe by placing it within an established context for a socially conservative Hollywood narrative. Both films endorsed the stabilizing influence of the family as a cohesive unit, and presented the tragic element of their stories as being the fragmentation of the family, without digressing into a consideration of the underlying causes of that fragmentation. While Zanuck did not strip the films completely of a political context, he nevertheless drastically altered their political implications by fitting them into a narrative that depicted "nice people involved in heartbreak," defusing their radical potential.

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This was less the deliberate imposition of a conservative viewpoint than ideological censorship by default. The Grapes of Wrath was nevertheless sufficiently "political" to earn the condemnation of Martin Quigley, the influential editor of the Motion Picture Herald and co-author of the 1930 Production Code. While Zanuck argued that the movies could educate through pleasure, Quigley firmly maintained the extreme conservative version of the entertainment ethic: "The entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political and economic argument."

Well, as so often, this insistence seems ideological and motivated rather than principled. The principled question is: are social, political and economic arguments well-served by the existing entertainment mediums?

Sure, a strong "no" evinces a conservative view: conservative as in modest. Modesty is principled, and it serves the activist better than ostentation. Alinski as quoted by Lasch:

"If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair."

The entertainment ethic provided for social and political conservatism in two ways. Firstly, it proscribed an area of human activity, going to the movies, as being detached from political significance. Movies were, according to the accepted wisdom of their manufacturers, mere "harmless entertainment," at most influencing only fashion and such inconsequentialities as whether or not men wore undershirts. They might aspire to "Art" so long as it was defined along the narrow middle-brow lines of Goldwyn's adaptations of "the classics of literature." In discussing the Production Code, Joseph Breen maintained:

Entertainment, then, is the keynote of the Code, in its practical application to the production of motion pictures. With the artistic character of pictures the Production Code Administration is not seriously concerned. But it is concerned with the attempts to justify immoral themes and indecent scenes by the sophistry of the excuse of beauty.

[quoted in Moley, The Hays Office]

Similarly, the Legion of Decency did not concern itself with "art," but with "immorality," even if its definition of that term was rather broad.

But this definition of films as mere entertainment required that the range of human activities presented by the movies must be taken as devoid of any political consequence. In 1938 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis criticized common value-judgments in motion pictures:

1.   That the successful culmination of a romance will solve most of the dilemmas of the hero and heroine.
2.   Catch the criminal and you will solve the crime problem.
3.   War and preparation for war are thrilling,

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heroic and glamorous.
4.   The good life is the acquisitive life, with its emphasis on luxury, fine homes and automobiles, evening dress, swank and suavity.

What they objected to was what the industry and the majority of its critics regarded as the beneficent conventions of an escapist entertainment. Moreover, industry heads presupposed that such value-judgments accorded with the contemporary consensus. Their reactive cinema reinforced attitudes that were presumed already to exist, while also providing a mechanism by which these attitudes could be permitted to reflect upon topical issues or subjects of debate.

Secondly, the entertainment ethic, bolstered by the economic necessity the studio heads saw in appealing to the mass audience, encouraged the tendency, implicit in the idea of entertainment as it was then understood, to appeal to the lowest common denominator of public taste. This did not necessarily mean appealing to the spectator's baser instincts; rather, it proposed that the films it produced should be as inoffensive as possible in order to keep them available to the largest possible audience. Since the righteous were more vocal, if not more numerous than the prurient or the permissive, once the industry had begun to seek respectability in the early 1920s, it expressed a more or less consistent willingness to cooperate with the most morally conservative elements of society.

"official communication" from fickle ears staff, re: "the jobs that they were counting on"

We recently received the following "official communication" from the local of which we are a member and under whose auspices our present employment is conducted:

...The Eagles are on tour right now and are scheduled to perform a few times in the Southern California area. Although they are not performing in our jurisdiction, they are contracting the string students from California State University Fullerton to replace the professional musicians that would normally be contracted for these performances. This is not the first time CSUF has done this. ...

The institution is displacing professional musicians’ jobs with their students; jobs that their students are presumably training for in the first place. ... Under these circumstances, by the time their students graduate, the jobs that they were counting on for will be no longer be filled by professional musicians. ...

We of course find this part of such stories to be at best the fifth or sixth most important part.

Also, we do greatly value the privilege of being represented by a union, but we wish this union would be more coherent in its stated positions.

First: people who willingly attend Eagles-with-orchestra concerts can't tell the difference between student and professional musicians. Those who maintain this not to be the case have a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events.

Second: whatever the failings of such an audience, these are not moral failings. It must be said that they betoken success too: namely the smashing success of the education-industrial complex in taking up the cause of the performing arts. We are unfamiliar with the CSUF strings but generally we find it unsurprising that a college group could be adequate for much "professional" work. We've heard and played in several that were. We've also done extensive "professional" work and found the bar to be quite a bit lower than we, and ostensibly the union (but only sometimes), would prefer. In two different locals in two different states we have been left mystified and incredulous at the union roster on our instrument, which extends to anyone who knows someone they can borrow a tuba from. At that point, to get bothered at students taking over "professional" work is absurd. How much of the local "tuba" roster could carry the jock strap of a state-school tuba player?

Third: ditto above with regard to quantity as well as quality. It is not breaking news that more students train in the performing arts than can work in the performing arts. The industry and the union both get what they want when more musicians split a fixed amount of work. Predictably both pay lip service to "music education." Less often but equally predictably, they also pay lip service to audience outreach. But musicianship has proven more amenable to progressive reform than has reception. You can build a better mousetrap, but you can't train anyone else to notice or force them to care.

