Parsons on Ideological Skewness

The relation of an ideological system to the social system in which it takes root is highly complex, and subject to a great deal of variation in different circumstances. In a well-integrated society the dominant ideology in large measure reflects and interprets a large part of the system of actually institutionalized patterns. But even in the most stable societies the ideological patterns are selective relative to the institutional. Ideological formulation often reflects a need to justify, which may imply a sense of insecurity. Hence, those patterns which are most completely taken for granted are likely to play a small role, if any, in explicit ideology. The system is thus "skewed" in the direction of emphasizing elements which are felt to be "problematical." Consciousness of contrast with other societies is one major factor in this." (267)

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

Note (4 June, 2016): A brilliant analysis. Essentially he's pointing out the same logical conundrum of the notion of something being "extremely average." The ideological average/LCD by definition does not have a strong enough profile in either absolute or relative terms to be consolidated into powerful political statements. Attempts at this fall flat just as sayings like "extremely average" or "intensely mediocre" come off as humorous and/or ironic no matter the affect with which they are uttered. Hence, the harder the political center tries to consolidate its message, the more ridiculous they look. Meanwhile, various extremists gain notoriety all out of proportion to their logical underpinnings and real level of support simply because they appeal to baser lizard-brain impulses and have a very strong/distinctive profile built into them. I have been maintaining this election season that the "center" represented by H. Clinton and other status-quo candidates (or are there any in the repub. party?) is essentially a crudely calculated mirage which simply takes the average of strong-left and strong-right positions and consolidates it in order to appeal to the LCD. I feel that it thus represents very few actual people's views. The increasing struggles of mainstream candidates and the increasing success of relatively extreme insurgents back this up. All indications are that the polity is highly polarized right now, which means that while this fake center tries to stigmatize "extreme" left and right views as if their common extremeness were their defining feature and their many substantive differences irrelevant in light of this, the fact is that these VAST differences are TOTALLY relevant, and hence that one or the other of the "extreme" candidates collectively represent far more people than the centrists ever could hope to. Hence their conundrum, and ours. Here TP sounds a cautionary note from the mainstream, reminding us extremists that our "ideologies" are undoubtedly rooted to some extent in our "insecurity" and in our "us-against-them" mindset (our "consciousness of contrast" with the other), and that just because we can't detect any common sense emanating from the center doesn't mean that it is not there (i.e. things are inherently "skewed" towards extremes). In a vacuum, I'll drink to that. In the actual world I live in, there are all manner of additional factors to consider which lead me to feel comfortable supporting Bernie and less and less comfortable with Hillary on any level. The current mainstream might literally be the worst of all evils. But TP's is a timely note of caution even so.

...the objects of ideological formation are mainly in the "remote" category to most persons–or are high-level abstractions with a similar significance. Hence, they are less fully controlled by realistic considerations and constitute particularly favorable opportunities for the operation of such nonrational and irrational mechanisms as projection, displacement, identification. Where there are severe and definitely structured tensions in a society there are almost certain to be ideological patterns which contain conspicuous elements of unrealism, romantic idealization, and distortion." (268)

Note (4 June, 2016): A partner statement with the previous one, and clearer connection between psychoanalytic theory and real-world political/ideological phenomena than any of the psychoanalysts themselves seemed to be capable of formulating.

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.

Krens' Footprints and Oteiza's Paradox

Oteiza’s paradox consists in that while New York’s world-class artists will consider him as their equal (Serra conceded to a reporter that he thought Oteiza was the greatest living sculptor, and Gehry called him one of the three or four fundamental artists of the century), the Krensified franchise museum will reduce him to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible.

But Oteiza is only one instance of this paradox. The same thing happened to the great Eduardo Chillida. Initially, when Basque critics charged that there would be no work by Basque artists at the new museum, Krens always countered that one gallery would be devoted to Chillida. But then he refused to buy Chillida’s work. When the Guggenheim was about to open its doors in Bilbao, a snubbed Chillida had to complain in the Basque press that Krens was unwilling to purchase any of his work—purchases that, needless to say, would be done with Basque taxpayers’ money. Krensification means that the museum mandarin from New York has the right to levy money for the purchase of art from the host society and then spend these public funds of the franchised public the way he best pleases. If this implies humiliating the most consecrated local artist, then so be it.

But the key lesson for local artists to be learned from Chillida’s case is something else. It has something to do with the repositioning of the artist as deserving a global or local audience. Chillida clearly belonged to the international elite art community when New York’s Guggenheim exhibited his work in 1981. Then the Guggenheim purchased Chillida’s work. But in the 1990s and in his home Basque Country, was he still a global artist whose work deserved to be collected? Krens decided that he was not. Suddenly, in the eyes of the Guggenheim, Chillida had become a minor artist unworthy of his interest. His work did not deserve the new museum’s international space. When I asked Krens about it, his cryptic reply was that his modus operandi was to buy two works and receive one for free. In other words, Chillida was unwilling to bend to the Krensified museum’s patronizing rules and had been punished for it.

Joseba Zulaika
"Desiring Bilbao: The Krensification of the Museum and Its Discontents"
in Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim
pp. 158-159

Besides a "paradox," I also smell a rat: members of the "international elite art community" indeed stoop to the level of local yokels when they demand the "elite" treatment on the basis of their local origins. They reduce themselves when they deal in terms of honor and status at the expense of practical considerations. They reduce themselves when institutional conduct "implies" things about them rather than does things to (or for, or with) them. In my home town, a long way from Bilbao in geographic terms, even the nonelite like to turn this trick. I have since grown to despise it.

If art itself shows a "tendency to reproduce something absent" (O. Rank), then so too must we permit the audience to meet their own "dynamic need of equalization" via occasional indulgences in novelty. Behemoth art franchises can suck all the air out of the room, but they also (and this too is something of a paradox) are importers of rare goods otherwise unavailable locally. Infusing more local work into these behemoths is the worst of both worlds. That is not their ecological function. Use them to equilibriate yourself as needed! Otherwise ignore them! Nobody can "humiliate" you without your permission! Not even a Yale MBA!

