animacy, intimacy, obstinacy

---

Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(orig. 1886)
Part 2: Materialism

... From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. ... The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul... and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation,... there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

Max van Duijn—The Lazy Mindreader

Max van Duijn
The lazy mindreader : a humanities perspective on mindreading and multiple-order intentionality
(2016)

---

[9]

Introduction

...

[13]

...why...The Lazy Mindreader? ...the short answer is this: we humans live in a socio-cultural environment that allows us to be “lazy” regarding the investment of mindreading efforts most of the time. This environment, of which the conventions underlying language and interaction are an important part, contains the coagulated experience of many generations interacting with each other and the world around them. Globally, I think that most approaches to mindreading have placed too much of a burden on individuals as “isolated cognitive units”, and paid too little attention to the ways in which this burden can be alleviated by, for instance, lexical items, grammatical patterns, or narrative strategies, and by the interlocutors (including writers/narrators) we cooperate with to make interaction work. My alternative view focuses on economy and least effort: processing of complex networks of intentional states is not seen as something the lazy mindreaders envisaged in this thesis do by default, but rather as a skill that is needed when the context requires deviation from a default—and even then, I will argue, is these mindreaders’ processing often supported by mechanisms that are part of, mediated by, or closely tied to language and narrative.

Edward Vessel—some papers from researchgate

---

Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin
"Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network"
(2013)

---

[1]

INTRODUCTION

...

[2]

One aspect that has so far received little investigation is that of individual differences: although it is widely recognized that individuals can differ markedly in their aesthetic response, previous research in neuroaesthetics tended to utilize art pieces that were manipulated in a manner intended to have a consistent effect on observers’ preferences or that were generally highly regarded and often, widely known... It seems reasonable to expect that studying widely admired artwork can help uncover the universal aspects of aesthetic experience. But studying artworks that generate a diversity of responses can also be valuable.

Hillman and Ventura—Participants in Media Images

James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)

---

[124]

Substance Abuse and Soul in Things

Dear Michael,

I want to lay out—practically!—the connection between soul and things. Then it will be clearer what it means to be a "psychological citizen."

Hillman—Life Lived Backwards/Letter Writing

James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)

---

[61]

...

Life Lived Backwards

Dear Michael,

There is a painting by Picasso done when he was ninety-one, the year before he died. It is titled Le jeune peintre (the young painter). ...

When I first saw this painting—and it is a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson André Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience for my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso Caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself.

McLuhan's New Sciences

McLuhan's New Sciences
(Cameron McEwen)

---

McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er

from a letter of McLuhan's, age 23, on T.S. Eliot:

the poems I am reading have the unmistakable character of greatness. They transform, and diffuse and recoalesce the commonest every day occurrences of 20th century city life till one begins to see double indeed — the extremely unthinkable character, the glory and the horror of the reality in life (yet, to all save the seer, behind life) is miraculously suggested.

Seeing double here being identified as a common theme of Plato and McLuhan.

Frederick Crews—Out of My System

Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)

---

[x]

...the effort to work out a consistent attitude toward radicalism in its newest guises proved to bear directly on the methodological inquiries I kept postponing. Essays that were written as acts of political self-scrutiny, exploring why I felt uneasy about movements I might have been expected to applaud, also amounted to partial reappraisals of psychoanalysis as a "radical" doctrine. At last I realized that instead of being continually diverted from my book, I had nearly completed it. Its true subject, I discovered, was not psychoanalytic method per se, but the difficulty of mediating between empirical responsibility and urges toward deep and revolutionary explanation.

where we've been, where we're going, according to the botverse

kacattac:
summarize the theory of aesthetics presented at fickleears.blogspot.com during March 2024

ChatGPT:
The theory of aesthetics discussed on Fickle Ears blog in March 2024 encompasses a range of topics, including the intricacies of aesthetic interests and qualities, the subjective nature of musical experience, and the impact of environmental factors on artistic performance.

One aspect touched upon is the subjective and deeply personal nature of musical experience, emphasizing that music's interpretation and appreciation can vary widely among individuals. This perspective underscores the importance of open-mindedness and engagement with music on a personal level, suggesting that our connection to music is shaped by individual taste, emotion, and context.

Another discussion revolves around the challenges musicians face in maintaining creativity and excellence over time. It suggests that even in seemingly repetitive and automated performances, there's room for subtle improvements and personal growth. This viewpoint challenges the notion of "automating" performance in the arts, arguing instead for the persistent human element of creativity and adaptation in even the most routine performances.