Fourth: the notion that pre-professionals "were counting on" pickup orchestra gigs with The Eagles is one which strains credulity. The union declares that they should, the industry that they shouldn't. In any case, we suspect they are not. They and their teachers are aiming much, much higher. This is as it should be, and this is what countless union and industry photo ops have goaded us towards: high motivation can come only from high aspirations. Those among the professorate who have had significant careers outside of academia know that students who are good enough to get admitted to 4-year college as music majors already play well enough to do pickup orchestra with The Eagles, no matter if the gig is union or dark. Anyone who maintains this not to be the case has a formidable task in explaining away the above-described events. They have an equally formidable task in explaining why the skills required to play pickup orchestra with The Eagles are post-secondary and graduate-level skills rather than elementary ones; why this is what music students should be doing while their peers are reading Plato and Kant, plotting regression equations, and extracting abcessed teeth; why and how this "aspiration" can be anything other than crippling and cynical in comparison to everything else the performing arts have to offer a young person. The indications are all around us that Eagles-with-orchestra skills are elementary skills, but many of us would rather hold out hope-against-hope of filling a couple more dates on the calendar than think too hard (or at all) about what is actually to happen on those dates. The cynical proposal that aspiring freelancers attend business school rather than music school speaks a certain truth, but it is not the truth that its cynical utterers think they are speaking. They think they are extolling the wisdom of markets; in fact they are pointing up an area of exceptional failure of markets and of the conceit to meritocracy, a failure so drastic that it is not the least bit representative of general market dynamics. For this and many other reasons, we ourselves prefer the idealstic outlook which challenges performing arts students to maximize their potential and to seek a distinctive artistic voice rather than bending themselves and their work toward an existing career path. But this does nothing to raise audience receptivity to those new voices. Nor does either industry or the union have any use for self-directed artists with day jobs. Prospectively we cannot really say what (if any) value self-directed artists might have. No one has any use for them, until they do.

Goodman and Goodman—Surpluses

Paul and Percival Goodman
Communitas
(1960)

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CHAPTER 3
Industrial Plans

These are plans for the efficiency of production, treating domestic amenity and personal values as useful for the end, either technically or socially. ...

Yet every use of men is also a moral plan; if it seems not to be, that itself is morally problematic. ...

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... the moral-technical motivation for a kind of industrial planning springs up in a different context altogether [than that of underdeveloped or emerging countries], precisely in the most advanced and overdeveloped technologies with a vast economic and technological surplus. This is technocracy. It is the cultural emergence of engineers' values against traditional humanist or business values, as so ably championed by Veblen. In contrast to the achievements of science and engineering, the ordinary standards, expressed in the system of consumption and especially of amenity, seem irrational, a mere cultural lag. Then it is felt that by social devotion to efficiency we can liquidate the cultural lag. But the only thing that can be efficiently planned is production and the physical parts of life most like machine products.

...

[77] In general, Fuller's plans amalgamate technical, ethical, and metaphysical principles. Thus, mass production is the new phase of Christianity where all men are again brothers. The obstacle to happiness is the clinging to material, especially landed, property; progress consists in "ephemeralization," dematerializing, and impermanence or process of experience and control.

Well, the millennials are hard at work on this, aren't we?

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Social Insurance vs. the Direct Method

elementary subsistence and security cannot be neglected by any social order; they are political needs, prior to economic needs. So the governments of the most highly capitalized states intervene to assure elementary security which is no longer the first business of the economy. And the tack they take is the following: to guarantee social security by subsidizing the full productivity of the economy. Security is provided by insurance paid in the money that comes from the operation of the whole economy. The amazing indirectness of this procedure is brilliantly exposed by the discovery of a new human "right"—as if the rights of man could be so easily amended. This is the "right to employment," failing which one gets the insurance. Full employment is the device by which we flourish; and so the old curse of Adam, that he must work in order to live, now becomes a goal to be struggled for, just because we have the means to produce a surplus, cause of all our woes. This is certainly out of human scale, yet the statesmen of America and England talk this way with absolute conviction; and anyone who spoke otherwise would be voted out of office.

The immediate result of such a solution, of insurance, social credit, or any other kind of give-away money, is to tighten even closer the economic trap. Whatever freedom used to come from free enterprise and free market—and they are freedoms which were indeed fought for with blood—is now trapped in regulation and taxes. The union of government and economy becomes more and more total; we are in the full tide toward statism.

Of course. But how is what follows below supposed to take hold if not also in a profoundly statist fashion?

This is not a question of anybody's bad intentions,

PHEW!!

but follows from the connection of the basic political need of subsistence with the totality of an industrial economy.

So much for the indirect solution.

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[illustrations]

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The direct solution, of course, would be to divide the economy and provide the subsistence directly, letting the rest complicate and fluctuate it at will. Let whatever is essential for life and security be considered by itself, and since this is a political need in an elementary sense, let political means be used to guarantee it. But the rest of the economy, providing wealth, power, luxury, emulation, convenience, interest and variety, has to do with varying human wishes and satisfactions, and there is no reason for government to intervene in it in any way. The divided economy has, therefore, the twofold advantage that it directly provides the essential thing that is in jeopardy, without having to underwrite something else; and it restricts the intervention of government to this limited sphere.

Up to, say, sixty years ago, more than half of the productive capacity of our economy was devoted to subsistence; subsistence could be regarded as the chief end of the economy; and whatever their own motives, most enterprisers served the subsistence market. Now, however, in the United States less than a tenth of the economy is concerned with subsistence goods. ... Except for the biological and political factors involved, the economic machinery could roll almost as usual though everybody were dead of starvation, exposure, and disease. When the situation is viewed in this way, one of the causes is at once clear why prosperity and surplus lead precisely to insecurity: namely, that too few people are busy about subsistence, and as we know from recent farming history, those who are busy about it try to get out of it; there's no real money in meat and potatoes.

But once the economy would be divided as we are suggesting, the very techniques of industry that, when applied incidentally to subsistence, lead to insecurity, would, applied directly to subsistence, produce it with an even smaller fraction of the social labor than at present.