It's hard to take seriously the notion that "the Krensified franchise museum" is either necessary or sufficient to "reduce" an "international elite" artist "to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible" on the local level. Anything ever-present will be taken for granted. There is more than a ring of truth to the notion that a prophet will never be recognized in his own land. There is also a material reality, a reality which transparently unethical behavior by the gatekeepers (and there does seem to have been some of that here) can too easily obscure. When the local scene's greatest export demands to be acknowledged in every local endeavor (as many of them do!), he himself has become the behemoth who sucks all the air out of the room. Frankly, there is no "key lesson for local artists" here that they do not learn quickly on their own. Perhaps it is only elite success which causes them to forget.

(Please forgive my indulgence in masculine pronouns here on the grounds that the principals happen to be men. True "murderous rage" over the failure of a project is such a guy thing, no?)

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As MASS MoCA evolved into an element of the Guggenheim Museum's expanding international network, it raised the issue of the cultural preservation or homogenization of local identities. Would a conceptual museum of avant-garde art overshadow the humble folk art traditions of North Adams? Would the preservation of the old factory buildings also preserve a local working-class identity? Under any circumstances, making a museum the arbiter of local identity risks undermining the cultural understandings that support any social community. In a fragile economy, making that community financially and emotionally dependent on a transnational museum adds irony to tragedy.

Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers. It diffuses slowly to other areas. Tourism may accelerate this process, as it did with modern music and dance in the Berkshires, but it does so within limits. Local museums outside a metropolitan setting rarely present avant-garde works. They perform educational and curatorial functions. They commemorate local histories. They preserve fossils found on native soil, paintings and sculptures by regional artists, and encyclopedic—rather than topical—displays.

We do not know whether Conceptual and Minimalist art, and its descendants in feminist and other installations, can command an audience in rustic or humble surroundings. Until now, the summer visitors who patronize arts festivals in the Berkshires come for mainstream modernist and Impressionist works. They fill evenings in their vacation schedules.

The MASS MoCA proposal essentially argued that space does not matter: art can be appreciated anywhere. The North Adams site was a "museum of space," in one meaningless expression, which meant that it was to be considered an outpost of global culture rather than a local social institution. Thomas Krens theorized that visitors would go to North Adams to see a definitive display of a highly specific art that was created elsewhere. While this strategy works for the Guggenheim's core museum in New York and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, few people thought it would work for North Adams. But who creates the social and spatial context in which a specific cultural strategy "works"? Could avant-garde art "work" without a critical mass of avant-garde artists to produce and view it, without a public already trained to "see" it?

Sharon Zukin
The Cultures of Cities (1996)
(pp. 103-104)

"Outposts" are indeed no substitute for (and can be highly destructive of) "local social institutions." About that there is no doubt. But again, the Localist Paradox: access to "global culture" is a necessity and a human right which "local social institutions" can't always provide. Bollocks on any art czar who would banish "global culture" from "rustic or humble surroundings!" Or vice versa!

Zukin's gambit here is very much a "populist resistance to change," though she has earlier written of that orientation as if it were someone else's and not her own. "Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers." Fine. But to question in this context whether "art can be appreciated anywhere" the volk are not "already trained" (Yikes!) I find rather shockingly contemptuous of these ruralites. I for one can say that I've seen some rather remarkable things happen in some rather unlikely places. Yes, I have seen truckers sobbing openly after a free jazz blowout, and I have seen rural children stage a swoon-in over a brass quintet. Certainly I have not seen these things everywhere I have performed. I have never seen anything like them in the city! Supply and demand is not too facile a construction here! Localism reproduces something present!

Appreciation by everyone, everywhere, all at once, is not the point. Also not the point: giving people exactly what they say they already want, or more of what they already have. Probably North Adams did not need a whole Guggenheim, but I'll bet that someone in North Adams needed modern art, and damned if they didn't get some!
---
Local and personal reality is always more granular than a distant consumer of print can do justice to. Both the genius and the folly of print is how impersonal it can be. None of what I write on matters such as these is to be taken "personally," but I realize that it cannot help but be taken this way. I happen to recognize many elements of these stories even though I have never been to Bilbao or to North Adams. Such public-facing print accounts are undoubtedly reductive; still, they are tools the rest of us can use to guide ourselves through similarly fraught territory. For me there are lessons here, just not the ones the authors explicitly state.

COVID Confessional—On Maintaining Just the Right Amount of Skepticism

Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.

I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.

Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.

There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.

Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.

I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others¹. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.

For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.

There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.

One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.

1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.

I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)

Parsons on Universalistic and Particularistic Systems

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

[A footnote to this passage...]

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

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

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

Parsons on the Instrumental and the Expressive

If we are right in thinking that special pressures operate on the younger generation relative to the general pressures generated by social change, on the other side of the relationship there are factors which make for special sensitivities on their part. The residua of early dependency, as pointed out above, constitute one such factor. In addition, the impact on youth of the general process of social differentiation makes for greater differences between their position and that of children, on the one hand, and that of adults, on the other, than is true in less differentiated societies. Compared to our own past or to most other societies, there is a more pronounced, and above all (as noted) an increasingly long segregation of the younger groups, centered above all on the system of formal education. It may be argued especially that the impact of this process is particularly pronounced at the upper fringe of the youth period, for the rapidly increasing proportion of the age cohort engaged in higher education–in college, and, very importantly, in postgraduate work. These are people who are adults in all respects except for the element of dependency, since they have not yet attained full occupational independence (172)

...

What I have called the romantic trend can be broadly expressed in two directions; the tentative terms "regressive" and "progressive" are appropriate, if not taken too literally. ...the former, at social levels, tending to resist change, the latter to anticipate and promote it.

...The cult of physical prowess [e.g. athletics] has clearly been a reflex of the pressure to occupational achievement in a society in which brains rather than brawn come increasingly to count. From this point of view, it is a regressive phenomenon. (175)

...

On the other side, the progressive one, the most important phenomena are most conspicuous at the upper end of the range, both in terms of the sociocultural level and of the stage of the life cycle. This is the enormous development of serious cultural interests among students in the more elite colleges. The most important field of these interests seems to be that of the arts, including highbrow music, literature, drama, and painting.

