Critical Commonplaces

The Commonplace Raised to a Higher Power
Arthur Danto
interviewed by Hans Maes
(excerpt)

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This so-called 'method of indiscernibles'...arises, according to Danto, not only in the field of aesthetics but in all other areas of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to address its subject matter...by seeking the conditions that make the things under scrutiny the kinds of things they are. The appropriate way of seeking these conditions, Danto suggests, is to examine how the thing...differs from an object or event that is ostensibly indiscernible from it.

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Ugh.

Could you forgive some of us, just maybe, for seeing in this merely an exercise?

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 .

+=+=+=+

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.

Richard Maltby—The Cinema of Disintegration

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 10

MERE ANARCHY: THE CINEMA OF DISINTEGRATION

[315]

...

PACKAGING CONCEPTS

The fragmentation of production coincided with the merger of the major distribution companies with larger corprate groupings. The period from 1966, when Gulf and Western took over Paramount, to 1969, when Kinney National Services merged with Warner-Seven Arts, saw an upheaval in company ownership more substantial even that that of the early 1930s. The majors diversified, predominantly into other media, or were absorbed into conglomerates attracted by their undervalued stock, their film libraries and their real estate. However, the reorganization of the industry that followed diversification was a less fundamental change than that provoked by the Paramount decrees. By and large, it extended the effects of divorcement. The merger with other media concerns, particularly the record industry, was in a sense only an extrapolation of the majors' post-

[316]

Paramount commitment to a power-base in distribution rather than production, and the growth of independent production completed a process begun in the early 1950s.

Hollywood's acquisition by conglomerates has, to a degree, merely been the swapping of one set of distant masters for another. The new landlords of the Dream Factory, like their predecessors, have pursued the primary motivation of profit; on occasion obtained by slum clearance projects like Kirk Kerkorian's sale of M. G. M. assets to build a Las Vegas hotel, or the urban renewal program of Century City on the back lot of the Fox studios. But if Hollywood has shrunk physically under corporate ownership, with its volume of production declining from 196 features in 1969 to 106 in 1978, its business remains much the same, and in one respect only have the new patterns of ownership made a significant difference to the way it conducts that business. The role of the mogul has been abolished: Hollywood's recent studio executives are men under different influences from those of Warner or Cohn. They share a trait common among corporate management, of frequent mobility of employment. Where Mayer ruled M. G. M. from 1924 to 1951, the studio saw six different studio heads in the years between 1968 and 1979. Only Warner Brothers and Universal had the same management team throughout the decade, while career structures like that of David Picker are increasingly the norm. Picker became President of United Artists in 1969, left to go into independent production in 1973, became head of production at Paramount in 1975, and returned to independent production for Lorimar in 1977. This pattern of short tenure in senior management helped to remove the last vestiges of any identifiable studio styles. By the mid-1970s the post-Paramount attitude of regarding each production as a one-off event had reached a point where none of the majors any longer possessed a recognizable identity either in its personnel or its product.

The corporate acquisitions and the economic crises of the late 1960s occasioned the removal of the old guard. Box-office failures combined with the spectacles of the counter-culture (Haight-Ashbury, Chicago, Woodstock) to offer further evidence that Hollywood's liberal consensus was no longer adequate to the demands of a more youthful and volatile audience. The accepted explanation was that the industry had lost contact with its audience because there were too many old men with too much control over production to encourage the right material. In response,

[317]

Hollywood engaged in an unparalleled wave of parricide. Its most conspicuous victims were the last surviving moguls. Jack Warner sold his interest in the studio in 1967 to embark on a notably unsuccessful career in independent production. Darryl Zanuck lost the last in a series of proxy fights at Fox, and retired in 1971. Between 1966 and 1973 all the majors acquired new, much younger production heads, drawn as often as not from outside the immediate confines of Hollywood. The more public search for the kid genius director concealed a more enduring palace revolution giving power to a younger generation of executives whose previous careers were most likely to have been in television, talent agencies or "creative management."* If the personnel changed, the professional ethos remained the same. Heads of production continued to insist on their ability to gauge an unstable public taste, and to argue that the nature of the industry militated against predictable profit margins.

Rank—Art and Artist (iii)—The Psychological Ideology of Art

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

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[xiii]

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiv] On the one hand, the individual urge to create is by no means the only specific quality of the artist; equally, on the other hand, canons of style, evolved from the collective consciousness, can by no means be regarded as the true essence of artistic creation; the one individual factor represents merely the motive-power, while the other, collective, element provides the forms that are suited in the circumstances to its activity and utterance.

...

[xxiii] in The Trauma of Birth I discerned the fact, which I later developed theoretically, that the creative impulse, which leads to the liberation and forming of the individual personality—and likewise determines its artistic creativeness—has something positively antisexual in its yearning for independence of organic conditions. Correspondingly, my conception of repression differed from Freud's; for to him it is the result of outward frustration, while I trace it to an inward necessity, which is no less inherent in the dualistic individual than the satisfying of the impulse itself.

...

[xxiv] if the neurotic type, who fails to synthesize his dualistic conflict, be studied from the therapeutic angle, the impression received is that of individuals who (psychologically speaking) represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art. ... In short, it would seem that the creatively disposed and gifted type has to have something in addition

[xxv]

before it can become a really productive artist, while on the other hand the work of the productive individual must also be added to before it can rank as a genuine work of art.

Neither the cultural and scientific history of art nor the aesthetic psychology of the artist has so far provided a satisfactory answer to this central question of the whole problem of art: namely, what constitutes the correlation between artist-type and the art-product; that is to say, the artistic creativeness and the art-form? And although it may seem evident that this common factor in the artist and the art product must be a super-individual, collective element, so obvious a conclusion at once raises a series of questions, the mere meaning of which is enough to show that they but make the real problem more acute. The first among such questions is likely to be: what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean? Following directly upon this comes the next question: what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others, such as religious, social, or national? In other words, why does the individual, endowed with this mysterious collective force, become now a popular leader, now the founder of a religion, and now an artist?

John Berger—The Success and Failure of Picasso

John Berger
The Success and Failure of Picasso
(1965)

My note says:
p. 6—"the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade"
p. 9—"For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does."
p. 13—"Picasso's historical ambiguity...his fame rests upon his modernity... And yet in his attitude to art...there is a bias which is not in the least modern..."
It could not have been obvious in 1965 just how post-modern this outlook is, though in drawing a connection between the "what he is" outlook and Picasso's great fame JB clearly grasps the underlying mechanism. It is but a short step from the focus on self and the hostility to learning and reason and experimentation to the phenomenon of Famous for being Famous. The Picasso herein described would have made a near ideal instagram user...and instagram (the company and the user community) would have loved having him. The nineteenth- and twenty-first-century provenance of this ethos suggests a cyclical rather than linear history.