Probably there are various political means by which this

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small fraction could be effectuated, and we will soon develop an obvious one, direct state production of subsistence by universally conscripted labor, run as a state monopoly like the post office or the army, but paying not money but its own scrip, exchangeable only for subsistence goods made by the same enterprise.

I volunteer. But seriously, anybody for statism?

(This is a vast undertaking. It would be apparently simpler to effect approximately the same end by using private semi-monopolistic concessionaires in the state non-profit subsistence-business. But if indeed the production cost is absolutely minimum and the types absolutely standard and non-competitive, how could a private firm profit? Further, it is intolerable, and unconstitutional, to have to work for a private concessionaire. Therefore we prefer the state production—taking over relevant private plant and building its own plant—because of its purity of method. It takes subsistence out of the economy. Subsistence is not something to profit by, invest in, to buy or sell. On the part of the consumer, it is not something to choose or reject or contract for or exchange his labor for, but simply work for.)

On whatever method...there is one principle: to assure subsistence by specific production of subsistence goods and services rather than by insurance taxed from the general economy. This involved a system of double money: the "money" of the subsistence production and consumption and the money of the general market. The subsistence-certificates are not money at all, for by definition a man's subsistence leaves nothing to exchange; this "money" is like wartime ration stamps, which are likewise not legally negotiable. A man's right to life is not subject to trade.

A major moral advantage of this proposal is that every person can know that the work he does for a living is unquestionably useful and necessary, and unexploited. It is life itself for himself and everybody else. In our times of so much frivolous production and synthetic demand, and the

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accompanying cynicism of the producers, the importance of such a moral cannot be overestimated.

Another consequence: To everyone, but especially to the small wage earner, the separation of his subsistence, employing a small fraction of his labor time, from the demands and values of the general economy employing most of his labor time, would give a new security, a breath of freedom, and the possibility of choice. He is independent. He has worked directly for what he absolutely needs; he does not feel the pressure of being a drain on society; he does not fear that his insurance payments will cease. By the same token, people in general, including the small enterpriser, would be more fearless, for their risks are less fatal. But indeed, these things imply a change of social attitude so profound that we must think deeply about both the dangers and the opportunities.

The retrenchment of government from economic interference in the general part, again, might go very far, relaxing the kinds of regulation that are now indispensible... For where the prospective wage earner has a subsistence independently earned, the conditions under which he agrees to work can be allowed to depend on his own education rather than on the government's coercion of the employer.

Let us sum up by contrasting the actual plans offered by present-day governments with the plan here suggested. They propose:

Security of subsistence.
A tax on the general economy.
Necessity to maintian the economy at full production
    to pay the tax: therefore, governmental planning,
    pump-priming, subsidies, and made work; a still
    further tax, and possibly a falling rate of profit.
Insistence on the unemployed worker's accepting the
    third or fourth job available, in order to prevent
    a continuing drain on the insurance fund.

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Protection of the workers thus coerced by regulating
    the conditions of industry and investment.

Against this we propose:

Security of subsistence.
Loss to the industrialist and merchant of the sub-
    sistence market and a small fraction of the social
    labor.
Coercion of a small fraction of the social labor to produce the subsistence goods and services.
Economic freedom in all other respects.

Now financially, the choice between these two plans would depend on the comparison between the insurance and subisidied tax and the loss of labor time and market. ... Socially and morally, however, there seems to be no comparison at all: our way is direct, simple, liberating, and allows people a quiet interim to make up their minds about things.

...

[200] The [subsistence] minimum is based on a physiological standard, heightened by the addition of whatever is necessary to give a person a true possible freedom of social choice, and not violating our usual mores.

If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political intervention than to raise the standard of living.

...

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Teacher! Today Again
   Do We Have To Do What We Want to Do?

Now supposing such a system of assured subsistence with almost complete freedom of economic ties were put into effect. No doubt for millions of people, no matter how much they might resist the idea in prospect, the first effect would be immense relief, relief from responsibility, from the pressure of the daily grind, from the anxiety of failure.

But after this first commonplace effect had worn off, the moral attitude of a people like the Americans would be profoundly deranged. They would be afraid not only of freedom and leisure, which release both creative and destructive drives nicely repressed by routine, but especially of boredom, for they would find, or imagine, themselves quite without cultural or creative resources. For in our times all entertainments and even the personal excitement of romance seem to be bound up with having ready money to spend, Emotional satisfaction, too, has been intricated into the motion of the entire productive machine, it is bound up with the Standard of Living. Movies cost money, bars cost money, and having a date costs money. ... Apart from these, as everybody knows, there is nothing to do but hang around. (Sports do not cost money, sex does not cost money, art does not cost money, nature does not cost money, intercourse with people does not cost money, science and god do not cost money.)

The Americans would suddenly find themselves "rescued" from the physical necessity and social pressure which alone, perhaps, had been driving them to their habitual satisfactions. They might soon come to regard commercial pleasures as flat and unpalatable, but they would not suddenly thereby find any others. They would be like the little girl in the progressive school, longing for the security of having her decisions made by the grown-ups, who asks, "Teacher, today again do we have to do what we want to do?"

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Would it be a salutary boredom to make these persons do what they want to do with their time, to discover what they want to do with their lives, rather than following widely advertised suggestions? And not for a couple of weeks of vacation—likewise organized into profit-bearing routines—but year after year. Or would the effect be like the unemployed adolescents on the corner who hang around, apparently unable to think up anything?

We are asking, in the framework of this model proposal, an intensely realistic question about the actual situation in our country. For indeed, in our surplus economy, millions really are technically unemployable—there is no necessary work for them to do, no man's work. If automation were allowed its full headway, these millions would become many millions. Because they are really economically unproductive, they have no culture and no resources of leisure, since culture grows from productive life. At the same time, each one of these people, no matter how he hangs around or perhaps spends his time in getting quasi-visceral "kicks" or being "cool," must also feed his face and come in out of the rain. It is this actuality that our scheme of a divided economy addresses and draws in black and white: we provide the subsistence part in an efficient, honorable, and compulsory way; and we leave open the horrendous question: then what?

