Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 2—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

---

[79]

Part II
Theories of expression

What is expression?

... even if not all art is expressive, much art is. ... [so] , we still need to say something theoretical about expression and art, inasmuch as quite a lot of art is expressive. ...

... in ordinary language. ... sometimes ["expression"] behaves like a synonym for "representation." ... "The White Paper expresses the British position" ... "The White Paper represents the British position." However, ... philosophers of art, ... typically when they talk of expression, they intend it to contrast with representation. ...

Another broad meaning of "expression" in everyday speech is roughly "communication." ... But ...

[80]

... this too is a broader sense ... than philosophers of art have in mind. ...

... when philosophers of art talk about what poems express, they are not thinking broadly about the communication of ideas. ... [but rather about]

certain human qualities

(also known as

anthropomorphic properties)

—notably, emotional tones, moods, emotively colored attitudes, ...

When I say "this poem is angry" I could mean at least two things: that the poet

reports that he is angry

... or that the poet

expresses anger.

... One could say [i.e. "report"] "We are angry" in the same tone of voice that one could say "Everyone here is over five feet tall." [But] ... when we express anger in life or in art, we

manifest

anger—we

show it forth.

... the quality of our anger saturates our utterance. ...

To express anger, in this sense, is to

get the feeling of anger across

—to make it perceptible (to

embody or objectify

it). ... Roughly ... to express ... is to manifest outwardly an emotive property— ...

... an artwork may also manifest a range of other human qualities ... we might say "The story is courageous" or "It expresses courage," ... Thus, what may be expressed are not only

emotive qualities,

but

any human qualities,

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 2—Part 1

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

---

[59]

2
Art and expression

Part I
Art as expression

The expression theory of art

For centuries, representation was taken to be the central, defining feature of art. ... broadly, the emphasis in imitation theories of art was on

the outward aspects of things—
the look of objects and the actions of humans.

In a loose sense ... the objective features of the "external" world— ...

nature and observable behavior.

But, in the West, as

the eighteenth century

dissolved into

the nineteenth,
ambitious artists

... began

to turn inward;

... less preoccupied with ... appearance ... than with ... their own

subjective experiences.

... landscapes [e.g.] were charged with

a significance beyond their physical properties.

... artists ... attempted to

register their reactions
—the way they felt—

about the landscapes. ...

... Romanticism places premier value on

the self and its own individual experiences.

... some outward scene ... is not presented for its own sake, but as a stimulus for the poet to

examine his or her own emotional responses to it.

[60]

...

... We still live in the shadows of Romanticism. ... Many twentieth-century art movements ...

can be seen

as direct descendants of Romanticism.

Should these movements
be seen as such?

Moreover, ... these developments ... employing distortion and abstraction for expressive purposes ... made ever more evident the inadequacies of imitation and representational theories of art.

. . . but presumably this didn't happen right away. I think Danto has a point there. The initial reaction, and the final reaction of many people until their final death-reaction, is simply to resist expansion of the "concept," as we might say in Anal. Phil. terms.

Danto can always be counted on to make many good points, but he usually manages to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from them. If "it was impossible to accept" Postimpressionism, at first, "as art unless inept art," then this does not at all suggest that "terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories." What it suggests, in fact, is that theories and concepts are the last to adapt themselves to a new reality.

If so, then Our Man Here has an even bigger problem than Danto: What does this say about any "analysis" of "our" concepts and practices? Are we analyzing yesterday's newspaper hoping to find out what is happening today?

[sc]airquotes (ix)—in praise of dick-thinking

Herb Goldberg
The Hazards of Being Male
(1976)

---

[22]

3. The Wisdom
Of The Penis

...

The essence and ultimate joy of male sexuality lies in the experience of total arousal, the moment when nothing in the world exists except the woman beside him, ... —desire at such a peak that no fantasies could possibly intrude ...

... it is a state most men have experienced at some time in their lives before they allowed their sexual spontaneity to be mired in the intellectualizations about "sexuality," derailed by abstractions about "meaningful relationships" and "sharing," alienated from their own experience by a destructive emphasis on techniques, and numbed by scientific teachings about the physiology of the woman and himself. That, to my mind, is the essence of much of the so-called new sexual enlightenment—the "progress" and the problem.

