Some time ago, I ran
across my personal idiom of “sardonic synopses,” moments where I crassly
collapse a work of art into its most general and absurd form by erasing all
traces of aesthetic value from the work.
Stravinsky’s
The Firebird.
Act 1:
Dude tries to fuck a bird made of fire.
Act 2: Dance fighting (literally, people
gesturing ferociously near each other).
Act 3: Everyone
dies, the world is no different.
This practice of mine
is usually met with resistance by anyone in need of defending the particular
work or genre that I am adressing (on grounds of the work’s aesthetic value and my lack of
knowledge or interest in the genre, for instance). But it is worth noting that it
is a great (if overly deconstructive) way to get an aesthetically oriented response from
someone who has highly aesthetically valued that art object that you defile. I once delivered this version of The Firebird to a professor of mine who reacted
by redirecting me to the medium of ballet itself, stating that I had missed the
value added to narrativity by telling the story through dance instead of
natural language. He also invoked a phrase I will never ever use in my writing because of its ability to function as a self-fulfilling, value defeating
statement: “the medium
is the message.”
I had, in reality,
during the production of the The Firebird,
pushed myself to understand that ballet must have its own idioms and styles, meaning
in its own culture (of which I am not a part) and I was looking for these idioms throughout.
But the idioms of ballet (dancing) are hard to break into without a hand to
hold, so I have never flourished as a connoisseur of ballet. If this changes, I
will make friends with those who know the idioms (of dance) and
have them talk me through the process of engaging with the aesthetic values
established in that discipline, a discipline so often referred to as one of the pinnacles of
Western art. I would do so knowing that I can only get a certain amount of perspective
from one person or source, and that to go down this road sufficiently would end
in me being able to say that ballet “is mine,” that I am a part of that
cultural practice enough to know it (and knowing that my knowledge will still
only constitute a certain perspective).
This process
constitutes what I would like to call “aesthetics.” It is not to be confused
with the terrifically complicated bourgeois analytic philosophy. The reason
I mark this word, presently, is that gaining knowledge about artistic production and the aesthetic realm (and aesthetic attitude with which I
will engage below) is not a transcendental or mystical problem; it is
a process through which one may process human work. It is a process of
establishing meaning personal or social (that is, contingent), real or imagined, for a
created object. It is not the logicing out of words about art, it is the
process of direct engagement with art objects.
The reason why I am
able write, today, about this process, is that I have been reading Janet Wolff’s
Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art.
In it, Wolff synthesizes the then current literature on the topic of the
social nature of aesthetics; sometimes she means aesthetics, but mostly, she
means Aesthetics, the established and institutionally supported philosophers who take up that dastardly question “what is
art?” While the book is great at establishing a body of literature, mostly from
the 1970s, about the history of the discipline of aesthetics, it fails to answer
all but one question: what is the best way forward in developing an aesthetic
theory suitable to scholarly discourse and real understanding?
The book, however, is not intended to do much more than trace the discourse of aesthetics. In the concluding four pages, it is explicitly
stated that Wolff is not working toward making the situation better but instead
giving what amount to three possible theories that could develop into the new
sociology of art, which would somehow have access to aesthetic values. The
first is the “discursive model,” the next, “the philosophical anthropology of
art,” and lastly, “psychoanalytic theories of art.” The former is the most
viable in Wolff’s viewpoint, as it is the only of the three that can explain
why art works between an artist and a subject (the viewer) in any meaningful
way. This model is given by Foucault in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, and is for investigating what we could know about the
artist and their historical moment by engaging the artistic object itself, including any relevant worldly knowledge. Understanding could be a process of, for instance, having
and applying knowledge of space and geometry that would inherently impinge on
the visual artist’s conception of the medium of painting; knowledge of synthesis techniques and digital computers inherently reflects what the electronic
composer knows about the world into electronic music.
The sticking-point,
here, is about the autonomy of a work of art. In chapter five, “The
Specificity of Art,” Wolff highlights these theories for how they contribute to
looking for the artistic quality of “specificity,” or, how are art objects
different from any other kind of object? Why are art objects so different from
other objects (Lukács classified cultural objects as practical, magico-religious,
or aesthetic)?