The moment when large numbers of people first discover clearly and distinctly that they do not know what they want to do with their time, is fraught with danger. Some no doubt will at once follow any demagogic or fanatical leader who happens to come along with a time-consuming and speciously thrilling program. (Street-gangs on a mass scale.) How to protect the commonwealth against these bands of bored prejudice? Others, having lost the thread of compulsory mental activity, will wander in the maze of idle idiocy that we associate with degenerate rural classes, except that the food would be even worse, across the counter in a government store.

Lasch—Circs Not Likely To Be Repeated

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[154]
The more the grand structure of Marx's theory has to be modified to allow for "exceptions," the less it explains. The entire history of capital-
[155]
ism in the West now has to be seen not as a stage in a rigid sequence of developmental stages—as it was seen not only by Marx but by the nineteenth-century sociologists as well—but as the product of a particular history, a unique conjunction of circumstances unprecedented elsewhere in the world and not likely to be repeated. A growing awareness that modern capitalism rests on a "particular history of political victories and defeats," in the words of Roberto Unger, and that these victories and defeats can no longer be dismissed as the mere enactment of a preestablished design," has generated growing dissatisfaction with "deep-structure social theories" in general, as Unger calls them, including not only Marxism but classical sociology and its twentieth-century offshoots. The "deeply entrenched necessitarian habits of thought" associated with the sociological tradition have by no means disappeared, as Charles Sabel reminds us; but they have become increasingly hard to defend.

One of the many difficulties that confront structural theories of history is the achievement of "modernization" under conservative direction—for example, in twentieth-century Japan, in later-nineteenth-century Germany under Bismarck, even to some extent in nineteenth-century England under Disraeli. Industrialism, it appears, can take place without a revolutionary redistribution of wealth and political power. Social theorists in the nineteenth century almost all shared the belief, stated in its classic form in Tocqueville's study of American democracy, that the "irresistable" growth of equality had "all the chief characteristics" of a "providential fact," since it was "universal" and "durable" and "eluded all human interference." They argued about whether equality was consistent with order and freedom, but most of them agreed with Tocqueville that "the revolution . . . in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men" was giving rise to a new order in which "great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown"—in short, to a condition of "universal uniformity."

[155]
Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and Western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully-developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocractic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by the right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes
[157]
with a good deal of exaggeration, " . . . runs counter to deeply grooved mental reflexes"; but an understanding of the "characteristic patterns of modernization" forces us to conclude that revolution is the better way.

That this conclusion rests on a tortured reading of history should be obvious at a glance. Early modern revolutions encouraged the growth of democracy, but the same cannot be said of the twentieth-century revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and other developing nations. The more we learn about these matters, the less we are likely to believe in "characteristic patterns of modernization." If there is such a pattern. it is surely western Europe whose history deviates from the norm. The Bolsheviks thought of themselves as modern-day Jacobins, but their revolution did not reenact the revolution in France. It was no more democratic than the autocratic programs of development instituted in Germany and Japan. Theirs too was a "revolution from above," as was Mao's revolution in China and Castro's in Cuba. If we consider the history of economic development as a whole, we might well conclude that it has everywhere been imposed from above. Even in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, it was seldom greeted with enormous popular acclaim. On the contrary, it was greeted with enormous popular suspicion and often with open resistance.

Nor was this resistance—usually dismissed as mindless opposition to progress—necessarily misconceived. The subsequent history of industrial societies does not justify complacency about their capacity to assure an equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. The relationship between industrialism and democracy looks more and more tenuous and problematical. If we insist on a law of historical development, we might be justified in concluding that "societies based on large-unit production have a verifiable historical tendency to become increasingly . . . hierarchical over time," in the words of Lawrence Goodwyn. "Supporting evidence is so pervasive," Goodwyn adds, "that this may now be taken as law"—a "direct counter-premise to the idea of progress."

...

[162]
The concept of modernization no longer dominates the study of economic development in the non-Western world; but the conceptually seductive images with which it is associated still color the West's view of its own history. ...

"Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of
[163]
the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions. Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state's dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry. Those who adhere to the modernization model have no way of accounting either for the persistence of traditional elites or for the resilience of traditional institutions like the extended family. The coexistence of traditional and modern elements undermines the claim that modernization is a "systematic" process. It now appears to be a highly selective process; and this discovery parallels the growing recognition that progress in technology, say, does not necessarily entail progress in morals or politics.

Lasch—Meritocracy

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

Meritocracy is a parody of democracy. It offers opportunities for advancement, in theory at least, to anyone with the talent to seize them, but "opportunities to rise," as R.H. Tawney points out in Equality, "are no substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization," of the "dignity and culture" that are needed by all "whether they rise or not." Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot—the very definition of meritocratic success.
(p. 41)

The educational reforms of the twentieth century "enabled the clever child to leave the lower class . . . and to enter into a higher class into which he was fitted to climb." Those who were left behind, knowing that "they have had every chance," cannot legitimately complain about their lot. "For the first time in human history, the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard."

(quotes from Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033)

If memory serves, Richard Sennett has said something very similar.

It should not surprise us, then, that meritocracy also generates an obsessive concern with "self-esteem." The new therapies...seek to counter the oppressive sense of failure..while leaving the existing structure of elite recruitment...intact. ... As Young observes, people on the left (like their opponents on the right) are happiest when attacking hereditary privilege. They ignore the real objection to meritocracy—that it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership—and content themselves with dubious arguments to the effect that education does not live up to its promise of fostering social mobility. If it did, they seem to imply, no one would presumably have any reason to complain.
(pp. 43-44)

[For James Bryant Conant,] Democracy did not require a "uniform distribution of the world's goods," a "radical equalization of wealth." What it required was a "continuous process by which power and privilege may be automatically redistributed at the end of each generation.