The first essential point here is that this constitutes a very definite upgrading of cultural standards, compared with the philistinism of the most nearly corresponding circles in an earlier generation. Second, however, it is at least variant and selective (though not, I think, deviant) with respect to the main trends of the society, since the main developments in the latter are on the "instrumental" rather than the "expressive" side. As to the special involvement of elite youth in the arts, it may be said that youth has tended to become a kind of "loyal opposition" to the main trends of the culture, making a bid for leadership in a sphere important to balanced society yet somewhat neglected by the principal innovating agencies. (176)

Talcott Parsons
"Youth in the Context of American Society" (1962)
in Social Structure and Personality, pp. 155-182

Note (12 May, 2016):
So, among the "romantic," "progressive" elements of youth culture, the arts present a sort of path of least resistance, an opening created by the slippage between society's stated valuation of the arts on one hand and its material/actual devaluation of them on the other. The arts are both socially acceptable and (TP explicitly denies it, but I would not) in some sense also deviant. Further, as TP perceptively identifies here, the source of the arts' deviant tinge is the broader trend of society in the "instrumental" direction at the direct expense of "expressive" concerns. Rapid change of this type creates anomic strain, which feeds youthful romanticism (the "unreality" component TP identifies elsewhere with "romanticism" is very apt here too). Even so, the "elite," "progressive" elements of youth culture, while they are not immune to romanticism and unreality, are still of their own volition bound to common social values and norms; hence, their brand of "youth culture" is merely "loyal opposition" rather than out and out rebellion. TP only IMPLIES that this "loyalty" is a direct and predictable product of this youth's socialization as "elite." He doesn't actually say so, at least not here. But isn't it obvious that those born "elite" have an awfully tough time later admitting that the society which delivered them to such privilege does not treat all people equally or equitably? IMHO, this is an important explanation for the "loyalty" of their "opposition" to a society which they inevitably, be it consciously or unconsciously, come to understand as fundamentally inequitable. The dialectical ring of the term "loyal opposition" is a reflection of the unresolved inner guilt which underlies it. So, it's true, TP has perhaps underemphasized the elements of class conflict here, choosing instead to conduct distinct analyses of the "regressive" and "progressive" elements. I would say that this approach is "incomplete" without being out-and-out "flawed." In fact, this is a brilliant take on the explosive escalation of post-secondary arts education that was just beginning to take shape as he was writing. VERY perceptive.

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Kluckhohn, among others [The Evolution of Contemporary American Values, 1958], comments on the current expansion in America of aesthetic and expressive activities "greatly beyond mere 'comfort.' Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] calls attention to the concern with taste in the widespread sophistication about food and dress. We suggest that this rise in aesthetic appreciation, in hedonism, if you will, is not merely an effort to establish new criteria of status through marginal differentiation but mainly a heightened expressiveness–complementary to, rather than conflicting with, a rise in instrumental demands for achievement. (229)

"The Link Between Character and Society"
(with Winston White) (1961)
ibid, pp. 183-235

19 April, 2021: In other words, this "expansion" of "aesthetic and expressive activities" is compensatory and equilibriating in a world where the "main developments" have for long been "on the 'instrumental' rather than the 'expressive' side." The idea is facile. Probably it is all but untestable scientifically. But there is lots of anecdotal evidence for it, and it holds great explanatory power.

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.

The Genetic Fallacy in Art and Life (i)

(2016, rev. 2020-21)
(Previously: Author's Disclaimer/Preface)
(a part ii may or may not be forthcoming, perhaps before, during or after another massive series)


It is always tempting to assign blame for unsavory social or scholarly trends to partisans of particularly visible brand name thinkers: to the Damned Freudians, the Fucking Marxists, the Obstinate Foucauldians. If not for Fanon, there would be no political violence on the Left! Blame the white male descent into anarcho-capitalism on Milton Friedman and his 10 Quotes to Make Liberal Heads Explode! The strongest appeal of such genetic explanations lies in their parsimony. They are simple and tractable in comparison to the actual complexity of the phenomena for which they purport to account. But as complex as human society actually is, so rarely are such simple, gratifying explanations justified.

Just ask an artist. In artmaking itself as well as in the scholarship surrounding it, those who most noisily fly the flag of a brand name, by name, are to be trusted the least, most of all by their own brand-name standards. How ironic is it that the ever-quotable Friedman himself said something precisely to this effect? Flag-waving is first and foremost an attention-getting maneuver. In the case of books which almost no one actually takes the time to read, the boisterousness of true believers most often belies their miniscule numbers and great vulnerability. Much like the autonomic puffing of furry animals caught in conflict situations, the point is to make themselves appear bigger than they actually are. The attention the rest of us can't help but pay reinforces the overall impression of a discernible ideological paper trail. (We are mammals too, after all.) Perhaps there are indeed a few exceptional individuals and microcommunities where such a trail can be established and followed back to its source; but how trustworthy, really, are their self-reported narratives of the "Aha!" moment?


Breadth and depth of learning are the best medicine. They are highly destructive of certainty rather than constitutive of it. Certainty is the badge of an uncultivated mind.


From the semblance of direct intellectual paths arises the first, best set of questions towards testing genetic hypotheses: How many of us on the Left have actually surveyed a representative sampling of Freud? Marx? Foucault? How many of our Rightist foils can quote Milton Friedman from books rather than from clickbait? How could such bodies of work, in all their complexity and internal contradictoriness, possibly lead to the drawing of common conclusions on a mass scale? Fromm defined ideology as "socially patterned rationalizations," and reading is not much of a social activity, eh? How many of us are both constitutionally and materially equipped to understand this work literally, let alone with any nuance whatsoever? And to pursue a personal synthesis? I would say not too many at all. This factor alone (not to mention the general problems of willfully putting "theory" rather directly into "practice") severely limits the possible impact of scholarship on mass politics, even as it clearly can have momentous impacts on the trajectories of individuals and their achievments, and even as it is customary for such individuals to deflect forthcoming accolades toward payment of these intellectual debts, in word if not always in deed.


"Individual initiative" is never an answer but merely a restatement of the question. It is tautological. It is a fallacy of parsimony.