Lasch—Of Valor, Chivalry, and Brains

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

The upper middle class, the heart of the new professional and managerial elites, is defined, apart from its rapidly rising income, not so much by its ideology as by a way of life that distinguishes it, more and more unmistakably, from the rest of the population. Even its feminism—that is, its commitment to the two-career family—is a matter more of practical necessity than of political conviction. Efforts to define a "new class" composed of public administrators and policy makers, relentlessly pushing a program of liberal reforms, ignore the range of political opinions among the professional and managerial elites. These groups constitute a new class only in the sense that their livelihoods rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise. Their investment in education and information, as opposed to property, distinguishes them from the rich bourgeoisie..., and from the old proprietary class—the middle class in the strict sense of the term—that once made up the bulk of the population.

Since they embrace a wide variety of occupations...and since they lack a common political outlook, it is also inappropriate to characterize managerial and professional elites as a new ruling class. Alvin Gouldner...found the unifying element in their "culture of critical discourse," but even though this formulation captures an essential feature..., it exaggerates the intellectual component in the culture of the new elites and their interest in the rationalization of life, just as it minimizes their continuing fascination with the capitalist market and their frenzied search for profits.

A more salient fact is that the market in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. They are more concerned with the smooth functioning of the system as a whole than with any of its parts. Their loyalties—if the term is not itself anachronistic in this context—are international rather than regional, national, or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications.

Robert Reich's category of "symbolic analysts" serves, apart from its syntactical incoherence, as a useful, empirical, and rather unpretentious description of the new class. These are people, as Reich describes them, who live in a world of abstract concepts and symbols, ranging from stock market quotations to the visual images produced by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who specialize in the interpretation and deployment of symbolic information.

(pp. 33-35)

So, here is precisely the thing (or one of them) which Lasch misses in his earlier attack on postmodern art in The Minimal Self: much postmodernism (and modernism, and several other scattered radicalisms and avant-gardisms here and there) is in fact a no-holds-barred Counterelite Revolt against precisely this regime of

interpretation and deployment of symbolic information
.

Certainly this alone does not gain these artists any extra moral capital, but it does show, I think, a sort of dialectical antithesis arising out of the knowledge economy itself. Unfortunately Lasch, like many others, is so attached to the

symbolic

dimension of art, and takes such joy in

interpret[ing]

it, that monochrome paintings and static music are simply beyond the pale. That seems to me like a pretty severe misjudgment, not necessarily of taste, but certainly of motive and utility.

Incidentally, the beleaguered, embattled, fallen-from-grace sense of

interpretation

bequeathed to us by Sontag's famous essay
,

and also her likening of interpreters to "leeches"
,

and also the overtones of militarism and conquest inherent in

deployment
,

all of these are, I think, very good hints as to some of the reasons artists have staged such a Revolt. And the defense of this Revolt is laid out beautifully by Lasch himself in this final work of his.

A more serious objection than imprecision is Reich's extravagantly flattering portrait of the "symbolic analysts." In his eyes, they represent the best and brightest in American life. Educated at "elite private schools" and "high-quality suburban schools...", they enjoy every advantage their doting parents can provide. ... These privileged young people acquire advanced degrees at the "best [universities] in the world," the superiority of which is proved by their ability to attract foreign students in great numbers. In this cosmopolitan atmosphere they overcome the provincial folkways that impede creative thought... Unlike those who engage in mind-numbing routines, they love their work...

Unlike old-fashioned intellectuals, who tend to work by themselves and to be jealous and possessive about their ideas, the new brain workers...operate best in teams. Their "capacity to collaborate" promotes "system thinking"—the ability to see problems in their totality, to absorb the fruits of collective experimentation, and to "discern larger causes, consequences, and relationships. Since their work depends so heavily on "networking," they settle in "specialized geographical pockets" populated by people like them. ...

(pp. 35-37)

But here the Pomos are very much Collabos too, and this is both symptom and cause of the desperation (often enough material and spiritual desperation alike) with which so many of us now confront the flaming ruins of industrialism. It is in this co-optation of collaboration, its conscious weaponization against the time-honored ways of old-fashioned intellectuals, where I would anchor any broad polemic against various "postmodern" developments in art. By insisting on the symbolic orientation instead, Lasch's "survivalist" dragnet (in The Minimal Self) snares too many artists who properly belong, in fact, to the very craft morality he seeks to recover.

Universal admission to the class of "creative" people would best meet Reich's ideal of a democratic society, but since this goal is clearly unattainable, the next best thing, presumably, is a society composed of "symbolic analysts" and their hangers-on. The latter are themselves consumed with dreams of stardom but are content, in the meantime, to live in the shadow of the stars waiting to be discovered and are symbiotically united with their betters in a continuous search for marketable talent that can be compared, as Reich's imagery makes clear, only with the rites of courtship. One might add the more jaundiced observation that the circles of power—finance, government, art, entertainment—overlap and become increasingly interchangeable. It is significant that Reich turns to Hollywood for a particularly compelling example of the "wondrously resilient" communities that spring up wherever there is a concentration of "creative" people. ...

Only in a world in which words and images bear less and less resemblance to the things they appear to describe would it be possible for a man like Reich to refer to himself, without irony, as secretary of labor or to write so glowingly of a society governed by the best and brightest. The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country still has not fully recovered. ...

This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are associated, has any place in the worldview of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains.

(pp. 37-39)

Heigh Ho, Pomo

Gerald Graff
"The Myth of Postmodern Breakthrough" (orig. 1979)
in Critical Essays on American Postmodernism (1994)
ed. Stanley Trachtenberg
pp. 69-80

In an essay that asks the question, "What Was Modernism?" Harry Levin identifies the "ultimate quality" pervading the work of the moderns as "its uncompromising intellectuality." The conventions of postmodern art systematically invert this modernist intellectuality by parodying its respect for truth and significance. ... It appears that the term "meaning" itself, as applied not only to art but to more general experience, has joined "truth" and "reality" in the class of words which can no longer be written unless apologized for by inverted commas.