Together, these discussions present a nuanced view of aesthetics that values personal experience, continuous improvement, and the complex interplay between an individual's internal world and their external artistic expressions.

kacattac:
how has this theory of aesthetics evolved when compared and contrasted with content posted to fickleears.blogspot.com during April 2021 and May 2021?

ChatGPT:
The theory of aesthetics explored on Fickle Ears during March 2024 and earlier in April and May 2021 reflects an evolution in the blog's approach to discussing art, culture, and the role of the critic.

In the earlier posts from 2021, the blog delves into the complexity of aesthetic judgment and the role of the critic. It discusses the challenges in changing deeply ingrained aesthetic perceptions and the limitations of language in conveying aesthetic qualities. The blog suggests that aesthetic appreciation involves more than just intellectual understanding; it requires a deep, often pre-verbal, engagement with the artwork. This period also reflects on the role of critics in helping audiences appreciate both new and traditional aesthetic qualities, despite the limitations of common language, which is seen as potentially obstructive to disinterested perception​​.

Moving forward to 2024, the discussions on Fickle Ears continue to build upon these themes but with a more pronounced emphasis on the subjective and experiential aspects of music and artistic performance. The theory presented emphasizes the deeply personal nature of musical experience, suggesting that even in seemingly repetitive performances, musicians are constantly adapting and innovating, bringing a human element to their art that defies automation.

Throughout this evolution, Fickle Ears maintains a critical stance on the reductive views of art and performance. The blog critiques the notion of reducing aesthetic experience to a set of standardized metrics or rules, emphasizing instead the nuanced and multifaceted nature of artistic engagement. This shift from a more theoretical and critical discourse towards a more experiential and subjective understanding of aesthetics highlights the blog's dynamic approach to exploring the complexities of art and its appreciation.

These shifts reflect a broader understanding of aesthetics as not just a matter of intellectual discourse but as a deeply felt, personal experience shaped by a multitude of factors, including individual background, societal influences, and the ever-changing dynamics of cultural production and reception.

FRANK SIBLEY—Aesthetic Concepts (ii)

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

[Sibley, "Aesthetic Concepts" (cont.)]

---

[41]

II

A great deal of work remains to be done on aesthetic concepts. In the remainder of this paper I shall offer some further suggestions which may help towards an understanding of them.

The realization that aesthetic concepts are governed only negatively by conditions is likely to give rise to puzzlement over how we manage to apply the words in our aesthetic vocabulary. ... One very natural way to counter this question is to point out that some other sorts of concepts also are not condition-governed. We do not apply simple color words by following rules or in accordance with principles. We see that the book is red by looking, just as we tell that the tea is sweet by tasting it. ... This kind of comparison... is indeed familiar;... Yet whatever the similarities, there are great dissimilarities too. ... ...but certain differences stand out, and writers who have emphasized that aesthetic judgments are not "mechanical" have sometimes dwelt on and been puzzled by them.

FRANK SIBLEY—Aesthetic Concepts (i)

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[29]

2. Aesthetic Concepts

FRANK SIBLEY

[orig. 1959]

The remarks we make about works of art are of many kinds. For the purpose of this paper I wish to indicate two broad groups. ... We say that a novel has a great number of characters ... ; that a painting uses pale colors ,... Such remarks may be made by, and such features pointed out to, anyone with normal eyes, ears, and intelligence. On the other hand, we also say that a poem is tightly knit or deeply moving ; that a picture lacks balance ,... It would be neutral enough to say that the making of such judgments as these requires the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation; one would not say this of my first group. ...

MONROE C. BEARDSLEY—The Aesthetic Point of View

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[10]

The Aesthetic Point of View

MONROE C. BEARDSLEY
[orig. 1970]

There has been a persistent effort to discover the uniquely aesthetic component, aspect, or ingredient in whatever is or is experienced. Unlike some other philosophical quarries, the object of this chase has not proved as elusive as the snark, the Holy Grail, or Judge Crater—the hunters have returned not empty-handed, but overburdened. For they have found a rich array of candidates for the basically and essentially aesthetic:

aesthetic experience	aesthetic objects
aesthetic value	aesthetic concepts
aesthetic enjoyment	aesthetic situations
aesthetic satisfaction

Confronted with such trophies, we cannot easily doubt that there is something peculiarly aesthetic to be found in our world or our experience; yet its exact location and its categorial status remain in question. ...