One idea could be that
art objects are in museums. Wolff refers to this as the “institutional theory
of art,” where the canonization of an artwork defines its difference from
practical objects. I would, however, say that museums and concert halls are somewhere in between aesthetic objects and
magico-religious ones, since it is virtually impossible to delimit ritual
behavior involving Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and attending to the musical performance as an art object. The very idea of playing Beethoven’s, or anyone’s, Symphonies
from start to finish with an American ensemble comprised of full-time,
professional musicians was born of the transfiguration of capital to cultural
capital (as shown in Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow-Lowbrow).
Besides, a (economically) contemporary equivalent of this practice would be to dismiss any
music that does not make the Billboard charts as something less than music, an obviously
untenable position.
The most interesting
point about the institutional theory of art is that it can be deeply,
fundamentally contradictory because institutions can assume any
applicable aesthetic theory into their purpose. For instance, the absolutist
aesthetic of nineteenth century Germany can be perpetuated by American musical
institutions. In this situation, canonized works become “playable,” a part of the identity of the institution. But this canonization into the concert hall, its own contingient social sphere, is an intrusion against the work’s theorized
autonomy from reality and social life. Most of the time this deep contradiction
goes unnoticed, and “great art” marches forward on its tide of cultural capital
(until it stops having support from that culture, i.e. becomes culturally
bankrupt; see “The Death of Cultural Institutions” on this blog).
A counter to this
position is the phenomenological viewpoint of artistic value. Although this
theory does not receive a catchy title from Wolff, it should instantly point to
the idea that listener reception and interactions with art objects create (at
least the potential for) aesthetic value judgments. As with all (Husserlian)
phenomenological accounts of the world, there remains one blind-spot: at its
core, phenomenology is investigating what is essential to experience, but can
never really grasp what the word experience means. While this remains a
rhetorical problem throughout the last century of philosophy, it would be
absurd to say that there is a single English speaker in the world who does not
have "experiences" or cannot engage in "experience." Here we are in trouble of needing to "logic out" something that we do not have any problems performing on the order of
hundreds of times a day. Again, a theory of experience as process, not a
defined, empirical object to be studied and shared, would help de-philosophize
the conversation and avoid the serpentine fray of language that promiscuously
complicates everyday praxis.
Now, to return to my then adumbrative example, Stravinsky’s The
Firebird: the process through which I engaged the performance is not
difficult to trace out; and there are maybe six areas of focus that I can
explicate here, even years after the particular experience.
Focus 1) Technical musical interest, because of my
instrumental training
As a “trained” pianist, singer, string, woodwind, and
percussion player, I have a number of interests in the instrumental technique
and the process of “playing together,” including the role of the conductor, and
an admiration for musicians who can perform individually and technically to create cooperative structures.
Focus 2) Creative musical interest, because of my
compositional training
Having studied the compositional strategies and individual and general styles of many composers
(and Stravinsky in a specific and intimate way), I have an interest in trying to decode what the
narrative and the music have to do with each other, as well as trying to
identify any changes in style between this particular ballet and Stravinsky’s
overall style (historically situated, of course). Besides this, the reason for
composing music is for it to be valued aesthetically by the audience, a
question that I generally leave for symbolic interactionalism (about which I
will write on this blog sooner or later).
Focus 3) Historical interest in reconciling or
reconsidering my knowledge of early twentieth century music
As a student of music history I am interested in revisiting
what I think I know about historical music from time to time, not to validate
the knowledge that I have about music history, but to see if it is becoming
developed or refined in any way. There are details to be found in any piece
that “I think I know,” which refute or challenge any understanding I already
have about music, as well as changes in my life that refocus my aesthetic
valuations.
