Kavolis (ii)

Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis
(1968)

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[165]

12
🙛 🙙
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
AND PURITANISM

Abstract expressionism, the imageless, energetic style of painting represented by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, is one of the few modern styles completely without analogues in any of the civilizations of the past. It has emerged in the only industrialized civilization in history. The partial correlation between abstract expressionism and an advanced stage of industrialization suggests that an economic determinant may have been important in the emergence of this style of painting. Our purpose will be to show that industrialism is inadequate, even on the level of sociological analysis, as an explanation of the abstract expressionist style.

Kavolis (i)

Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis
(1968)

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[4] The most obvious, although excessively general, explanation of the societal universality of art is the assumption that affective orientation to the situation of action is one of the basic requisites for the successful functioning of the human society, and that art is a strategic means of fulfilling this need.

In the past, sociologists have been encumbered in their approach to art by inadequacies in their theory of the social functions of art.

Or have they been

encumbered

by

their approach ,

whereby everything must

function

in a rather narrow sense?

Rank—Art and Artist (iia)—The Inessentiality of Biography (a)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

[xxii] during all the years when I was constantly absorbed by problems, particularly those connected with poetry, I did not attempt a single biography (or pathography) of a famous artist.

...anything in the nature of psychographic material and view-points that I myself had to contribute invariably presented itself to me at once as something fitting into a larger frame,...

...I propose to follow the line of reaching out beyond what is individual in the artist-personality and to show, or at least suggest, the collective aspect...

...my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life. I arrived at this conception by a concentrated psychological study of the two human types which most clearly reveal success and failure in this struggle to overcome: the so-called neurotic type, and the creative.

---

[22] it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all æsthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology.

For
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator.

But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.

...it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. ...

Ever since Aristotle's day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical

[23]

processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the æsthetic critic.

... [of course] in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work,... Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it.

But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self.

Riesman—Abundance For What?

David Riesman
Abundance For What? and Other Essays
(1964)

"Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity"
(with Warner Bloomberg, Jr., 1957)
(pp. 147-161)

[149] Some workers responded to the exhausting demands of the workplace by a heroic effort to build up a counterlife outside the plant... Some retired into a close-knit family life and to home-improvement rather than self-improvement...

Where no other escape existed, the factory workers tended, like sailors, to fall back on the common denominator of the male sex as defining their leisure: gambling, fighting, whoring. ... Men became habituated to the factory, as children to school, but this "second nature" never overtook them completely nor turned them into enthusiastic addicts of monotony.

No wonder that a counterattack soon began against the central place of work on the simplest level of demanding shorter hours, with men choosing to take part of their increasing productivity in the form of time off rather than of an increase in real income. ...

[150] At a certain point, however, workers seem to want to buy leisure inside rather than outside the plant. No doubt this in part reflects still operative conventions as to a proper working day... And in part men may fear to have too much time outside—time perhaps on which their wives could make demands.

...

[155] ...the worker, as a parvenu, tends to have a more unequivocal relation to consumer goods than do people who have had a longer exposure to them. One of us supervised a study which illustrates this point. Working-class and middle-class parents were interviewed concerning their attitudes toward TV: for the former, this was an extrapolation of radio and the movies, and indubitably and good thing in a world of things, whereas for many middle-class parents TV presented a problem in self-definition, as well as in its possibly harmful effects on children.

This adherence to the tangible, then, characterizes working-class leisure activities in a wide gamut: the garden harvest which, like the fishing catch, can be counted and weighed; the travel mileages and car horsepowers which can be compared; and sex (whether marital or not), drinking, sports, and betting, which are all felt as essentially palpable. To be sure, we do not want to exaggerate...the lack of abstraction, nuance, and shadings of taste among factory workers. We know that even where the objects are the same, the meanings we assume to be attached to them

[156]

are of course attached only to their human possessors and that there is great variety here. ..

Beyond that, it is our impression that the simplicities of working-class leisure are under pressure not only from the tastes of the better educated strata as class consciousness and cultural encapsulation decline, but also from what we might term the feminizing of leisure. ...