When it comes to the problematization of individual subjectivity, the death of the author, the dethroning of high art, and so many other canonical art-theory tropes which challenge essentialism's hitherto unchallenged assumptions, it is important to keep in mind that questions of reading and misreading nonetheless pale in comparison to those of non-reading, non-engaging, non-struggling as socially-patterned antiphenomena, the massive cold spots on any given intellectual heat map. I'll bet lunch that the "Marxist" heat map in particular is actually pretty frigid, and that cold is the absence of something rather than the presence of something else. And if I am wrong about this, then the expansion of the epithet "Marxist" to include everything left of center still wins me the bet on a technicality. The actual Marxists, bless their bleeding hearts, need not enter into it at all.

If simply correcting literal misreadings or encouraging creative ones, if establishing baseline empirical facts or reinterrogating the ones we (think we) already had, if any of these were the path to salvation, we would have arrived long ago. In fact we have rightly learned to be suspicious of those flag-wavers who posit just such tasks as Final Solutions rather than the trifling preparatory obligations they are. Another MF periodically reminds us that even the most seemingly radical thinkers are "merely conduits for the zeitgeist," at least in the colloquial sense of cause and effect. To be sure, genetic logic is cause-and-effect logic, i.e. it is uniquely well-suited to the task of mistaking one for the other. Conduit Theory, to the contrary, cannot be fooled by this primitive trap, no matter the social scale. Thought which issues from a particular cultural milieu cannot help but find corroboration therein. There is nothing mystical or prophetic about this dynamic, not even in the hands of mystical or prophetic writers. Further, as the Freudian brand admonishes us, the particular ways in which writers are wrong are also supremely informative. Too bad Freud's method of analyzing "fortuitous actions" has found its most amenable habitat in the GOTCHA culture of the Twitterverse. That is a flesh-eating waste of a promising idea.


It is galling to find so many online user reviews opining that a given book is both worth reading and "outdated." Pick one motherfuckers.


Psychoanalysis provides useful cover for any schlub who wants to claim, for any reason, that their rhetorical opponent is actually self-loathing, self-deceiving, that they literally don't believe what they themselves are saying...because who else ever could believe it? Psychoanalysis, the field of inquiry taken collectively, indeed furnishes such tools lovingly and in abundance; and yet psychoanalysis, the field of inquiry taken collectively, can only ever be equal parts cause and effect. It represents the crest of a larger wave of skepticism which has since overtaken Western intellectual life and would have done so just as readily even without constructs such as the Freudian unconscious to help it along. GOTCHA culture just happened to wash up on the beach in its wake.

I am of course wary of condemning and exalting vulgar relativism in the same breath; of implying that it doesn't matter what we read, just that we read. On a personal level I must mention that I absolutely am becoming less and not more certain the more I learn. But I would also say that the Author is only Dead if we Leave Him Be; that is, if time or ignorance leaves us utterly lacking in context for His ideas. (Hell, the way things are going we'll be lucky if people can still read well enough to parse Him literally.) Yes, (re)building context under such circumstances can be quite the pain in the ass; and yes, postmodernists, institutional-level med[dl]iation in that process is quite often more ideological than altruistic, more destructive than constructive, and more contrived than inevitable. But if we can humor the notion of individual initiative for just a moment, every one of us must individually be capable of establishing which authors are worth the trouble, for us; and if, for whatever reason, we don't take the initiative to build context that enables us to make some educated guesses as to who these authors might be, then we might as well not bother either with art or with life. Certainly we may not accuse our political opponents of being dupes. To make that accusation, you damn well better have done your homework.

For me at least, there is a middle phase of discovery about a new topic during which writers become interchangeable, but also a later critical mass of understanding beyond which the particular value of individual contributions reemerges into view. The sample rate must nonetheless always remain sufficient to capture the full spectrum of the issue. True consensus belongs only to extremes which are logical impossibilities: total ignorance and total knowledge. In practice we all are doomed to inhabit incommensurable positions across the vast middle ground which lies between these two extremes. It is a region which inexorably defies genetic logic, confluences of chance notwithstanding. No one actually lives in a poleplace where genetic logic comports with the intellectual environment. If they say they do then they are lying. I just said certainty is hard to come by, but I am certain about this.

As a result, and also because we are, it must be said, exceedingly weak and simple creatures relative to the social edifices which we unwittingly help to construct, we do seek facile comforts in times of distress and later rationalize them as Parsimonious Solutions, as if to appoint ourselves lead scientists conducting cutting edge research on the culture in which we ourselves are subsumed. Hence we blame Frantz Fanon for Eco-Terrorism and Milton Friedman for Paleo-Conservatism even as the vast majority of Eco-Terrorists and Paleo-Conservatives remain variously but powerfully under-educated, no matter what the wide circulation of reductionist glosses might seem to indicate. After all, causation just feels better than correlation. The thrill of the hunt is most intoxicating when our prey is just elusive enough to keep us entertained but not so elusive as to be unattainable; and so we distort its image in our own heads until our ideational porridge is just the right temperature. This is, incidentally, one of just a few psychic maneuvers that orthodox psychoanalysis, itself an infamous bastion of overreliance upon genetic reasoning, has had pinned down from the start, so blatant and endemic is it to human social life. It is just too unsettling a proposition for too many people to leave the answers to pressing existential questions permanently floating in the ether; and yet the effort at spearing, skinning, cleaning, and curating them is obviously the greater of the two evils.