Thus it is tempting to agree with Leslie Fiedler's conclusion that "the Culture Religion of Modernism" is now dead. The most advanced art and criticism of the last twenty years seem to have abandoned the modernist respect for artistic meaning. The religion of art has been "demythologized." A number of considerations, however, render this statement of the case misleading. Examined more closely, both the modernist faith in literary meanings and the postmodern repudiation of these meanings prove to be highly ambivalent attitudes, much closer to one another than may at first appear. The equation of modernism with "uncompromising intellectuality" overlooks how much of this intellectuality devoted itself to calling its own authority into question. . . .

(pp. 70-71)

With no scruples whatseover about repeating myself, I must say that following my trip to art school the ultimate archetype of these "highly ambivalent attitudes" and of the "deliberate avoidance of interpretability ha[ving] moved from the arts into styles of personal behavior" (71) will always be, for me, the radical conceptual art grad student who drives a gas-guzzling motor vehicle and listens exclusively to top-40 radio.

My unconsidered gut reaction to Graff's final sentence above is that "modernist" musicians tended more towards reasserting/recovering/recreating some lost "authority" and were usually not too interested in questioning themselves. Also that the principals of the eventual postmodern backlash are quite comfortable slipping into the tattered robes of "authority" whenever they think they can get away with it. Hence this whole question of exposing shams of undue authority is what inclines me toward a positive self-identification as a "postmodernist." I can't really say so in casual conversation, however, because there are too many other associations with the term which don't fit me at all.

Conspicuous among them: I do believe that rational, just authority exists. It's just that, in music, I am typically most skeptical about its possibility on the level of "meaning;" and yes, those scare-quotes are so totally necessary anytime that warhorse word is trotted out of the stable.

today i found a tiny bit of courage floating in the cesspool of compulsory optimism that is our postmodern, postjudgmental world

Parsons on the Romantic and the Methodical

...the dominant character structure of modern Germany had been distinguished by a striking dualism between "A: an emotional, idealistic, active, romantic component which may be constructive or destructive and anti-social," and "B: an orderly, hard-working hierarchy preoccupied, methodical, submissive, gregarious, materialistic" component.

In the traditional pre-Nazi German society it is overwhelmingly the B component which has become institutionalized. The A component arises from two principal independent sources: certain features of the socialization process in the German family, and the tensions arising from life in that type of institutional order. It is expressed in romantic, unrealistic emotionalism and yearnings. Under other circumstances the dissociation has historically been radical–the romantic yearning has found an outlet in religion, art, music and other-worldly, particularly a-political, forms. (248)

...

The peculiarity of the Nazi movement is that it has harnessed this romantic dynamism to an aggressive, expansionist, nationalistic political goal–and has utilized and subordinated all the motives behind the B component as well. In both cases the synthesis has been dependent at the same time on certain features of the situation and on a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols. The first task of a program of institutional change is to disrupt this synthesis and create a situation in which the romantic element will again find an a-political form of expression. This will not, however, "cure" the basic difficulty but only its most virulent and, to the United Nations, dangerous manifestation. (248-249)

Talcott Parsons
"The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" (1945)
in Essays in Sociological Theory (1954)
pp. 238-274

Note (4 June, 2016): This resonates strongly with my conception of the aesthetic realm as, at minimum, a "padded cell" for various human impulses to inhabit without being enabled to do real damage (or, it is fair to add, make improvements) to the "real"/outside world. It would, of course, be great if in the first place there was not so much inner destructiveness flowing from human beings out into the world that we needed a special reservoir just to drain it off. I don't know that TP's discussion here anywhere near fully accounts for that. Even so, it is also not to be assumed a priori, as some postmodern Critical Theorists seem eager to do, that pure/absolute aestheticism is so inherently destructive in and of itself. As TP describes it here, the Nazi synthesis of "A" and "B" was an unusual and unlikely achievement, and one that could be disrupted precisely by recreating an apolitical space for romanticism to inhabit. And so, has the American academic left not been working quite diligently since the 1960s at forging and promoting just such a synthesis between industriousness (i.e. activism) and romanticism (i.e. art and aesthetics), accompanied by "a meaningful definition of the situation and system of symbols?" Hate to say it, but I think that description fits almost perfectly. Perhaps the antidote is also the same.

Note (23 April, 2021): I know that you're never, ever supposed to liken anyone to the Nazis. At the same time, such a taboo effectively limits what we are allowed to learn from history. Obviously there are many, many more differences than similarities here. That caveat should be superfluous, but I realize that in the present environment it is not. The point is that here we have one single instance of an influential speculative thinker offering up the speculation that art and politics make for an explosive combination. This seems to me very much worth considering in light of current events all over the political spectum. Perhaps we cannot learn much here, but surely we can learn something.

Chasing The Over-a-Hundred Prize

The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new innovation is a "breakthrough," that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. ...

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later, turn out to be breakthroughs.

So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the "ten hottest papers" in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.

If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist "under forty," a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value... The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don't get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.

Should we have a prize, it should be for "over a hundred": it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher's stone. His work stayed obscure all this time."

N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
pp. 329-330

These prizes have their counterparts in the music world, and there too they are well-known as strong "reverse indicators of value," at least to everyone outside the immediate social orbit of the committee and the recipients. A certain amount of focus on the under-forties arises from a good-faith response to a good-faith criticism: lifetime achievement awards are obscene when the elderly achiever really could have used that money to stay afloat during their starving-artist years. This, together with the realization that many small grants to individual artists would do more good than a few massive grants to superstars and large organizations, has (re)shaped the landscape somewhat for the better. I suspect there are good intentions behind this; yet NNT's observations here supply the necessary damned if you do caveats. Radical postmodernists get the most attention for rejecting the cleansing effect of time, for junking the Thirty Year Rule that historians formerly observed, etc., and yet functionally the bourgeois mainstream has also rejected these things, much more quietly but with equal thoroughness and equally strident rationalizations. In one respect it is obvious that people need the money more when they are younger. The problem, though, is that it is not so easy to see the future. To attempt to do so is a fragilista maneuver through and through.