"Leisure and Work in Postindustrial Society"
(1958)
(pp. 162-183)

[169] An informal poll a union local...found that the leaders did want a shorter work week whereas the rank and file did not. This was interpreted as suggesting that the leaders, better educated and more enterprising, feel cramped for time to do everything they want to do... Such men already had many hobbies... But the less active members...had no similar feeling of wanting the days to be longer. Such men, asked what they would do with an extra day, sometimes say, "sleep"; others could use it in hunting season—and already did so, to the dismay of the foreman. . . .

[In another study] some 80 per cent of industrial workers stated that they, in effect, kept on working for lack of alternatives, not for positive satisfactions. ... This clinging to the job is not simply a legacy of the Puritan ethic: it is rather a legacy of industrialism itself, of the old structures it has destroyed and the new structures it has created. Nor is it merely the feeling of shame in not having a job that is involved (although this is certainly an element). Work may not be an active presence in the life of American workers, but its absence would be an active absence. Or, more accurately, it is not so much work that would be missed as having a job...[as in] the self-definition (these data refer only to male workers) that comes from holding a job and the punctuations of life provided by regular employment.

...

[175] I have the impression that a general decline is occurring in the zest for work, a decline which is affecting even [certain] professional and intellectual groups... ...there is some slight evidence that application lists to medical school are no

[176]

longer so full, a decline which is attributed to the belief among young people that medical education is too arduous and takes too long before one is stabilized on a plateau of suburban life and domesticity. ... [In one study of medical students] three quarters of them are married, and, instead of sitting around waiting for night duty or talking about their work, they are eager to go home, help the wife get dinner, and relax with television.

Indeed, when I was an undergrad at The U, many of the grad students were both married and quite eager to go home. This meant, among other things, that you couldn't expect to get a practice room before 5pm, and that scheduling rehearsals was always difficult. It also was, already to me at that age, just really annoying to find music being treated like just another job. (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

[178] I have largely been discussing the uneven distribution of leisure in terms of differential attitudes toward work in different occupational groups. In comparison with the achievements of our occupational sociology, however, we have little comparable information concerning the sociology of leisure. ... A more systematic study than most...found that radio and TV listening were the top two activities for both upper and lower prestige groups, followed by studying in the upper group

[179]

and do-it-yourself activities in the lower. The latter spend much more time just driving around, as well as polishing the car; they also spend much more time in taverns. Only in the upper group do people go out to parties, as against simply dropping in on a neighbor... In both groups, commercial recreation outside the home, such as going to the movies, plays little part. This and other, more impressionistic studies point to the conclusion that the busier people, the professionals and executives and better-educated groups generally, also lead a more active life in their time away from work; as the saying goes, they work hard and play hard. ... Contrastingly, at the other end of the social scale, the unemployed as we know from several studies have in a psychological sense no leisure time at all...

"Some Issues in the Future of Leisure"
(with Robert S. Weiss, 1961)
(pp. 184-195)

[188] While for a few [industrial workers] this [response that given an extra hour in the day they would "sleep"] may bespeak an overfull life, and for others a general irritation with a nettling or silly question, the answer seems to us to symbolize the lack of interests and resources that could give point to the leisure time that is now available. ...

[189]

... This relative indifference has not always been the case: in the period before the Civil War, energetic workmen, in a burst of enthusiasm for science and literacy, created and attended the Mechanics Institutes. Presently our education system tends to siphon off from the working class the more literate and ambitious...

It is discomfitting to reflect on the complexity and scope of the programs that would be required to overcome this legacy of passivity and aimlessness. ...