...

The only way of "restoring social mobility" was to make the school system a substitute for the frontier.

...

It would be hard to find a better example than Conant's essay ["Education for a Classless Society: The Jeffersonian Tradition"] of the paltry view of democracy that has come to prevail in our time. In the name of the "Jeffersonian tradition," which envisioned a community of intelligent, resourceful, responsible, and self-governing citizens, Conant proposed merely to ensure the circulation of elites. ... His program...contained the additional irony that although it presupposed a rigorous separation of manual and mental labor and a hierarchy of social status in which those who worked with their hands ranked at the bottom, it was conceived as a way of achieving a classless society. ...

Historically the concept of social mobility was clearly articulated only when people could no longer deny the existence of a degraded class of wage earners tied to that condition for life—only when the possibility of a classless society, in other words, was decisevely abandoned. The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

The truth is that our society is at once "highly stratified and highly mobile," in the words of Wendell Berry. There is little evidence that rates of vertical mobility have declined. On the contrary, a vast body of social research points fairly consistently to the conclusion that rates of mobility have remained more or less constant ever since the Civil War. ...
(pp. 75-77)

Berry's interrogation of [Justin Smith] Morrill defines the most important choice a democratic society has to make: whether to raise the general level of competence, energy, and devotion...or merely to promote a broader recruitment of elites. Our society has clearly chosen the second course. It has identified opportunity with upward mobility and made upward mobility the overriding goal of social policy. The debate about affirmative action shows how deeply this pathetically restricted notion of opportunity has entered public discourse. A policy designed to recruit minorities into the professional and managerial class is opposed not on the grounds that it strengthens the dominant position of this class but that it weakens the principle of meritocracy. Both sides argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy

Earth to Hanna Rosin...

when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience,

Word...

devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience,

...but be careful here, anti-positivists, because no one's "experience" is comprehensive. Of course it would be great to have BOTH both book- and street-smarts, in whatever proportion depending on the field. What's stopping us?

Anyway, earth to both the positivists and the anti-positivists.

and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise—the logical result [of all this]...—is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the "last, best hope on earth."
(pp. 78-79)



Racial integration might have been conceived as a policy designed to give everyone equal access to a common civic culture. Instead it has come to be conceived largely as a strategy for assuring educational mobility. ... The misplaced emphasis on professional careers, as opposed to jobs and participation in a common culture, helps to explain the curious coexistence, in the postsixties politics of race, of a virulent form of cultural particularism with strategies having the practical effect of undermining particularism in its concrete expression in neighborhoods.
(p. 135)

Len Bracken—Debord, Adorno, Time

Len Bracken
Guy Debord—Revolutionary (1997)

...the difference between Adorno's ideas and Debord's relates less to the question of what would be desirable in itself than to the question of what is actually possible at the present moment in history. (117)

For Debord, as for Lukács, alienation arises from the predominance of the commodity system in social life; it is thus associated with industrial capitalism, and has not existed for more than about two hundred years. Within such a relatively brief period of time, changes occurring in the space of a decade may naturally assume great importance.

By contrast, the changes of a whole century can carry little weight for Adorno, whose yardsticks for measuring events are "the priority of the object" and "identity." By "exchange" he does not in the first instance mean the exchange of commodities embodying abstract labor...but rather a suprahistorical "exchange in general" that coincides with the entire ratio of the West. The antecedent here was the kind of sacrifice that sought to win the favor of the gods by means of an offering that soon become purely symbolic; this fraudulent aspect of sacrifice foreshadowed the fraud inherent to exchange. (119)

Generally I am strongly inclined towards the Long View, which Adorno represents here as against Debord's Shorter one, even if it would be easy to quibble with a few of the specifics here. The adolescent petulance and self-importance in Situationist writing can be overwhelming, and it seems that even two hundred years is quite a bit vaster than many of those young people's frame of reference. On Adorno's scale of time, rather, Capitalism cannot possibly be a new or unique problem but rather an instantiation of so many ancient problems given modern form. [Name of former roommate redacted] once attempted to stake out just such a position, which was not at all consistent with many of his other opinions, but which in and of itself was not too far off from what is being laid out here, and which I find compelling, at least as far as it goes. It is less clear to me that it is possible or profitable to, as [roommate] was implying, somehow oppose these endemic human problems while simply leaving Capitalism alone to continue to do God's work. "Exchange" is not new, but Capitalism IS built on exchange. Would a better -ism not necessarily be built on something else?

More of the same, but worth including:

One gets the general impression that for Adorno the particularity of different historical periods fades in the face of the working of certain unchanging principles that have obtained since the beginning of history, such as domination and exchange. ...the division between the thing and its concept had already begun in the animistic period with the distinction between the tree in its physical presence and the spirit that dwells within it. Logic arose from the earliest relationships of hierarchical subordination, and the identification of things by means of their ordering by kind begins with the "I" that remains identical through time. ...the same "reason" applied in the pre-Socratic period as applies today. For Adorno, therefore, it ought to be well-nigh impossible to surmount reification, for he sees it as rooted in society's very deepest structures. (119-120)

[from a notebook, 2017]

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]

RIP my eMusic account (2010-2014)

I could easily have rolled this into yesterday's dispatch but thought it deserved its own entry: after almost exactly four mostly happy years, I've put my eMusic subscription on hold and am likely to walk away entirely in the near future. By the time I first signed up for eMusic, paid MP3 downloads were already on their way out of fashion. I nonetheless have appreciated and enjoyed many facets of the experience: offline access, crazy as it is to say in 2014, is still a boon; the ability to dump transcribables into the software of my choice is highly preferable to wrestling with Spotify; making and tending to my many lists is a vice I'll never outgrow; the motivation to "get into" rather than merely "get through" my purchases, which is a motivation even I need from time to time now that streaming and total access are increasingly the norm, has been good to have; and though eMusic has been infamously secretive about their artist compensation system, certainly more of my money has gone to artists this way than if I had done my repeat listening on Spotify.