In borrowing this Talebism, I am certainly wary of embracing Taleb's peculiar brand of Darwinism. He is not the least bit convincing when he claims, after all else he has written here and prior, to be content with merely passing on his genes and riding off into the Darwinian sunset. Clearly he lives to read, argue, eat and drink, put mice down people's shirts, and so on. (How I wish I'd had this last idea when I was sitting in Dr. Damschroder's theory classes!) I'm not in favor of a full Hunger Games approach to artisthood. The point, rather, that Taleb's arguments reveal, and which is in my experience simply not yet acknowledged in artists' circles, is that the fragilizing effects of awards are even worse than the trappings of a pure survival competition. They compound "cumulative advantage," lead to "Matthew effects," and claim to see the future. They "penaliz[e] those who don't get them and debas[e] the field by turning it into an athletic competition." I'm sure we will continue to have them even so. We all might as well apply just in case. But please don't believe anything anyone involved says about the recipients or the process, and please don't believe that competitions and awards are about supporting the next generation's finest practitioners. They cannot be about that. The list of Pulitzer winners speaks for itself here.

Synchronically, lifetime achievement awards are indefensible; diachronically they are the only defensible kind of award in fields that are, for our purposes here, the opposite of math, where the value of results is very rarely immediately seen, indeed where this value is all but guaranteed to change, and where this guarantee in and of itself does not need to be elevated to a risk by our having previously bet against it. Of course we can collectively decide to redefine value as strictly limited to that which can be immediately seen. It may seem like this has already happened; but watch those pomos carefully, especially when they don't know they are being watched, and you will find all the evidence you'll ever need that this presentism is no more a part of who they really are than their mismatched tube socks.

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.

Preliminary/Residual Thoughts on Descaling

(1) When even the most specialized of academic specialists cannot hope to keep up with the deluge of publication in their narrow specialty, the result is a new and distinctive kind of social volatility borne of something like information overpopulation. Research findings would then resist synthesis into social action, operating only in fragments scattered far and wide throughout the social system. Many collective advances would remain mere potentialities whose likelihood of manifesting plummets as the system continues to grow in scale. No matter the gross quantity of raw information such gains in scale might beget, the basic unit of social agency (the individual human being) stays pretty much the same. Ditto the system gain from pooling such units into networks (e.g. research teams, political action committees, musical ensembles) which show diminishing returns at scales proportionate to today's information overload. Even the effect of introducing better information into the system is mitigated by diffusion given such vast scale as the current global village (not to mention its Virtual shadow-world) has attained. The tortu(r)ously slow burn of incremental progress seems pleasurable in comparison to the fracturing and anomie which the present situation promises to engender.

(2) The above assumes that an increase in the gross quantity of overall knowledge production begets a corresponding and proportionate increase in the (smaller) gross quantity of competent and constructive knowledge production; this as opposed to merely spreading ever thinner a fixed quantity of collective intellectual potential. This is a very large assumption which may not be warranted; but if not, then we are left with an older, simpler problem: the haystacks grow while the needles and the metal detectors pretty much stay the same. As for the sentient pieces of throbbing flesh wielding the latter device, one can only hope that their dignity is not too closely cherished.

(3) Perhaps then there is something to be said for periodically turning one's back on the great data diffusion and carving out a little extra time to cherrypick the choicest nuggets from the twilight of pre-computerized thought, e.g. in the same vein as Debord but with a dash more childlike curiosity and a tad less puerile obstinacy. Whatever strictly perspectival shortcomings individual thinkers of the recent past might now be understood to have had, at least the economy of ideas within which they were subsumed was of a more just and optimal scale. Even the choicest of today's intellectual nourishment is grown in depleted soil, meanwhile, and thus perspective has become a problem of abundance rather than one of scarcity. If this is not quite a fatal blow to progress, it just as surely has not been adequately accounted for by progressives who merely consider the ostensible quality of information but not the system-level prospects for making any use of it whatsoever. In any event, it promises to be a very long time indeed before ideas are again permitted to circulate in an optimally-scaled intellectual environment; optimally-scaled, that is, not merely for progress but also for dignity.

(4) A recent 30 second junket on Google produces one intriguing and one utterly demoralizing revelation: (a) the term/concept "descaling" has found at least cursory usage in the heavy economics literature; (b) in absence of companion terms to narrow the field, any such Google search is badly confounded by the far more pressing and widely discussed issue of how to clean a coffeemaker.

Reports of My Demise (v)

For middle class children fortunate enough to have access to them, The Arts lay out a uniquely treacherous path from success to failure, starting (and often ending) with the fact that you can major in them through the doctoral level at most of this country's best public and private universities. Many of my peers have sardonically labeled this a pyramid scheme, and I am not above backing that interpretation. Indeed, it is fair to say that we have done a very good job of building and sustaining institutionalized programs of pre-professional artistic training for the middle and upper classes to enjoy, and concurrently a piss-poor job of taking our work to the streets. The latter is, in fairness, and as anyone who has tried can tell you, easier said than done, and not merely on account of aesthetics or access: the centrist upper-middle classes and apolitical nouveau riche are hardly the only families who might balk at a child who wishes to pursue a professional arts career. For poorer Americans and recent immigrants with aspirations of upward mobility, I imagine the pigeonhole Western society reserves for its artists must look like a great place to continue toiling in economic purgatory, which of course in many ways it is. Predictably, becoming a rich celebrity is a more common aspiration, even though the odds of being able to eke out an existence teaching lessons and playing money gigs are exponentially greater.

Indeed, in the United States we have seen tremendous recent influxes of immigrants from cultures with radically different conceptions of art and music than those brought here by previous waves of Central Europeans and West Africans. And of course, it is hardly unheard of for such groups to bring with them as well regressive gender politics which greatly circumscribe both men's and women's roles and career options. This poses a great challenge, if not out-and-out crisis, to liberal multicultural idealism. For one thing, American Westernist arts organizations, especially orchestras and museums, which were founded decades or centuries ago with very particular cultural purviews are now being challenged by many on the left to better reflect today's America or lose their charitable status, intrinsically if not legally. The aesthetic results of such triangulation tend, predictably, to be disastrous, which is the first, best reason to seek a better solution. To be sure, a panoply of isolated conservatist vacuums is not that solution either, just a different kind of disaster. Culture is living and living things evolve! Decaying carcasses stink to high heaven, and so does formaldehyde. Synthesis irrevocably defines both American music and global postmodernity; it would be the ultimate regressive maneuver to artificially inhibit this essential human intellectual process out of a precious sentimentality for native cultures. Remember kids, space is curved, so let's not drift so far left that we end up on the right.