While women's sexuality has been misunderstood and they've been confused and degrated [sic] by psychoanalytic interpretations ... men, I believe, have been seriously and negatively affected by such labels as "latent homosexuality," "fear of intimacy," "mother fixation," "repressed hostility toward

[23]

women," "fear of failure," ...

Undoubtedly these all contain a basis in truth, but instead of facilitating his growth, the major impact of these concepts and terms have been to propel the male into greater self-consciousness, guilt, and self-accusatory reactions. Belief in these ideas often causes him to distrust his own unique sexual responses.

The beginning of a new male consciousness in the area of sexuality will first require, along with being fully aware of his feelings, a different way of interpreting his responses. ...

... It is true that a boy is given more exploratory privileges and has traditionally been allowed a wider latitude in terms of sexual indulgence. However, cultural evaluations of his sexual behavior have been far more harsh.

Impotence

... In our culture the subject has become an almost maniacal preoccupation.

[24]

... While lip-service is paid to the fact that impotence is a two-way problem, it is the male who is in the majority at the sex therapy clinics. The image of the female's role in male impotence is still largely one of helper—a sometimes supportive, sometimes resentful spectator waiting for him to overcome his problem.

...

The psychoanalytic and psychiatric approach to impotence, which involves tracing back and exploring early experiences and traumas, has a basis in reality but is a little like treating

[25]

food poisoning by exploring early eating habits. It neglects the fact that the real cause may be in the present, with the body appropriately responding to something that is seeks to avoid.

... The vast majority of men are of course capable of becoming erect under certain conditions and with certain women. So-called impotence is almost always a pair-specific phenomenon, that may be making a powerful statement about the man's feelings about the relationship toward the particular woman he is in bed with. Ironic as it may seem, most men, would rather feel they have a medical problem than say very simply to their intimate, "I don't want to make love to you." In other words, acknowledging impotence and claiming, "I've got a problem," is easier than expressing the feeling, "I'm not turned on by you." Therefore, instead of seeing himself as impotent, I would encourage him to say "I don't want to have sex with you." I would have him translate "premature ejaculation" into, "I want to get this over with as fast as possible." I would encourage him to explore and understand his negative responses to the particular woman or situation rather than assume the burden and then try to overcome the "symptom."

My clinical experience indicates that the man who diagnoses himself as impotent is often experiencing something within his relationship or about his partner that is killing his desire. However, the feeling message is only being telegraphed by his body response and is not being recognized in his conscious brain.

A colleague of mine is treating a forty-one-year-old man who became impotent after he lost his job. The patient previously was informed by one well-meaning doctor and had also read in several magazine articles that his inability to achieve erection had something to do with the fact that he associated his job with his masculinity ... An in-depth interview with his wife revealed that she was secretly deeply resentful about his unemployment and blamed

[26]

him for his lack of foresight. Out of guilt, however, she never told him, but she did say to the therapist, "He knew it was bound to happen and he could have done something about it in time, if he had really wanted to." The man's penis was perceiving her unspoken anger and her attitude of rejection toward him and was refusing to "make love" in the face of her anger and rage.

...

A different form of the wisdom of the penis is illustrated by the responses of a twenty-six-year-old recently married engineer. ... The twenty-nine-year-old wife had had two years of psychology courses and had convinced him that he was really angry toward women because of the way his mother had treated him. ... That sounded plausible to him and he came to therapy wanting to be "cured." Several private sessions with his wife, however, brought to light the fact that she had married him primarily because she was approaching thirty and was concerned that she'd never get married. She revealed that she had never been attracted to him physically and had been faking her sexual excitement right from the beginning. ... His penis was aware of her basic lack of true involvement with him. ...

[27]

...

An associate of mine told me of a patient who had recently gone to bed with the wife of a friend of his and found himself impotent. As he explored his reaction he realized that she probably was only using him to precipitate an end to her own faltering marriage. His body sensed this and wisely kept him out of a potentially explosive and dangerous relationship.