The Genetic Fallacy in Art and Life—Author's Disclaimer/Preface

(2020-21)

The bulk of the forthcoming essay was written between four and five years ago. That time already seems more like a past life. I abandoned this project when I realized that I could not (and possibly no one could) bring off its full demands in an intellectually responsible way. Also when I remembered that I have grown to hate reading things like this. Also when I accepted that this was a desperate lunge toward equilibrium borne of a living situation which had become unpleasant. It arises most directly from this latter consideration. After CalArts, I rented a room in a North Hollywood apartment for about four years. (Later I would learn that almost everyone who moves to LA rents a North Hollywood apartment for some similar stretch of time.) My apartment-mate was a Valley native almost exactly my age whose backstory and views could not have been more different from mine. Our more intense political discussions are among my most valued as well as my most traumatic memories. Supposedly this was and is exactly what a Divided America needed to be doing more of. Frankly I think we might just have another civil war if we all did intentionally what I did accidentally. I for one have had my fill for a good while. Give me time for about 500 more books before I next confront the specter of an alt-right cohabitant. Politics aside, I grew to deeply respect this guy for bootstrapping himself after being dealt a really terrible hand in life. I also realized that underneath all the bluster he was off-the-charts brilliant. I consider him an intellectual equal and often wondered if he was not in fact my superior. I am not one to confuse education and intelligence. No one who has been to graduate school should need any clearer empirical demonstration that the one does not follow from the other. To my detriment, it seems that I veritably radiate the contrary impression; either that or there are just certain things anti-academic people like to say about people who finished college, whether or not these things are true. If the latter, then they stand guilty of projection, that most Freudian of thought crimes, and Freud's ghost gets to have a chuckle at their expense while the ghost of Ernest Jones whacks him off. If the former, then maybe I just need to be more mindful of managing impressions, and maybe ghosts don't actually whack each other off. Anyway, about my roommate, curiosity eventually turned into avoidance when I found that subtleties of context and idiom made discussion of anything more than the weather extremely difficult for both of us. In between breakthroughs, we spent way too much time hammering out semantic and historical baselines. While I was making my great leap into books, he did almost all of his reading on the internet (as I formerly did too) and openly questioned my frequent trips to retrieve materials from the library. The library was but a five minute walk away. Susan Sontag used to go there after school to work on her editorials for the North Hollywood High School newspaper. I thought that was cool. He thought it was part of the problem. One time I got him to at least consider the usefulness of public libraries by invoking the specter of a tech company monopolizing the electronic distribution of "books." But by that time I was just bluffing, trying to survive rather than thrive. Needless to say this made the discussions even less constructive than they had already become. Finally, as Trump's 2016 candidacy gained momentum, my cohabitant became enraptured, he seemed to identify personally with the man, and the frankly racist test-balloons which he had previously learned not to float over my airspace gradually reemerged as well-rationalized "racialist" aircraft carriers. Alienation of affection set in. It was felt, and it is felt still. The only other people I know who voted for Trump did so with little to no enthusiasm, the same level of enthusiasm with which I voted, in my first one of these obscene spectacles, for Al Gore. One such unenthusiastic maybe-Trumper whom I work with told me in the course of a comparatively tame political conversation that I go "straight out of the liberal playbook." This recapitulated my old roommate's assertion that I would agree with him/them if only I could reject the lies I had been taught in school. That is reason enough to post this, albeit a reason I wish I didn't have. They won't read it and wouldn't understand it. Those are facts and not insults, empirically tested ones no less against which the next countervailing evidence will be the first, and against which offense taken is merely creeping doubt projected. Neither education nor intelligence nor the twain can guarantee understanding; and understanding, though it is a practical necessity, is not a moral quality. Sometimes I too do not understand, literally or otherwise, what these gentleman are on about and I can't find my way there by any available route that I can see. Their opinion of me, apparently, is that I have not bothered to look, and that my education has consisted of passively-ingested propaganda. The two of them actually are as different from each other as I am from each of them, but they have this opinion of me in common, along with their contempt for the public libraries and used bookstores where I have sought and found many things which they remain ignorant of. The first time I said I was going to the library after work, my co-worker told me "You have a disease." That is an insult. (Technically it's also a microaggression, which I do believe is a real thing, even though I'm skeptical of multiculturalism, the Situationists, government arts funding, the anti-gentrification movement...) This essay was one attempt to reckon with all of these issues and more, all at once, complicated yet further by the burden of its concurrent therapeutic, equilibriating function, resorted to instinctively after one too many invitations to a debate on the genetic diversity of American Blacks, a debate for which I was and probably will remain ill-prepared, I confess, to take any informed position at all. The exercise here was to explore what such mutual ill-preparedness means without moralizing about it. This is not easy to do. I think it might be impossible. Certainly it is impossible for anyone to think that you have achieved it unless you engage in some serious impression management. All these misgivings and others aside, following an emergent pattern here, another frozen essay is hereby defrosted, heated, and served. Just don't start any civil wars.

The Mind on Furlough

I am still furloughed and still on the public dole. It has been just over six months, and if it goes on for only another six that will hit the under for most people's bets. I have been tremendously productive in ways which probably don't count for much. The first thing that happened was that my apartment got very clean; now it is extremely messy, even by my standards. I stopped practicing on July 1 and have not yet resumed. Instead, I have torn through books and records, scrabble word lists and annotated games. I have given the life of the mind due regard. I would rather have my job back, but I also could never relate to those who found themselves "bored" or stir-crazy when the first lockdowns hit. Privately I already had enough on my plate for ten lifetimes, and much of it was going to require a lockdown of one sort or another anyway. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The immediate future is very uncertain, but I have become more preoccupied with the long-term. Specifically, I cannot fully repress the thought that as I have just begun to find full self-actualization in the cultivation of the mind, the efforts and the thrust of the wider world are all directed toward rendering the human mind obsolete. I am reminded of this by things as varied as: Quackle simulations (a Scrabble computer program which plays quite well but not infallibly, and which almost every serious player now uses to self-evaluate); a podcast about the uses which VR and game engines are finding far outside of their conventional bailiwicks; the need for constant rule tweaks just to keep pro sports entertaining now that minds real and virtual have been unleashed upon them, thus exploiting the existing rules so brashly and effectively that the "product" suffers; and of course, the LAX jetpack stories, which remind us of just how far behind schedule we have gotten in fulfilling bygone pop-technological prophecies.

We may still be a long way off from the singularity, but I don't know that we are all that far off from a world where all of the mind-based abilities I have so enjoyed cultivating are either superfluous, obsolete, or politically retrograde. Life will surely go on, but I will look awfully silly. Silly, and incapable, and certainly unnecessary. Because this relates to closely-held values and to identity, I do care what people think about me in this respect. What the man-without-god question was for my god-oriented forbears, so the man-without-mind question has become for me. Of course we did get some good philosophy and cantatas out of the old paradigm; the bygone prophets of doom would probably be surprised to know just how much mileage we've gotten out of these old things even without an imaginary friend to guide us. Yet these too are mind activities, which just makes the analogy more troubling, makes it harder to imagine that life will indeed just go on, because it has to, just like it had to when god (and the author close behind him) died or were killed.