I'm jumping ship now because eMusic has, in a move that smacks of desperation, reverted to their original purview of featuring strictly "independent" music, a purview which evidently excludes ECM. Not only is almost all of ECM missing from Spotify, but digital purchases from this label, though they were invariably priced higher than eMusic's default scheme, were significantly cheaper this way than physical media. I am certainly of two minds about all of this since I think eMusic made a big mistake abandoning its mission the first time; and yet unfortunately my sole use for the site over the last couple of years has been access to this "major" label. Now I have three months to think of another one.

And speaking of reverting, I have already begun cleansing myself in the waters of materialism:

On the Scarcity of Scarcity

I have a confession to make, again: contrary to what you might assume about someone having such a tough time "making it" as an artist (and being apt to write about it at such length), I find it awfully hard to get upset about the existence of Spotify. Certainly I am a consumer as well as a producer of content and have taken full advantage of the digital apocalypse to deepen and broaden my own listening; and certainly I am just young enough that I've never lived in a world where an income stream from record sales was ever a reasonable career expectation. Those are obvious points that you've heard before or thought yourself, and I hope this one is too: scarcity is not coming back, so we had better learn to live with abundance. Why should that be so hard to do?

As Cory Doctorow so aptly pointed out in Content, a big part of getting this particular genie back in the bottle would be to make computers less capable, and that simply is not going to happen. Then again, this twenty-first century problem is, I think, too often posited in place of a more basic, nineteenth century one: when we traded in cultural consensus for a modicum of freedom of expression, and similarly music-as-craft for the romanticized, singular, freelance artist, the wheels were set in motion, even as the technology remained over a century away. We remain miles away from a truly "free" society, but what freedom we do have in the aesthetic arena is gained at the direct expense of cultural consensus. The more we have of one the less there will be of the other. If you are one of those people who would draw the analogy between downloading a song and shoplifting a candy bar, I think you have not completely grasped this point. At the very least, with specific regard to Spotify, which is legal and market-driven, this old trope no longer fits at all.

And aah, the market. Since I'm on such a roll, shouldn't I have more mean stuff to say here about capitalism? Could I possibly have shot all of my bullets not yet halfway through Blog Month? Allow me to reload: the whole conceit of "American Ingenuity" and "competition driving innovation" is a fucking ruse. The roadmap is and for the most part always has been to gain near-monopolistic control, by hook or by crook, over essential resources and services that people need just to stay alive (e.g. health care), to artificially manipulate supply and pricing, and then profit off of our literal desperation. I don't doubt that capitalist competition has been great for spurring businesses onward towards ever more appealing non-essential consumables, and I as much as anyone else want to live in a world where we can enjoy them guilt-free and for what they are. Bona fide "innovation" is hard work, though, and consumers don't always behave in ways that would most obviously seem to represent their best interests; corporations know this, and hence also that the most reliable way to ensure handsome profitability will always be through exploiting the most basic necessities of life.

Simply put, music is not a basic necessity of life, no matter our widespread figurative insistence to the contrary. If it were, the capitalist streaming music industry would look a lot more like the capitalist health care industry and we would be having a very, very different discussion right now. And so, with the music industry thus being a more truly American, capitalist endeavor in this way, are we to take more seriously the suggestion, per Marc Ribot and others, that if things don't improve for independent at-the-margins artists they will simply go out of business as it were? Extended to its logical conclusion, this is precisely the outcome my reasoning above would predict; again, however, we all know (or should) that the notion of "rational actors" is itself something of a ruse, and most especially in an area of inquiry where rationalism itself is at best a marginal player.

To wit, have we not been hearing precisely this fatalistic prediction for over a decade now? And at the current rate of cultural and technological evolution, is a decade not a pretty decent sample size from which to conclude that more people actually are making and distributing music than ever before? At the risk of invoking the ill-fated governorship of Jesse Ventura, it seems for whatever reason that people who are smart enough to play this kind of music also are smart and resourceful enough to find ways to fund their projects. (I hope I'm not the only musician-in-the-trenches to read the Ribot blurb and think to myself, "If you gave me $15,000 to spend on a trio record, I'd have trouble spending half of it." Clearly we're dealing with very different cultural, possibly generational expectations here.) The market is indeed a powerful force, but it is not and never has been quite as powerful as this camp would make it out to be, certainly not in the specific ways they are apt to enumerate. I for one would absolutely enjoy assuming a yet more overbearing degree of righteous indignation that I am working security instead of collecting fat royalty checks, but aesthetic plurality and ease of access are real things too. Worrying about that which you can control also has its upsides.

Reports of My Demise (vi)

It's telling that the popular saying "The customer is always right" is seldom uttered without a hint of sarcastic contempt. That's because, as anyone who has actually sold goods or services of virtually any type has learned, the customer is almost always wrong. Wildly, comically wrong.

Why is this? We become customers when we need something we don't have, and even where "services" become reified into "goods," usually this something is, in part, knowledge. You seek out a mechanic to determine that your car needs $1500 worth of work, but because you are a Customer, you respond that you can afford $800 to get it marginally drivable and that they should be happy to have your business goddamn it. You want to know what you really need, but you will take less in order to pay what you intended to pay from the start. And so, when you sit down at conferences with your children's band teacher and this teacher insists that Johnny and Susie really need to practice more, that receiving one-on-one instruction from an established professional player would greatly help to focus this practice time, and that in the broadest sense these children will "get out of it what they put into it," you are apt to say to yourself, "Gee whiz, Mozart, it's not like we're training professional musicians here. Music is for nourishing mind, body, and soul, for helping my kids get into Yale, and for tickling their neural pathways just so, leading to success at, you know, real life jobs, like stockbroker and financial analyst. And besides, they already have soccer Mondays, youth group Tuesdays, quilting Wednesdays..." Maybe you think these things to yourself, or maybe you go out and write an op-ed to this effect for a major dead-tree media outlet. Or, if you're really ambitious, maybe you install yourself at the helm of an arts non-profit in order to spread the wisdom of protracted dabbling and gross overcommitment. Hey, you and your kids all turned out great, didn't you?