I am not saying that nothing is lost when the last exponent of a native tradition passes away. Nothing lasts forever, though, and the ritual maiming of our own traditions and institutions out of white liberal guilt is the least constructive response. What would behoove these institutions of ours is to seek and support multicultural, pan-stylistic artists who are smart, dedicated, and altruistic enough to push beyond facile pastiche and quotation into finer creative granularities; who do not merely dabble in various traditions but have made deep concurrent investments in two or more of them, achieving a pre-modern degree of idiomatic authority therein as a prerequisite to constructive synthesis; and whose constituent influences thus operate at deeper perceptual levels. All of that is to say: artists whose work clearly sounds different, but may not sound the least bit multicultural on the surface.

This question of surface, of course, points to precisely why this type of work will never be supported to the same degree as the orchestral composer who tacks a superfluous clave part onto his ersatz neo-classical drivel, or the atom-smashing puppet-master impressario who throws groups of Western and non-Western specialist musicians haphazardly together. These are affronts to non-Western traditions just as they are to Western ones; they are supported not on aesthetic merit, nor simply because they are multicultural, nor, I don't think, because of some vast liberal-multiculturalist conspiracy, but rather because their multiculturalism is transparent enough to be perceptible to administrators too dense to perceive it otherwise, and because those administrators see their lives flash before their eyes with each new wave of immigration. In other words, because we live in a "democracy," and because more is more.

The question of how our life experience finds its way into our art is in one sense almost too obvious to bear verbalizing: traffic is bad one night, you lose an hour you had blocked off for composing, you return to the piece the next day in a different state of mind and write something either slightly or wildly different than you would have otherwise. But of course this quotidian sense is not the one which the most overdetermined aesthetic identity politics invoke: in that sphere, rather, identity issues must be overbearingly worn on one's sleeve, laid on with brute force, and articulated with all the sophistication of a jackhammer. Victimry and deviance become coveted locations from which to make art, even as it becomes ever more apparent, and not least to theorists from this very milieu, that these are matters of degree for each and every one of us and not isolated, privileged perspectives that we either do or do not inhabit. Indeed, in contravention of so much overdetermined deconstructionist insistence that identity inevitably shapes aesthetics, the contemporary paradigm is not one where identity simply finds its way into the work, but rather one where it must be put there as conspicuously, self-consciously, and overbearingly as possible, as if out of fear that it might otherwise fail to turn up.

Is my evident skepticism about all of this merely a dressed-up version of "I don't mind x people as long as they act like y?" I am not an expert in any non-Western musical traditions, so I will eat my words here if anyone who is wants to put forth a compelling case that postmodern pastiche is an essential cultural and aesthetic value in one or more of them. Perhaps my privileging of "finer creative granularity" is a more contestable, Westernist maneuver. In my defense, the West best knows the dictum that influence begets depersonalization not as a multiculturalist battle cry but as a well-chronicled phase of juvenile misconception through which virtually all of us have passed and from which a few inevitably fail to emerge. Depth of engagement with a variety of streams is, rather, is the surest path toward individualism in our paradigm. The more and finer the granules, the less perceptible their individual sources; conversely, the people whose pieces sound like teetering Jenga towers of superficial references are the ones who have fewer influences and know them less thoroughly.

Style, be it a decadent aestheticist contrivance or an ancient aural continuum, is above all a trivial, surface feature that too often distracts us from deeper conceptual affinities among musical works. Tribalism is the ascription of ancestral thoughts and actions to all living genetic exponents, and hence the source of "us versus them" mentalities that blind members to such "deeper conceptual affinities" shared with other "tribes." And to be sure, it is in depth and not in surface, in reconciliation and not in tribalism, that any constructive multiculturalism qua multiculturalism must trade. Aesthetically that is. #SorryNotSorry conceptual art people, but in news to no one who reads these dispatches, I really just care about aesthetics.

To that end, a final thought: to construct a piece out of the coarsest stylistic granules is to make the underlying concept transparent and the surface contour uneven. Finding a "match" between two such granules is inherently a process of trial-and-error and minimally if at all one of exercising the will. It seldom rises beyond the level of an ironically inelegant mosaic comprised of just two unwieldy, misshapen panels. Sounds like...conceptual art, right? Indeed, conceptual art makes its nut in this space, not infrequently at the hostile, direct, and intentional expense of the pre-modern traditions referenced, and often in precisely the manner I am describing. Adherents of those traditions, even if they have no other use for conceptual art, could undoubtedly learn something by paying more attention to it; perhaps the world is trying to tell them something.

Exchange with Milo Fine (ii) – "*every* survival strategy is fraught with pitfalls"

[Previously: Foreword – (i)]

[SK] At the risk of both lapsing into cliches and miring us unduly deep in the critical theory labyrinth, for me your last missive leads unavoidably to questions of a postmodern condition. One defining feature of postmodernity is the sense that everything has already been done, the ultimate triumph of the status quo since it can, at that point, not be meaningfully subverted.

[MF] I concur. *But*, I would draw a line -- however ultra-razor-thin -- between "meaningful subversion" and "subversion" (the marketing term.) Understanding that of course, as I stated previously, it's *all* -- "meaningful subversion" disruption, etc. -- part of the status quo. What is ideally sought in "meaningful subversion" would be a shift in the nature of the status quo itself. An impossible task! But, in my view, one worth pursuing anyway.

Aesthetically, at least, it's all too easy to feel that way right now;

Especially if it's a strategy for "getting over". [smile]

and yet I think you would agree that anecdotally there would seem to remain ample opportunities to subvert, or something akin to it, by incredibly simple means. I am, of course, reminded of this often merely by virtue of playing traditionalist music on a non-traditional instrument, to which positive and negative reactions alike tend to be exaggerated.

I'd call that "subversion" (the marketing term).

But of course, after the gig, we still have war, poverty, political corruption…

As if a course of action taken by any individual could immediately eradicate any of our ills; internal *or* external...

The second, less-cliched, possibly contentious but I think potentially more important aspect of the postmodern condition I want to raise is the self-conscious manner in which artists go about their work once it is not only established but widely trumpeted that the arts are "the harbinger of (human) potential," that they, so to speak, "matter." I often wonder if the whole endeavor isn't spoiled the moment we really, truly convince ourselves this is the case? To hone in on an issue of "wiring," I'm not sure it's possible for human beings to have such an eye towards our place in history as it is unfolding and not succumb to what Shunryu Suzuki calls in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind "gainfulness." Here is a "hurdle" if there ever was one.