In another instance, a forty-two-year-old man became completely impotent with his wife of seventeen years. However, he was extremely potent during occasional visits to prostitutes. When I first spoke to him he was in an extreme anxiety state regarding his inability to perform sexually. He wanted to be "cured" as quickly as possible. ...

As we spoke at greater length however, it readily became apparent that internally he had been experiencing rage toward his wife for many years. ...

He acknowledged that he felt smothered and engulfed by his wife whom he felt resented him and tried to block his every autonomous move. He had been unable to assert himself with her. Instead he had given up his own activities— ... He simply went to work and came home.

While consciously he rationalized his wife's demands and stated that he felt she was justified in her expectations and requests to have him at home with the children, his penis registered his innermost feelings. It was protesting the annihilation of his real self. It was his "truth teller" and it said that he did not really want closeness and physical intimacy with a woman he felt was destroying him.

There are other examples, some so transparent that they are amusing. For example, an obviously hostile woman who was always putting down men, recently asked me if I could confirm her experience that "just about all men today have impotency problems." Clearly, she was not aware of the impact her

[28]

hostility toward men had on her lovers. She apparently believed that erections automatically appear under all conditions. Her underlying assumption was that men have no emotional reactions when it comes to sex, and that a "normal" man will automatically have an erection when there is a naked, willing woman.

Men are not impotent today. They only are impotent with some women under some conditions and their non-responsive reactions reflect important truths that they must learn to trust and understand.

... Certain kinds of contemporary conditioning techniques and "helpful" and "supportive" advice ... would have done these men great disservice. Their basic distrust of the wisdom of their body responses would only have been reinforced.

... I don't believe that an erection, no matter how achieved, is a good thing simply because it reduces a man's anxiety for the moment. I feel that this attitude robs him of the necessity of owning up to his real feelings about his partner or the relationship in which he's involved. The man who gets his erections by cheating on himself through fantasizing sex with other women, arousing himself with pornography, or using various and sundry mechanical devices is demonstrating disrespect for himself and rejection of his real emotions.

... The penis is not a piece of plumbing that functions capriciously. It is an expression of the total self. In these days of over-intellectualization it is perhaps the only remaining sensitive and revealing barometer of the male's true sexual feelings.

---

Arthur Danto
Analytical Philosophy of Action
(1973)

---

[116]

5

GIFTS

i

'We are not able to move all the organs of the body with like authority',
Hume observes,
'though we cannot assign any reason besides experience, for so remarkable a difference between one and the other.'

'As we are now',
wrote St Augustine,
'not only do our articulate members obey the will — our hands or feet or fingers — but even those that are moved only by small sinews and tendons we contract and turn as we list, as you may see in the voluntary motions of the mouth and face . . . and the lungs do serve a man's will entirely, like a pair of smith's or organist's bellows.'

Like Hume,
Augustine supposed it merely contingent that our 'authority' should be circumscribed as we find it to be,
for there are men capable of doing odd things: 'We see some men's natures far different from others, acting those things strangely in their bodies which others neither do nor hardly will believe.'

So
we could have been framed
with our authority differently seated:
'God could easily have made us with all our members subjected to the will',
he writes,

adding the possibility
which obviously haunted him as a man,
as we might recall from the Confessions,

'even those which now are moved by lust'.

I italicize the word 'now', which occurs twice in this passage. For it was Augustine's curious view that Adam, in paradise, indeed was so framed that he could perform what I have termed basic actions with his sexual organ, and hence achieve the sexual act immune from the contaminations of sin.

It is thus not sex but lust which is the root of sin, and hence the domination by the flesh of us rather than the domination by us over our bodies, which is the fallen state. Paradise accordingly is a condition we may get some glimpses of from our present powers of direct action, executing intentions without the concomitant torment of desire.

I am not at all certain that
it is a merely contingent matter
that voluntary erection
lies outside the boundaries of direct action.

For curiously enough,
a man who were able to erect at will
might in fact be impotent in the received sense,
which is an incapacity for genuine

[117]

sexual response;

where response implies
precisely the absence of
that order of control
Augustine supposes our first parent
to have exemplified.

A man who had direct control, or who was obliged to exercise direct control, would be a man without feeling, erection being the common expression of male sexual feeling.