Those of us who have, perhaps ill-advisedly, chosen to devote the entire fabric of our being to music know better than to think that any student, no matter the modesty or grandiosity of their ambitions, musical or otherwise, could ever reap the benefits these people constantly namecheck from the kind of distanced, half-suspicious quasi-engagement their actions tend to beget. And yet most customers simply will not buy real musical education. Many will not or cannot accept it even free of charge; I know because I and those around me have tried to give it away on more than one occasion.

In news to no one, the idea of music moves the needle for parents and students while the reality of music does not. Vendors know the reality, customers only the idea, but it is the customer who is, in our society, always right. Exceptions are not unheard of, but they are rare. I have done my fair share of sales-pitching in committee meetings and planning sessions, in conversations with prospective parents and job interviews with prospective employers, for the kind of intense, no-holds-barred, academically rigorous and intellectually stimulating music education that has made me who I am both on- and off-stage. I typically face little or no dissent as to the abstract value of what I am proposing, but all manner of fierce resistance to its implementation. This is because customers will not buy it, administrators know that customers will not buy it, and, well, you know the rest.

The ostensibly charitable segments of the arts economy upon which virtually all practicing artists today rely directly or indirectly to support themselves financially, and which, perhaps more importantly, essentially serve as the last remaining justification of our very existence, replacing aesthetic- and morally-grounded cultural consensus which has fragmented well beyond retrieval, are in spite of their loudly proclaimed "not for profit" legal status nonetheless profoundly consumer-driven enterprises. These are milieus where the heat and light of constructive competitiveness and the pursuit of mastery look just animalistic enough to turn the stomachs of the Bourgeoisie upon which they disproportionately rely for support and validation. They are where uncompromised, unmediated, untriagulated musical pedagogies and traditions go to die. And all of that is to say that they are, at least if you buy the analysis of contemporary gender constructions seized on by Hanna Rosin in The End of Men, profoundly and intrinsically feminine structures.

Certainly for those of us more or less on the outside looking in, its feminine construction explains several facets of the arts education job market: the inverse correlation between the number of teaching opportunities and the age of the students; the flooding of popular music into a socio-aesthetic-epistemological space formerly reserved exclusively for art music; and a willingness to compromise away rigorous pedagogies, the ones which might actually help justify so many public policy battle cries that that The Arts are core academic subjects, but which customers inevitably balk at on account of what is demanded of them in return to make good on this promise.

As I try to recall some of the specific places I have heard or read the core subject battle cry, I in fact can conjure only images of women, a useful reminder that the structuring of an institution or body of knowledge as masculine or feminine, as many theorists have argued, does not mean that only one gender participates in the structuring, or even that the majority of participants will be of that gender. And it most especially does not mean, if I may take this opportunity to preempt the obvious potential for misunderstanding of what I am getting at here, that people born with vaginas are inherently and irrevocably inferior to those born with penises when it comes to "rigorous" or "uncompromised" scholastic arenas. What it means, rather, is that the undue polarization of certain types of thought and behavior along gendered lines creates arbitrary burdens of expectation which mediate our ability to become our authentic selves. And so the facts on the ground leave me to wonder if the "core subject" trope has not become just one more marketing tagline that few of the men or women who might utter it out of self-interest would actually be willing to fight for.

Are you?

Reports of My Demise (i)

...throughout my reporting, a certain imaginary comic book duo kept presenting themselves to me: Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man. Plastic woman has during the last century performed superhuman feats of flexibility. She has gone from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it. If she is no longer required by ladylike standards to restrain her temper, she starts a brawl at the bar. If she can get away with staying unmarried and living as she pleases deep into her thirties, she will do that too...

Cardboard Man, meanwhile, hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way. For most of the century men derived their sense of manliness from their work, or their role as head of the family. ...Some decades into the twentieth century, those obvious forms of social utility started to fade. Most men were no longer doing physically demanding labor of the traditional kind, and if they were, it was not a job for life. They were working in offices or not working at all... And as fewer people got married, men were no longer acting as domestic providers, either. They lost the old architecture of manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one. What's left now are the accessories, maybe the "mancessories"–jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV and, at the end of the season, fade back into obscurity.

Hanna Rosin, The End of Men, pp. 7-9

First and foremost, allow me to take credit for my contribution, however small, to any statistical case that women have "pulled decisively ahead" of men, to quote the publisher's blurb for Rosin's faux-provocative screed. I can't claim that pursuing a music career has been either a graceful or a constructive way to disavow my white male privilege, but it certainly has been an effective one: I am 32 years old working for $11 an hour; I hold an entry-level position in an industry where I previously worked for over 5 years; I have never held a job that required more than a high school diploma; I rent a room under the table in a shabby shared apartment close enough to spit on the Hollywood Freeway; I have been single for longer than I care to admit; and of course, like so many of Rosin's Cardboard Men, I have spent most of my life trying to make play look as much like work as possible.