Exactly! But, you know, the whole
business of a "self-conscious manner"
and fame is essentially the result of careerism(posturing)/marketing(words)/positioning. Additionally, once one reaches that artificial pinnacle, there is the tendency to just keep repeating the same thing that got one there; and thus insuring an income stream while diminishing the work if indeed there was anything left to diminish. To wit, the vast majority of the time, the emperor has no clothes. There are, of course, exceptions; at least in the quality of the work itself. But, I've always been troubled by the fact that so few qualitative "artists" even attempt to match the resonance of their work with the resonance of their daily life. This would seem to be a key in getting to something like "meaningful subversion". And let's not forgot the inherent paradox in the fact that we are simultaneously utterly insignificant and, for wont of a better word or term, sacred.

In any case, I know from experience that when material gain is at play, all bets are off, and this is for me, though I had little faith in the notion of arts activism to start with, the gravest unaddressed, practically unmentionable issue in that sphere. Charitable arts education work suffers tremendously when artists are paying their mortgages that way. I don't mean to imply here that you should have to take a vow of poverty to be an artist, or that artists involved in this work now are necessarily incompetent, but rather that hitching this entire wagon to our checkered (that's a kind description) network of public and private institutional arts funding more or less guarantees a reinforcement of the status quo, no matter who the artist-educators are or what they bring to the table. This supposed great vehicle of change truly has been co-opted for quite the opposite purpose, enabled by the bourgeois aspirations of our own ilk, for which we/they do deserve a fair share of blame, and which is itself a direct result of the monied outflanking the poor in arts access and achievement from the start. So it's a cycle.

Too too true. But, instead of attempting to "break the cycle", a better course of action would be to pursue "inner something-like-the-truth" without being at all concerned with an outcome. Can this involve seeking funding or entering into the field of arts eduction? Perhaps; at least to an extent. Keeping in mind that "untenability" and "ambivalence" are my watchwords, I am ambivalent about funding. Can one truly wash the blood off of robber baron fortunes by doing good work? Let's face it, these foundations are a front; a PR mea culpa for the heinous machinations which allowed such a fortune to be accumulated in the first place. Plus, keep in mind that in almost every case, all the money they're benevolently giving away is nothing but the interest on their investments. (Gotta keep the heirs living in the style to which they've grown accustomed.) Still, if one can face that reality, and proceed in as ethical a manner as possible, some small amount of blood can be, if not eradicated, then slightly diluted. (And, of course, there's the issue of getting grants being a "career" in itself, as careerists chase trend and fashion in an attempt to become one of the "anointed"/entitled whose place at the trough is assured.)

As for public funding, I have no problem with spending taxpayers' money on work of deep resonance; work which, ideally, contributes to the, for wont of another better word, health of a culture/society. Unfortunately, most of what is funded falls far short of that reasonable expectation, and thus could be better spent providing food, housing, etc. for the underclass. (However, as we know, given the structure of organizations/bureaucracies, only a limited amount of the money earmarked for such worthwhile endeavor is actually used for the intended purpose; too much of it going to the usual parasitical suspects: bureaucrats, ancillary sub-contractors, etc.)

Working in arts education is likewise a tricky treacherous business, because these organizations/institutions aren't really interested in art, but rather, the *appearance* of art. I know people who have entered the academy as a survival strategy, and while despising the politics, etc. have nonetheless been able to maintain the overall quality and resonance of their work. To reiterate, when looking at/for "opportunities", one simply *must* look closely at the up-side and down-side of a given scenario. And, while the majority of even those who bother to objectively and ruthlessly assess a situation into which they decide to enter ultimately abandon their principles as soon as the money starts coming in, it is possible to make it work. To be clear, *every* survival strategy is fraught with pitfalls.

The notion of pop/rock as "parasitic" forms/styles gave me a chuckle, but I think it's a valid observation. Of course, as you say earlier, all creativity borrows from existing strands; and yet not all creativity is parasitic in the sense that it drains or ultimately kills its "host."

I agree. For instance, Henry Cowell, way back when, introducing so-called ethnic elements into his compositions, while a novelty (and something which generated attention) was, as far as I can tell (and pardon me if I'm being naive or, even worse, nostalgic!), done out of a genuine interest. This has become less and less the case, as appropriation and self-aggrandizement have gotten substantially more hand-in-glove.

Aesthetically, we both, possibly to the surprise of many who know us, can count a smattering of rock-(though not pop-)derived music among our very favorite.

I wouldn't say "my very favorite"; more like songs which spoke to me, for whatever reason. But, that has a *lot* to do with our basic wiring of which pop/rock is extremely aware; hence "hooks". It's sort of akin to my getting tearful watching some half-assed movie. The plot/script and acting gets to me, even as I know I'm being manipulated by the screenwriter/director "pushing my buttons." There is very little, if anything genuine therein, but I accept the sentiment even as I recognize the artifice. That stated, I do certainly sense and appreciate the directness/sincerity of some rock/pop music; often those that seemed underproduced. (And let us always remember the origins of rock and roll; the appropriation of Black rhythm and blues for a white audience.)

(Would you care to hip us to a short list? Or am I misremembering here?)

You're remembering correctly, but, for a lot of reasons, I don't care to go into specifics. Besides, my tastes in that regard are pretty fickle. Things often wear out their welcome quite quickly. After all, disposability -- built-in obsolescence -- is a key component of consumerism/commerce.

It is socially and economically speaking, rather, that I think "parasitic" is a perfect description. How many "jazz" gigs sprout up at newly opened restaurants and summer concert series only to (d)evolve into hosting the same handful of half-assed world-pop groups? Further, the compression of various musics from around the world into these salable, nearly indistinguishable reductions, always with a backbeat and a "chick singer," is an aesthetic issue, for some people an ethical one as well, and certainly a textbook parasite-host relationship, a prime example, my mother would not miss the chance to point out, of capitalism killing culture.

Couldn't have said it better. (Though let's give credit where it's due. There are plenty of packaged "dude singers" too!)

There is, on the other hand, traditionally what can only be called a symbiosis at work in jazz and creative music, at least where the players permit it to arise. It's a nice analogy, and especially for your groups.

Thank you. A primary reason it works for me and my collaborators is that I don't try to force any kind of symbiosis. (And it is a symbiosis which, as you know, while having jazz at its core, also encompasses many other impulses.) It happens as the result of mutual respect, sensibility and sensitivity. Put another way, I consider myself a facilitator/catalyst rather than a "leader". And, make no mistake, there is a clear line between the former and the latter.

