Wolterstorff—Kissing, Touching, and Crying

Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)

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[17]

I

From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the Times regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,

imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.

The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the Times regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,

The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.

One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."

How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this attendee's pronouncement to the scrutiny of analytic philosophy!

Paul Goodman—The Beats

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[65] Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford,... Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them,......in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised. We shall speak later about the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its products; but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal

[66]

and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must have a future, and it is worth while to study its grounding and economy.

...

[67] ...the writers on the Beat Generation are confused. For one thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives the justification of art as a vocation. It is not art but something else, and they do not behave as if they were justified by it.

[177] It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, "It's the greatest!" or, "Go, man, go!" don't give much security. The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a culture hero for the immortal world. ...

[e.g.] An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the "previous" generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much

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still be added!) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best of the "Beat" writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to "give them a chance." This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoreity that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among whom he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.

That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he receives notoreity and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.

Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite

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conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting "Don't listen to this crap! let's hear from X." His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist.

And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it's childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming "I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!"

These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversation bring out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

Salganik, Dodds, and Watts—Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market

Salganik, Dodds, and Watts
"Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market"
(2006)

The abstract:

Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that ‘‘the best’’ alternatives are qualitatively different from ‘‘the rest’’; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial ‘‘music market’’ in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants’ choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.

The gist:

our results suggest not only that social influence contributes to inequality of outcomes in cultural markets, but that as individuals are subject to stronger forms of social influence, the collective outcomes will become increasingly unequal.

[emailed to self, 6 April 2021]

Individualism and Nonconformity

I
Most everything Lasch has to say in The Revolt of the Elites about the dangers of "refer[ring] everything to a plurality of ethical commitments," about the way this leads to "double-standards" which a democracy cannot afford, and about "tolerance becom[ing] indifference," most all of this could be neatly transfered over to the realm of art and made to sound equally convincing. I would venture that much of it is quite often applied in this way, and that within a narrow subculture of professional specialism or fanatical connoisseurship this is unproblematic, maybe even necessary. But it does not work, I want to argue, on any broader level of discourse about art, and it becomes more oppressive the broader any such discursive pretensions become.

Parsons on Universalistic and Particularistic Systems

Social systems in which a considerable number of individuals are in a complex and delicate state of mutual interdependence tend greatly to limit the scope of "personal" emotional feeling or, at least, its direct expression in action. Any considerable range of affective spontaneity would tend to impinge on the statuses and interests of too many others, with disequilibriating consequences for the system as a whole. (187-188)

[A footnote to this passage...]

This tendency for multiple-membered social systems to repress spontaneous manifestations of sentiment should not be taken too absolutely. In such phenomena as cliques, there is room for the following of personal inclinations within the framework of institutionalized statuses. It is, however, probable that it is more restrictive in groups where, as in kinship, the institutionalized relationships are particularistic and functionally diffuse than in universalistic and functionally specific systems such as modern occupational organizations. In the latter case personal affective relationships can, within considerable limits, be institutionally ignored as belonging to the sphere of "private affairs." (188)

Talcott Parsons
"The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States" (1943)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 177-196

Note (4 June, 2016): It would be interesting and productive to consider the various contemporary trends toward social theories of art in light of this observation. Such theories seem hell-bent on delivering a more particularistic, functionally diffuse relationship between artist and audience in place of the universalistic and functionally specific relationship that persisted in earlier European high culture. Of course, the larger implications of this are never sufficiently considered, either on the side of drawbacks to contemporary social theories of art or of benefits of the supposedly outmoded romantic/modernist theories, and so the various systemic-level drawbacks articulated by TP throughout his later essays could make for potent rebuttals. The notion that particularistic/diffuse/interdependent social structures inherently restrict "spontaneous manifestations of sentiment" certainly would be a damning charge if it could be proven.