And it is in some measure a logical truth that if erection were an action it would not be an expression, and the entire meaning of sexuality would be altered were tumescence something over which we had 'authority'.

Hence feeling,
or lust, if you will,
is not so contingently related to erection
as Augustine's argument implies.

But
perhaps it is his claim that there would in fact have been no sexuality in paradise:
a wry conjecture in the light of post-Freudian sexual romanticism.

Matravers—Representational vs. Expressive Qualities

Matravers and Levinson
"Aesthetic Properties"
(2005)

[196] Many terms that have an aesthetic use, also have a use in what I shall call 'central cases'. For example, in the central cases 'sad' refers to a particular mental state, or objects and events reasonably connected to such a state. There is an aesthetic use in which it refers to representations of situations which, if the situations were actual, the term would be appropriate... However, there is also an aesthetic use where it does not refer to the propositional content of objects (broadly construed), but to their expressive quality. Most
[197]
familiar from the literature, some pieces of purely instrumental music...are sad. Although this case is the most familiar a little reflection shows that a vast range of predicates have both central and aesthetic uses. The overwhelming aesthetic feature of Liverpool Cathedral, after all, is that it is big. Here is [Roger] Scruton's argument.

Consider the application of an emotion term —such as 'sad' — to a work of art (or, for that matter, to an event, or a letter, or anything that cannot literally be in the emotional state of sadness). To understand the word 'sad' is to know how to apply it to people in order to describe their emotional state. The criteria for the application of the term 'sad' concern the gestures, expressions and utterances of people on the basis of which I describe them as sad, and to grasp the concept of sadness is to know how to apply it on the basis of these criteria. When we apply the concept to art, however, it is arguable that these criteria are not, or need not be present. Does this mean that the term 'sad' is ambiguous?

Scruton points out that if the term were ambiguous, it would follow that someone could grasp fully what was meant in applying 'sad' to a work of art, whilst having no grasp at all of what it meant in the central case. This he rightly takes to be impossible. Hence, any view which entailed such ambiguity would be in trouble.

[emailed to self, 26 April 2021]

Bodies and Artifacts (iv-a)—A Story of Jean and LeRoi

Jean Cassou
"The Nostalgia for a Métier"
in
Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (1963)
ed. Wylie Sypher
pp. 399-409

Think of the tragedy of modern artistic consciousness. Try to discern first of all what it really is. We are led back to the inception of the creative act, where the artist can do only what springs from himself alone; and without knowing what his work will be or how it will be received (save that he is utterly sure it will be refused) he appears as a nearly unknown, useless, nameless creature...

It is the grandeur and honor of modern art to have put the accent on this first step in the artistic process, that of conceiving, to have reduced the definition of art itself to conceiving, it being clearly understood that each conception is not an a priori abstraction, that it comes into being only by manifesting itself as a form. But in that form what [it?] signifies is its problematic character: it is a proposal, a hypothesis, an abnormal and subversive venture. And its inventor can only doubt its viability. For in its behalf he has no guarantee, no guarantor. No teaching has guided him in developing it, and since he is alone in his corner and it in no way resembles things produced by certain, sanctioned, and regular methods, it seems to him that the world will not know what to make of it.

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Human Potential

Karen Kurczynski
The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn:
The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (2014)

He [Jorn] believed that expression is a basic human potential that the institutions of art actually deny ordinary people by turning it into the specialty of a few heroic geniuses. (8)

What "institutions of art" "deny" to "ordinary people" is NOT their potential, but rather recognition and resources. If Sunday Painters believe they are entitled to those things simply for being human, then they deserve neither!

As a child of the 1980s who is suitably well-versed in motivational posters, I believe it to be true and prescient that No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission. They ought not, at least, simply by forming insitutions for the pursuit of a common agenda, or not necessarily. Past and present adherents to the doctrine enumerated in this passage hence contradict themselves by seeing institutions as inhibiting potential, since it is recognition that is withheld rather than freedom. Certainly it seems true that mere knowledge of the existence/praxis of recognition does inhibit many amateur artists; but this merely proves (proves!) that recognition is in fact their motive! This is SELF-inhibition!