Aside from a couple of college summers, I have never had so much time to devote to my own work. I have often found myself thinking even so that lack of brain has been a far greater obstacle than lack of time. There are days where I can find 9-letter words through disconnected tiles, and there are days when I can't keep my 3s straight. There are days when I can read for 12 hours and other days when I can barely focus for more than a few pages. As for my former work life, there were days on the ol' Metrolink where I could fully absorb a difficult book chapter and other days where I had to punt and aim for a much-needed nap. I have always been this way, regardless of what else is going on in my life. Where I am almost inhumanly consistent is that I wake up every day, regardless of how much brain I have, with a burning desire to progress, develop, actualize. Like my coworker's old Powerbook G4 which I coaxed into running Lubuntu, my own power module flashes the message "No Kernel Support," which means I eventually overheat and have to rest. This can be demoralizing. The occasional triumphs are gratifying. But they seem increasingly like triumphs which technology will soon render superfluous.

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.

City Living

"By and large working artists seek privacy and anonymity. But they also require exposure to all sides of life. These two benefits are available jointly only in the city. For artists solitude is not a vacuum, empty and meaningless. Isolating oneself in the country is contrary to experiencing and feeling the realities of the human condition, as beautiful as the country might be. Though it sounds contradictory, isolation in the midst of hyperactivity paradoxically means a chance to create one's own beauty, or to react against one's own choice of exposures; a little understood phenomenon among nonartists."

Robert Perine
Chouinard: An Art Vision Betrayed

Three Views on Competition

-I-
Mid-quarantine sports media has gone nostagic out of necessity, with the recent Michael Jordan documentary leading the charge, and thereby it has been pointed out that MJ's pathological competitiveness would today run afoul of numerous sensitivities. Leaving aside for now the litigation of those sensitivities and the triteness of the observation, I think it is nonetheless an observation worth dwelling upon and extending: the games are mere escapist entertainment and the Darwinistic element is, unlike the analogous Roman spectacles, more symbolic than real; yet the people are real, and if they are not usually worth truly feeling sorry for, that is not to say that their outrageous salaries somehow void their basic human entitlement to dignity and health. MJ in his more infamous moments undoubtedly created a Hostile Work Environment. Since his playing career ended, American pro sports have seen a handful of high-profile breakdowns, AWOLs, and early retirements which are either partly or wholly attributable to similar behavior by less-revered teammates. The social ground has indeed shifted beneath the feet of bigtime sports, making this human toll seem less collateral and more integral. It is doubly inconvenient, then, to be told that MJ's now-questionable motivational tactics were integral rather than peripheral to his success. I love sports and I also think it is okay to be uneasy with this, i.e. to impose today's standards on yesterday's events. Nothing would ever get better if that type of hindsight was not allowed. The anti-civs can howl all they want about PCness and Revisionist History, but even they know that there is a right and a wrong way to treat people. Some of them may even have had an experience that (gasp!) changed their mind! I certainly have...and somehow I still love watching sports. Love of sports is, paraphrasing a girlfriend-of-a-friend, my only "normal" trait. I take no offense to the comment; rather, taking it at face value, I choose to strategically deploy this aspect of my public-facing self in those tough social situations where it is crucial to seem normal. But of course in my remaining abnormal moments, it has only gotten more difficult with time to ignore everything about sports that is unseemly.

For the most part, even pro sports lockerrooms have at least met the new sensitivities halfway. The greatest countervailing force to this belated enlightenment is not the odd Old School jock, but rather the amount of money at stake. Rule-bending/breaking is itself something of an art form, and exceedingly thin competitive margins in high-stakes endeavors tend to encourage its consolidation and refinement. MJ of course authored the definitive work of contextual rule-bending when he...created separation from Utah's Bryon Russell in the closing seconds of the 1998 NBA Finals (his only signature moment that I vividly remember watching on live TV). It is a "work" without parallel even in MJ's oeuvre, by, of and for that moment and that moment only. Among the commentators I listen to, the ones who not only were there but also have dug deepest into all of this after the fact tend to emphasize a similarly contextual, circumstantial, incentive-driven understanding of MJ's most infamous interpersonal conflicts. Context and circumstance are crucial to the sensitivity question, no matter where you fall on it. It is of course possible for high-stakes athletic competition to unfold with minimal "personal" friction, but it is not possible 100 percent of the time. Similarly, high-level competition might emerge without correspondingly high stakes, but it probably won't. A long-winded way of saying: sports cannot be sanitized much further than they already have without harming their intrinsic appeal to "normal" people (or, as the case may be, to the little tiny "normal" person that lives inside even of weirdos like me).

For now, a basketball game still has a winner and a loser, and the team sports franchise remains nothing less than the contemporary archetype of patriarchal, non-particularistic organization. The Chicago Bulls can turnover personnel a dozen times and still be the Chicago Bulls. If the rarefied air of hyper-thin competitive margins is then thought to be first and foremost hazardous to one's health, and thus unseemly on specifically that basis, this represents a particularistic turn which is anathema to what bigtime sports are. If the human toll is no longer acceptable then I will fall in line with that new reality, but I don't have to enjoy the new sports-like product. I'm not very normal, but I am too normal to enjoy games where no one wins or loses. If we now "root for players, not for teams," as even some of the above-mentioned sports commentators claim to, then it does seem that winning and losing no longer matters. I can't relate to this, but I think I at least understand it. Why we would continue to channel competition-averse desires through sport is, conversely, something I can't even understand.