Admittedly, to implicate myself in this way requires strategically omitting a few incongruous details, such as my enviable academic track record, a graduate degree from an expensive private college, a stellar professional resume in a field wholly unrelated to the aforementioned day job, and a life that on the whole has been more frequently over- than under-privileged. Call it my Plastic side if you will; it has nonetheless proven entirely ineffectual in delivering even a whiff of the self-made material or domestic respectability by which polite bourgeois society measures its charges. And while any grand pronouncement on the contemporary economics of gender is well-suited to attract attention, that Ms. Rosin's appears through and through to have been issued from the perspective of just this sort of contended, materialistic non-culture is, as many have already pointed out, the real lead story here. This much, at least, is obvious to anyone who has lived concurrent Cardboard and Plastic lives, and who thus inhabits part of the vast grey area unaccounted for by her imaginary comic book duo.

In my case, the highway from academic all-star to broken manhood runs squarely through territory most commonly (if unwieldily) referred to as The Arts, ironically thought by so many unliberated men to be the exclusive domain of sissies and faggots, but which, as even its seasonal inhabitants quickly learn, in fact harbors its own litany of gender terrorists, macho men, misogynists, and homophobes, some of whom would undoubtedly get on just fine with their more politically conservative brethren in fields like finance, law, and politics. A more substantive defining characteristic of The Arts, rather, is the inevitable disparity between intrinsic and popular valuation arising under advanced capitalism and fragmented postmodern culture, a disparity which, as intensely uncomfortable as it is for many artists to verbalize, itself has an unmistakably gendered component. The Arts in fact present a more extreme case of material incentive lying almost entirely on the side of compromise, accommodation, and malleability than most any economic sector Rosin endeavors to chronicle. If those have become, as she argues, highly gendered characteristics, then the valuation discussion indeed takes on a highly gendered character.

Such it is that for a field of endeavor so often and so loudly criticized for representing, literally or figuratively, the interests of male aristocrats and colonists, it is today difficult to locate which upper class privileges, exactly, are being enjoyed by any but the most conventionally successful artists; that is to say, by those exhibiting the ostensibly feminine "willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape." (TEOM, 270) The true men and women of leisure one encounters in artists' circles are far more likely to have simply inherited a fortune than to be collecting royalties from a hard-won mainstream breakthrough. And yet the rest of us white men do not simply divest ourselves of privilege in one fell swoop by choosing to become workaday professional artists; privilege, or the lack thereof, reproduces itself as long as one continues to exhibit the trait(s) with which it is associated. Such it is that as far out of my lane as I might seem to be these days, I am nonetheless reminded frequently and vividly that white male privilege is powerful enough to moderate even the extreme indignities and vicissitudes of the service sector in ways that most of my co-workers will never enjoy. This makes it hard for me to take seriously any argument that a service economy could ever serve as the backdrop to real feminist progress.

There is more than one reason for the underrepresentation of historically oppressed groups in so many Western artistic disciplines. It starts with good-old-boy politics but it does not end there. Becoming an artist of almost any kind worthy of the name in a world where cultural consensus and common practice have gone extinct is one humongous risk. All artists sign up for certain challenges, but only some see these challenges magnified immeasurably by intersecting oppressions. An arts career is thus a more manageable proposition for someone of my background who can count on relatively fair job interviews and loan approvals and an emergency familial safety net; it is less so for people truly on their own whose lives are already defined by underground discrimination and the daily risk of police brutality and/or sexual assault. Much as health care reform will do more for artists than a hundred NEAs, winning the ability for everyone to count on basic human dignities from their employers and governments is infinitely more central to the task of diversifying perspectives in The Arts than identity-based curating or grantsmanship ever could be.

And so, while I do wonder if my high school teachers, for example, might not be horrified at what has become of me, I can also accept this as a First World Problem. I have a steady job, a roof over my head, and just enough "spare" time to maintain the semblance of a music career working with some very talented people. Make no mistake that the ability to be an uncompromising artist at all and still attain even this basic degree of human dignity has everything to do with having had untold advantages from the outset. As such, I do not and never have considered holding a service sector day job to be in and of itself an affront to my dignity. To conclude from this that I have not been "successful" in life is, on the other hand, beyond an insult.

Indeed, there are always just enough artists of various stripes succeeding in polite bourgeois terms to make the more uncompromising elements look like failures. Just as surely, there will always be a few bourgie busybodies observing all of this from a safe distance and jumping to questionable conclusions; sometimes we meet them after a show, other times in print. Such it is that while the ostensibly cherrypicked, anecdotal nature of Rosin's case studies and her alleged statistical misstatements have proven fertile territory for critics wishing to engage her on her own turf, for me it is the turf she neglects to cover which opens up a far more revealing line of inquiry. Indeed, The Arts had to be more or less ignored to maintain Rosin's central conceits; the life of a modern-day Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Bix Beiderbecke, or Herbie Nichols would blow the roof off of such clean and clear distinctions between success and failure. These men, like virtually everybody else, male or female, artist or not, were both successes and failures, compromising and uncompromised, part Plastic and part Cardboard. The "old architecture of manliness" has seldom been more than an undue burden on The Arts, but nor does consigning The Arts wholesale to the playpen of "mancessories" and "ornamental masculinity" do them justice. Literally, this is not what The End of Men does; by proxy and the occasional odd whiff of hostility, it comes closer.

[sc]airquotes (vi)

"The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, a coalition of business and education leaders and policy makers, found, for example, that education in dance, theater, music, and the visual arts helps instill the curiosity, creativity, imagination, and capacity for evaluation that are perceived as vital to a productive U.S. work force. And the Conference Board, an international business-research organization, polled employers and school superintendents, finding that creative problem-solving and communications are deemed important by both groups for an innovative work force. Additionally, IBM, in a 2010 report based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide, concluded that 'creativity trumps other leadership characteristics' in an era of relentless complexity and disruptive change."

Sunil Iyengar and Ayanna Hudson
Who Knew? Arts Education Fuels the Economy
Chronicle of Higher Education
10 March, 2014


Has anyone who conducts these studies or writes these articles ever tried to get a job armed with an arts degree?