The SI ultimately considered visual art mere cultural capital with no agency to effect broader social change (a belief that led Jorn to leave the movement). While Jorn's ongoing engagement with such neo-Marxist critiques of the institution of art was one of the driving forces behind Situationist theory, he also remained firmly committed to the idea that art plays a very specific role in society. For Jorn, art fulfilled a basic human need for expression. Yet even as modern art foregrounded personal expression for the first time in history, its institutionalization as a specialized sphere of the social elite cheated the non-artist out of a fundamental aspect of human experience. (10)

...the young and idealistic artists regarded Helhesten's ["Hell-horse," journal published in Denmark from 1941 to 1944 by Jorn and colleagues] activities as a direct intervention in social life, rather than simply an art movement. (27)

Jorn would continue to uphold this view of the avant-garde as an emancipatory force in both art and life, writing in 1949 that, "The purpose of art is first of all moral, and subsequently aesthetic." (27-28)

Oddly, this wording connects the seemingly new, proto-postmodern focus on the everyday to the older (typically intensely ideological) trope of "moral" uplift through the arts.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Parsons on the Instrumental and the Expressive

If we are right in thinking that special pressures operate on the younger generation relative to the general pressures generated by social change, on the other side of the relationship there are factors which make for special sensitivities on their part. The residua of early dependency, as pointed out above, constitute one such factor. In addition, the impact on youth of the general process of social differentiation makes for greater differences between their position and that of children, on the one hand, and that of adults, on the other, than is true in less differentiated societies. Compared to our own past or to most other societies, there is a more pronounced, and above all (as noted) an increasingly long segregation of the younger groups, centered above all on the system of formal education. It may be argued especially that the impact of this process is particularly pronounced at the upper fringe of the youth period, for the rapidly increasing proportion of the age cohort engaged in higher education–in college, and, very importantly, in postgraduate work. These are people who are adults in all respects except for the element of dependency, since they have not yet attained full occupational independence (172)

...

What I have called the romantic trend can be broadly expressed in two directions; the tentative terms "regressive" and "progressive" are appropriate, if not taken too literally. ...the former, at social levels, tending to resist change, the latter to anticipate and promote it.

...The cult of physical prowess [e.g. athletics] has clearly been a reflex of the pressure to occupational achievement in a society in which brains rather than brawn come increasingly to count. From this point of view, it is a regressive phenomenon. (175)

...

On the other side, the progressive one, the most important phenomena are most conspicuous at the upper end of the range, both in terms of the sociocultural level and of the stage of the life cycle. This is the enormous development of serious cultural interests among students in the more elite colleges. The most important field of these interests seems to be that of the arts, including highbrow music, literature, drama, and painting.

The first essential point here is that this constitutes a very definite upgrading of cultural standards, compared with the philistinism of the most nearly corresponding circles in an earlier generation. Second, however, it is at least variant and selective (though not, I think, deviant) with respect to the main trends of the society, since the main developments in the latter are on the "instrumental" rather than the "expressive" side. As to the special involvement of elite youth in the arts, it may be said that youth has tended to become a kind of "loyal opposition" to the main trends of the culture, making a bid for leadership in a sphere important to balanced society yet somewhat neglected by the principal innovating agencies. (176)

Talcott Parsons
"Youth in the Context of American Society" (1962)
in Social Structure and Personality, pp. 155-182