Focus 4) Interest in the construction of ballet dancing,
both general and particular (as a non-dancer)
As noted above, my process was largely about trying to find
what the idioms meant to the process of telling the story. This was a process
of attempting to fathom what choices the choreographer made for the production,
as well as imagining other choices, or trying to assess which parts of the
choreography would be essential to the portrayal of The Firebird. (Also as noted above, I largely failed at this
due to lack of region-specific knowledge).
Focus 5)
Interest in narrative
This may even be a default, a cop-out of some kind, or a
product of Western culture and tradition that I continue to have a section of
my consciousness roped off for. Because of the seeming triviality of these
causes, it seems the easiest way to deconstruct the aesthetic values of the
piece based on these ones, since they are given, automatic. In other words, my tearse deconstruction has more to do with ease than anything else, and deconstructing the narrative, instead of more aesthetically and productive reasons, builds the most absurd version of the work that misses the majority of what is happening in the art objects that constitute the performance.
Focus 6) Interest in the particularity of this performance,
being privy to the technical background knowledge of producing events, and knowing a great number of the performing musicians in the orchestra
This is my direct link to the social world of the performing musician,
and the great impetus for my viewing of the art object. How important is it to
knowing The Firebird? Probably
little, but it does show a bit about who I am, what my biases may be, and the
fluidity between this mode of aesthetic valuation and any of the other levels. If I hear a flubbed note in the brass section, I can theorize why that note was a mistake on a psychological level of the player or ensemble.
Each of these were
options for me to analyze, attitudes for me to assume, and variably have to do
with the specificity of the experience as they do the social constraints
surrounding them. I have not, necessarily, marked out each as an aesthetic valuation process (it is buried and deferred in Focus 2). However, each of
these items would form a symbiosis, my “total aesthetic evaluation” of the
performance, something that is not necessarily the aesthetic evaluation of each
item, nor the sum of them. I am, as of yet, still free to make my own course of
judgment and valuation throughout these foci and create and destroy them as I
please. Beyond that, I am not distinguishing the aesthetic valuation of Stravinsky's work from the choreographer's from the conductors. Structure here is brutish, inattentive to the individual values and production.
This haphazard and subjective routine is exactly what would be thought of (by a vulgar philosopher) as
solipsistic, devoid of objective information about valuing the art object in an
aesthetic way. This would, of course, be true, since I have not supplied the
content of my valuations, just the structures of them. The structural reading
of my aesthetic process is already cumbersome enough, and I will not go into an
actual aesthetic valuations they enable for that reason.
But, let us say, these
structures may actually exist for every individual in the world, and this may
be the structure for apprehending art
objects. This would then constitute what Wolff calls the “aesthetic attitude,”
derived from Husserl’s “eidetic attitude,” which is the way of engaging objects
as art objects. Just as the eidetic attitude can be applied (in any moment and
by any consciousness which contains the metaphorical tool) to try to establish
what is essential about an object, i.e. what the object’s pure attributes are
that make it into that object, so can the aesthetic attitude be applied to any
human work to “find the art in it,” (see my previous post on Pure Music Analysis). My process of multiple foci running through
different regions of my own knowledge is my own structure of the aesthetic
attitude, the structure through which I identify how I will assign aesthetic value.
I would side with
Bourdieu, whom Wolff quotes, when he claims that any attempt to
essentialize the process of aesthetic valuation will fail. Any essentialization
(including that of aesthetic valuation) moves toward the erasure of the individual
and their freedom to engage the world on their own terms. If I were to say that
this process is everyone’s process, I would simply be wrong (just as the Aesthetician
Roger Scruton is wrong in saying that art is about beauty, which is disproven
by the art I make, unless he wants to jump into the metaphorical bed with
Adorno and Hegel and declare that we need a different word to mark art in the
twentieth century). My process is my own, but I can, at least, understand that
I do have a process working to build these values, even if anyone else would
have a different process.