French Theory taking a beating at PostClassic

Get in on the melee here.

Selective Naciremical Reverse Pseudo-Relativism Exercise

Imagine a purely hypothetical non-Western, non-white society with an autonomous, aestheticist-leaning classical music tradition. Now imagine the tempest of vitriol that would rain down upon the Western author of a postmodern, deconstructionist critique of this hypothetical musical culture. Imagine as part of this critique the positing of a Freudian subconscious underlying this musical culture whereby its aspiration to autonomy is understood as a manifestation of all of human kind's worst attributes all at once. Imagine the concurrent pathologizing of this musical culture based on the social implications of the aspiration to artistic autonomy and the normativization of functional music based purely on its preponderance across the globe and only secondarily on its own social implications. Now imagine the possible reactions and how out of place the customary urging of tolerance would seem when applied to an art-music tradition.

It's a purely hypothetical, highly cherrypicked scenario that will never ever play out. Perhaps that's simply because the kind of postmodern theory I'm thinking of was never designed or intended to be applied to any other cultures: as Albert Murray said, "We [Afro-Americans] invented the blues; Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need." Then again, the notion of classical musical tradition is not, strictly speaking, confined to The West (nor would Freud be, if there is anything worth salvaging from him, applicable only to us, even if we needed it more). In any case, if there is such thing as a death drive, I wonder if our present relationship to our musical past might well offer an example of it at work?

Hearing Modernity (iii)

Olivia Lucas on Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: Meaning of a Format:

The approach to history here is never teleological; instead, it emphasizes the contingency of all events and artifacts. The book addresses the fact that the mp3 could have been invented thirty years earlier than it was, and uses this fact to interrogate the assumption that technological capability alone leads to invention. The emergence of the mp3 in 1993 was the result of a long history of people, institutions and technologies.

Okay, okay, I get it. I mean, not really, but kind of. No musical style or technique is universally applicable anymore, but everyone in a society lives under the same set of social, political, and economic conditions, and the better we understand them, the better equipped we are to make and consume sound/music. The idea of replacing music theory with acoustics in the core curriculum actually has always kind of appealed to me for the same reason: we all live under the same physical laws, even if our Musical traditions are vastly different and irreconcilable. Why not go all the way? Isn't embracing "the contingency of all events and artifacts" going to do more for more students of sound and music alike than sweating out the gory details of how "a minority of aesthetes" chose to spend their putrid little lives?

I honestly am not sure. It seems we will find out in due time. I do wonder, though, just to belabor the point a bit more, what becomes of the last thousand years of willfulness in Western music? Are we to behave as if it never happened? Today, given enough data from which to extrapolate, computers can spit out convincing sound-alikes in the style of virtually any classical composer; and yet simply by virtue of being first, the original works themselves tell us so much more about the world we live in and how it got to be that way. Sociology, meanwhile, can explain or excuse the work, but it can't perform or compose it. The former are ideal academic pursuits; the latter never fit quite so well. Perhaps it's better, then, that academia do Sound Studies rather than Sound Making; that it focus on what it's good at and leave the creative, subjective work that it never really knew how to properly approach or nurture to be done outside its walls. Isn't that what people like me have been saying for a long time? And yet it was the academics' unhealthy distance from real live musical practice that prompted those complaints in the first place. Seen in that light, instituting a yet further distance suddenly becomes a lot less appealing, and the very point of doing so rather unclear. That's my main problem here. As long as there has been music, practitioners have always already been analysts, historians, and most of all, teachers and mentors. That aspect of music predates modern academia and promises to outlive it. The story of the academic perversion of the time-honored mentor-disciple relationship is one of increasing distance from musical practice; of enforced insularity as an inevitable product of a particular kind of hierarchical structure in the organization of such institutions; and of people with no particular interest in or ability for teaching or mentorship half-assing their way through it in exchange for a much-needed paycheck when the society they live in presents them with no alternative income source. The strongest backlash against this monstrosity was bound to come from far enough beyond its walls to ensure that those leading it didn't entirely understand or appreciate the value of a properly functioning version; they simply wanted their own demands met, their own self-importance validated, by whichever institutions they happened to be looking at after being shot with Cupid's envy arrow, and where such things were not immediately forthcoming, they set about burning the whole thing to the ground. Ergo, Sound Studies, the new and improved, politically correct version of Sound Making, where everybody gets a trophy, no one has to practice, and the only prerequisite is fluency in a coded language of five-dollar words. In all seriousness, there is undoubtedly important work to be done here should its exponents demonstrate the ability to learn from the history of the institutions they've worked so hard to penetrate; it so often seems, however, that this history has simply been dismissed as a dark age without being fully digested, the very notion of aesthetic contemplation considered beyond redemption, and our nose thus cut off very much in spite of our face. There are other questions, too, like what becomes of the "music makes kids smart" narrative after every last piece of physical and mental exercise inherent in the traditional Western musical experience has been decolonialized right out of it, and anything less than a Partchian mania for first principles is pathologized as reactionary propaganda? It is not for nothing that Christopher Small, The People's Deconstructionist, builds his widely-read book "Musicking" around the notion that music is something people do; it would seem rather obvious, though, that art which anyone can make, which requires no specialized knowledge or skills, is inherently non-transformative, art with zero "extrinsic" benefits, if you will. Who cares, then, how many people it reaches?

The 21st century postmodernists have let the 20th century musico-academic terrorists win. Distrusting the power of beauty to elicit irrational behavior, or perhaps possessing no ear for it themselves, they can't seem to understand why anyone else would have use of it; and so the play of contingencies and constructivisms is supposed to fellate our minds the way music once did our ears. I'm a smart guy, so...almost. But not quite. I have ears, not ice, where my heart should be.

Hearing Modernity (ii)

More from an essay by Ian Power:

Here was the bedrock for scholarly work that was not about analyzing music formalistically; it was about analyzing the lines between music and daily life, the ways music was controlled and distributed—in studying a modern music politics, it began to become clearer that it wasn’t just music that was political, so was everything surrounding its dissemination. ...Music, seen through this lens, now appeared as a minor cog in the wheel of sound. ...Studying only music restricted us to studying a leisure activity in the face of mounting evidence that the study of sound was always already the study of politics and power, environment and experience. In studying music, we had been studying the actions of a minority of aesthetes; studying sound is, almost by definition, studying everyone.