Note (12 May, 2016):
So, among the "romantic," "progressive" elements of youth culture, the arts present a sort of path of least resistance, an opening created by the slippage between society's stated valuation of the arts on one hand and its material/actual devaluation of them on the other. The arts are both socially acceptable and (TP explicitly denies it, but I would not) in some sense also deviant. Further, as TP perceptively identifies here, the source of the arts' deviant tinge is the broader trend of society in the "instrumental" direction at the direct expense of "expressive" concerns. Rapid change of this type creates anomic strain, which feeds youthful romanticism (the "unreality" component TP identifies elsewhere with "romanticism" is very apt here too). Even so, the "elite," "progressive" elements of youth culture, while they are not immune to romanticism and unreality, are still of their own volition bound to common social values and norms; hence, their brand of "youth culture" is merely "loyal opposition" rather than out and out rebellion. TP only IMPLIES that this "loyalty" is a direct and predictable product of this youth's socialization as "elite." He doesn't actually say so, at least not here. But isn't it obvious that those born "elite" have an awfully tough time later admitting that the society which delivered them to such privilege does not treat all people equally or equitably? IMHO, this is an important explanation for the "loyalty" of their "opposition" to a society which they inevitably, be it consciously or unconsciously, come to understand as fundamentally inequitable. The dialectical ring of the term "loyal opposition" is a reflection of the unresolved inner guilt which underlies it. So, it's true, TP has perhaps underemphasized the elements of class conflict here, choosing instead to conduct distinct analyses of the "regressive" and "progressive" elements. I would say that this approach is "incomplete" without being out-and-out "flawed." In fact, this is a brilliant take on the explosive escalation of post-secondary arts education that was just beginning to take shape as he was writing. VERY perceptive.

---

Kluckhohn, among others [The Evolution of Contemporary American Values, 1958], comments on the current expansion in America of aesthetic and expressive activities "greatly beyond mere 'comfort.' Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] calls attention to the concern with taste in the widespread sophistication about food and dress. We suggest that this rise in aesthetic appreciation, in hedonism, if you will, is not merely an effort to establish new criteria of status through marginal differentiation but mainly a heightened expressiveness–complementary to, rather than conflicting with, a rise in instrumental demands for achievement. (229)

"The Link Between Character and Society"
(with Winston White) (1961)
ibid, pp. 183-235

19 April, 2021: In other words, this "expansion" of "aesthetic and expressive activities" is compensatory and equilibriating in a world where the "main developments" have for long been "on the 'instrumental' rather than the 'expressive' side." The idea is facile. Probably it is all but untestable scientifically. But there is lots of anecdotal evidence for it, and it holds great explanatory power.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xiv)

"As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of the early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended upon the photographer's respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before his eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice--which sometimes occurred at the point when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints--the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit." (93)

The Sneakernet of Everyday Life

A couple of years after college I commenced sporadic production of a half-humorous zine as an outlet for various petty frustrations with the world of music and musicians. The focus was more personal and quotidian than on this blog, which I started around the same time. Blogging being public and more or less permanent, I have always maintained that the more personal the content the more interesting and unique it ought to be. Ditto regarding any imperative towards expression as that word is broadly and colloquially construed across The Arts. Seems to me that any such imperative is necessarily colored by several more general features of the society or social group in question, e.g. the degree of shared experience, conformity to norms, obedience to authority, and so on. In other words, most of us are not quite different enough from each other for the public airing of even the most intimate details to be the least bit interesting to our various constituencies. (And if a public airing is to be deemed necessary on purely therapeutic grounds, then the offending malaise must be a particularly virulent and contagious one indeed; on which point I must thereby beg your indulgence in suspending judgment of this meta-airing until its purpose has become clear.)

In any case, as the blog has skewed speculative, the zine has become an archive of the personal, and this dovetailed with the fact of the latter's strictly private and offline circulation. I have recently resumed production after a long hiatus and am finding it quite useful in exactly this way. The reason, however, for writing at length on all of this now is to relate a very practical use, perhaps even a necessary one, which has recently emerged and which never would have occurred to me the day I brought out the first installment.

Employers are demanding to moderate what their employees say about them online, and not even a jazz tuba player can avoid falling under surveillance. This was ostensibly the case with a certain car opera recently staged in and around LA by a company you probably haven't heard of, and it is ostensibly the case regarding my current employment with an entertainment franchise you’ve most certainly heard of. Neither of the organizations in question will ever be mentioned by name here, not by me at least, and not by you either if you happen to know me well enough to put all of this together and would like me to be able to address any new developments to the already limited extent possible under the circumstances. They will not be mentioned because as a condition of employment both demand authority to moderate online content pertaining to them, and because one is known to devote significant resources to this. (And really, what quantity of resources is not "significant" when you consider the implications of such policies and the time-is-money realities of running a business?)