At the level of the society the problems are no less grave. Where

[190]

the recreationist works for the public rather than the private sector, he has as little leverage at his disposal as the city planner has. One of us has recently had the chance to observe the enormous resistance that developed in a small Vermont community to a recreation leader's idea that the town should build a swimming pool, rather than some monument, as a war memorial: the project was fought by the town's elders as frivolous and a waste of money, in spite of the fact that the nearby rivers had become too polluted for swimming. Only great civic effort finally carried the project through, and now "everyone" can see what a boon it is to children and their parents, to farmers and workers after a hot day, and to otherwise idle teenagers, who can display themselves on the high dives, or, if they swim well enough, make a little money and gain some sense of responsibility from helping act as lifeguards around the pool. One consequence of the political weakness of public recreation is a tendency to overideologize particular leisure-time activities, exaggerating their importance and their potential contribution to individual character and the fabric of society. The President's campaign for physical fitness as a way of beating the Russians is an illustration. College sports may have suffered in the same way; it has repeatedly been shown, in novels and in the newspapers, that football or basketball do not inevitably build character. Yet it is hard to see how social forms adequate to the new leisure can be developed without an ideology that will mobilize people and strengthen the power of the few groups who are now concerned with the preservation of wilderness areas, the setting aside of land in our sprawling metropolitan belts for the play of adults and children, and the general release of resources other than commercial ones for experimentation and research in the field of leisure.

In comparison with the organizational forms developed for the integration of effort at work, there barely exist the social forms within which the energies of leisure might be developed or even illustatrated. Yet such comments evoke the whole paradox of planning for the use of what is an uncommitted part of one's life. Leisure is supposed to be informal, spontaneous, and unplanned, and is often defined as unobligated time, not only free of the job but free of social or civic obligations, moolighting, or more or less requisite do-it-yourself activities. One re-

[191]

sult of this outlook, however, is to discourage whatever planning is possible (except, perhaps, in terms of the family, not always the optimal unit for leisure when one thinks of the development of its individual members). When we confront such problems, we are inclined to think that significant changes in the organization of leisure are not likely to come in the absence of changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms, and its cultural style.

The Matthew Douglas Effect

The Matthew Effect in Science
Robert K. Merton

character structure and an acquired set of high standards often lead these outstanding scientists to discriminate between work that is worth publishing and that which, in their candid judgment, is best left unpublished though it could easily find its way into print. The laureates and other scientists of stature often report scrapping research papers that simply did not measure up to their own demanding standards or to those of their colleagues. ...a referee’s incisive report on a manuscript sent to a journal of physics asserts a relevant consequence of a scientist’s failure to exercise rigorous judgment in deciding whether to publish or not to publish: “If C——— would write fewer papers, more people would read them.” Outstanding scientists tend to develop an immunity to insanabile scribendi cacoethes (the itch to publish). Since they prefer their published work to be significant and fruitful rather than merely extensive, their contributions are apt to matter. This in turn reinforces the expectations of their fellow scientists that what these eminent scientists publish (at least during their most productive period) will be worth close attention. Once again this makes for operation of the Matthew effect, as scientists focus on the output of men whose outstanding positions in science have been socially validated by judgments of the average quality of their past work. And the more closely the other scientists attend to this work, the more they are likely to learn from it and the more discriminating their response is apt to be.

Indeed, if D—— D———— would put out fewer records, I would listen to more of them.

The Selective Exaltation of Norms

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[49] The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain.

Sure. But is this ever such a cut-and-dried case of promot[ing] a very specific view of life? Or, mustn't it be granted that individuals will process/respond differently even to such a supposedly rigid normative concept as the developmental schedule? Isn't there always something like rugged instrumentalism available as a rejoinder to such assertions as this one?

Sniderman and Tetlock—Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis

Sniderman and Tetlock
"Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis"
(1986)

[144] Only a minority of Americans favor strict racial segregation, but they exaggerate how many other Americans favor it, often by a factor of two or more. ...

The point is not merely that many white Americans misperceive the racial attitudes of their fellow whites. It is rather that their misperceptions are asymmetrical, in two respects. First, they overestimate the number who are racially intolerant while underestimating the number who are racially tolerant... Second, the kind of mistake people make—whether they over- or underestimate how many people agree with them—hinges on their own racial attitudes. Thus, the racially intolerant overestimate—while the racially tolerant underestimate—how many people agree with them.