MARGOLIS—Part One: Aesthetic Interests and Aesthetic Qualities

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[1]

Part One
Aesthetic Interests and Aesthetic Qualities

It is notoriously difficult to define the boundaries of such large and lively interests as the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. At least since Immanuel Kant, philosophers have hoped to be able to mark out nice logical distinctions among the kinds of judgments corresponding to such interests. In fact, Kant imposed one of the great obstacles to modern philosophy in this respect: enormous effort has been required to show that the demarcation lines Kant favored—or other similarly construed distinctions—actually falsify or distort the uniformities and differences favored among our conceptual networks. This is not to say that questions that belong to the very heart of empirical science, moral judgment, the appreciation and criticism of fine art are not easily identified. They are, of course. But since Kant, philosophers have been inclined to hope that when they are sorted, such questions will lead to neat categorical differences justifying their having been distinguished in the ways in which they have. Hence, there is a certain embarrassment at stake in failing to discover the required distinctions.

...

[2]

...

Even after it develops that no simple logical differences exist among scientific, moral, and aesthetic judgments, philosophers may enthusiastically continue their attempt to distinguish the aesthetic domain. Inquiry then turns to another sort of distinction—for instance, the controlling interest of each of these domains. ...

Beneath all this lurks the question of the nature of such large category-terms as the aesthetic, the moral, the scientific. It may be asked, for instance, whether philosophers are primarily explicating the meaning of "aesthetic" or whether, by an ellipsis, they are really generalizing about the properties of certain sorts of judgments or remarks that are taken without dispute (though they are not infrequently disputed) to belong within the scope of aesthetic interest. That is, one may ask whether an analysis of the meaning of "aesthetic" will be fruitful independently of the second sort of issue, whether in fact it can even be undertaken. The point is not without some interest (given the professional literature), because it is well known that philosophers have quite regularly disputed among themselves whether this or that is really appropriate to the aesthetic point of view. It may then be that statements about the aesthetic point of view are actually elliptical summaries of findings upon this or that set of favored data ...

...

Fickle Ears According To ChatGPT

kacattac: Summarize the site fickleears.blogspot.com in 500 words or less

ChatGPT: Fickleears.blogspot.com is a blog dedicated to music reviews and analysis, with a focus on indie, alternative, and experimental genres. The site offers in-depth critiques of albums, EPs, and singles, providing readers with insights into the artistic merits and cultural significance of various musical works.

The blog's author demonstrates a keen understanding of music theory and composition, often delving into the technical aspects of songs while also considering their emotional impact and thematic content. Reviews are written with a thoughtful and subjective approach, incorporating personal anecdotes and reflections to convey the author's connection to the music being discussed.

One of the distinguishing features of fickleears.blogspot.com is its eclectic taste, covering a wide range of musical styles and artists from around the world. While the blog primarily focuses on independent and lesser-known acts, it also occasionally features reviews of mainstream releases, offering readers a diverse array of music to discover and explore.

In addition to album reviews, the blog occasionally publishes interviews with musicians, providing readers with insight into the creative process and inspiration behind their work. These interviews offer a behind-the-scenes look at the music industry and help contextualize the artistry featured on the blog.

Fickleears.blogspot.com also serves as a platform for critical discourse within the music community, encouraging readers to engage with the content through comments and discussions. The blog's author fosters a sense of community among music enthusiasts, facilitating dialogue and exchange of ideas around the music being reviewed.

Overall, fickleears.blogspot.com is a valuable resource for music lovers seeking thoughtful analysis and commentary on a diverse range of musical offerings. Whether readers are looking to discover new artists or deepen their understanding of familiar genres, the blog provides engaging and insightful content that celebrates the rich tapestry of contemporary music.

---

kacattac: Summarize fickleears.blogspot.com’s theory of aesthetics

ChatGPT: fickleears.blogspot.com's theory of aesthetics centers around the idea that music is a deeply personal and subjective experience, shaped by individual taste, emotion, and context. The blog emphasizes the importance of approaching music with an open mind and a willingness to engage with diverse styles and genres. Rather than adhering to strict criteria of "good" or "bad" music, fickleears.blogspot.com encourages readers to appreciate the artistic merits and cultural significance of each piece on its own terms.

The blog's aesthetic theory also values authenticity and innovation, celebrating artists who push boundaries and challenge conventional norms. While technical proficiency is acknowledged and appreciated, it is not the sole determinant of artistic merit. Instead, fickleears.blogspot.com emphasizes the importance of emotional resonance and creative expression in evaluating music.

Furthermore, the blog's aesthetic philosophy recognizes the interconnectedness of music with other forms of art and human experience. Music is seen as a reflection of society, history, and individual identity, with each song carrying its own narrative and meaning. By contextualizing music within broader cultural and social contexts, fickleears.blogspot.com seeks to deepen readers' appreciation and understanding of the music being reviewed.