Again, an omission of sorts that it takes a musician to get bent out of shape about: when we read "analyzing music formalistically" in this context, we of course know that the author really meant "jacking off to magic squares," and not "the instrumentalist's conscientious preparation of musical work(s) for performance." The latter is, after all, something only that pesky "minority of aesthetes" is silly enough to bother with anymore, trapped as they are in the Victorian, Darwinist clusterfuck of determinacy and willfulness, and burdened by the outmoded belief that the intentional refinement of a musical creation in direct reflection of one's own predilections and experiences enhances (potentially, at least) that product's intrinsic value, brightening an irreparably dark world ever so slightly.

In any case, if that's the musical framework that you live (or are trapped) in, you probably have no more patience than the Soundists do for the particular varieties of formalistic musical analysis that have prevailed in American academia. Even so, there certainly is a species of what can only be called analysis that you and everyone else you live (or are trapped) with in this world of music necessarily engage in when it comes time to give a public performance. People like us grew up associating such seemingly commendable abstract values as personal pride and respect for others with the drive to prepare and refine our work; for us, the most destructive force known to music, aesthetically as well as socially, is permission to dispense with them. Such an erosion of standards seems an awfully steep price to pay for something as silly as molding the sonic world into a slightly more idealized political allegory, especially when there's a "real" world of people and institutions out there that could use a bit more attention than it gets through this maneuver alone.

Not all aestheticism is politically naive: if one's musical desires are so destructive (but are they really?), does it not make sense to seek a padded cell for them to inhabit? Without such an outlet, the strictures of accepting the world of sound precisely as it is, simply presented with no hope for change, becomes a form of oppression, and the study of how the world got to sound the way it does becomes deterministic and empty. Aestheticism, meanwhile, was only ever a threat when tastes became institutionalized, just as determinacy is only inherently destructive when accompanied by spectacular deficits of consciousness which both music and sound, I hate to say for the second time in as many paragraphs, are hard-pressed to remedy on their own.

We are all aesthetes, even if only a minority of us are awake to it. The notion that "studying everyone" would be more politically appealing seems to me to overvalue the privilege of being studied while undervaluing that of sonic self-determination. Such a thorough distrust of intentionality and refinement threatens to trap us in the world as it sounds at the expense of how it might sound. Aestheticist music-making, conversely, is less about exerting control over others than about exerting it over one's own soundworld; about being the change you wish to see in that world, as the saying goes.

For its part, analysis (the type does matter, but not for the moment) is part and parcel of being a music-maker, i.e. a practitioner, or at least one worth his or her salt in any musical tradition that still permits its members their own value judgments. It's important to recognize that grain of civility lying at the heart of an early American musico-academic framework that was indeed to go precipitously off the rails in so many other ways. That such institutions can no longer possibly cover enough stylistic ground to make any claim to comprehensiveness in the contemporary musical environment is its own rather separate issue; the exclusive classical music emphasis never suited me either, but the aspiration to achievement sure did, and I certainly find it too important to be sacrificed as collateral damage in the postmodern theory wars. May benevolent willfulness find a way to coexist with Sound as well as Music, and nihilism thus be kept at bay for a little while longer.

Priorities

A typically green New Music Box article about teaching 4-part writing develops into an atypically productive and stimulating discussion. Commenter Sam L. Richards makes, for me, the key contribution, which deserves to be reblogged at length:

I think if the classroom is going to focus on four-part writing, there must be a sufficient justification for doing so; there must be a sufficient justification for placing a particular style of chorale writing of a particular Austro-Germanic composer from a very particular time period at the center of our 21st-century music pedagogy. When viewed like this, our four-part pedagogical preoccupations appear to be a rather specialized skill. Indeed, writing a good four-part chorale is a rather specialized skill, as is writing a Chopin-like nocturne, a Webern-like short, an Adams-like whirlwind, or a Muhly-like musing. [SK interjects: Dude, you're on a roll here, but please never utter that last name in the company of the other three again.] Bach-like chorale writing is a prerequisite to none of these.

It is important to also acknowledge that a four-part writing centric pedagogy also necessarily, yet often clandestinely, emphasizes and educates with only a few musical parameters in mind: pitch and harmony. Timbre, texture, trajectory, energetics, emotion, rhythm, meaning, cognition, context, feminism, an engagement of philosophical aesthetics, et al are usually not only marginalized, but not engaged at all. These are not advanced subjects whose reservation for a graduate course can be easily justified.[SK's emphasis added] They are now essential elements of the current musico-theoretical discourse. Most of the parameters which appear in my partial list above can easily be engaged in conjunction with pitch and harmony; in other words, one need not first master the esoteric art of baroque part-writing before they begin to engage musical meaning. One need not learn to mimic the chorale style of a particular period in order to learn about energetics. The limited mode in which pitch and harmony are so frequently taught is not a prerequisite to musical learning, musical thinking, or, to invoke the late Adam Krims, an engagement of “theory about music”.

I fear that our pedagogy often educates our students into cultural irrelevance instead of out of it. While acknowledging that such a style, no doubt, possesses harmonic, and voice-leading similarities to many other styles, placing it at the center or treating it as a foundation of one’s early musical training (or later musical training) is not only a pedagogical move, but an aesthetic one which serves to marginalize other styles which do not “adhere” to its practices.

Can I get an amen, hold the plagal cadence?

[sc]airquotes (v)

Instead of repeating such Western myths of the noncontingency of artworks, why not search for jazz meanings behind the music, in the life-shapes that gave rise to it and that continue to sustain it? Why not, in other words, scrutinize the interactions between our own rules of formation and those we impute to the makers of jazz as the source of our evaluations of it? Why not create a jazz pedagogy in which our construction of the varieties of black life experience takes priority, saving the music–intricately bound up with those experiences, after all–for last, construing it in light of them and resisting the aestheticizing tendency to exaggerate its differences from other manifestations of expressive culture?

...Placing the music first will always distance it from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and that sustain it. It will always privilege the European bourgeois myths of aesthetic transcendency, artistic purity untouched by function and context, and the elite status of artistic expression. (Such myths concerning the composers of the European canon badly need to be exploded, so it is all the more troubling to see them neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers.) Emphasizing the musical appreciation of jazz only transfers to the study of African-American music the formalist view that remains debilitatingly dominant in Eurocentric musicology, with its continuing emphasis on internalist music analysis." (89)

Gary Tomlinson. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 71-105.