The asymmetry in preference estimation—pluralistic ignorance, as it is commonly called—suggests how the American dilemma is enduring. Not only does racial intolerance resist change, but even when it does diminish, the change often goes unnoticed, especially by the racially intolerant, with the result that they continue to believe they are in the majority while the tolerant continue to labor under the belief that they are in the minority.

Research on pluralistic ignorance undercuts the presupposition of symbolic racism researchers that social pressure against overt expression of anti-black affect is now widely effective in American society. Many bigots are not ashamed of their bigotry. It is not, from their point of view, bigotry at all; it merely a [sic] factual description of the world, and of certain kinds of people as they really are—indeed, as any open-minded person would acknowledge they are. Of course, some will feel inhibited from open expression of racial hostility. But many will not. If racists were as quick to dive for cover as symbolic racism theory suggests, racism would be a less serious problem than it is in fact.

Symbolic racism researchers also may have been too optimistic in their analysis of values. Race is the American dilemma, as it seems to us, in part because resistance to assuring equality for blacks (in addition to being rooted in racism) may still more fundamentally be grounded in the American ethos itself.

Symbolic racism researchers have pointed to the importance of such traditional values as self-reliance and the work ethic. But these values come into importance, on a symbolic racism analysis, only insofar as they are allied or conjoined with racial prejudice. But there is another, more sobering possibility: values such as individualism may undercut support for efforts to achieve racial equality, even when these values have nothing whatever to do with racism. For
[145]
example, suppose a woman opposes government assistance for blacks. Then she confronts a request for assistance for women similar to that requested for blacks. If she opposes assistance for women, just as she opposes it for blacks, should she be described as a racist?

There are many Americans like the hypothetical woman. They oppose government assistance for blacks, not out of aversion to blacks, but rather out of a set of normative beliefs defining the propriety both of asking for, and providing, public assistance. And these normative beliefs, a growing body of research suggests, tap values central in the American ethos, especially individualism.

Just how does this analysis suggest that a symbolic racism analysis may be overoptimistic? Quite simply, even supposing prejudice were to disappear completely, there would in all probability remain substantial popular opposition to government efforts to achieve racial equality. From this perspective, the American dilemma may involve a deep paradox: resistance to efforts to achieve racial equality may be rooted precisely in a commitment to a distinctively American conception of equality.

[emailed to self, 26 April 2021]

Hanson and Kysar—Market Manipulation

Hanson and Kysar
"Taking Behavioralism Seriously: Some Evidence of the Problem of Market Manipulation"
(1999)

[1426] Rather than simply
[1427]
asking how a particular anomaly will influence the typical consumer, the more probative question is how the presence of cognitive anomalies will influence all actors in the market. With that distinction in mind, we explained that manufacturers have every incentive to utilize cognitive biases to lower consumer appreciation of product risks. Such manipulation, we argued, is simply another form of cost externalization, a practice that manufacturers naturally pursue in an effort to avoid costs and increase profit margins. We noted also that this manipulation of consumer perceptions should occur whether or not manufacturers are cognizant of it. That is, the competitive forces of the market should drive manufacturers to act as if they are utilizing behavioral findings to exploit consumer perceptions, regardless of manufacturers’ awareness of the processes. Thus, we argued that the relative indeterminacy of the behavioral research is irrelevant to products liability theory because manufacturers operating under the evolutionary influence of the market will untangle the various cognitive forces at play in the consumer’s mind even if behavioral researchers and legal scholars cannot.

[emphasis in original]

...

[1434] After a cleaner, more efficient alternative to cockroach spray sold well below expectations in rural areas of the Southern United States, researchers assigned to the problem asked a focus group of representative women to draw pictures of cockroaches and describe their feelings about them. To the researchers’ surprise, all the insects were drawn as males and the stories accompanying the drawings clearly revealed feelings about the men in the subject women’s lives. Researchers learned that for these women, “killing the roaches with a bug spray and watching them squirm and die allowed [them] to express their hostility toward men.

....