For what it’s worth, I don’t have to start a limited-run, privately-circulated, dead-tree social commentary franchise with which to digest, explore, archive and (usually) exorcise the vicissitudes of such personal experience: I already have one as an existential matter if not much of a material one. What I didn’t have before was real necessity for such an outlet ("real" in this case meaning "beyond the personal")¹. Thanks to the new thought police, which, like so many other rhetorical constructions of modernist dystopian thought, has coalesced fragmentarily and incrementally rather than all at once, now I do.

For anyone just devoted enough to my personal concerns to be an earnest and comprehensive reader of both publications, it might be useful to think of the zine as a sort of annotated bibliography in support of the more sweeping generalizations I make here about the professional circles I inhabit, and perhaps also as a way of “blogging” on topics and experiences which would be socially ungraceful and/or professionally damaging to address publicly online. I suppose this betrays my rather cynical view of prevailing norms of social and professional comportment, but unfortunately there is almost always something arising from artists' relationships with employers and/or with each other which really ought to be addressed and brought to wider attention, i.e. for the specific purpose of giving the community a chance to look itself in the mirror. Social grace and professional viability are quite flimsy excuses for forgoing such opportunities: first, because together they amount to very little when compared to the potential chilling effect of the new reality; and second, because, as I am attempting to outline here, it is not impossible to have it both ways given the variety of media and social settings presently at our collective disposal. In any case, there won't be much worldly grace or prestige left to preserve if transparency is ritually sacrificed to branding in this arena as it already has been in so many others. Unfortunately the seemingly ideal online platforms which emerged in the 1990s are in the 2010s now equally ideal for surveillance. Hence the ongoing need for a Sneakernet of Everyday Life.


1. Again, is “personal” necessity ever better than oxymoronic vis-a-vis the act of telling others about yourself? And does the therapeutic value of artistic "expression" really hinge on the act of public presentation over and beyond private creation? Even if the answer is simply, "It depends," these two questions are always worth pondering before hitting the Send button. Ask me how I know.

Activation

Today I listened, at his behest, to a very talented younger friend run down an upcoming classical trumpet audition. I have all but cut bait with the mainstream classical brass world at this point and found myself frequently prefacing/qualifying comments with, "What I'm about to say explains exactly why I don't do this anymore, but..." I am speaking specifically of questions of "expression," that ever-loaded, euphemistic catchall for everything that's not on the printed page. Everyone who has crawled under this particular rock for any period of time has spent countless hours in private lessons being told that a certain line needs more direction, that the speed, width, or amount of vibrato is not quite right, that all the notes and rhythms are there and all that is needed now is to "make music," as if that phrase means the same thing to everyone everywhere for all time. For my friend today, for me always, and I suspect for many, many other classical brass students, the challenge is simply caring, about what we are playing, about the people listening, and, highly problematically I would argue, about what kind of carrot is dangling at the end of the stick du jour. When the music is "our" music, and when the carrot is something real and personal and not simply career-driven grasping, it doesn't matter whether we're playing for thousands of people, one person, a microphone, or an empty room; but when the music is anything less than the very core of our identity, "expression" threatens to materialize only as a contrivance, if sometimes a convincing one, or perhaps not at all. This is a non-problem; it vanishes in "our" music as quickly as it appears elsewhere. But of course, even for the most uncompromising among us, the line between "our" music and the rest is not always so clear. For the moment Bach is my one lifeline to classical quasi-legitimacy, but I wouldn't refuse to play Hindemith, Kraft, or Galliard again, even though none of them are quite core identity material. I would be well-prepared technically simply because I would enjoy playing them, but in absence of an engaged audience I probably would need some prodding to "make music." And if this were all a teacher could think to offer me, I wouldn't be getting much out of my tuba lessons. Stylization is personal business, and it can scarcely be verbalized anyway.

Another can of worms, perhaps for another post: prescribed repertoire is essentially a means of controlling for personality. If competitors were allowed to choose their own rep, committees would have to judge on the aesthetics of the collective presentation instead of on (a) brute technique, and (b) the ability to play as if one cared deeply about (usually) awful music. We hear so much handwringing over (a), but I would insist that (b), being as it is highly destructive of sincerity, is actually the far greater evil.