One question that I
cannot get past, here, is the question of “what happens when a conscious person
does not actually have a model for processing art objects?” I will address this
from both base level and superstructure level:
As I have outlined my
structure of aesthetic valuation in one particular instance (a live performance
of The Firebird, complete with
staging and choreography), I must also confess that I doubt any such process
happens in (the majority of) Americans’ consciousness. I have, in the past year
or so, tried to conduct a number of conversations with non-artists and
non-musicians about aesthetic values (concealing that term or the goals of my
questions throughout the conversation). The results are usually simplistic,
mystical, and repetitive. The artistic lives of non-artistic people generally
boils down to a) finding entertainment, not art; b) superficial engagement with
art objects; and c) desire to be, above all else, affirmed by art.
This may sound non-empirical and pessimistic, and, not ironically, Adorno and the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research had already conducted such an experiment. While I
was dealing with the simple content of lyrics or story in my personal
conversations, their experiment dealt with a royal wedding, that of Princess
Beatrix of Holland and a German Diplomat, Claus von Amsberg. When asked why the
story was of interest, the respondents would almost always return an answer
about spectacle or the nice story; when asked to critically engage with the
event on a (politically) meaningful level, each respondent was able to turn to
an attitude in which they stated that it could have real political
consequences, and thusly proposed a political analysis of the event, instead of
chatter about the event's details as reported in the media.
Although this experiment seems to have been one of those rare things that could make Adorno
sound optimistic (“that would concur with the social prediction that a society,
whose inherent contradictions persist undiminished, cannot be totally
integrated even in consciousness”), it is possible that there is not
an aesthetic structure in each individual’s consciousness, an attitude by which
to judge art, and music most specifically. Without knowing that there even is a
world surrounding art, how would one go about apprehending its objects?
It is safe to say that
the philosophical Aesthetics that pervade Aesthetics
and the Sociology of Art could be interpreted as a conversation that
illuminates a culture that no longer even knows what art is! A lack, en masse, of individual processes calls
out the need for as complicated a structure as is possible to mark art as an
impossible dilemma. In this case, vulgar Aestheticians seem to contribute problems
(not insight) to the art world, problems that we all seem to be able to process
and resolve with relative ease at a subjective level. What truly is difficult
is making a generalization about aesthetic attitude, and what constitutes it
for individuals.
It is this problem,
along with Wolff’s interesting conflation of materialist aesthetics with
biological essentialisms, which paints the New Left as absurd in the latter
half of Aesthetics and the Sociology of
Art. Terry Eagleton, in Criticism and
Ideology, does not do himself any favors in his essentializing program of
literary criticism, even if it does produce interesting analyses and
interpretations. The major problem with materialist aesthetics is that no phenomenologist would ever escape material history in a factual
assessment of aesthetic values; aesthetics (processes for assembling the necessary information and structures about art) are local, available to individuals as well as social
groups called "genres," which are undoubtedly "subsumed under," or established against, Modes
of Production. The phenomenologist would be in no position to disavow “vulgar
materialists” (as I am wont to call revolutionary materialist aesthetics) in
the same way that Eagleton dismisses phenomenology as a vulgar philosophical
routine. At the very least, Eagleton can admit, in the formation of his
“science of materialist criticism,” that what is at stake for materialist
aesthetics is keeping track of those institutions which become reified and get
to educate (that is, reproduce ruling
ideology) to the masses, what the ruling ideology says that art is, or what artistic practice is (presently, little more than useless garbage assembled by petty-bourgeois twentysomethings to be enjoyed after your 50 hour work week while inebriated).
The complications of
aesthetics are uninteresting to someone who tries to explore their own process
of assigning aesthetic value; this is the most universal generalization to be
had in the realm of aesthetics. Someone with zero technical knowledge about aesthetics (which philosophy
has convolved beyond recognition, garnering this result for Western culture in toto) may or may not have an aesthetic attitude
with which they can access art objects. Wolff’s conclusion is that art should
be seen (for now, 1983) as inaccessible to sociology, since sociology (proper)
requires a solid theoretical basis from which to work. And thus, aesthetics and
the entirety of the humanities seem to be in the same place that Engels found historical
materialism in an 1894 letter: “The further the particular sphere which we are
investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure
abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its
development, the more will its curve run zigzag.”