[1481] There is growing evidence that cigarette warnings may actually give the product an enhanced gloss in the eyes of young consumers. Several studies have demonstrated a forbidden fruit appeal from television parental advisory warnings for violent shows. Similar studies on the labeling effects of alcoholic versus nonalcoholic drinks also suggest
[1482]
that the warning itself may enhance the attractiveness of the product. Tobacco industry executives seem to have been well aware of that possibility. As early as 1973, Dr. Claude Teague of RJR noted that a new brand aimed at the young group “should not in any way be promoted as a ‘health’ brand” and perhaps should carry some implied risk. To the contrary, “the warning label on the package may be a plus.” Thus, just as tobacco manufacturers were able to devise seemingly safer cigarettes to appease risk-conscious adult smokers, they also seem able to take advantage of government-mandated product warnings as an appeal to children in their constant efforts to recruit new smokers.

[emailed to self, 16 March 2021]

Lasch—Minerva's Owl and the End of Adolescence

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[74] By centering her criticism of the American family on Momism and adolescence, Mead singled out familiar features of domestic life that were already passing from the scene. The mother's influence in the middle-class American family has increased only in relation to that of the father. The decline of paternal authority has weakened the influence of both parents and undermined the affective identification of the younger generation with the older. Recent evidence suggests that American children, far from becoming overly dependent on their mothers, form strong attachments to neither parent, acquiring instead, at an early stage in their lives, a cool, detached, and realistic outlook on the world.

That's just...terrible?

Lasch—"Social Science" as "Elaborate Apology" for "Interdependence"

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[xv] Anyone who insists on the historical importance of human actions, and who sees history not as an abstract social "process" but as the product of concrete struggles for power, finds himself at odds with the main tradition of the social sciences, which affirms the contrary principle that society runs according to laws of its own. The claim to have discovered these laws is the overriding mystification of social science, which bears the same relation to later stages of the industrial revolution that the science of political economy bore to the earlier stages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classical economists interpreted industrial capitalism but also provided it with an elaborate apology, which disguised the social relations peculiar to capitalism as universal principles of economics. Whereas these social relations represented the end product of a particular line of historical development in western Europe, political economy mistook them for natural laws, disguised exploitation as the natural order of things, and thus gave class rule an aura of inevitability. Both
[xvi]
in capitalist practice and in the theory in which it was mirrored, the relations between men now assumed "the fantastic shape," as Marx put it, "of relations between things."

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expansion of the managerial function and the growth of bureaucracy brought into being a new branch of knowledge, social science, which attempted to explain the increasingly dense, opaque network of interpersonal relations so characteristic of advanced societies. Although the social sciences' attack on the commonplace illusion of individual autonomy represented an intellectual advance, their insistence that man is wholly the product of society vitiated this advance and led to new forms of confusion. According to social science,

It's hard not to be suspicious of sentences that start with,
"According to [ENTIRE BRANCH OF KNOWLEDGE]",
but sure...

Stephenson's "Small-Sample Doctrine"

William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)

[10]

A METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCE

... For over a century social scientists have been concerned with the fundamental problem of what should be the basis of measurement in their science. In physics there are units of weight and length, time and mass, and these suffice for all measurements. In the social sciences, when these units cannot be used, recourse is made to other devices either of an ad hoc nature (different therefore in every study) or else systematically constructed, as scales of intelligence, attitudes... These scales are based on the large-sample theory and the Theory of Error... Psychologists understand this very well, for a branch of their work, called differential psychology, is fashioned upon this methodology. The principle is important: it supposes that if we wish to measure a person's intelligence (for example), a test is made and applied to a large sample of individuals from a parent population. According to the theory of errors, the scores gained by such a large sample, for a suitably constructed test, will tend to be normally distributed. The scores—whatever their units may be—can be transformed to standard scores, which are pure numbers whose mean for the test is 0 and whose standard deviation is 1.0. ...then, any test one cares to make for the parent population of individuals...can be systematically reduced to standard scores, the same pure numbers for everything so measured. ...