-II-
The current slogan of the North American Scrabble Players Association is, "Making Words, Building Friendships." What exactly does this imply? (Or not?) Perhaps most basically, a matter-of-fact concurrence with reality: even I have made at least two unusually good/close friends on the Scrabble scene, and the proportion of people I find tolerable is non-negligibly greater than the baseline expectation. This being as it may, if an equivalence is what is implied in the slogan, I think this is wholly illogical and dishonest. Certainly it is not in concurrence with the reality I've observed. There is at least as much animosity as friendship in Scrabble; this much was palpable in the room from my very first expedition to a NASPA-sanctioned club. What has only become clear with experience is that this animosity exceeds the mere social background radiation one expects to find everywhere; it is, rather, intrinsic to the game itself. The disproportionately extreme consequences of seemingly marginal strategic decisions make Scrabble as much about mastering one's own emotions as about cognitive ability or competitive spirit, and no one in this pressure-cooker is a perfect master of their emotions, no matter how friendly they are the rest of the time. If you want to engender friendship, you definitely do not place people into this sort of dynamic interaction with chance; and if you have a friend-target in mind, it's best that this friend-target not embody the opposition in a zero-sum test of the two acquaintances' comparative abilities to manage said dynamic interaction with chance. Given some of the dust-ups I've witnessed, I give myself relatively high marks for civility; but mere civility is not friendship. I confess that I find friendship (d)elusive here, not only in the heat of competition, where it is colored by visceral emotion, but also upon distanced reflection, where it is colored by a wider interest in sport as expounded upon above. I grant that the drawing of any analogies between the NBA and the NASPA strains credulity. Nonetheless, both a game of basketball and a game of Scrabble have a winner and a loser; if the analogy can be extended only that far, this is nonetheless quite a significant fact with many significant implications. As such we might add that both are ritualized, sanitized reenactments of base instincts, or some flavor of that old trope. What does this phylogenetically distant basis in primal violence mean? Is it the distance or the violence which is more meaningful? Sensitivity is the obsession of the moment for hard-liners on both sides that question, but I think the answer really depends more on our intelligence than on our sensitivities. (I also believe the covariability of intelligence and sensitivity to be generally overstated¹, though I do need to learn more about this and could be swayed.) For the most part, sentient adults are capable of compartmentalizing ritualized reenactments from so-called real life. As a species we are, I think, quite capable of civility per se in this scenario, if not always of friendship; and as the eminently social species, there is much to be gained if we can achieve this, and certainly also lost if we cannot: the ventilating function of such ritualized, non-destructive competitive outlets, the lexico-cognitive dimension of Scrabble as healthy mental exercise, the greater acuity of such exercise-benefits when they are channeled by competition rather than pursued casually, and so on. Call these the Extrinsic Benefits if you insist, though really they are intrinsic to this uniquely human institution. Of course the institution of friendship matters too. But if friendship is your end, tournament Scrabble is a strange choice of means. If friendship were the ultimate aim, what wouldn't we change about Scrabble? And if winning and losing isn't what really matters, what are we doing playing a game that has a winner and a loser?


-III-
My 2002 summer expedition to the Aebersold workshop in Louisville was rather fruitless from a playing perspective, but the lengthy evening concerts were, as many others have remarked, themselves worth the trip. By now most of the finer details have blurred, but I specifically recall a Don Braden-Eric Alexander tenor battle not for the music (which I'm sure was fine nonetheless) but for Braden's mid-set remark to the assembled newbs. Paraphrasing: it can't help but be a competition when the two of us are up here together, and this is fine as long as it serves the music. I can't help but agree, which leads us seamlessly back into navel-gazing: is competition thought able to serve a constructive purpose here because there is, metaphors and figures of speech aside, no winner or loser in music? Certainly there is an aesthetic dimension to sport: John Stockton is said to have described the Dream Team scrimmages as "poetry;" and Scrabble played at the highest level certainly has struck many an informed observer as "beautiful." But only in the case of exhibition games can I imagine a convincing argument that aesthetics are essential to sport, even as they are quite essential to my own interest in it. Conversely, as Debussy would have it, "Pleasure is the law" in music. That assertion can be problematized from any number of abstract ethical perspectives, same as can ritualized competition; but the overwhelming thrust of real social practice, rational or not, is on the side of pleasure here. Hence I think the burden is on the ethicizer/moralizer to demonstrate that pleasure and competition alike are entirely about wants and not at all about needs. I do not believe this to be true in either case.


1. Anecdotally, the phenomenon of the pathologically cutthroat pickup basketball player always seemed to me a product of vulnerable class position, not of individual psychology, and certainly not of intelligence. Where individual psychology comes in, I suppose, is in the case of players whose competitive drive stems from perceived vulnerability that is not necessarily real. MJ and Tom Brady are often mentioned in this connection, as is the significance of what I am calling "perceived vulnerability" (as opposed to the real kind) in the realm of politics and demagoguery.

Conquering Dependence on Necessary Evils

One day as a high-schooler writing music on my Dad's PowerMac, I discovered that ConcertWare had a meter called "Free Time." Thus began an abiding compositional habit of periodically dispensing with barlines. Having now seen much more printed music and made many more forays (not totally successful ones) into hand-written/mind's-ear composition, it is always a bit embarrassing to think back to moments like this, when composing was for me something of a video game. Whether the software thus encouraged that impressionable young person to play fast and loose with convention or whether it merely allowed him to is a question of framing rather than of substance, and one which composers will answer more according to our own orientations rather than according to reality. Since the reality was in my particular case lost to the sands of time without anyone (including myself) caring nearly as much as composers seem to care about this issue in the abstract, perhaps this is just fine. Admittedly, from the perspective of a more experienced quasi-teacher attending to a hypothetical student, I would not be totally at ease with such a process now. Yet the same hindsight shows that there were at least two undeniably propitious elements in my case: (a) the ease and accessibility of this feature exploded a hitherto unquestioned convention rather than rigidifying it, and (b) ConcertWare undeniably handled unmetered notation far more flexibly than Finale, Sibelius or MuseScore do, even now.