Overall, fickleears.blogspot.com's theory of aesthetics promotes a holistic and inclusive approach to music appreciation, valuing diversity, authenticity, and emotional resonance above rigid standards or genre classifications. Through its reviews and analysis, the blog seeks to inspire curiosity, foster dialogue, and celebrate the rich tapestry of musical expression.

Kavolis (ii)

Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis
(1968)

---

[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)

---

[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?

Ericsson and Pool—Peak

Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)

---

[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...

[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-

[13]

ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...

But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.

Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (ii)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

---

[201]
(g) The Spirit of Jazz

By jazz, of course, I mean the whole movement roughly designated as such, and not merely that section of it known as Afro-American, or more familiarly as 'Harlem'. The negro once enjoyed a monopoly of jazz, just as England once enjoyed a monopoly of the industrial revolution, but for the negroes to imagine that all jazz is their native province is as if an Englishman were to imagine that all locomotives were built by his compatriots. Even the Harlem section of jazz is by no means so African as might be supposed.

...

[202] ... The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices, and the more the European tries to imagine himself 'down on the Delta' the more the negro tries to imagine himself in an aristocratic salon. In this connection, it is amusing to recall the situation that arose recently when a well-known negro-dance arranger

[203]

was called in to produce a ballet for a highbrow company trained in the classical tradition. While all the Europeans flung aside their carefully won training to indulge in an orgy of pseudo-Charlestons the negro himself was moved to tears, not by his own work but by the classic elegance of Lac des Cygnes.

...

[205] ... The phrase 'barber-shop chord'—which denotes a chord of unusual succulence—dates back to the days when a guitar hung in every negro barber's shop, and a client who was waiting would vamp about on the instrument until at a lucky trouvaile everyone would shout 'Hold that chord'. It need hardly be pointed out that this type of harmonic experiment is as sophisticated in its method as that of the contemporary composers who—deny it hotly though they may—compose 'at the piano'.

...

The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements. ...

[206]

The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...

... Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully. The valse has received august patronage from Beethoven onwards, it is true, but the valses of the nineteenth-century composers are either

[207]

definite examples of unbending or definite examples of sophistication—sometimes both. ... In the nineteenth century the split between the classical and popular came between a follower of Liszt, let us say, and a follower of Gungl. Today the split occurs between a composer like Kurt Weill and a composer like Jarnach—both of them pupils of Busoni.

The same rapprochement between highbrow and lowbrow—both meeting in an emotional terrain vague—can be seen in literature. [e.g. Eliot] ...

[208]

The words of jazz songs mark the first popularization of that well-known modern vice—the Inferiority Complex. Until recently a certain exuberant self-confidence has usually formed the spiritual background of a popular tune. ... A general air of physical attractiveness, sexual bounce and financial independence is naturally assumed by the writers of pre-war song hits. ...

In modern songs it is taken for granted that one is poor, unsuccessful, and either sex-starved or unable to hold the affections of such partner as one may have had the luck to pick up. ... For the most part...the heroes and heroines of modern songs meet with the rebuffs they deserve and take refuge in the unmute reproach of 'Ain't misbehavin' ', and 'Mean to Me',...

[208]

... The other side of the medal, the series of crazy words, crazy tune numbers, with their assumed galvanic energy has an equally neurasthenic basis. The so-called 'hot' songs are as depressing as the so-called 'sweet'; they spring from no genuine gaiety such as inspires the marches of Sousa, the sardanas of Bou and the valses of Waldteufel—they are a desperate attempt to hide an underlying boredom and malaise.

Well, one does wonder if the author has not badly misjudged all of this simply for ignorance of The Blues as a major tributary.

Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

---

[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The general cessation of musical activities during the war resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...

[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it, mainly retrospective in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.

Rudi Supek—Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism

Rudi Supek
"Freedom and Polydeterminism
in Cultural Criticism" (1965)
in
Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium
ed. Erich Fromm
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, pp. 280-298.

---

Culture
is very likely

one of the most
sensitive
areas of

social criticism.

Nowhere else
can

the inadequacy or absurdity of theoretical presuppositions or methodological procedures
be
uncovered so rapidly,

nowhere else
can

human creative activity
overwhelm
erroneous premises and conclusions with such promptitude,

and

nowhere else
can

such harm be
inflicted
upon the creative potentialities of human beings

as when

a dogmatic theory
is
imposed on cultural policy

by means of
social compulsion.

The Sign of the Spectacle

Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
(2012)

Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.

Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.

This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a major part of something or other, whereas the study of skilled performance and special training necessarily comprises only a minor part .

Sennett—The Craftsman (iv)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[246]

Expertise
The Sociable and the Antisocial Expert

The danger to others posed by people driven by excellence crystallizes in the figure of the expert. He or she appears in two guises, sociable or antisocial. A well-crafted institution will favor the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble.