Lasch—Survivalism

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Total institutions—the death camps above all—have made us aware of the banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase; but they have also taught us something about the banality of survival. A growing belief that heroes don't survive informs the disenchantment with conventional codes of masculinity... It is not only masculinity that has lost its survival value, however, but the entire stock of allegedly outworn ideals of honor, heroic defiance of circumstances, and self-transcendence. As Vincent Canby noted in reviewing Lina Wertmüller's movie Seven Beauties, the survivor has discovered that "idealism is self-defeating."
(p. 73)



"A number of things give us hope," write Ehrlich and Harriman in the conclusion to [How to Be a Survivor]... "The first is that survival itself is the issue. Once people understand that, they will fight like hell for it." On the contrary, people committed only to survival are more likely to head for the hills. If survival is the overriding issue, people will take more interest in their personal safety than in the survival of humanity as a whole. Those who base the case for conservation and peace on survival not only appeal to a debased system of values, they defeat their own purpose.
(p. 78)

Bodies and Artifacts (iv-b)—Jean and LeRoi together again

(previously)

Whereas Jean makes much of

the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world,
(p. 406)

LeRoi bends over backward to downplay this part.

as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact.
(p. 211)

And earlier,

The trumpets, trombones, and tubas of the brass bands were played with a varying amount of skill, though when a man has learned enough about an instrument to play the music he wants to play, "skill" becomes an arbitrary consideration.
(p. 75)

This last statement especially lays bare the disjuncture, since for Jean skill cannot be arbitrary, and the reason it cannot be arbitrary is because it forms a/the basis upon which a newly-minted work of art, no matter how stylistically esoteric, is never quite as unfamiliar as the plebes' visceral indigestion tells them that it is. Jean's theory is every bit as sociological as LeRoi's, but the two writers appeal to this sociological angle with entirely different agendas in mind.

Collins and Bilge—Experience≠Evidence≠Theory

Intersectionality (2016)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

p. 46—"...foregrounds the ways in which activism or experience shape knowledge, an insight that is often lost when theoretical approaches are institutionalized in the academy."

This is something of a false dichotomy, or at least a diversionary one. What both "experience" and "theory" suffer from, statistically speaking, is insufficient sample size. Hence the more technocratic, mainstream methodologies of Sociology proper typically involve a certain gathering of evidence before any conclusions are (or can be) drawn. It is true that this has historically been the site of myriad biases, usually toward Power and whatever groups hold it; but if that is so scary, just look at what an eerily similar conception of knowledge construction via "experience" currently prevails among the alt-right and the ways which it is called into service by them (e.g. D'Souza's "rational discrimination"). Can we really trust informal consortiums of like-minded activists to pool their experience and look for patterns with any meaningful degree of detachment? Probably no more than we can trust ivory tower theoreticians with no "experience" at all to create it in their proverbial laboratories. Scientific empiricism is hardly perfect, but IMHO it beats the pants off the other options, and I do find it conspicuous by its absence here.

[from a post-it, late 2017]

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.

Facts and Fancy

(from my Goodreads review of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 by Nicholas Sammond)

The overall posture and style of this study are so self-consciously disinterested and relativistic as to read like a caricature of postmodern academic writing. This pastiche has lost not merely its sense of humor but its sense of purpose too. The fear of letting a stray value judgment slip out seems to have stultified the author's analytical capabilities. And yet values per se are largely what the study is about. The superficial irony of this is plain enough, but I think it is more than ironic. It is at least mildly disingenuous. In some respects it is cowardly.

The disinterested empirical scholar is discouraged from bringing their own values into the mix because disinterested empiricism cannot, by its own inner logic, operate that way. This book stumbles its way into a subdiscipline where disinterested empiricism is thought to be especially de rigeur but where it is actually quite inadequate. Sammond repeatedly invokes something like "the dominant presence of members of the white, Protestant, progressive middle class in the study of childhood." (7) He repeatedly names and specifies these agents of institutionalized moralization, repeatedly inviting us to consider them by profession, race, and class. Their work, he tells us, was profoundly shaped by classbound values. The fact of classboundedness and the identity of the classes in question are unequivocally named and reiterated. But Sammond seldom names the values themselves, and when he does name them I found it difficult to conjure much righteous indignation.

