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?
Given such different ways, mustn't our various methodologies for identifying and analyzing said mirroring be as vastly different as the objects we study?
(Saying "methodologies" is just a jiveass way of saying: don't be a jiveass.)
(I wonder if, contrary to popular opinion, "analyzing" is the easy part? And "identifying" the hard part?)
Moreover, mustn't some such inquiries be more or less urgent than others?
(Academic politics anyone?)
I wonder if social norms are not in fact circular in the same way as are semantics; not because social norms are necessarily semantic-al in nature but because they exist concurrently with each other and cannot help but interact. Or maybe they are (also?) like McLuhan's media: the content of a social norm is other social norms.
In any case, if I dare pile onto Sennett's dustup with Marxism and the social sciences with as yet very little concrete ammunition, I would say that in any case "social norms" themselves cannot possibly be the simple things that coinages such as two-ness or conditional love or cutting contest (or indeed social norms!) may mislead us into thinking. As suggested earlier in the series, to un- debase the relevant material considerations means ascribing to them the objectivity which died-or-was-killed right along with the author and the subject, a noisy but victimless mass extinction which unfolded piecemeal in approximately the 1960-1995 date range.
To be sure, this objectivity is problematic. It can be made as problematic as I above have made the question of identifying social norms. This objectivity is a social fiction whereas norms are social facts; such is the basis for the denial of all epistemological anchor points; that is, the denial of all standpoints from which, say, a cutting contest is exactly what it fucking looks like to an armchair sociologist and what it sounds like to a fellow initiate, and not anything like what it looks like to the academic sociologist nor what it sounds like to the breathless arriviste.
The basis for indulging in the social fact of material objectivity is something like Arendt's remark about "retrieving their sameness." It seems to me that this retrieval is possible even if we are in fact living in a hologram, even if in fact Bach really is no better or worse than Britney, etc. Moreover, the possibility of retrieval presents itself as a material fact to the extent that it evinces predictive power prospectively. (Explanatory power is retrospective and, in this particular capacity, meaningless.)
Elsewhere, Mumford namechecks all of the reasons why historically people maybe just didn't want to perform the retrieval, did not want to be reminded of their "sameness." Looking around today (and I do think sociologists are helpful here) it is not hard to arrive at a facile and parsimonious theory that this problem has intensified to where it is an explicit and central problem of modern life that being reminded of one's "sameness" has become literally traumatic to the the point that every available material means will be enlisted to escape or repress it, and that it is overcome, if at all, only with great difficulty. (Put more simply: self-styling is an intense psychological need created by developed societies; this requires the constant denial of materiality, often enough it would seem as an unthinking byproduct rather than itself a primary motivator; but it is a denial all the same; it is autoplastic rather than alloplastic; it is explanatory rather than predictive; therefore it can and probably will fail spectacularly and traumatically.)
Jones performs the problem on multiple levels. Start with the strawman metaphor of the "artifact" applied to the sound that comes out of the saxophone (or certain saxophones when played by certain white musicians). Materially, the compression crests and troughs set into motion respectively by Paul Desmond and Charles Parker were not nearly so different as were the various thoughts and feelings they were bound to arouse in various listeners; and this rarely if ever unaccompanied by intense awareness of the player's race. Usually this is a superfluous observation, but Jones makes it more important than it should be when he finds the meaningful difference between these players in their supposedly differing material relationships to the instrument. It seems to me that the "unity," if that's what it was, of Parker with the instrument can be fully believed in and experienced only by Parker himself; which also means that only Parker himself can really know (though even he may not!) whether this is actually what's happening. The conceit of any listener to have a direct window into the soul of this "unity" simply by digging it is not to be taken seriously.
This is actually being kind. It is almost impossible for a professional musician to take seriously either (1) the ascription of a unity even to such a facile technician as Parker, or (2) this dubious ascrpition of it to Parker but not to Desmond based (as it must be) on the listener's experience and not the players'; as if such a leap is made in the first case less because it explains (much less predicts!) anything at all, but rather because it can then be withheld for rhetorical advantage. Good luck finding any professional musician to endorse this view of things; arrivistes on the other hand seem to have no such trouble. Such is life after the death (and prior to the resurrection) of the author and the subject.
Speaking for myself, the subjective experience of unity with the instrument is incredibly elusive. I wouldn't say it is unknown, but it is very rare. Meanwhile, the material fact of unity doesn't exist. It cannot exist for instrumentalists. Ascriptions to this effect are arriviste projections, and an eloquent arriviste is a much tougher problem than a dunderheaded one.
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