The expert's provenance and prestige are ancient, beginning with the civic honor of the demioergoi. The expert has since the Middle Ages figured as a master craftsman who is perforce a sociable expert. The civic and religious rituals that organized the guilds forged a social bond in which it was the master's duty to participate; the internal organization of each workshop, based on face-to-face authority and exercised within a small community, further cemented sociability. Closer to modern times, the amateur gradually lost ground, especially with the dawn of the Industrial Age—the amateur's foraging curiosity seeming of lesser value than specialized knowledge.

This is already getting too loose. "Amateur" or "professional" is one distinction, expert or novice is another, specialst or generalist is yet a third.

Sennett—The Craftsman (iii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[149]

CHAPTER 5

The Hand

Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the connection.

Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. ...

Sennett—The Craftsman (ii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...

The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way protected from the rigors of competition . Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.

It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...

[36]

Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves. Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return —Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic ; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work .

If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.

Sennett—The Craftsman (i)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

Pandora's Casket
Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer

Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis,... I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ... She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.

Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.

Well,
if a given

fear

well and truly

traces back,

then it is not

her

fear.

And
if it is
"her" fear,
then it does not
"trace back."

i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.

Bodies and Artifacts (interlude)—Sennett's Materialism

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

[7] The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.

More than one thing can be true of course. This rage to understand social norms from every conceivable angle has, among other things, put beyond reproach the notion that said norms are in fact mirrored pretty much anywhere we might seek or find them. This certainly leads to things not being fully or properly considered in themselves . The above paragraph is yet another useful reiteration of the general thrust of this series. But it stops short of asking such questions as the following:

If social norms are reflected in everything, mustn't there nonetheless be vast differences among various objects' ways of mirroring?

Neil Postman—Amusing Ourselves To Death

Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves To Death
(1984)

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[9] In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.

Speech, of course, is the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means. This is not to say that if there were no other means of communication all humans would find it equally convenient to speak about the same things in the same way. We know enough about language to understand that variations in the

[10]

structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language. We dare not suppose therefore that all human minds are unanimous in understanding how the world is put together. But how much more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message. His aphorism , however, is in need of amendment because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor . A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world . But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality . Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

[11]

What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times, Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "'moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

Amy Kiste Nyberg—Seal of Approval

Amy Kiste Nyberg
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
(1998)

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[38] The legal case of most concern to those drafting state and federal legislation against comic books was a case that dealt, not with a comic book, but an adult crime magazine, Headquarters Detective, True Cases from the Police Blotter. Two thousand copies of the magazine were seized in New York under a section of the New York Penal Code that made it illegal to publish, distribute, or sell any book, pamphlet, magazine, or newspaper made up primarily of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime. The

[39]

book dealer was convicted, but after more than seven years of litigation, lower court decisions were reversed by the United States Supreme Court on March 29, I948, on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. Similar statutes in eighteen states were overturned by the decision in Winters v. New York.

The Supreme Court found the laws prohibiting depiction of crime and violence in the media unconstitutional as written, since they violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. Although obscenity and pornography were not protected under the First Amendment, the Court ruled that crime magazines, while containing little of value to society, were as much entitled to free speech protection as the best of literature. The Court also noted that while words such as obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting were "well understood through long use in criminal law," the provisions against crime and bloodshed were unconstitutionally vague because the clause had no "technical or common law meaning." Without a precise definition, it was impossible for an individual to know when he or she was in violation of the law. Therefore, the New York law was also in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process.

...

The Supreme Court's decision in 1948 set guidelines for media content that are still at issue today. Laws regulating obscenity and pornography are on the books in almost every city and state, but the regulation of violent content in the media, while it spurs periodic public outcry and legislative investigation, ultimately remains the responsibility of the media industries and their self-regulatory bodies.

Fallacies Intentional and Unintentional

This is my Goodreads review of The War on Music by John Mauceri. It turned into more of a summation of everything I've been churning over for the past several years.

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Scattered amongst the howlers is a story that deserves to be told. Two stars for that story, zero for its rendering here.

This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle .

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There are some notes and citations at the end, but really this is a polemical work and not a scholarly one. It is a mad dash on the hamster wheel for Mauceri, who repeatedly stakes out some patch of moral high-ground only to tell on himself later. Even the digression on sour liner notes is recapitulated when, in the acknowledgments, he says, "Many peers have read this manuscript, some of whom were enraged. ... What was hated—and why—taught me a great deal." One can only hope. But for now he has merely doubled down, as any polemicist must.