I do not wish to suggest that there actually is a universal morality. That is not what I believe. I don't think you have to believe it, though, to trip up on the idea that "truthfulness" and "unselfishness" are "middle-class virtues" (85) which cannot be reasonably expected of other classes. To me that sounds a lot like, say, reading being a White thing. Sammond himself probably believes no such things, but he is not allowed to say so, because this is scholarship and mere opinions aren't worth anything. The hubris of progressive sociologists, on the other hand, is an objective fact which can be presented as such, for if there is no universal morality then all progressivism is just a stillborn moral fallacy. Even "truthfulness" cannot mooch a provisional exemption. Truthfulness!

Naturally, the chickens of relativism roost in the hencoop of hypocrisy. What are the moral implications of accommodating the actions of a dishonest or selfish poor person? Does this help them or hurt them? Is it justified merely by the fact that they are poor and you are rich? By the right to cultural self-determination? Liberty? Consequentialism? Echoing overzealous committees everywhere, Sammond could claim that these properly philosophical questions are beyond the scope of his social-scientific study. I agree that they threaten to explode any such study into an unwieldy interdisciplinary patchwork; but I would strongly disagree that they are, literally, outside his scope. His own methods have made these questions essential to his scope and he makes no effort to acknowledge or address this. Instead, the really important takeaway is that most of the reformers were white, Protestant, progressive, and middle-class, whereas not all of their objects were these same things. As it turns out, this is not quite worth writing a book about.

Reformers of any slant in any area of human endeavor are vulnerable to the charge that they have put forth their own values as universal ones. Without this fundamental arrogation there can be no collective social action of any kind. The mere fact of arrogation is endemic, background radiation to the perceptible heat and light of social and political life. The arrogation of reformers is not an urgent sociological issue. What is urgent, I think, and what could have been pursued more doggedly here, is a compelling chronicle of the dynamic interaction between values and institutions. Strictly speaking, the thesis that "discursive circuits constructed around and through media-effect arguments sell products and build careers" (360) does describe a dynamic process, but it begs a lot of questions too. My sense is that Sammond forbid himself as a matter of methodology from opining, judging or blaming, and that by proscribing these things he railroaded himself into a static account rather than a dynamic one. (When your first order of business is to name the race and religion of the principals, it's hard to say much of anything more without offending.)

I also am not convinced, either by this account or by others, that the interaction between the Disney Studio and the reformers Sammond identifies was truly dynamic until quite late in the period he covers. In amongst all of the imbrication and commodification, I noticed that the dates, types and sources of the documents he reproduces throughout the book support my skepticism. Concerned parents created the market and Disney, eventually, seized on it. But Disney already had an enormous market, and progressives had a lot of ideas which were oblique to Disney and to media generally. Following academic convention, Sammond takes a laser-focus on the tiny area of overlap. It turns out there is not nearly as much for him to write about as the length of the book would imply.

If you don't already know something about the reformers Sammond chronicles, you still won't have much of an idea of what their values actually were after reading his book. He detects that the progressives have unduly assumed at least one non-working, stay-at-home parent, a luxury which many working class and immigrant families didn't enjoy; and he points out that child labor has persisted in agriculture (and disproportionately among children of color) long after progressives had more or less succeeded in abolishing it for white children. These are sobering reminders for white, middle-class readers; they are nonetheless quite underwhelming in the role Sammond has carved out for them here, where the towering monoliths of American Sociology, Enterprise, and Entertainment have collided in a giant orgy of...what exactly?