It is true that such departures can be made too easy as well as too difficult, depending on the technical intermediary and the cultural atmosphere. It is also true that frequent interface with printed music outside of one's computing life has a way of diluting the computer's influence over notational decisions. I was fortunate as a tween to at least be seeing printed music in band class, and occasionally tripping over stacks of it at home. I suppose it was only later, when I realized that composers, publishers and conductors I had heard of (or at least a few of them) were open (or at least not irrevocably opposed) to temporarily dispensing with barlines, and when I encountered my first gentle opposition to this practice on the part of other musicians, that my decision thereby became something of an informed decision, taken freely. And when a beloved college wind band conductor habitually referred to barlines as "a necessary evil" in rehearsal, as an idealist I of course heard "evil" more than "necessary," and at that point all barline bets were off.

Unmetered notation remains controversial, even among the most seasoned and fluent musicians. Periodically I have occasion to pause and reflect on this situation, and it occurs to me now that there is a significant connection here to another Style Wars polemic which bubbles up occasionally: the question of learning one's part from notation as against learning it via aural transmission. In addition to asking for unmetered music to sound a certain way, by writing unmetered passages composers are asking the player to do some extra work; perhaps to figure out for themselves, by shedding, where the barlines might be if they had been used; perhaps to become familiar enough with (essentially, to memorize) the passage such that the coordinating function of the barline is superfluous; and perhaps therefore not to concern themselves with what other players' parts might be asking of them, nor with how those other players might handle those demands, including the possibility (within reason) of different grouping/phrasing in different parts. There is more to unmetered passages than the possibility of multiple "correct" meterings or the absence of composerly guidance (not to say intent) on said point: there is, more importantly, a practice, rehearsal, and performance process which is mediated by a notational decision. The result of this now-changed process is what I am seeking with unmetered passages. I am not seeking a "perfect" rendition as if barlines had been deployed and subsequently observed by unusually adept players or by a machine. I am, in a sense, actually going out of my way to avoid this.

Process is the only reason that the performance of unmetered music might, potentially (hopefully?), sound different than if the music were metered; getting music to sound a certain way is the only logical reason to depart from received notational convention; and departing from received notational convention is a good way (if not the only way) to shake up the performance process. This is the kind of procedural perfect circle that composers dream about, and usually only dream about. If the "process" merely consists of the performers staying 5 minutes after the first rehearsal to compare parts and draw in uniform barlines, then we can still say that the notation has mediated the process, and that the music might still sound different than if the composer had provided the same information to them from the outset. But this amounts to normalizing/conventionalizing what was non-normative about the piece in order to make it easier to play. That maneuver is the domain of Jobbing, not of Artistry. Shedding also makes any given piece easier to play, regardless of notation, and invites the reflection which breathes life into Dead Tree composition. It is socially ungraceful to point this out in a world where Everyone Is Busy and there is already plenty of music to listen to. I accept that judgment on a cosmic level. On an earthly level, meanwhile, I see unexplored/neglected aesthetic avenues hiding in plain sight and conjecture that they might be fun to explore. So come fly with me, or whatever.

Reflection tends to be baked into the process of aural transmission, and it tends to be eschewed (usually almost totally) by users of notation. This I do not deny, but I do choose to find fault with the users rather than with the notation. Thus for me the basis for preferring one mode of transmission to another is a matter of what I might want to do with it, not what everyone else thinks everyone else is doing with it. Modes of transmission are mere vehicles for the realization of the abstract concept of a work; it is the concept which indicates favorably or poorly for either process, not the other way around. Notation is all about expedience, and this is both its best and worst quality. Notation allows Eye Players to realize music without reflecting on it, perhaps even, as the figure of speech would have it, without even thinking about it. Owing to innumerable big-picture factors which are best set aside for now, this is normally exactly what happens (or doesn't happen). Certainly no one is more puzzled by or discontent with this situation than I am, and I will not be out-discontented by partisans of Ear traditions who choose to resolve this structure-agency question one-sidedly. It is true that the structure here (the notational system) is what enables users to become passive re-creators, but it is not true that it imposes passive re-creation, nor that the etiology of passive re-creation is entirely or even mostly a matter of the notational system, nor that the notational system has nothing more to offer us than the shortest on-ramp to the path of least resistance. If any given Eye Player chooses to reflect upon their Eye Music, they will find every bit as much to reflect upon as will the ear player upon theirs. If they neglect to take this opportunity where it presents itself, then my heart bleeds for them.

Writing without barlines aims at imposing a process that is intermediate between the rhetorical extremes of the Ear Player who is forced into a reflective outlook by the laboriousness of their process and the Eye Player who habitually tears through piles of written music without any reflection whatsoever because Everyone Is Busy and reflection would slow them down. Writing without barlines aims at imposing selective reflection by omitting small pieces of customary information, while nonetheless providing all the other information that written music customarily provides.

Notation doesn't breed soulless performance; rather, soulless performers gives soulless performances. Unfortunately this conclusion has become unavoidable as Ear Playing increasingly carries the day and soullessness remains rampant. Yes, Everyone Is Busy, and so there aren't too many bands around today where everyone really commits to the Mingus process. We're so Busy, actually, that the dwindling repertory has moved decisively away from anything even as structurally specific as Haitian Fight Song. The overdetermination of musical structure by social structure is a material question, not an expressive or metaphysical one. You cannot claim the exquisite-corpse process as an affirmative creative decision when your five band members have moved to five different states! You cannot claim notational or conceptual simplicity as an affirmative creative decision when you know that no one is willing to rehearse! I am not saying that you cannot succeed under these circumstances. What I am saying is that you cannot claim success.

When process is materially circumscribed from the outset, concept can only trail at a distance. It is unideal for process to lead concept in this way because all processes are conceptually limiting. Ideally the creator of the work would have taken account of this from the embryonic stage of creation, identifying a process which best serves their concept while working around the inevitable potholes. That is, ideally the mediation between process and concept takes place though the creative process itself, not in sequence with one consideration leading the other around by the scruff of the neck after the piece is "done." When process dictates to concept, its flaws and slippages are foregrounded anywhere the creator is unwilling to sacrifice concept to expedience. On one hand, this unwillingness is socially maladaptive; on the other hand, it is one leading indicator of the presence of a soul. Hence owing to unconscious self-other identifications that even educated citizens of enlightened post-industrial societies are subject to, this unwillingness to compromise tends to be rewarded by the soulful and punished by the soulless. And that's where we're at!