"Truthfulness" and "unselfishness" arise in the discussion of Disney's Pinocchio. It is the natural film for Sammond to discuss, since its overbearing didactic moralism stands out even in the Disney oeuvre. Yet transparent texts can be difficult to handle, and Sammond breaks everything he touches. With so much threadbare symbolism sitting right on the surface (Stromboli is literally a puppetmaster), Sammond cannot possibly work his way back to "middle-class values" without committing an act of interpretation. He has previously been too vague about values, whereas this film is explicit about them. Sontag warned us about this: "to interpret is to impoverish." Disinterested empiricism has taken him as far as it can, and now it is his turn to recapitulate in reverse the error of media effects crusaders by projecting upon the text the social location of those most eager to consume it. Consumer eagerness now engulfs the text from without, metastasizing into its organs of content and meaning. Suddenly it is not Edward Filene or Walt Disney but Sammond himself who has elevated consumption to a moral value! Buy a film and you become its content! And its content you! It's cheaper than the naming rights to a distant star or atoll! Hence a fleeting indulgence in armchair criticism is the precise moment when things go off the rails for good, whereby "truthfulness" becomes "middle-class," whereby poor people's untruthfulness is locked away in the black box of cultural self-determination, whereby Pinocchio cannot reflect the values of a solitary poor person unless all of the other poor people are also lining up to view it. Not just a filmic text is impoverished this way but also the "virtue" of everyone who is not "middle-class." That is quite an accomplishment.

I'm not a critic or a sociologist, but I feel like there has to be a better way to go about this. Fromm defined ideologies as "socially patterned rationalizations." Say we take those three concepts, pair them into three dyads, and then study each dyadic nexus; each one generates a limited but salient field of material which is relevant to our topic, and also a sprawling field of extradisciplinary connections. Given the organic limits of human cognition and the profusion of published research, each of the outward-facing fields is functionally unbounded; but they are perfectly finite in number (there are three of them), and this makes it possible at least to momentarily stare into each abyss and admire what makes it unique from the others and from the original topic. Then we return to the inside, reassemble the triad, and look for the triadic nexus. A geometric analogy to planes, dimensions and wormholes suggests itself. This is just silly stuff I think about, but it seems to me that this book has done none of this nor anything remotely resembling it. It is not even a one-dimensional sociology, because it has not even the first prerequisite for the dimensionalization of sociological thought, namely a sentient authorial being. The strict repression of authorial slant in this area of scholarship is quite ironic given one of Sammond's key takeaways from the inconclusiveness of Media Effects research: even children do not simply swallow whole everything they are told or exposed to. I think we can assume this of readers of scholarly publications as well. A profusion of value-oriented scholarship could actually be the best way to achieve the "parallactic" ideal that some postmodernists have put forth, whereby observation from a variety of angles permits a clearer view than any single one of them can alone. The first step towards that ideal is not to give up on fixed moral positions but rather to stake them out. A moral position can be the second point which defines a line of inquiry. This poses methodological challenges, to be sure, but there is a payoff for surmounting those challenges, a payoff with which studies like Sammond's cannot compete. Fromm and Maccoby made a blind stab in this direction which is simultaneously comical and profound: they constructed numerical scales of psychoanalytically-defined traits by which to measure the Mexican villagers they studied, they took the measurements (basically they made them up), and they performed some conventional statistical analysis of these figures to look for Results. To a self-loathing postmodernist this looks like pure arbitrary slant, the methodological equivalent of intentionally exceeding the speed limit at first sight of a cop. My contention is that if hundreds or thousands of diverse minds were to construct their own numerical scales and take their own "measurements," the aggregated results would be as meaningful as the minds are diverse. (This diversity would need to be more than skin-deep.) Against this backdrop, Sammond's approach looks like another fruitless search for perfect objectivity, distance, disinterest. If the slant is always there anyway, we might as well turn it to our advantage.

At great semantic and rhetorical pains, Sammond does eventually work his way around to some interesting big-picture theses about commodities and the social construction of childhood. For reformers and parents alike, the erroneous belief in strong media effects

"smoothes over some unpleasant contradictions in the construction of personhood and identity in democratic capitalist society. Quite simply: the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making...[whereby] persons must be simultaneously and impossibly unique individuals and known quantities." (360)

Ay, that's the stuff! But by this time the sins of omission are piled high, reflected in the endnotes by a veritable profusion of beyond-the-scope apologias which I literally lost count of. I'm reasonably sure I have never seen so many in one place, actually, and I think that is a singularly meaningful reflection on the nexus of topic and method here.